Such, however, are the lives of all wives - a grim feminist Sicilian novel from Maria Messina

I’ll follow Serao’s Neapolitan unmarried women with a Sicilian example from Maria Messina’s little novel A House in the Shadows (1921), one kind of feminist fiction with another.   Serao’s stories almost suffer from their abundance of characters and movement.  Messina’s book is in places almost static.  Serao’s women worry about the ways they are trapped by circumstances, but poor Nicolina can barely leave the house.

Nicolina’s sister makes what seems like a good match with an estate manager.  Nicolina goes along help establish the household and keep her sister company.  Soon enough they discover that Don Lucio is a petty tyrant – sometimes worse than petty – using everything, for example his health problems or his obsessive compulsive disorder, as a weapon:

Peeling fruit was the most delicate task…  Pears and apples, carefully peeled and cut in pieces, one piece already stuck on the little silver fork…  (31)

Neither the wife nor her sister do anything except serve this husband.  The house is a prison.  The title, even aside from the symbolism, is accurate.  A “narrow little street,” a view of nothing but “reddish, moss-covered roofs,” no neighbors, no family.  Serao’s book was of high interest just because of all of the detail about life in Naples.  A House in the Shadows is almost free of local color, or much color of any kind.

The novel begins with a young boy on his sickbed, with Nicolina doing everything she can to accommodate the father.  It is a relief when the son becomes old enough to become a character in his own right.  At least he can leave the house!  This is a grim novel.  “Such, however, are the lives of all wives” (29).  In this novel, actually, all women.

I hope it does not sound like I am complaining.  I can handle 125 pages of this stuff, and it should be clear enough how the tone of the novel is necessary for its argument.  But Messina does sacrifice some novelistic pleasures in the process.  I suppose I found the greater concentration of her short stories to be more artful.

Messina’s novel ends with, I was shocked to find, an element of hope.  For all of their suffering, Nicolina and her sister have perhaps succeeded in one way – they have protected the sister’s two daughters from their abusive father, Don Lucio.  Or so I understand the ending:

They listen.  A footstep, a voice in the street.  An impetuous exuberance surges in their young bosoms.  They are growing up like certain odd delicate flowers that appear between the cracks in old walls and that the rain will soon spoil.  Don Lucio clears his throat.  The two girls are startled, but then laugh for having been startled, and then they are silent, once again waiting, anxious and moved, while the heavy, silent hours pass across the starry sky.  (125)

The father is still there, in the middle of the daughters’ reverie.  But they are young and he is now old.  They can outwait him.

John Shepley is the translator.

All the misfortunes - Maria Messina's feminist Sicilian stories

When I was casting around for Italian books in January, a friendly reader, a teacher of Italian literature, suggested some books that are were not quite the usual stuff, not in English discussions.  This will be the first of those suggestions that I have read.

The author is Maria Messina, a Sicilian writer active from 1909 to 1928.  She explicitly emulated Giovanni Verga, writing sad stories about ordinary Sicilians and their hard times.  Compared to Verga she: 1) writes about a more eventful period, when the mass emigration to the Americas was overthrowing the old order in Sicily, 2) seems to focus more on women, and 3) seems not to have written a story at the level of “Rosso Malpelo” or “Malaria,” although few have.

I say “seems” because I do not quite trust the collection available in English, Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily (The Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 2007, tr. Elise Magistro).  The Preface, and the Introduction, and also the Afterword – thirty percent of the book is apparatus – make it clear that the assumed interest is historical and sociological, that Americans researching the Italian immigration will be interested in stories about the women – wives, mothers, sisters – who stayed behind.

The editors are right – this material is of really high interest.  What I mean is that if Messina did write a story as good as “Rosso Malpelo” but it was not about a woman constrained by her husband, etc. it would not be in this collection.  What is here is good enough.

A woman remembers:

the arbor at Licata, with its ripening grapes, her mother dressed in black, and she herself embroidering bunches of red roses with stems as stiff as sealing wax onto a bright yellow coverlet.  The coverlet, that took forever to finish, was destined for her corredo [trousseau]  (“Red Roses,” 127)

But the woman’s mother dies and she is sent to live with her married brother.  She is essentially imprisoned in their house.  They refuse to let her marry, even with a good offer in hand, because they would have to pay a dowry.  All of this is seen as entirely normal by everyone involved.

She buried her face in her hands but did not cry.  Filled with anguish, she saw with exacting clarity her gray life as an aging spinster, still in love.  (134)

The end.  These are sad stories. 

God, it seemed, wanted to test Grandmother Lidda with all the misfortunes he had sent her,  She was a widow and poor; her daughter-in-law had died, and her son had nothing but La Mèrica in his head.  (“Grandmother Lidda,” 58)

Yes, a Job story.  So poor granny is now raising an infant, her grandchild, a burden at first but eventually one more thing, the last thing, for God to take away from her, when the father sends extra money from America – for a ticket for his son, but not for Grandmother Lidda.  In “America 1911,” it is the wife who is left behind – she goes blind, then mad.  In “America 1918,” it is the man who is destroyed by emigrating, while his wife prospers.  “With her husband sick and in need of medical attention, she was free to do what she wanted” (76).  Messina’s technique is almost inherently ironic.

I am discovering that Messina’s stories are hard to pull apart for quotations.  Verga is the same way.  A lot of what these writers do is pretty plain, but full of little traps.

Maybe someday someone will translate more of these stories. There is also a short novel in English, A House in the Shadows (1921) that I might be able to find.

Many thanks to JS for suggesting Messina.