Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9781350137806
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

11

Writing food

Issues of female identity and gender politics in Dacia Maraini’s novels

Maria Morelli

By her own admission, Dacia Maraini’s ‘obsession’ with food dates back to her traumatic experience of the Japanese concentration camp for anti-fascists where she was interned with her family during the Second World War, an experience she has recounted in her autobiographical account of her childhood years, La nave per Kobe: diari giapponesi di mia madre (The Boat to Kobe: My Mother’s Japanese Diaries, 2001).1 The hunger she suffered then, as a small child, inevitably shaped her aesthetic and literary imagination. Food – or lack of it – has become a quasi-ubiquitous motif in her writings.2

Women’s predilection for food imagery and symbolism in literary works has been a growing interest for scholars at least since the 1980s. For Hélène Cixous, food is central to women’s relationship with their corporeality, as well as with their culture. Taking the ‘scene of the apple’ as recounted in Genesis as a starting point for her argument, in ‘Extreme Fidelity’ (1988), Cixous contends that Eve’s story is that of every woman, constantly negotiating the cultural taboos that the patriarchal law has inscribed onto the surface of her body. Albeit addressing the relationship between women and food in strictly psychoanalytical terms, in The Hungry Self: Women Eating, and Identity (1985), Kim Chernin reaches a similar conclusion, positing eating habits – and conformance to, or denial of, maternal teachings about them – as the most obvious factor in shaping women’s identity. This connection between food and what it entails (housework, childbearing and childrearing) and female identity became all the more obvious with the women’s movement, when expectations about domesticity and foodwork were challenged by the feminist critique of the myth of the ‘happy housewife’.3 Women began to question their role as nurturers – food purveyors, that is – and to explore the implications of conforming to a traditional, patriarchal script.

In this chapter, I will analyse the recourse to food imagery in a number of Maraini’s works belonging to what critics have usually identified as her most explicit feminist phase: Donna in guerra (Woman at War, 1975), Lettere a Marina (Letters to Marina, 1981), Il treno per Helsinki (The Train to Helsinki, 1984), all texts where images of food, or what it stands for, are too pervasive to be merely coincidental. Looking at both levels of representations – the literal and the symbolic – I will argue that in these writings, the act of preparing, presenting or consuming meals, while reaffirming food as central in the shaping of the female experience, also bespeaks the author’s preoccupations with an essentialist model of female identity that casts women in the role of carers, the very same preoccupation that feminism had for the first time brought to the fore.

Donna in guerra tells the story of a meek and compliant primary school teacher, Vanna (Vannina) Magro, and her path towards self-awareness and emancipation from patriarchal expectations and a constrictive marriage. Heralded by many as Maraini’s most overt feminist novel, it reflects the author’s concern towards domesticity against a backdrop of changing cultural values.

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