Puntini, Puntini, Puntini: Motherliness as Masquerade in Sibilla Aleramo's Una donna

As the first avowedly feminist novel in the Italian tradition, Sibilla Aleramo's 1906 Una donna occupies the space that Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own occupies for the Anglo-American tradition, and has been the object of similar veneration. After all, Aleramo's autobiographical protagonist commits the cultural crime of leaving her child in order to live a life of her own, and break the "monstrous chain" that links mothers to daughters, forming a continuum of maternal sacrifice.¹ Our sympathy is with her predicament. But contemporary readers may be less sympathetic with aspects of her prose that I, for one, have always found almost unbearable: the trailing off of sentences as they sink into sentimentality, the overuse of points of suspension. Take the following episode, for example. Towards the end of the autobiographical novel, the protagonist has announced to her brutish husband her intention to separate from him, remain in Rome, and make a living on her own. The husband covers her with vile insult, beats her, and threatens, in the child's presence, to take the child away with him. The thought is unbearable to her:

The little one looked at me in bewilderment. Oh, my child, my child . . . Would I not die if that man took him away from me? He was my flesh, my life, that small, warm bundle who trembled in my arms was my faith. . . .

(A Woman 171; [trans. mod.]²)

Only a "madre snaturata," a de-natured mother, could possibly countenance such a thing. And indeed, the following day she informs her male friend, "the prophet," that she has decided to give up her attempts to be independent, on account of her husband's threats to take away her child. The evening afterwards, with her child playing at her feet, she breaks down and sobs violently. The child offers solace:

The little one turned towards me, shocked. Certainly he had no memory of having seen me like this, sobbing alone with him. In vain he clung to my knees, he stroked my face, said his childish endearments to make my crying stop. Finally he seized my pen from the desk, and placed it between my limp fingers: "Mamma, mamma, don't cry; write, mamma, write . . . . I'll be good; don't cry . . . .

(A Woman 173; [trans. mod.])³

The child presses a pen into his mother's hands, giving her permission, indeed commanding her, to write. The scene is one of several that attempt to reconcile writing and motherhood when, in fact, the events of the novel suggest that no such reconciliation is possible. The strategy at work here is a defensive one; after all, the narrator has left her child, refused to sacrifice herself and her writing to her role as mother. In the quotation above, the child's words would seem to represent a role reversal, with the child occupying the role of mother; it is not, in other words, a mother who consoles a crying child, and tells him to be good, but a child who consoles a mother, and tells her he will be good. The child is mother to the woman. And as the passage continues, it is the child who sacrifices himself to the mother:

Oh, the painful pursing of those cute little budding lips, the precocious fixity of that moist glance . . . He truly shared my pain with all of the goodness of his little loving soul. And I could only accept his sacrifice, I, his mother, who had dreamt of all possible joys, all possible victories for him . . . .

Write? The dear little soul intuited this as well, the necessity for me to plunge into my work and dreams as never before. My son was not jealous, he was not overbearingly egotistical; he thought of my salvation, of the complex needs, obscure to him, of my own being. He did not claim to fill my entire life all by himself.

(A Woman 173; [trans. mod.])⁴

The tables have turned to such an extent that the child is imagined as sacrificing his...