In recent months, including after the femicide of Giulia Cecchettin, there has been a lot of talk about how dominant cultural models encourage gender-based violence, and the issue of emotional education in schools has resurfaced in the public debate. Due to a kind of conditioned reflex, most of the criticism was directed against so-called pop culture (trap and rap music, certain television shows, pornography). But it is interesting to examine, precisely because we are talking about school, how these affective models also come from high culture, from texts that have been studied for generations.
With a brief digression into how many and which relationship models the classics of our literature propose, the overall picture is rather clear (and desolate): sexism, gender prejudice and secondary victimization are a constant in school anthologies. Female writers are missing or relegated outside the “canon.” For generations, even at school, we have absorbed a “sentimental culture” through literature that lacks balance because it is an expression of a purely male view of the world. This “sentimental culture” has inevitably become the norm because it was or is rarely the subject of discussion; Of course a reflection of the time in which it was born, but inevitably also a role model for the time that followed. For example, the female characters of Italian literature over the centuries have never freed themselves from the two possible stereotypes: the pure angel or the devious seductress.
(Mandatory disclaimer: With this article we do not want to question the value of literary masterpieces, we do not want to delete anyone from the anthologies or enable a forced reading of the texts with an anti-historical and uncritical perspective. The study of texts that are “detoxified” is certainly not Rather, we try to become aware of the texts that we admire and love and that were inevitably internalized models full of stereotypes that are difficult to break down.
Since their beginnings in the 13th century, first in the Sicilian school and then with the Stilnovo poets, women have been “angelized,” abstract entities that do not even belong to the earthly dimension. In fact, it's better if they're dead, like Dante's Beatrice or Petrarch's Laura. Of course, the reality of the texts and their context would be more complicated, but what remains of them are angels, elusive ideas of purity, impossible love, inspiring agents, intangible guides to the divine.
Women who are rebellious or unfaithful to their husbands (even if they are cruel) burn in hell: Paolo and Francesca, a rare, if not the only, example in our romance anthologies that we would today consider “sane” after We have fallen in love thanks to their shared passion for reading, and in the end they are killed and damned. They go to hell because the betrayal of the husband and the brother is more important than the feeling. Dante shows his pain (he actually faints), but the verdict is final.
In the triad of fathers of our letters, Boccaccio is considered the “most advanced” because in the Decameron he entrusts women with the central role of narrators and often makes them the protagonists of the short stories. However, Nastagio degli Onesti, one of the most anthologized novels, is a real apology for femicide. The noble Nastagio is not reciprocated by his lover despite showering her with attention and gifts, but in the end he finds a way to convince her by making her witness a ghost scene during an outdoor banquet in which a naked boy Woman is pursued and killed by the “rejected lover” who feeds his heart and entrails to the dogs (the scene repeats in a loop). Apparently the lover, shocked by the scene, is persuaded to marry Nastagio: happy ending. The story is brutal and the moral is shocking, but it is mentioned again and again in anthologies: the girl who was torn apart by dogs asked for it because she did not return a man's love. Perhaps we could choose something else from Boccaccio, such as the story of Filippa da Prato, who fights the death sentence in court for cheating on her husband and is acquitted only because it shows that women are slaves to their insatiability Desire.
But let's move on. Other sacred monsters: Ariosto and Tasso. Love is a central theme in knightly poems. In Orlando Furioso, the two main love stories are not just a love tormented by adverse circumstances, but a series of reactions that would today be considered serious psychiatric pathologies. Orlando is in love with Angelica, the beautiful and capricious oriental princess with whom everyone falls in love at first sight (except for Paolo and Francesca, we have not yet heard of a love that came from meeting a woman or talking to her is). The appearance, the vision of a beautiful girl is always enough for her). When the Christian paladin finds out that Angelica is in love with Medoro, who is just an infantryman and a Saracen, he goes crazy (“becoming the wife of a poor infantryman,” “the ungrateful woman who has come to settle with her Drudo “). , are lines of wounded pride that seem like the great-great-great-grandparents of the famous “She went home with the Neg*o, the T*oia” from Vasco Rossi's Colpa d'Alfredo, now considered false.
Orlando goes through the psychotic phases of denial of reality and self-deception, blaming imaginary third parties who want to “tarnish his wife's name”, then falling into despair, crying and flying into a blind rage, laying waste to everything he finds until he takes off his weapons because he himself was “betrayed” as a knight in his honor. No one would think of throwing dirt on the verses of Orlando's madness that we have studied with passion, but if we abstract ourselves for a moment they tell us that it is a destructive madness that is considered legitimate applies because it is triggered by jealousy.
Angelica is not the only character: there is Bradamante, who disguises himself as a brave knight, because to be interesting, a woman must perform deeds like a man. And then there is Isabella, who, separated from her Zerbino, suffers harassment and kidnappings by countless men and ultimately plans suicide to escape the rapist Rodomonte, who first beheads her and then remorsefully builds a mausoleum for her.
– Also read: The Orlando Furioso is 500 years old
Torquato Tasso seems to take a step forward in Gerusalemme liberata by portraying more complex female characters. His most important love stories both have a very high rate of violence because they arise between opposing faiths: Clorinda and Tancredi (he kills her in a duel, only recognizing her under the armor after he has mortally wounded her), and the rebellious figure of the A warrior disappears when she asks her murderer to baptize her before her death.
Armida and Rinaldo are the protagonists of a happier ending, but without any limits. Armida is a beautiful pagan sorceress who tempts dozens of crusaders with erotic promises and traps them in her enchanted garden. When her beloved Rinaldo manages to free himself, she becomes angry and unleashes her warriors against him. She would like to kill him herself, but when she sees him, she realizes that she loves him and runs away to attempt suicide to ease the pain of love (“and let death be medicine for the heart” ). However, Rinaldo saves her and also Armida. At the end of the subversive aspect of this character of a magical and strong-willed woman, she converts, submits to God and Rinaldo's will, with words that follow those of Mary: “Behold, your maid, you can dispose of it as you see fit – he said to him – and the sign will be read to you. Happy ending thanks to complete submission to God and people. Amen.
The centuries pass, even the pages of anthologies, but the contemporary adage “If it hurts you, it's not love” is systematically refuted by school texts that seem to support the opposite theory: “If it doesn't hurt you, it doesn't hurt “hurt.” can’t be true, love. So Alfieri, “a man of mind and heart, born free,” seems to care deeply about the potential for human rebellion, including women, but then not a single one is saved in his works. What metaphor does he use in one of his most famous sonnets (the CLX of rhymes) when he has to dramatize the two opposing emotions that relentlessly torment him, anger and melancholy? “Two wild women, hard, cruel furies indeed / I cannot remove them from my side (miserable, unfortunately!)”. Two wild women, two furies who torment him.
In Ugo Foscolo's Last Letters from Jacopo Ortis, the unfortunate Jacopo, in love with Teresa and engaged to a man she does not love, kills himself (like Goethe's young Werther) after writing her a letter today an example of passive-aggressive victimism would be: “But I die unsullied and master of myself and filled with you and sure of your tears!” …comfort yourself and live for the happiness of our miserable parents; Your death would curse my ashes!
With the 18th century and the freethinkers, women finally seemed to have a legitimate form of agency over their sexual lives, but the myth of the irresistible seducer, loved by women and envied by men, has never had a female correspondent. In my memoirs for Giacomo Casanova, the libertine par excellence, women are prey more or less difficult to conquer, of which one can make a bare, infinite and hackneyed list. We say “casanova” and “dongiovanni”, but there is no positive and non-pejorative literary or linguistic correspondent that defines a woman who has a lot of men. We have never read the story of a sexually liberated woman, told with a sense of adventure and in which she does not end badly.
Goldoni, ditto. Of course, one of his most read and performed comedies, which is always present in school anthologies, has a seemingly emancipated and autonomous woman as the protagonist. It's about time!, you might say. In reality, if you read carefully, the innkeeper is nothing more than a slightly happier version of one of the two female roles: namely the cunning manipulator who uses satanic seduction skills to lead all men, even the less naive ones. do what she wants without being able to resist.
Lyrical works are not included in anthologies of Italian literature, but they are certainly part of our education. But for many, it wouldn't be such a crazy idea to project onto the curtain before beginning: “Warning: toxic love, gender stereotypes, femicide, victim blaming.” In fact, the protagonists of bel canto do only one thing: they die young and desperate in search Love. Usually suicide or tuberculosis, as in La Traviata, the most performed opera of all time (where, as the title suggests, the guilt-inducing impression is much stronger than in the French text that inspired it, The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre). Dumas Fils). Violetta, a “woman of the world,” has to leave Alfredo because this could endanger his sister’s marriage “as pure as an angel.”
Mimì also dies of consumption in Bohème, after all Puccini doesn't save any of her. Madame Butterfly is a seduced and abandoned girl who remains faithful to her husband even after he has gone away and married someone else, and when he returns to take back his son, she not only leaves him to raise with his partner can woman, but he also kills himself. In Turandot, Liù kills herself to avoid revealing her lover's name, and Tosca also ends up dead, despite her more emancipated claim “I lived by art and I lived by love” and her ability to manage political intrigue, revenge and rescue to throw himself from the fortress walls of Castel Sant'Angelo, because without the love of his life, life itself no longer has any meaning.
Back to the anthologies, here are the inevitable ones from the 19th century:
Advocate of unhappy love, Giacomo Leopardi. We thank all this misfortune for giving us masterpieces, but poor Silvia, whom he spied on during her studies and who “was intent on women's work,” and the girl from “Evening on a Holiday” who sleeps and her torments obviously ignored, they are one-dimensional characters of naive, clueless, simple-minded girls who cannot understand the meaning of life, least of all the injustice of the world, in contrast to Giacomo, a kind of incel-ante litteram who secretly spies on them and doesn't failed to emphasize that he is systematically rejected: “This day was solemn: now give entertainment / Rest; and maybe you remember / In a dream how many liked you today and how many / liked you: not me, not what I hope for».
The manuscript of “A Silvia” by Giacomo Leopardi, Pisa, 1828 (via Wikimedia)
What about the great children's books of the late 19th century? There are no women in Cuore by Edmondo De Amicis and Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. The protagonists are male, but there are some supporting actors. In “Heart” we remember the teacher with the red pen, a good, motherly and sweet girl who was dedicated to her work as an educator, but who easily gave way to a sexist insult given that Once a woman tends to correct when If the conversation partner makes mistakes, she is referred to as the “teacher with the red pen”.
In Pinocchio, the only woman in action is the blue-haired fairy, who is even more idealized… Just to remind you how much literature is a relational model, in psychology we talk about the “Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy syndrome ” to describe the relationship of a dysfunctional couple where she takes care of and solves all the problems while he continues to cause trouble in a dysfunctional codependent relationship and begs for forgiveness that she can't wait to give him.
As for the great prose, even in this masterpiece of The Betrothed there is no lack of toxic examples, condemned by Manzoni, of powerful men who are used to dispossessing women against their will: Don Rodrigo, who has his eye on Lucia or Gertrude's father, who forces her to become a nun, to name just the two most famous ones. The female characters are basic and very articulate for narrative purposes, but in fact they are still reduced to the two possible models, the innocent, God-fearing woman modeled on the Madonna (Lucia), and the lost woman without the opportunity Redemption (the nun of Monza) She is actually the victim of her family's cruel psychological violence, but she is unable to escape her desire – “and the unfortunate woman answered” – and once she comes into contact with evil is no longer able to escape him, remains entangled in ever darker blood conspiracies that will lead her to ruin, without the possibility of redemption, which is instead granted to some important male characters, such as the Unnamed or Fra' Cristoforo, who, after she have encountered and experienced evil and are able to counteract and transform it).
Another text that appears frequently in anthologies is the novella La Lupa by Giovanni Verga, in which the woman is the demonic incarnation of the feminine magic that corrupts men, especially one, the son-in-law, who is “defeated” by temptation and evil in order to get rid of Lupa , can only kill them. It doesn't matter that in return for his sexual favors he had asked the woman's young daughter to marry her against her will: the devil who conquers all is the she-wolf, an absolutely evil woman who deserves no pity, not even that Priest, let alone the reader. The first description is enough:
“She was tall, thin, she only had firm and strong brunette breasts and yet she was no longer young; She was pale, as if she always had malaria, and on top of that paleness were two large eyes and fresh, red lips eating into them. In the village they called her La Lupa because she was never full – of anything. The women frowned as they saw her pass, alone like a dog, with the wandering and suspicious gait of a hungry wolf; She undressed her children and their husbands in an instant with her red lips and pulled them behind her skirt just to look at them with those satanic eyes even when they were standing in front of the altar of Saint Agrippina.
Everything was supposed to change in the 20th century, but it didn't. Of the poets in the anthologies, Giovanni Pascoli is perhaps the most vile (to put it like Boomers imitating Generation Z), with this semi-incestuous relationship with his sisters, all of them “quivering nests.” The two girls with the purple thimble are reminiscent of Pascoli's sisters – Maria, “simple in gestures and looks” and Rachele, a brunette with a fiery look (Aridaje with the dualism of angel woman/demon woman) and one longs for the morbid memories of the both who experienced the traumatizing and sweet experience of the poisonous flower, symbol of sexual experience.
D'Annunzio's women are divided between useless collectible figures and sensual enchantresses, while he is always an indomitable, fascinating, heroic conqueror in search of muses. Tertium non datur. Oh yes, there are mothers, angelic angels (of the hearth), who give birth for their homeland, as fascism wanted. Pirandello, very modern: In the story “Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza” is all about the elusive double truth of the two protagonists, mother-in-law and son-in-law, who think each other is crazy despite having a relationship with mutual respect and affection. In both opposing versions, it remains in the background as an acceptable fact that the daughter/wife is excluded at home and cannot have contact with the world due to the great jealousy of her husband, his “totally exclusive love”. who still remain content and calm. Surely.
In the ministerial programs that would reach today, it is difficult to go beyond Zeno's Conscience of Italo Svevo: torment, psychoanalysis, Joyce and Freud, failure, identity in crisis… and women? Again supporting actors whose psychological depth is largely ignored: Zeno socializes with four sisters, Ada, Alberta, Anna and Augusta, and obviously falls in love with the most beautiful one, Ada, but space is given here to describe his personality and his motives Rejection is minimal. What matters is only Zeno, his desire for marriage as a kind of “cure” and the comparison with Guido, the man Ada prefers. In the end, Zeno proposes marriage to Augusta, the “ugliest one,” and confesses to her that he chose her as his replacement. In the novel, that is, in literary fiction, there will be a happy marriage, because Alberta agrees to be the woman “who wants to live for him”, the ideal, loving and caring wife who will be able to be with to answer Zeno's neuroses and his infidelity, gentleness and willingness to sacrifice. In short, the happiness of a couple in the 20th century is achieved by the one who endures: Is this something new, perhaps?
Sometimes at school we also meet Alberto Moravia (last year, for example, in the state exam there was a title about Gli indifferenti, a very toxic story in which a mother and a daughter compete for a lover), who describes women as an empty bourgeoisie Opportunists who are almost never disconnected from the erotic dimension, the only one in which they seem to have the power to exercise their own will (surrender to a man, deny themselves, exploit his desire).
In short, it seems to us that, when talking about the possibility of bringing affective education to schools, it would not be bad to also reflect on the fact that, precisely because of their power, the exemplary figures of Italian literature do not only offer a reflection of the However, the times in which they were written have gradually shaped the collective imagination by continuing to perpetuate stereotypes, toxicity and justifications for gender-based violence. A first step might be to give more space to the discussion and deconstruction of these models, to better contextualize them and to highlight the places where the most persistent stereotypes can subtly nest. Above all, more space should be given to female authors – and not just outsiders – to offer broader perspectives, less stereotypical and more plausible voices. But there is already a lot to discuss about a healthy education of emotions, even if only against paradigms.