Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini

Spatialized Gender and the Poetry of Dacia Maraini

Corrado Federici Spatialized Gender and the Poetry of Dacia Maraini In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard conducts a formal analysis of the aesthetics of spatial signifiers. He prefers to deal with what he refers to as "topophilia" or "images of felicitous space" and defers the task ofexamining the negative orapocalyptic dimension ofthe topic. He argues in favor ofthe interpretability of spatial structures in the context ofa phenomenological discourse and spawns a number of semiotic analyses such as those ofJuri Lotman and Angelo Marchese in the area ofpoetry criticism. In all ofthese cases the working premise isthat specific physical locations are associated in the imagination of the poet with particular affective states. Although inspired to a degree by the theories of these critics, by a sensitivity to the polyphonic feminist discourse in general and concern·for the "new spaces of female sociality" (de Lauretis 8) in particular, the present essay turns on an inverted premise. Instead of taking it given locus as a hermeneutical starting point and proceeding to ascertain the associations or connotations that it promotes in the imagination of the reflective subject, what is proposed is the notion that a hypothetical or virtual spatiality is.constructed that houses and determines a set of gendered images corresponding more or less to Bachelard's "topography of our intimate being" (1). In the poetry ofDacia Maraini, at least three significant spatial configurations emerge, operating through a complementary but sometimes oppositional dynamic in which the writer's ideology and aesthetics take form. The spatialization is the product of a metaphorizing process in that Maraini's images of men and women can be situated in two contiguous macro-spaces or parallel universes that are figurative grids or three-dimensional loci. This is where the poetic subject's impressions of the two 61 Corrado Federici sexes tend to gravitate. In some cases actual physical space within which the protagonists of the poems operate pr live is named. More often than not, the' space exists by implication. Maraini herselfmakes this distinction in writing: "the oppressed take on the values of their oppressors" (Birnbaum 114). The general scheme identifiable in the poetry of Maraini is that of two co-extensive but distinct ideological and emotional hemispheres: one male and the other female (SI and S2 in figure 1). Each of these is subdivided into smaller conceptual ar.eas (SIA, SIB, and S2A, S~B, S2C), A third space, S3' also begins to be delineated, though less forcefully. Incorporated within the male segment of the model are all references to images of the male as predator, aggressor, or patriarch (SIA) and allusions to males as themselves victims of social pressures and norms (SIB). The feminine portion of the figure is filled with characterizations of women as exploited, oppressed, and disenfranchised members of society (S2A); as redeemed, liberated citizens of a truer democracy (S2B);' or as leaders of the women's liberation movement (S2C), S3 emerges as an ideological alternative to the main antithetical "spheres of influence" and can be considered in a sense as a stepping back from perhaps too clinical a polarization of male-female relationships. Each of these paradigms is the product of the "productive imagination," as Bachelard might say, but in'several illustraS .2 Fig. 1. Spheres of influence in Maraini's poetry. 62 Spatialized Gender and Maraini's Poetry tions a complex societal voicing can be detected beneath or within the voice of the poetic subject. The volume in which these categories are most compellingly articulated is Donne mie (1974; Women of mine).! In Crudelta all'aria aperta (1966; Cruelty in the open air), the spatial-rhetorical paradigms are not as convincingly conceptualized, while in the later poetry of Mangiami pure (1978; Devour Me Too), Dimenticato di dimenticare (1982; Forgot to forget) and Viaggiando con passo di volpe (1991; Traveling in the Gait ofa Fox), the categories tend to soften, and greater attention is given to elaboration of the S3 interpretive model. In the space designated as repository of terms that denote the male as visualized by the female poetic subject, the figure .representing manifestations of the oppressor or despot, especially in Donne mie, takes shape around the noun padrone .("owner" or "boss"), which recurs six times. The word connotes possession of objects or property over which is exercised sanctioned dominion or authority. Such a function is reinforced by adjectival markers such as legale ("legal") or mio ("my"). On occasion, ownership...