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Laura Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy . Laura Benedetti. Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. viii+165.

2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/659132

1545-6951

Rebecca West,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Previous article FreeBook ReviewLaura Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy. Laura Benedetti. Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. viii+165.Rebecca WestRebecca WestUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author University of ChicagoPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreItaly is now one of the many European nations with an extremely low birthrate—so low, in fact, as to suggest that motherhood may be becoming obsolete. Yet it is also a country imbued historically and currently with images and concepts emanating from the cherished figure of the mother, from the Holy Mother to the stereotypical Italian mamma, both of whom unceasingly adore their always unblamable sons. Laura Benedetti focuses her analysis of motherhood in Italian literature on texts written primarily by women authors ranging from the early years of the twentieth century to the late 1990s. Mapping out a trajectory of ever-changing representations of the maternal sphere, Benedetti plots an itinerary through a culture and a literature that, although always in transformation, nonetheless reveal certain constants in the perception and presentation of mothers, motherhood, and the maternal symbolic. The result is a fascinating and perceptive analysis of a theme that is a collective obsession in Italian culture, even in these times of an apparent refusal on the part of numerous individual women to assume the actual role of mother.Laura Benedetti begins her study by asserting that “the institution of motherhood has been the site of constant negotiation” (3). She therefore chooses to study literary texts from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of that century, thus encompassing a century of radical social as well as literary shifts in perceptions of and approaches to both actual motherhood and its representations. That mothers are rarely written about as subjects but often objectified is one of Benedetti's main points. Even though the majority of literary texts that highlight the maternal figure were written by women, there is nonetheless a tendency to embrace the “resilient and long-lasting construction” (5) of the objectification of the mother figure rather than to give her voice as an autonomous subject. Yet it is also the case that women writers taking on the theme of motherhood have tended to use it as a focal point for exploring questions such as what the notion of female self might be, what a woman's place in society is or could be, and how women relate to others.International gender criticism and theory provide the analytical tools for Benedetti's analyses; she mentions Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, Marianne Hirsch, and Sara Ruddick's work as having played a large role in her elaboration of a critical approach, and the philosophical revisionist work on the maternal symbolic carried out by the Diotima group in Italy has been combined with Anglo-American theory to construct a highly articulated methodology that is also sensitive to specifically literary critical issues such as narrative style and intertextuality. One of the most appealing aspects of this study is precisely its employment of critical work from both sides of the Atlantic, which puts diverse feminist approaches into conversation with one another, showing either explicitly or implicitly the cultural specificity as well as the points of contact and overlap between and among them.The mysterious title of the book (The Tigress in the Snow) is explained in the final paragraph of Benedetti's introduction. It was inspired by Elsa Morante's novel, La storia (History), in which the image is used to describe the mother Ida Ramundo's desperate attempt to keep her little son Useppe alive. Recounted in the novel as lore (“si racconta” [it is said]), we read that in order to keep herself and her cubs alive a tigress in a frozen wasteland will lick the snow to sustain herself and will then tear off pieces of her own flesh to give as food to her little ones. This shocking image of self-sacrifice is, according to Benedetti, relatable to the pelican, the creature believed to sacrifice its own flesh to nourish its young; the pelican is, in turn, a symbol of Christ. So the mother morphs into her crucified son, whose death on the cross signifies both the ultimate act of self-annihilation and the highest divine power. Benedetti takes the image of the tigress as the “guiding metaphor” of her book because, for her, it “captures the risks and the rewards of motherhood” (11). I am not entirely convinced that an image of extreme self-sacrifice, even if based on tenacity, is quite right in representing motherhood as it is explored and “negotiated” through a century of literary texts. The essentialism of animal instinct portrayed in the figure of the tigress runs counter to Benedetti's claim of the historical and social constructedness of maternity; moreover, such an image endows self-sacrifice with a superhuman, transcendental meaning that negates the very human and immanent suffering of mothers, whether real or literary, whose identity as subjects is not advanced by the objectification implicit in divine transformation. Nonetheless, it may be true that, more often than not, in the past as well as currently, motherhood is inextricably linked to self-sacrifice, in spite of women's attempts to elaborate in art, as in life, more nuanced and positive definitions of this fundamental role.The analyses of diverse literary texts from the early twentieth century to its end are well done, especially in terms of how the works are contextualized and explored in relation to sociopolitical and broader cultural elements of the periods in question. As probing and intelligent as these readings are, it is the final short chapter, “Mothers without Children,” that I found to be most original and thought provoking. Here Benedetti introduces the concept of motherhood as a “disposition of the self ” (121) rather than the physical birthing of a child. In this category are included women who adopt children whom they raise as their own but also women who nurture children outside of their domestic spaces in relationships of mentoring, teaching, and protecting. The Diotima group at the University of Verona, made up primarily of women philosophers and led by Luisa Muraro, has done a great deal of work on the symbolic maternal sphere, reaching toward separating maternity from its biological component and concentrating instead on “its implications at the level of authority, power, nurturing, and emotion” (119). Psychoanalysis has opened a new field of inquiry also, as the work of Silvia Vegetti Finzi has probed women's generative potential, a psychic predisposition that she argues can be seen in the “child of the night” (119) or the imaginary child that preadolescent girls produce in their fantasies. Benedetti also refers to the work of Elaine Hansen, who has written about nonprocreative motherhood and about the now not so unimaginable time when a child may have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, and a custodial mother, each a different person. Lesbian motherhood is also considered in Hansen's work, as are women who choose to have abortions, women in prison, or women who simply refuse to bear children. This dizzying array of mothers (and nonmothers) brings us to our current moment in time, when options and choices unthinkable to women at the beginning of the twentieth century are now realities. Perhaps women will someday no longer have to tear off pieces of their own flesh in order to nurture and sustain their young. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 4May 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659132 Views: 43Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.