Introduction: Life and works

Abstract

Elsa Morante has long been recognized internationally as one of the most significant innovative writers of twentieth-century Italy. Nonetheless, there has to date been no full-length study in English dedicated to her work, and indeed this volume proposes to offer the first comprehensive evaluation of Morante to appear outside Italy. Perspectives on Morante's literary achievement have shifted dramatically in recent years, and the contributors to this volume take full account of the recent course of Morante criticism, locating Morante's work within modern critical and theoretical paradigms. These essays thus work across a range of transcultural disciplines; indeed, one of our aims is to underline Morante's centrality in a broader context which goes beyond Italian national borders, departing from the traditional realm of philological analysis to encompass approaches informed by cultural, feminist, and interdisciplinary studies. Scholars contributing to this volume are writers and critics from America, Italy, the UK, and Poland, each offering their own particular and specific perspective on Morante's work within this broader interdisciplinary and international framework. Elsa Morante was born in Rome on August 18 in 1912-not 1916, as sometimes stated in American translations.1 She was the second daughter of Irma Poggibonsi, a Jewish schoolteacher, and Francesco Lo Monaco, while her legal father was Augusto Morante, a social worker in the Istituto Aristide Gabelli. Elsa received little formal education and was largely self-taught at primary level. During these years she spent time in the house of her godmother, Donna Maria Guerrieri Gonzaga, where she became acquainted with more privileged social groups and became acutely aware of class difference, a theme that was to emerge particularly in her early stories and first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio. The principal reason for her extended stays at Donna Maria's was her precarious health, suffering as she did from anemia. Indeed illness emerges as a trope throughout her work, where it takes not only a physiological but an existential and epistemological dimension. After 1922 the Morante family moved from the working class Testaccio district of Rome, to the Monteverde Nuovo area on the other side of the river. This was a considerable change for Elsa, who now began to attend school regularly. At this time she also began to write regularly for several children's magazines, contributing short stories and poems to Il Corriere dei piccoli among others.2 Morante never finished her university degree; having decided to live independently from her family, she had to find the means to support herself. Indeed, money was a constant problem for Elsa, who found financial security only in 1941, with her marriage to Alberto Moravia, a novelist and journalist with an already substantial reputation. The experience of war touched the couple closely: with the fall of Mussolini, the armistice of 1943, and the Nazi occupation of Rome, Morante and Moravia escaped south to Ciociaria, living for several months in the small village of Fondi. While this experience led directly to Moravia's novel La ciociara (1957), later filmed with Sophia Loren in the lead role, Morante spent these years writing her first novel Menzogna e sortilegio. Indeed, she undertook a dangerous, if brief, return to Rome from Fondi in order to rescue the manuscript abandoned in the urgency of departure. The novel, set in Sicily at the beginning of the twentieth century, follows the experience of three generations, filtered through the memory and imagination of the narrator Elisa. In this novel the commonplaces of popular and romantic fiction-love across the social divide, a sequence of unrequited passions, country versus city-are transformed into a narrative of intense tragic drama, while, as narrator, Elisa offers a self-consciously literary framework that reflects continuously on the process of writing itself. A realist novel, Menzogna e sortilegio simultaneously derails the conventions of realist fiction in a text of almost postmodern irony. Published in 1948, the novel was awarded the Viareggio Award ex-aequo with Aldo Palazzeschi, but Morante was frequently accused, in a spirit of partisan and superficial criticism, of anachronism, of writing a great nineteenth-century novel when there were more pressing concerns in the re-establishment of the nation and of a national culture. In this same year of 1948 Morante and Moravia moved to via dell'Oca, where Morante was to remain until her suicide attempt in 1982, immediately following the publication of Aracoeli. After an accident, her last three years were spent in the Villa Margherita, a private clinic near via Nomentana, where Morante died of a heart attack on the 25th of November, 1985. Like Elisa, the narrator of Aracoeli seeks a healing for his damaged psyche through the recovery of his family history and memories. Middle-aged, homosexual, and self-hating, Manuele is tied to the memory of his mother by bonds of simultaneous hatred and adoration. While Elisa stays in her tiny room throughout, Manuele undertakes a journey from Italy to Andalusia in order both to rediscover Aracoeli and to free himself of her. In her first novel as in her last, from Menzogna e sortilegio to Aracoeli, Morante explores the deepest recesses of eroticism, sexuality, identity, and trauma. Her texts consistently avoid sentimentalisms; they deploy psychological insights gained through Freud and others, and vary in tone from witty and knowing humor, to ironic and comic pastiche, to dark despair. Morante's publications, in between Menzogna e sortilegio and Aracoeli, were not numerous, but highly respected or controversial. The novel L'isola di Arturo won the prestigious Premio Strega in 1957. This is her second fulllength novel, narrated by an adult Arturo, who speaks of his blissful childhood on the wild island of Procida. The young boy is ignorant of the world in his isolation, and of women following his mother's death in childbirth. When his adored father, the willful, bisexual, and capriciously godlike Wilhelm, brings home a new wife-a simple young girl from Naples-Arturo is compelled to confront the transition from idyllic childhood to the complexities and uncertainties of adulthood. A year later, Morante's collection of poems, Alibi, was published, while Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini won the Brancati- Zafferana Award in 1968. During these years Morante made frequent trips abroad, with Moravia, Pasolini, and others. While in the United States in 1959, she met Bill Morrow, a young painter from Kentucky. Their friendship opened a new path in the author's sentimental life, which ended with Morrow's tragic fall from a New York City skyscraper in 1962. The following year Morante published Lo scialle andaluso, a collection of stories including some first published in Il gioco segreto (1941). In 1974, Morante published her third novel, the highly controversial La Storia, closely based on the unfinished Senza i conforti della religione. La Storia confronts the official history of war and battle with individual, subjective experience and the struggle for survival. Ida Ramundo, a fearful and timid schoolteacher, is raped during World War II by a German soldier passing through Italy on his way to die in Africa. She is left pregnant, and she seeks to conceal this second, illegitimate child, Useppe, just as she conceals her epilepsy and her partly Jewish heritage. Each chapter deals with a year of the war and is prefaced by a brief "official" history of events during that year, while the main part of Morante's text describes the war of an ordinary woman whose elder son becomes first a Fascist, then a partisan, then a black-marketeer. Her younger son, by contrast, epileptic like Ida herself, exhibits an unsentimental but touching innocence, a sympathy for the natural and animal world. Useppe cannot survive in the world in which he lives. For Morante, to be human is to be outside history, and her sympathies are quite clearly ranged with those of the popular classes as yet unaffected by the rapid advance of a new technological and bureaucratic age. And indeed, ordinary people were the intended readership for this book. In her desire for La Storia to achieve a wider readership than the cultural elite, Morante urged her publisher Einaudi to produce a paperback edition, priced at 2000 lire, for the work's first publication. This pricing policy, together with Einaudi's aggressive marketing strategy, produced sales of over 100, 000 in the first month alone. Copyright ©2006 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.