Book 7: Una Donna (A Woman, 1906)

This novel by Sibilla Aleramo is a feminist classic in continental Europe but is not widely known here. Published in 1906, it precedes Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," the feminist touchstone in English, by more than two decades.

Aleramo is not the writer that Woolf is (but who is?). Her book occasionally gets mired in sentimental rambling that you'd never see in Woolf, but it also teems with insights and observations about women's experience that still — a hundred years later — sharply resonate.

The plot of her novel is simple and, when you discover it is autobiographical, shocking. The main character is, as the teenaged Aleramo was, raped by a man and compelled to marry him. Apparently the practice of "seducing," i.e., sexually assaulting, girls was common at that time in rural Italy as a way of procuring a bride. After the act, the girl is "ruined" and must look to her rapist and the "legitimization" of marriage as the only entry back into society.

Because the culture is so deeply misogynistic, the full horror of this union is not immediately apparent to the girl. She even determines to love the man, partially to make a virtue of necessity, but also because her mind simply can't abandon her youthful ideals and hopes. Growing up in an educated, liberal household — before her father accepted a job in the Marche, a rural region of Italy — she had not felt the constraints of her gender. "I had never acknowledged that being a woman might affect my future." She had imagined freedom, deep love for a soulmate and satisfying work as the rewards of adulthood.

She thinks these things are still in her reach after the marriage, despite all the contrary signs. "I wanted to believe in my happiness, present and future. I wanted love to be a grand and beautiful experience. I was sixteen and wanted a love which would incorporate all the mysterious poetry of life."

But wishing can't make this so. Her husband has other ideas. The incalculable selfishness that allowed him to rape her — and the society that nodded its approval — allows him to continue on a course wherein she is little more than a domestic servant, existing to satisfy his various needs. It's a backwater Italian culture where men are never expected to grow up or develop empathy. They go from being fawned-over, egotistical sons to fawned-over, egotistical husbands. A domestic world in which they are not at the center, with all other family members in faithful orbit, is simply inconceivable.

Eventually her determination to love him and make the best of her fate unravels. He has no notion of the tenderness and "color" and love she had longed for as a girl growing up in urban, "magical" Milan. (The differences between the industrial, sophisticated north and the primitive, peasant-filled south are a big theme in Italian literature, I'm finding). He is jealous and intellectually inferior and often offends her "love for rationality." He wins arguments because he is a man and childish, not because he is right. He is terrible at love, treating her body only as a receptacle for his lust. "Was I merely to be used as an object of pleasure, sensually debased in a relentless round of days and nights, until I died?" she grimly asks. "Did this man own me?"

As the questions mount, she realizes the hopelessness of her determination to love him. It's an enterprise dependent on absolute self-neglect. The self-sacrifice and submission touted as the feminine ideal seem more and more like nice words for self-hatred.

When she becomes pregnant, she believes she at last has a reason to live, that a child will supply the missing tenderness and human connection she had longed for. She is right. She loves her son and he loves her. She wants to be an interesting parent for him, an interesting person. She wants to write and travel and enjoy life, as much for his sake as for her own. But this is impossible, she discovers. Her husband legally "owns" his child, just like he owns her, and he has different plans. End of story.

Eventually she musters the strength to leave, to head off to sun-drenched Rome, with its piazzas and fountains and architectural reminders that our histories continually evolve, to become the writer she always wanted to be, to find the "room of one's own," as Woolf would later describe it, but not without horrific and needless tragedy.

Some interesting tidbits about Aleramo after she started her new life: She started it with a vengeance! Like Woolf, she became the most famous feminist in her country and also had a female companion, Lina Poletti, and openly supported homosexual rights. She simultaneously had a relationship with the male writer Giovanni Cena and said she never felt guilty for loving them both at once. That seems remarkably frank for 1900! She was quite attractive to young literary types and, according to the Introduction of my book, "for two generations of young Italian writers, an affair with Sibilla Aleramo was worth, in terms of publicity and reputation, at least a major literary prize." I love that.