The Silent Duchess (40 page)

Marianna's silence is not one of renunciation and passivity. I wanted to recount the victory of the written word over imposed silence. Marianna is not a writer, and writing for her is her primary means of survival. The novel is an act of trust in regard to the written word and to reading, for if Marianna wins her liberty after the public and private violence to which she has been subjected, she owes it to these two indispensable acts of knowledge. *27

For women, such acts of knowledge have the power to rejoin us with ourselves, to clear a path toward the creation of something of our own, which opposes itself to a reality that excludes us. Certainly, solitude is often the price we pay, Maraini seems to say. It is a solitude which may make us feel like strangers even to ourselves, for it involves the act of "telling ourselves" through a medium--writing--which is fundamentally foreign to us.

For this reason, perhaps, Maraini has Marianna leave at the end of the novel for a trip that distances her definitively both from her lover and from the lovesick old man who has asked her to re-enter the established order by marrying him. Traveling, Marianna also gains distance from herself, from her own familiar world, from the images of her

literary world, to recover a sort of nomadism and foreignness which frighten her but at the same time attract her. Comforting memory, accompanied by nostalgia, is ready and waiting to frustrate every anxiety of knowledge and to make desire waver. Maraini describes Marianna's thoughts at the end of the novel:

Now everything is strange to her and therefore valued. But for how long can she expect things around her to remain foreign, perfectly intelligible, yet far away and impossible to decipher? This withdrawal from the future that is sealing her fate, will it be too great a challenge for her strength? This wish to wander, to meet different kinds of people, is there something arrogant about it, something a little frivolous and perverse? Where will she go to make a home for herself when every home seems too sunk in its roots, too predictable? She would like to be able to carry her home on her back like a snail and go off into the unknown. To suppress the remembrance of those ardent embraces that she so longs for will not be easy. The sluice-gate is there to intercept every drop of memory, every crumb of happiness. But there must also be something else, something that belongs to the world of wisdom and contemplation, something that deflects the mind from its foolish preoccupation with the senses. ... This rushing from here to there, setting off, stopping, waiting, wandering, is it not a premonition of her end? To walk straight into the waters of the river, first to the tips of her shoes, then up to her ankles, then gradually up to her knees, her chest, her throat. The water is not cold. It would not be difficult to let herself be swallowed up by those eddying currents with their smell of decaying leaves. (476-477)

Marianna cannot go back, for the experience of knowledge and desire has made her different, incompatible with the social order and discourse she has left behind. Nothing can be as it was before. The return to herself must come about on another level of signification and representation, to which the instruments of "telling her self" are intimately linked. Women must traverse the unknown to claim a writing that finally belongs to us. We risk, in fact, being engulfed by the "waters" of writing, which tell our stories in a patriarchal language that is foreign to us and that has in many cases succeeded in colonizing us.

To break this chain requires the desire and the

courage of the adventurer. *28

Women must lose themselves in order to rediscover themselves, redefine themselves--retell, from a new vantage point, the stories that have always been told for us. Maraini herself seems animated by this contradictory awareness, this pattern of departure and return. She seems torn between the desire to travel--to leave behind that self which gives both comfort and unease--and the desire to return, which is linked to the possibility of telling the self. It is a constant alternation, both sweet and bitter, which never lets up, a perpetual torment capable of overcoming and destroying us but also of empowering us. In the eloquent introduction to the poems collected in Viaggiando con passo di volpe (walking with the tread of a fox), Maraini describes the anxiety linked to this intricate process:

I know for certain that, traveling, I am distanced from myself, enough to lose sight of myself. And this gives me peace. But at the same time it disturbs me. Enough that I immediately need to grab myself by the hair, slap myself a few times, nail my hands to the typewriter, so that I will stay this time, stay, confront things, as I must, with dedication and determination. But as soon as I say the rosary of my days, they suddenly all seem the same, interchangeable. Time slips through my fingers and skins me alive. I know that, staying, I will wind up with no skin at all, vulnerable to the blasts of air which will chill me. *29

Like Marianna, Maraini chooses a nomadism devoid of certainties as a condition linked to the process of awareness and the search for self. And just as the journey becomes a metaphor for literature, literature can itself become a journey: "Since the journey is a metaphor--the most ambiguous and seductive of metaphors, we tell ourselves--it can also be born of immobility. There is no need to drag our bodies around so much, all dressed up. It's hot, there are flies, diseases. It is enough to close our eyes, seated on a chair in the shade, to float on the waves of imagination. Isn't that what books are there for?" *30

The task of writing involves a perpetual roaming between desire and its translation in the written word: a constant interplay of journey and

homecoming. The definition of identity requires a distancing from the self, in order to come back to a self which is something other than what it was. This process is an essential element in finding one's voice. And for women, in particular, it is a necessary element in breaking through male representations of women and in discovering the ability to give voice to ourselves, to write our own lives, with tools of our own creation.

The path that reconnects women to the body of the mother, to a symbolic world which belongs to us and in which we are at ease, to a literature of our own, is uncertain and without guarantees. Marianna never regains her speech, as we might be tempted to hope, but she decides to go beyond speech, retaining her difference. The conclusion of the novel underscores the irreducible difference of this character, who does not wish to be led back to the world which has excluded her and in which she feels a stranger: "But the will to resume her journey is stronger. Marianna fixes her gaze on the gurgling yellow water. She questions her silences. But the only answer she receives is still another question. And it is mute" (477).

Anna Camaiti Hostert

Chicago

April 1998

Notes

1. The Piano (film), written and directed by Jane Campion, a Jan

Chapman production, 1992.

2. The Silent Duchess was published in the original Italian under the title La

lunga vita di Marianna Ucr@ia (the long life of Marianna Ucr@ia)

(milan: Rizzoli, 1990). The first English-language edition was published in

Great Britain (london: Peter Owen, 1993). This Feminist Press edition, which

is the first U.s. edition, reproduces the translation made for the British edition,

by Dick Kitto and Elspeth

Spottiswood. Although few of Dacia Maraini's books have been published in

English relative to her enormous output and her prestige in Italy, the number of

translations seems to have increased in the late 1980's and the 1990's. Books by Maraini

available in English include

Bagheria, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood (london: Peter

Owen, 1994); Isolina, translated by Sian Williams (london: Peter

Owen, 1993); Letters to Marina, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth

Spottiswood (freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1988); Memoirs

of a Female Thief, translated by Nina Rootes (london: Abelard-Schuman,

1973); Only Prostitutes Marry in May: Four Plays, edited by Rhoda

Helfman Kaufman (toronto: Guernica, 1994); Searching for Emma,

translated by Vincent J. Bertolini (chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1998); Voices, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood

(new York: Serpent's Tail, 1997); and Woman at War, translated by Mara

Benetti and Elspeth Spottiswood (new York: Italica Press, 1988).

3. The film, entitled Marianna Ucr@ia, was directed by Roberto

Faenza.

4. Because it deals with the fortunes of an aristocratic Sicilian family, The

Silent Duchess has been compared by some critics to Giuseppe Tomasi

Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (1958; tr. The Leopard, 1960). Although The

Silent Duchess offers a similarly vivid portrait of a family and an age,

her concerns are, not surprisingly, quite different from Lampedusa's. While The Leopard

portrays the sunset of a society based on aristocratic privilege almost with a kind of

regret, The Silent Duchess strongly condemns that social order as a means for the

oppression of subaltern classes but also as the main instrument for imposing violence and

discrimination against women.

5. M. Grazia Sumeli Weinberg, Invito alla lettura di Dacia

Maraini (pretoria: University of South Africa, 1993), 101.

6. Dacia Maraini, interview with Giosue Calaciura, Giornale di

Sicilia, 11 November 1986.

7. Dacia Maraini, personal interview with Anna Camaiti Hostert,

Campagno, Italy, 10 and 11 December, 1994.

8. Ibid.

9. Maraini, interview with Calaciura. 10. Maraini, interview with Hostert. 11. Ibid.

12. Other notable plays from the 1970's include Reparto speciale

antiterrorismo (special antiterrorism squad), which won the

Riccione award in 1975, Don Juan in 1976, and I sogni di

Clitennestra (clytemnestra's dreams) in 1978.

13. In addition to those discussed in the text, Maraini's notable publications during the

1980's include the play Maria Stuarda (mary Stuart) in 1983, winner of the

international Spanish Sitges award and her most produced play abroad, as well as a

collection of poetry, Dimenticato di dimenticare (forgotten to forget) in 1982. 14. This novel closely parallels portions

of Il bambino Alberto, a long interview conducted by Maraini in 1986 with her

former companion of eighteen years, Alberto Moravia, about his childhood.

15. Dacia Maraini, Veronica meretrice a scrittora (milan:

Bompiani, 1992), 5.

16. Starting with the exploration of subjectivity and female identity, Carla Lonzi first

affirmed the principle of sexual difference over the one of equality in her feisty little

pamphlet Sputiamo su Hegel (let's spit on Hegel) (milan:

Rivolta Femminile, 1974). More recently, three volumes of essays

published by La Tartaruga, Milan, have resulted from the Diotima group's

reflections: Diotima: il pensiero della differenza sessuale (diotima:

The thought of sexual difference) (1987); Diotima: mettere al mondo il

mondo. Oggetto e soggettivita' alla luce della differenza sessuale

(diotima: Giving birth to the world. Object and subjectivity in the light of sexual

difference) (1990); and Diotima: il cielo stellato dentro di noi

(diotima: The starry sky within ourselves) (1992).

17. "Riflessioni sui corpi logici e illogici delle mie compaesane di

sesso" appeared in a collection of newspaper articles written by Maraini between

1974 and 1986, entitled La bionda, la bruna e l'asino. Con gli occhi di

o)i sugli anni settanta e ottanta (the Blonde, the brunette, and the ass. The

eyes of today on the seventies and eighties) (milan: Rizzoli, 1987). The title

of the volume immediately suggests a retrospective vision which is also turned to the

future. The themes of sexual difference, the authority of women's writing, and the gendered

body form a bridge between the historical periods that Maraini considers. 18. Maraini, La bionda, xii.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 17.

21. Ibid., xxvii.

22. Denis Mack Smith, A History of Sicily: Modern Sicily After 1713

(new York: Viking, 1968), 288. 23. Dacia Maraini, Bagheria (milan:

Rizzoli, 1993), 72.

24. Ibid., 80.

25. Quoted in Natalia Ravida, review of The Silent Duchess (u.k.

edition), The European, 4 June 1992.

26. Maraini, Bagheria, 129.

27. Dacia Maraini, interview with Monica Lanfranco, in Parole per giovani

donne. 18 femministe parlano alle ragazze di o)i (chieti: Solfanelli

editore, 1993), 37.

28. Asked whether "a woman needs more courage than a man" to write, Maraini responds,

"In a historical sense a woman needs more courage for the simple reason that writing has

always been considered an educated, noble, powerful and prestigious activity from which women were

excluded from the very beginning. ... A woman is always conscious of belonging to a world which has been

confined to the margins of culture, knowledge and education, and therefore she always has the impression of lacking

the appropriate tools to confront an undertaking as culturally involving as a

novel." Dacia Maraini, Interview with Anna Camaiti Hostert, Forum

Italicum 1 (spring 1994), 114. 29. Dacia Maraini, Viaggiando con

passo di volpe (walking with the tread of a fox) (milan: Rizzoli, 1991), 19. 30. Ibid., 16.