Italian Modernism – Freedom must remain outside

In Italy, literary modernity has found a form that is incomparable to any other European country. Here, avant-gardism, cosmopolitanism and the enthusiasm for urbanity in the early 20th century combined with regionality and local tradition, from which emerged a prose that was as cosmopolitan as it was brittle, which is only inadequately captured by the terms realism or naturalism.

The contrast between big city and province is also not as pronounced as in the rest of Europe. Just as the workers’ movement in Italy was not the sole concern of the industrial proletariat, modernity was intimately tied to specific localities, to geographical experiences crystallized in landscapes, buildings, squares and idioms. In her 2010 study “The Spirit of Turin,” Maike Albath showed how this regionalism was passed on and made productive in Italian literature after 1945 using Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg and the history of the Einaudi publishing house, founded in 1933.

An earlier example of this connection between regionalism and modernity are two short novels or long stories – the difficulty of assigning them to genre is significant – by Maria Messina, which are published by the Friedenauer Presse, which is now part of the Matthes & Seitz publishing house. A new translation of the volume “The House in the Gasse” published in 1921 and the first translation of Messina’s book “A Flower Without a Blossom” published in 1923. In both books the focus is on female protagonists who reflect Messina’s own situation, which oscillates between the narrowness of her life and intellectual breadth, isolation and cosmopolitanism, without therefore belonging to the genre of autofiction.

The writer was born in Palermo in 1887. Messina’s mother came from an impoverished aristocratic family, her father was a school teacher and was forced to move with his family again and again due to multiple transfers. Through her mother, she learned early on about the advantages of a literary education, but because her father forbade her to go to school and rarely let her go out alone, she was forced into isolation at home until she came of age and was only looked after by her brother, who was five years older than her supported for literature.

In 1909 Messina began an exchange with Giovanni Verga, the most important representative of verism, the Italian form of naturalism. In the same year, his first book of stories was published under the title “Feine Kämme”, and two years later the prose volume “Kleine Rinnsale” was published. From 1912 onwards she wrote books for children and young people – a career opportunity for female authors in the early 20th century – through which she became better known than her more highly regarded novels. Christiane Pöhlmann, who edited both volumes, outlines their characteristic features in her afterwords. She particularly emphasizes the tendency towards smallness, filigree, succinctness and omission, which is already evident in the titles of the volumes of stories, and which gives Messina’s prose the character of miniatures, even when it tends towards novel form. In this respect, Messina’s verism differs not only from the large-scale novels of the naturalistic master Émile Zola. It also makes Messina useless as an icon of a feminism that is looking for “key witnesses” for its cause. She died of multiple sclerosis in Pestoia, Tuscany in 1944.

The laconicism that Pöhlmann sees as a distinguishing feature of Messina’s texts also characterizes the translations of the short novels. In both books, the focus in a double sense is on a household, a community of intimately connected people, familial and friendly, through affection, contempt, envy and sexuality, for whom the place in which they have to endure each other becomes a trap. “The House in the Alley” focuses on Antonietta, her husband Don Lucio Carmine, a tenant to whom she is bound through an arranged marriage, and her younger sister Nicolina.

“A Flower Without a Bloom” is about the young Franca, who lives with an aunt after her mother’s death, and her contradictory relationship with her father, whose generosity only serves to keep her dependent. Together with her clique of friends, Franca practices female emancipation by almost rejecting boys and men, which she cannot achieve in reality. The young Stefano, with whom she falls in love, seemingly allows her to free herself from her father’s tyranny, but is ultimately no different from him in his claim to power.

Just as Franca resignedly returns to her aunt because she has more freedom in the female family community than with men, so too “The House in the Alley” shows the protagonists’ persistent exclusion from each other of a world that, despite real offers of freedom, seems hermetic Interior appears. Here the sibling relationship between Antonietta and Nicolina, which initially appears to Antonietta as a way out of the dependent relationship with her husband, turns out to intensify it, because Nicolina becomes her brother-in-law’s lover out of passivity and jealousy of her sister’s seemingly secure married life.

Both books are framed by scenes of exclusion and self-walling up. “A flower without a blossom” begins with the sentence “Stefano has had enough,” in which the relationship, which Franca later temporarily sees as a way out, is anticipatively declared to be over in view of the barriers that separate Franca from him. “The House in the Alley” begins with a scene in which Nicolina lets her gaze wander from the balcony, but sees it as “constricted, as if crushed between the small alley, which at this hour seems deep and dark like an empty well, and the wide, redder area and mossy roofs”.

The scenes into which Messina splits the plot, often only half a page long, differ from fragments in that, in the fragmentation, they no longer point to an uncatchable whole that goes beyond the experience of being locked in and locked out. The society that Messina describes is not unfree – the author is far from Marxist class analysis – but the freedoms it allows are based on a self-disempowerment that is suffered and reflected upon by the female protagonists just as much as by the men. Messina’s women point to the fact that they not only suffer, but also think about this suffering and their own part in it, without it improving their situation in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni ahead, whose human and soulless external worlds, which seem like hermetic interiors, are reminiscent of both novels.

Maria Messina: The house in the alley. Translated from Italian by Ute Lipka. Reviewed and with an afterword by Christiane Pöhlmann. Friedenauer Presse, 216 pages, hardcover, €22. Maria Messina: A flower without a blossom. Translated from Italian and with an afterword by Christiane Pöhlmann. Friedenauer Presse, 184 pages, born €22.