A Woman by Sibilla Aleramo

Author:Sibilla Aleramo [Aleramo, Sibilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141988085
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

13

One day, after reading a news story about an incident in the provincial capital, I felt compelled to write a short piece of my own in response to it, and sent it to a newspaper in Rome. It was accepted for publication. The piece included the word feminism, and when I saw it in print there, that acerbic-sounding word seemed suddenly to take on its full meaning, signifying for me nothing less than a new ideal.

Meanwhile my other writing was piling up. One attempt followed another, disparate one. Alongside visual impressions and the rapid sketching of some type or other, in a hundred fragments the thread of my observations on life unfurled – and I tried to steer them towards connectedness, to make them cohere into some kind of organic whole. A hidden ardour which I was beginning to cherish as something better than myself ran through those pieces almost as if they had already purified my self-image, convincing me that I was capable of living intensely and usefully. To be alive! To live! I wanted this not just for my son but for myself, for everyone.

I considered myself fortunate in my solitude. The memory of my own bitter Calvary was still always in the front of my mind, and I became fascinated by the number of people who reach their own summit without even a crucifixion on the basis of which they might expect posthumous justice. Women and men: agglomerated together and yet isolated, incapable of helping each other! Was this humanity? And who was reckless enough to define it with a formula? Women, who had been slaves down to the present day, were in reality completely ignored, and all the presumptuous psychological portrayals of them by novelists and moralists only served to demonstrate the inconsistency of the elements that made up their arbitrary constructions! And men, men so unaware of themselves: without the other, complementary half of humanity, evolving separately in life, intent on enjoyment, on fighting, on stupidly renouncing the spontaneous affection that could allow them to experience the deep beauty of the universe – remaining both weak and fierce instead, always partial and imperfect. In different ways both men and women were to be pitied.

No book had the power to counter my recently acquired convictions, and none of those that I read at the time made much of an impression on me. I realized that after a prolonged paralysis, my critical faculty had seemingly expanded and intensified; and at the same time I discovered that I had a kind of heartfelt nostalgia for all the things that my education had lacked. Poetry, music, the arts of colour and form remained almost unknown to me, while the whole of my body longed for the rapture they might bring; the thought by which I lived sometimes wanted to take flight, to mingle with light and with sound. Writing, my inability to lyrically translate my amorphous inner world, was frequently the cause of acute frustration; everything that I failed to express seemed to fall back into the unknown void from which it had momentarily emerged.

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