A Fairy Tale Madonna: Grazia Deledda's "Our Lady of Good Counsel"

Introduction

Grazia Deledda is the only Italian woman to have won the Nobel Prize for literature. The motivation for this award, which Deledda received in 1926, reads: "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general."¹ Deledda's native island of Sardinia provides the setting for most of her texts, and for all her best-known ones. She was born in Nuoro, located in central-eastern Sardinia in 1871, the fifth of seven children. Encouraged by her private tutor (Deledda only attended school through fourth grade), she published her first short stories locally in 1886 and then in a Roman literary journal two years later. In 1900, Deledda married and moved to Rome with her husband, who gave up his government job to become her literary agent. She went on to publish such major novels as Elias Portolu (1903), Cenere (1904), and Canne al vento (1913). Her autobiography, Cosima quasi Grazia, was released posthumously in 1936 just months after her death in Rome from breast cancer. She is buried in Nuoro, the city of her birth.

At the heart of Deledda's writings are the workings of place, history, and local tradition, often infused with a sense of the numinous. However, if this author's thematic emphasis on her island granted her a certain literary authority, it also led to the dismissive label of limited regionalist writer. The socialist intellectual Antonio Gramsci described Deledda's work as depicting a "lyrical, oneiric, fable-like and therefore, in the end, unreal picture of Sardinian life."² This fellow Sardinian's mention of "fables" (used in Italian interchangeably with "fairy tales," which in this case would be a better translation) reads as a scathing critique of Deledda's work. Fairy tales, however, may be positively and productively invoked when engaging with Deledda's work as it relates to the folklore of her home region, including legends and other orally transmitted narratives. Deledda wrote a number of ethnographic studies and even a book-length essay. Her Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro in Sardegna (Popular Traditions of Nuoro in Sardinia) was published in installments between 1891 and 1896 in the highly regarded journal Rivista delle tradizioni popolari italiane (Review of Italian Popular Traditions), directed by the influential writer and philologist Angelo De Gubernatis. Both thematically and stylistically, Deledda's fiction as a whole is profoundly shaped by the folklore that fascinated her. Prominent literary critic Giorgio Barberi Squarotti has even described Deledda's novels as "una specie di romanzo-fiaba" ("a kind of fairy-tale novel"), because they are texts that follow "la linearità dello schema fiabesco" ("the linear nature of the fairy-tale pattern").³

Although Deledda never had the opportunity in her own lifetime to publish the volume of Sardinian legends she was working on, she did author several short narratives based on local folklore and Sardinian spirituality, sometimes in conflict with the more official Catholic religion, and they endured. Some of these texts have been reprinted together in the volumes Fiabe e leggende (Fairy Tales and Legends, 1994) and Leggende sarde (Sardinian Legends, 1999).⁴ Two of the texts in this later collection read more like fairy tales than like legends, as the title suggests. In "I tre fratelli" ("The Three Brothers"), the eponymous protagonists, orphaned and impoverished, are rewarded for their kindness by three fairies, who give them as many magical objects including a table cloth which, when shaken three times, becomes covered in food; a wallet that never runs out of money; and a flute that makes everyone who hears it dance (only the three brothers are exempt). These objects first get them out of trouble by immediately relieving them of their poverty, then into trouble again when they are excommunicated and condemned to death for their sinful use of magic, and finally, out of trouble for good when they use their accusers' covetousness to their own advantage in order to escape their punishment. The fairy tale structure, dramatis personae, and motifs in "The Three...