Professor Examines Motherhood in Italy

In her new book, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy, Georgetown University professor Laura Benedetti explores how literature was influenced by and helped to shape notions of motherhood in twentieth-century Italy.

“From the turn-of-the-century rhetorical celebration of the mother as Madonna (a celebration that often ignored the very real lives of mothers working in factories and rice fields) to the Fascist regime’s demographic campaign and the feminist revisions of the maternal role, the institution of motherhood has been the site of constant negotiation,” writes Benedetti.

Examining how this negotiation came to be represented in literature, Benedetti, looks at four generations of women writers, stressing their similarities and differences, as well as their complex interactions with their male counterparts and their reactions to changes in Italian society.

“Desired or feared, accepted or denied, cherished as a privilege or stigmatized as a biblical curse, motherhood has a capital influence on women’s lives,” writes Benedetti, the Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor in Contemporary Italian Culture Georgetown University. She argues that as motherhood was radically redefined in the last century, Italy saw some of the most dramatic changes.

Benedetti explores representations of motherhood in poems poems, novels, plays and short stories as well as in critical and public debate, to gain a better understanding of the twentieth-century Italian culture as a whole. In a careful investigation of how literature shapes, and envisions social models for the present and future, Benedetti highlights literature’s role in the formation of cultural discourses up to the dawn of the twenty-first century and analyzes the changing nature of the maternal role in a culture that has always put a strong emphasis on the institution of motherhood.

“Laura Benedetti has written a well-documented and informative study illuminating the importance of motherhood in understanding the ‘difference’ in Italian women’s writings as well as the ‘difference’ in Italian feminist theory,” says Carol Lazzaro-Weis, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Missouri-Columbia. “She presents a broad and comprehensive picture of the complex interaction between different generations of women writers, their male counterparts, and changes in Italian culture throughout the twentieth century.”

Laura Benedetti is the Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor in Contemporary Italian Culture at Georgetown University. She founded and directs the Georgetown University L’Aquila Summer Program— designed to enhance students’ understanding and appreciation of Italian culture through a combination of intensive language studies and cultural activities, including private lectures, film screenings, guided tours, cooking lessons and wine tastings. Benedetti’s publications include a monograph on Torquato Tasso (La sconfitta di Diana. Un percorso per la «Gerusalemme liberata», 1997), the proceedings of two conferences (Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies, 1996), as well as the edition of a Renaissance treatise (Giraldi Cinzio’s Discorso dei romanzi, 1999). The subjects of her articles span 700 years, from Boccaccio to the most recent narrative production, and deal with topics as diverse as the fictional treatment of historical figures, intertextuality in the Renaissance and the representation of women, as well as issues of narrative strategies and construction. Since 2000, she has contributed the piece on Italian literature to the annual update of the Encyclopedia Britannica. She earned a Ph.D. (1992) from Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. (1988) from the University of Alberta, and Laurea in Lettere (1986) from the Università "La Sapienza" (Rome).

Source: Office of Communications

February 7, 2008