La Mamma by Penelope Morris & Perry Willson

Author:Penelope Morris & Perry Willson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

It is notable here that the image of the chain used by Ginzburg originates with Aleramo in the Italian literary context. Ginzburg’s vision of the intensity and the darkness of the mother–child relationship is also strongly reminiscent of its representation in Aleramo. Echoes of Aleramo’s concerns around the maternal, indeed, seem to be more noticeable from the 1970s than in the decades in between.

Ginzburg’s essay on abortion, written in 1975, is timely in the political context of debates on abortion, both within and without the feminist movement. So too, of course, is Lettera a un bambino mai nato by Oriana Fallaci. Often considered primarily as a novel about abortion (and it is as much a roman à thèse in its considerations of the legal system and its limitations in relation to women as is Una donna), Lettera is much more than that and would better be described as an embryonic fantasy. I would suggest, moreover, that this work is almost as influential for late twentieth-century approaches to the maternal as Aleramo’s turn-of-the-century novel. Fallaci, while discussing abortion in remarkably few pages of this short work, sets out instead, it seems, to reconceptualize the maternal. Her protagonist (anonymous, like that of Aleramo) speaks in a maternal voice, and only rarely in a daughterly discourse. The protagonist’s concern is both for herself, and for the “bambino,” who is destined never to be born. The discovery that the “bambino” has died in utero at a relatively early stage in the pregnancy means that the event of childbirth and the day-to-day undertakings of mothering remain outside the narrative in an experiential sense, but the latter certainly form part of the textual fantasy. The narrative voice repeatedly flags this fantastical dimension of the work, through the dream-sequences and fairytale interpolations in the narrative, as well as through the protagonist’s avowal that the “bambino” is “like my moon, my moon-dust,”53 alerting the reader to the insubstantiality of both at a relatively early stage. There are, too, early recurring references to “fancies/phantoms of unborn babies,”54 which perform an analogous function.

In this novel, Fallaci both “clarifies the designs of the institution [of motherhood] as social imperative [and] expands the meaning of motherhood in its personal and social dimensions,” as Robin Pickering-Iazzi has noted.55 Lettera certainly reveals the uses of motherhood and the maternal in the service of patriarchy (as Aleramo does in Una donna and, in many respects, little has changed here), but also presents it as both potentially revolutionary and transformative. The narrator tries, through the tales she tells the “bambino,” to make him socially and politically aware, as well as to reject, for herself, maternal stereotypes. These transformative depictions of the maternal, though, are held in the realm of the protagonist’s imaginary. They are never enacted in the novel; in this respect, they are reminiscent of the fantasized maternal universes briefly evoked by both Aleramo and Banti.

As in Aleramo and Banti, too, Fallaci’s version of the maternal is represented with an extraordinary physicality. John Gatt-Rutter has

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