Italian Women Writers Between Femininity and “Feminism”: From the Unification of Italy to the Twentieth Century

Examining the traits of the female characters offered by a number of prominent women writers in a specific space-time interval of civilisation contributes to identifying the potential relations between the female characters created by women writers and the literary tradition, the historical context and the mentality of an era, which in this case characterise post-Unification Italy and the first decades of the 20th century. Given the distinctive historical and cultural environment in which the Italian women writers of those decades were active, and based on the dichotomous representation of women (“the woman-angel” figure vs the “femme fatale”) in literature, an overview of their experience from the perspective of the “women’s question”, inextricably linked to the “social question”, is presented. In the post-Unification period, writing provided an opportunity for Italian women authors to rethink, and not only from a literary angle, women’s role in the newly-formed society. Through the study of a select group of women writers, an attempt is made to provide a picture of what can be defined as “the Italian interpretation of emancipation and ‛feminism’.” Although there was a small group of women authors who were not afraid to overtly fight for the “women’s question”, demanding for their fellow countrywomen the right to civic engagement in the making of the “new Italy”, in most cases women writers favoured taking, at least outwardly, more conservative stances, only to then present authorial choices that make one wonder whether they had not decided to challenge the system from within.