The Silent Duchess (38 page)

As women began to raise these questions, they soon recognized the need to construct their own groups and their own political praxis. Women discovered that personal experience could not be separated from the political--moreover, that the former generated and constituted the latter. The sedute di autocoscienza (consciousness-raising sessions) of the 1970's, in which women confronted each other in analytical and critical discussions, were the product of this awareness. One of the main slogans of Italian feminism, "Il personale every' politico" (the personal is political), challenged men's revolutionary political agenda and redefined the character of Italian feminism.

Although many of these same processes and slogans also characterized the feminist movement of the 1970's in the United States and elsewhere, they took on special significance in Italy. Supported by more than two decades of fascism and more than a dozen centuries of Catholicism, the patriarchy in Italy was particularly well entrenched. And in a nation where politics saturates life down to the level of personal discourse and personal relationships, women's insistence that the formula be reversed--that the personal relations between men and women be viewed as political acts--was an event that shook society, and particularly the society of the

Left, to its core.

Some of Maraini's novels, like Donna in guerra (1975), Lettere a Marina

(1981), and Il treno per Helsinki

(1984), specifically deal with the uneasiness of women in the masculine world of politics, even in the radical universe of men who portrayed themselves as liberated from prejudices against women. These books point out the importance of relationships among women as autonomous and independent subjects.

In these and other works, Maraini suggests that there is a difference between men and women. Because of the subordinate role women occupied throughout centuries of patriarchal domination in private and public life, they feel and behave differently than men. This difference lies in women's distinct experience as a gender, as well as in their bodies as sites of sexual difference. The ideology of equality, which wants to make women equal to men, can be problematic because it tends to view women as essentially identical to men, erasing their specificity as subjects.

This theoretical position within feminism-- particularly important and uniquely developed within Italian feminism--is called difference theory. In Italy, difference theory was initially elaborated by Carla Lonzi, and more recently developed by the group of Italian feminist philosophers called Diotima. The Diotima group, which met and worked in Verona, has elaborated the principle of sexual difference as a way of advocating the recovery of a symbolic space that was taken away from women. In such theoretical formulations, sexual difference is linked to the difference in male and female roles transmitted by society through stereotypes --but it is a difference that also empowers women to acknowledge and recreate their own identities, their own culture, their own forms of communication, distinct from those created by men. The principle of equality is rejected in favor of that of difference, which does not theorize a participation in male power but rather calls into question its deepest structures. The Diotima group invented the concept of "female mediations," capable of building woman-centered theory, consciousness, and practice on political, literary, and linguistic levels. *16 Maraini, at an

early point in the development of these ideas, made extremely creative use of them in her work, further evidence of her originality as a writer and a feminist thinker.

In Maraini's work, two elements stand out in relationship to difference theory: first, the function of silence not as the absence of speech but rather as an alternative to male language, and second, the significance of the symbolic order of the mother in the formation of the female voice. These themes wield particular weight in The Silent Duchess. They are also present in an essay that marks a division between Maraini's rougher, more ideological writing of the seventies and eighties and her more mature, refined work of the nineties, particularly The Silent Duchess. In this provocative essay, "Riflessioni sui corpi logici e illogici delle mie compaesane di sesso" (reflections on the logical and illogical bodies of my compatriots in gender), the intentions and objectives that can be traced in Maraini's later work are clearly laid out. *17

Maraini's begins with the assumption that there is no innate gender difference in the approach to writing. Yet there is, generally, a sense of foreignness on the part of women with respect to a language from which they have been historically barred and exiled--their space reduced, instead, to that sentimental, private world that has never had a voice in literary tradition.

Women who do choose to write must bear the burden of the socially constructed assumptions that surround their literary production. According to such assumptions, which correspond to rigid gender separations, any writing that is not concerned with domestic or trivial matters is unsuitable for the female sex. Thus women's writing has been excluded from the literary canon--from the realm of "great," "worldly," and "enduring" works-- by virtue of the very fact that they are written by women. The female voice has never carried weight within this realm.

Maraini recognizes that women's exclusion begins in the realm of the imagination--or rather, in the realm of the misogynist, male-centered representations that underlie the production of writing in our culture. Maraini writes:

Writing, its roots lazily entrenched in the

deep terrain of the collective imagination, nourishes itself on old habits of thought, on secret aspirations, on fears made greater by unconscious desires. But in their transformation into a common theme, these desires, these aspirations, these habits have nearly always characterized the interests of man without woman, and are frequently even geared against woman. Suffice it to look at the commonest symbols of the fairy tale, the myth, of both ancient and modern cosmology. *18

Writing, which is descended from language, reflects the products that arise from a male-centered imagination (which naturally takes root in the imaginations of women as well). So women find themselves the schizophrenic victims, torn between the male representation of the female point of view, which reflects the authority of the public, patriarchal world, and that faint and subtle voice that arises from the enclosed, private, female realm, which is devoid of all authority. The plight of the woman writer illustrates the lack of credence given to any female-centered imagination--in the language of Diotima, a female symbolic order--which has so fundamental a role in the constitution of a gendered point of view.

For Maraini, an essential initial element in the development of a distinct women's writing is the rediscovery of the gendered body--the body not merely as a physical or biological entity but rather as a cultural concept, shaped over centuries in a climate of separation and oppression. The result, Maraini tells us, "is that one writes with the body, and the body has a sex, and sex has a history of separations, exclusions, segregation, abuse, violence, fear, aphasia--segregation of which we retain an atavistic memory." *19

The rediscovery of the female body as a source for the female voice is thus linked to the rediscovery of the body of the mother, the original source of all language. For Maraini, writing is itself born female, for it is through the mediation of the body of the mother that language arises, only to be later transformed into a masculine tongue by the language of the fathers. Theorizing the existence of an original maternal language links

Maraini to the Diotima group, which traces a

symbolic female order in this retrogressive genealogical path, claiming that both sexes not only draw life from the female body but gain language from it as well. This process has always been clouded by patriarchal power, which denies the existence of any power other than itself. For Maraini, as for Diotima, the obfuscation of maternal genealogy lies at the origins of women's difficulty in finding their voice:

Writing, after all--with its wanderings amidst the details of daily life, its insistence on the forever new absurdities of love, with its feeling for language as nourishment, and with its everyday heroes--is profoundly female and maternal. This is especially true for the novel, linked as it is to a sense of becoming. Roland Barthes did not speak idly when he said, "To write means to play with the body of the mother." We can take the body of the mother to mean the flesh and the milk of every spoken language. However--and this is the surprising part--language, born a daughter, becomes a son as it matures. It develops muscles and hair and expects its own spiritual interests to take absolute priority. *20

Just as women's language, essential as it may be, has been marginalized, so has women's experience, women's memory, women's testimony--women's history. The making of history requires witnesses, and if the only witnesses have been denied a voice, it is the same as if they had never existed. Maraini writes:

What, exactly, is this difficulty in historicizing that is typical of women, forced to inhabit the margins of history? Or is this difficulty actually a refusal to link the past with the present? To give a meaning to things? To believe in what we have accomplished together? So adept at amputating, forgetting, destroying, crushing are women, that we end up more active and efficient than that black-clad old friend with her scythe. Women's memory is not preserved, not valued. It is careless with itself to the point of dispersion. It grinds up, gathers, and then throws it all to the wind. In order to remember we must love our past, and therefore, in some sense, ourselves.

But women would sooner die than demonstrate tenderness and indulgence toward themselves. They know what the most closed kind of narcissism is, the kind that leads to the annihilation of love; but they do not know how to value their own thought, with its reasoning and its needs. Female memory is wounded, deformed. It prefers not to look back to the past; like Lot, it fears being transformed into a pillar of salt. *21

As Maraini suggests, women have in some sense aided in their own exclusion from history by failing to value, to record, and to disseminate their own testimony. Yet Maraini does not hesitate to acknowledge the external obstacles that prevent women writers from procuring a place in the literary canon, and thus in human history. As Virginia Woolf noted in A Room of

One's Own, there are no laws that preclude women from being writers. But there were and still are attitudes, rules, and structures within the literary world that prevent women from being heard. In addition to the difficulty women encounter in expressing themselves with a language that has been rendered foreign to them, they face a host of practices and prejudices that marginalize or trivialize their literary output. It is for this reason that some women writers have, through the use of pseudonyms, "disguised" themselves as male writers and even adopted misogynist attitudes, thus merely reinforcing female exclusion from the public spaces in which the authority of literary and historical tradition is constructed. And it is for this reason that many women writers, in the attempt to lay claim to spaces that have never belonged to them, have been careful to define themselves simply as "writers," rather than "woman writers."

Adding to such obstacles is a continuing lack of access to the channels of book publication and distribution. The fact that the business of publishing in Italy--and to a somewhat lesser extent in the United States--is still largely directed by men contributes to the silencing of many women's voices. When women remain unpublished, they also remain unread and therefore unheard. (the mission of a publishing house such as the Feminist Press, which provides access to women's voices--including that of Dacia Maraini, who despite her international stature has had few

books published in the United States --certainly contributes to the creation of that "permanent memory" which Maraini claims is essential if women are to outlive their bodies and become part of literary history. Such projects are what enable women's voices to emerge from silence.)

In short, what has impeded women from bearing witness, making their voices heard, writing their stories, and becoming part of history is a complex of obstacles that begins with their inability to express themselves within a system that fails to reflect or value female experience or to take into account female difference. Women have been largely written out of the male-authored narrative, and, in order to write themselves in, they must change not only the narrative's content but also its underlying assumptions. It has been the task of women writers to create a new kind of narrative, reflecting female subjectivity and drawing upon a female symbolic order. Within this alternative symbolic order, things are not always what they might seem: silence, for example, can be incomparably eloquent.

One of Maraini's brilliant conceits in

The Silent Duchess is her depiction of silence as a definite and unique form of expression. It is a form of expression that reflects women's inability to give voice to themselves with the communicative tools made available to them. It constitutes an alternative means for women to situate themselves in that "nonplace" where women's history begins. In Maraini's hands, silence, far from being a passive state, is a radical way of interacting with the language of the patriarchy. Silence expresses women's unanswered longing to exist in their own right, to participate in history with a voice that refuses to be molded or compromised by the male-centered imagination. Silence is connected, moreover, to the possibility of self-expression through the language of the body, traditionally relegated to the background in the male-dominated realm of oral and written language. The ironic nature of silence, according to Maraini, is at the heart of The Silent Duchess, which centers around a protagonist who is both deaf and mute. We can, Maraini says, read the silence of Marianna as a "metaphor for the female condition" in relation to self-expression, and