Women Writers and Italian Fascism: Figures of Female Resistance in Paola Masino, Paola Drigo, and Milena Milani

This dissertation brings into focus a vital body of women's writing about fascism in order to highlight the articulation of a literary discourse that undermines fascist depictions of femininity. I provide evidence of the emergence of a distinctly Italian approach to feminist creative and theoretical practices, founded in critical interpretations of sexual difference. I consider the work of three authors who have yet to be fully acknowledged in the Italian literary panorama: Paola Masino (1908-1989), Paola Drigo (1876-1938), and Milena Milani (1917-present). My analysis focuses on the stylistic, thematic, and structural elements that Masino, Drigo, and Milani employ to engage with and re-imagine normative fascist narratives of femininity and womanhood. The scope of the project is multi-faceted: I attempt to 1) recuperate these particular authors who have not yet been fully recognized by Italian literary scholarship; 2) highlight their critical engagement with and resistance to fascist constructions of woman; 3) recapitulate and illustrate through my analyses fascism's use of rhetorical strategies intended to streamline and contain femininity by way of patriarchal conceptualizations of gender and the `naturalization' of concepts meant to relegate women to a subservient role; 4) and finally, to suggest that feminist literary critics learn from the `Italian approach' found in the works of innovative theorists such as Adriana Cavarero and Teresa de Lauretis. These Italian scholars anticipated the `new' direction of the kind of feminist literary scholarship practiced by Rita Felski and others as a dialogical practice that creates positive aesthetic value through the highlighting of textual tensions, polyvalent forms, and constructive figures of resistance. The authors studied in this dissertation re-imagine traditionally female realms and identities with new and empowering energies. Masino, Drigo, and Milani not only utilize narrative strategies to disrupt patriarchal ideologies and gendered narrative identities but additionally create new figures that redirect women's representations. Milani's novel, La ragazza di nome Giulio, written in the early 1960s, provides a retrospective account of women's experience of Italian fascism, building upon the discourses of her predecessors, Masino and Drigo, in order to create a new female textual imaginary and a feminist narrative voice. Milani's novel provides a fractured yet compelling image of a female narrative self that illustrates simultaneously women's repression by and resistance to a limited patriarchal imaginary. Milani's novel constitutes a link between the cultural resistance by female writers such as Masino and Drigo to women's cultural and political oppression during the fascist era, the wartime and postwar letteratura partigiana and memorialistica resistenziale authored by women such as Ada Gobetti, and the narrative acts of resistance that would continue to shape women's narratives in the period of the elaboration of Italian feminist thought and practice in the 1970s