Un clandestino a bordo: Sexual Politics in Dacia Maraini’s Narrative
In reference to the relationship between political theory and practice, Luce Irigaray states that “. . . it is not possible to give so-called university courses without being concerned with women’s freedom as regards the rights to contraception and, if necessary, abortion.” Irigaray also pointed out many other rights in the need to be “gained” namely “identity, work, love (especially sexual), relationships to children, and culture (Thinking the Difference xiv).”[1] My work is inspired by Irigaray’s thoughts on emancipation, by what I perceive to be a need for a university curriculum mirroring what is happening to women in society, and my own personal interest in the topic. My work proposes an investigation of Maraini’s passages that depict in a moving way the dramatic moment of a woman’s choice to give up a life over which a woman has absolute power, especially when this choice becomes an imperative. I analize how Maraini’s voice bears witness to this feminine experience in her life-writing narratives and essays. The former are autobiographical novels,[2] poems or theater plays, (e.g. La donna perfetta, Lettere a Marina, Il treno per Helsinki). The latter reveal personal experience within nonfictional contexts such as dialogs, letters, and essays (e.g. Storia di Piera, “Lettera sull’aborto”). I suggest that Maraini’s outwardly fictional narratives, and her openly autobiographical nonfictional works present a coextensiveness between the writer and her subject matter. This coextensiveness blurs the boundaries between auto and fictio. In exploring the issue of abortion as represented in Maraini’s narratives and in her latest “Lettera sull’aborto,” I intend to define a certain literary/autobiographical connection, rather than merely focussing on the socio-political situation in which Maraini’s writings are clearly embedded. What interests me is to see then how a writer and feminist activist[3] such as Dacia Maraini has accomplished the creative research of giving shape to the sorrows, the decision processes, and the constrictions that surround the material experience of getting an abortion. I am also interested in how she represents the arduous decision that leads a woman to eliminate a life from within herself.
Much has been said about Maraini’s engagement in public life in Italy, where, since the ‘70s she has always been present in the struggles for women’s rights, those involving ethical and social issues especially. Maraini’s political aesthetics[4] are a most representative example of what letteratura al femminile [literature in the feminine] means in Italy today, a literature in which gender issues society faces occupy most of the narrative space. The specific purpose of this aesthetics might be considered, in Sharon Wood’s words, that of “challenging women to change” (Italian Women Writing xiv). It is a process of self-discovery present in numerous recent Italian feminist novels and autobiographical works. Indeed, the literary works of Maraini are inseparable from her engagement in the Italian Women Movement. And I say this even at the risk of inviting criticism against her, since certain critics claim that her political concerns affect negatively the literary value of her works.[5] As is well known, Maraini’s attempt in analyzing and revisiting the Italian androcentric society permeates her work entirely and encompasses several genres of writing. In general, Maraini adopts the narrative genre that Rita Felski defines as the “feminist realist novel of self-discovery.” Felski describes this subgenre as a text which “traces a clear developmental plot in which the heroine moves from a state of alienation to a discovery of female identity through a process of separation from male-defined values” (Beyond Feminist Aesthetics 83). The protagonists of her novels all belong to this kind of narrative, where the search for female emancipation is sought and fictionalized in various techniques and strategies through the reworking of already existing literary types into the needs of feminist personal and political beliefs. In the Italian political arena, roughly composed of a conservative/catholic side and a liberal/secular one, abortion is an highly politicized issue. The debate focuses on a woman’s personal responsibility in making a “choice” for herself; a personal issue which becomes “political” when conveyed to the political stage. In my view, “choice” is the option that must be offered to women for them to be able to make personal decisions about life and how to continue it. But, apart from the ways the issue is socially constructed, for a woman abortion also fundamentally means physical pain, emotional distress, psychological torture, and ultimately, a devastating sense of loss, even when the fetus is unwanted.
It is not coincidental that few years ago, writer and then director of Nuovi argomenti, Enzo Siciliano, asked Maraini to write a piece on abortion which she entitled “Lettera sull’aborto.”[6] This letter reiterates the problematics of a woman’s choice to terminate a life. But Maraini discusses the issue of reproductive choice as well as a woman’s need and/or right to be a mother, the latter being a decision that holds the same importance as the one of deliberately giving up one’s reproductive potential in the name of other very relevant rights. My analysis of the images of abortion in Maraini’s narrative is informed by her strong political message about personal freedom despite any ideology.[7] With touching yet disenchanted words, Maraini defends both rights, that of being a mother and that of getting an abortion. Among the factors leading to a woman’s choice to abort, she underscores the importance attributed to our body, and the fact that, as women, we still belong to an androcentric society, where being pregnant is still perceived as an obstacle to achieving independence, a career, and a measure of control over our bodies. Abortion has always been an issue and a motif in Maraini’s writing, much before her programmatic engagement in the feminist claims of the 1970s. As feminist theory has taught us (Felski 83), abortion essays a fundamental interrelation between what we could consider the personal and the political, between the “I” and the “we.” In fact, personal decisions and choices do reflect what we consider the political sphere, a place where a person must be granted certain “rights” to direct his/her life in one or another way. In my view, Maraini’s feminist claims and her struggle for the abortion law form the “political” aspect of her fictional and autobiographical work. Yet there is also another, very distinct aspect that must be considered; this is her fictionalization of personal pain and psychological suffering experienced at the time of abortion. This more subjective mode of Maraini’s involvement seemingly departs from her desire to obtain justice for all the women she met in her years of militancy. It is made apparent in her literary pieces on abortion, where a more lyrical vein sustains the weaving of the narrative. Those passages are directly drawn from personal experience and recollection of past events and show the difference between personal and political choice. Choice is personal, but so is suffering: when a woman who desires motherhood is denied this option, or denies it to herself, a large component of pain enters the game of “rights.”
More specifically, I base my argument on the considerable importance that the autobiographical experience holds in Maraini’s literary representations of abortion. Proof of this are the lexical similarities between the “Lettera sull’aborto” and her previous fictional texts, which include descriptions of the actual experience of loss and of the “eternal” pact between a mother and her child. They are complemented by actual narrative images of a baby floating in the mother’s womb. On several occasions, Maraini’s experience of her own “therapeutic abortion” (a voluntary interruption of pregnancy due to health causes) is brought in as authentic material for a literary representation . In my analysis, I present these materials to stress the fact that historical reality is indiscernible from Maraini’s literary creation. It is coincidental that, in her narrative, abortion starts as a motif with L’età del malessere, and with the exception of La vacanza, (written soon after the writer experienced her abortion), it remains one of Maraini’s leading thematics.
I must discuss now the actual term abortion. The Random House Dictionary gives two distinct terms to define the act of losing a baby, miscarriage (1128) and abortion (6). The first term is strictly used to describe children unwittingly lost by the bearing mother because of situations that do not depend on her own will (illness, car accidents, etc.), thus stressing the concept of “spontaneity.” With abortion, on the other hand, the language used implies that the woman’s will interferes with the birth of the fetus. I believe that this verbal distinction has a lot to say about how people think about the decision of a woman to lose a child. In Italian, for instance, only one signifier covers both semantic areas: in using the word aborto, one can mean something medically needed, something spontaneously occurring, or the actually reasoned “choice” of not continuing a gestation, the “voluntary” act of terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Depending on the situation, the noun aborto is accompanied by different terms “therapeutic,” “spontaneous,” and “provoked” (Il Nuovo Zingarelli 9). One would imagine that the lack of a specific distinction between the two concepts would make major difference in the relevant decisions, laws and social mores. Yet, just as in the case of the Italian dictionary, in the way Maraini’s narrative reinterprets women’s suffering, this distinction is blurred and seems to lose strength. Whether the woman has decided on the loss (thus making it “voluntary”), or the loss occurs against her will, for medical reasons, pain is basically portrayed in the same fashion. And, as I argue, such representations of loss tend to prevail in spite of the programmatic stand that articulates the different female characters portrayed by Maraini.[8] Loss exists in spite of the strong public position Maraini always took in terms of abortional choice. Yet, Maraini’s narrative representations of abortion changed according to parallel mutations taking place in Italian society, as the issue became increasingly public and new measures were being tried to prevent further problems with the design of the new law 194. First presented in L’età del malessere (1963), abortion is a completely forbidden act caused by male lack of consideration for the character Enrica, and imposed on her by her lover. In Donna in guerra (1975), abortion becomes a necessary instrument of independence for Vannina[9] who must abort her child because its birth would tie her up with an oppressive husband. Unlike Enrica, Vannina is not abandoned by her man: she is the one to leave Giacinto by physically killing his potential progeny, but in the process of ensuring her human rights as a person, she also gives up her own rights of becoming a mother. Vannina refuses to be a container[10] for Giacinto’s seed. She gives up a role attributed to woman since the beginning of societal organization, and rejects maternity when its social significance finally becomes clear to her, which happens especially through the voice of Giacinto, a voice symbolically defined as “paterna, autoritaria” (Donna in guerra 262).[11]
Abortion is, again, the topic of the theatrical work La donna perfetta written in the same years of Donna in guerra. Here, though, self-discovery does not enter the trajectory of the character. Nina is a victim of society, but the issue is deprived of any ideological solution; abortion and its motivations are pictured more in the manner of Enrica’s experience of abortion in L’età del malessere, than in that of Vannina’s newly discovered condition as a person reconfiguring herself. In an antimimetic representation of the story of Nina—a young woman who aborts a child by her student boyfriend and later dies from hemorrhage—Maraini investigates the behavioral models and societal patterns that produce women like Nina. The main character of this apologia is a young woman whose subtly masochistic behavior is shared, according to the author, by many women who still live in complete subordination to men. Yet, the lack of alternative models that we experienced in Enrica’s story is now filled by the presence of Christa, a German friend who helps Nina in her calvary. As Christa is a foreigner, her different views on male-female relations are entirely `justified’ with respect to Nina’s complete observance to Italian societal repressive mores.
The “autobiographical” years
After these programmatic years, Maraini reconsiders abortion’s psychological rather than the merely ideological implications. In her most overtly autobiographical fictional period, from the early 1980s to the end of that decade, on several occasions and in several genres, Maraini explores her recollection of an authentic experience, the therapeutic abortion she suffered in the early 1960’s. This abortion caused her the separation from her husband and it constitutes the topic of the recollection narrative in the two novels Lettere a Marina (1981), and Il treno per Helsinki (1984). It was already also explicitly mentioned in Storia di Piera (1980; 64), as the author’s counterpart to Piera degli Esposti’s history of nine abortions. Because of the personal suffering and involvement in the tragic experience of having to have her fetus taken out her womb, in those years Maraini’s narrative focused more on the self and the motif of self-confession. It dealt primarily with the concept of loss, rather than focusing on the issue of choice and the fairness of the law. Indeed, in that particular circumstance, Maraini’s abortion was not a choice. Definitely, her choice would have been to keep this much-desired “blue-eyed baby,” which is clearly indicated by the way in which the female characters of those years desperately fancy their children. In my view, Bianca’s analepses of the moment of her loss, in Lettere a Marina, and even more so Armida, in the highly autobiographical Il treno per Helsinki, are far from being aligned with Vannina’s choice and her presa di coscienza rendered explicit by her abortion. In conformity to the pattern of self-discovery of the feminist realist novel, Vannina’s choice is a declaration of power, of acknowledgement of the self. However, Bianca and Armida acquire a new knowledge from their shared experience. They learn that the significance of their lives is not in another person. Ultimately, they realize that this lesson has a high cost, thus anticipating Maraini’s current understanding, that being free might cost one’s life together with one’s fetus (Un clandestino a bordo 24).
Lettere a Marina is chiefly a novel about redefining love, also erotic love, between women. Rita Felski theorizes this kind of narrative as conducive of the process of self-discovery, since the other woman mirrors the protagonist of the story.[12] The topic of self-discovery is enhanced by Bianca’s frequent flashbacks to her childhood in a strict boarding school, where she learned about masturbation and lesbian love. Self-discovery as the beginning of a new life is articulated by her difficult attempts to write the novel she plans to finish, in a sort of the “multiple beginnings,” as theorized by Genette. Through her letters to Marina, Bianca offers an almost self-conscious parallel between biological and artistic conception. Lettere a Marina is also about abortion; either freely decided or medically necessary, Bianca’s act of interrupting her pregnancy is not presented as a choice. Rather, it is a necessity suffered by a woman who has either been deprived of her decision to procreate, or is physically unable to continue her pregnancy. Indeed, in this epistolary novel, both cases are presented novel. The first is brought tangentially by the character of Basilia (Lettere 43) raped by her own father, and thus, as an incest survivor, anticipates the Marianna Ucría of a more recent Maraini novel. Basilia’s casa presents incest as a widely and legitimate cause of abortion. The second occurrence of abortion in Lettere a Marina is when Bianca tells Marina of her own. The protagonist brings a sense of loss to the topic, which also anticipates the one found in Un clandestino a bordo, and stands in contrast to Basilia’s reaction to the tragic rape. It is the occasion for some moving pages
Forse qualche giorno e ce l’avrebbe fatta. Tu non sai come si muoveva questo figlio dentro le cupole fresche del mio ventre. Aveva i muscoli di un nuotatore era un atleta. Si voltava e rivoltava su se stesso faceva dei capitomboli dei salti mortali da
lasciare il fiato sospeso. (15–16; italics mine)
[Perhaps another time and he would have made it. You can’t imagine how this son stirred beneath the wide dome of my belly. He was an athlete with the muscles of a swimmer and all on his own he made headlong jumps that took my breath away each time falling back .] (17)
But hope is left to sorrow when the death of the fetus is revealed to Bianca:
Poi una mattina ho smesso di sentirlo. [...] E solo quando sono venuti a prendermi i portantini per trasportarmi nella sala parto mi hanno detto che era morto e che bisognava tirarlo fuori. [...] Il mio corpo non si apriva, Il bambino diventava senpre più pesante e gelato dentro di me. [...] Mi acconciavo ad andarmene senza un sospiro non me ne importava più niente delle cose buone e belle che mi aspettavano fuori non me ne importava niente di niente. Ero appagata di me di lui. [...] Nel momento che ho scelto di morire mi sono lasciata andare l’utero si è ammorbidito ha permesso che sgusciasse fuori prima la testa e poi le spalle e poi il torso di un bellissimo bambino dagli occhi azzurri spalancati morti. [...] Sotto le fasce strettissime sentivo ancora i piedi minuscoli dell’atleta che si puntavano per spiccare il salto op, op! nella grande volta azzurra del mio utero indolenzito mio figlio faceva volteggi e acrobazie. Io lo seguivo con l’occhio interno che hanno le madri un occhio ardito e attento da falco guerresco e trattenevo il fiato quando si librava nel vuoto per un attimo prima di afferrarsi alla corda volante per poi lasciarsi cadere con delicatezza sul pavimento sanguigno. (17–18; italics mine)
[Then one morning I stopped feeling him at all. [...] Only when they brought a wheel-chair to take me to the labour room was I told that he was dead and it was necessary to pull him out. [...] My body would not open and the child became heavy and frozen inside me and I prepared to die however meaninglessly in this hospital bed... [...] With my son I had fulfilled myself and now I could surrender myself to death. At that moment when I chose to die I let myself go and my uterus softened just enough to allow the head to slip out then the shoulders and then the body of a very beautiful baby with blue eyes wide open in death. [...] Beneath the tight bandages I felt tiny athlete’s feet pushing off to take a flying leap up! up! in the great blue vault of my numbed belly as my son did his acrobatic turns. I followed him with the interior eye that mothers have the warlike and the watchful eye of a falcon and I held my breath when he poised himself for a moment in the vault before he seized the swinging cord to let himself fall gently on the blood-stained floor of my womb.] (17–18; italics mine)
Reminiscent of the same autobiographical experience is another passage in Il treno per Helsinki when Armida, pregnant with her husband’s baby, loses her child. It uses almost the same lexicon of Lettere a Marina, almost the same descriptions, certainly the same immense sadness is evoked in the narrative mimesis of the abortion scene. Armida’s recollection expands into many facts left untold in Lettere, thus further magnifying the bases of the resemblance with Maraini’s personal experience. Background details are supplied, such as the announcement of her pregnancy, and her departure from the public hospital in Rome caused by her manipulative mother-in-law. Afterward, we witness to Armida’s disappointment in herself (a feeling shared by most women) for not being able to carry a baby, and her sense of defeat in witnessing the uncomplicated natural birth of Zaira’s child. The personal aspect of Maraini’s experience in Armida’s recollection is almost obsessive when it comes to the description of the “celestial baby.” The guessing of the baby’s sex with a hair and a ring is repeated in both novels (Il treno 65 and Lettere 15). In The Train, the secret pact between the woman and her own life, the most evident similitude of the fetus to an “acrobat” or to an “athlete,” are vividly described, almost in the same words as in Lettere a Marina:
I muscoli si sono
irrigiditi nell’ultimo abbraccio del figlio amante che vuole fare della
mia cupola una tomba
moriamo insieme lui ed io per quel patto d’amore che ci lega contro tutti
io mi arrendo al suo possesso e lui si avvinghia a me mortalmente. [...]
Poi crollo nel sonno. I muscoli si allentano lasciando che il figlio venga rapito da mani professionali che senza neanche una carezza lo gettano nel secchio della spazzatura. Poi mi dicono che era un maschio come aveva detto Gesuina aveva gli occhi azzurri ed era robusto e sorridente. Il piccolo acrobata si è rotto l’osso del collo e si è rifiutato alla famiglia per sempre. (74; italics mine)
[My muscles go rigid in the last embrace with my lover son who has decided to make my dome into his tomb. We are both of us dying in a love pact that welds us together against the world. He possesses me. I surrender myself into his possession. He clings to me. He embraces me in the agony of death. [...] Then I collapse into sleep. My muscles relax so that my son can be snatched from me by expert hands. Without even a caress they throw him into the refuse bucket. Then they tell me he was a boy just as Gesuina had predicted that he had blue eyes and that he was smiling and sturdy. The little acrobat has broken his collar-bone and has fled from he family for ever.] (65–66; italics mine)
In those years, the persistent fictionalization of a personal occurrence, that of the unwanted abortion, “quell’aborto non voluto” (Il treno 74), remains a paradigm of Maraini’s writing. The pact between herself and the child remains intact, as the lemmas chosen to repeat the mother-child love story over and over again. In this ballad, a blue-eyed “acrobata” or “atleta” is a boy happily playing in his mother’s metaphoric blue dome. But motherly protection will not be enough: he will not jump into life, and thus the pact is broken. Once again the woman is denied motherhood on her terms; she is left alone to her life, to her responsibilities. In an osmosis between author and character, Armida tells Paolo about her determination not to have children anymore, which is what Maraini also apparently chose. The legacy of Maraini’s experience and her engagement in the feminist groups provides corroborating evidence of this osmosis, due to Maraini’s clear vision of what abortion really means to a woman: a painful but sometimes necessary choice, a difficult issue to understand, especially by those who do not experience it.
Voci and Un clandestino a
bordo:
a new path on the legacy of Lettere
a Marina
and Il treno per Helsinki
For many feminist militants, the 1990s brought the bitter realization that women’s entrance in society’s structures did not undermine its androcentrism. At this time, Maraini reproposed the view of abortion as an act imposed on woman by a phallocentric order. After millennia, women, still decide to resort to the oldest and saddest (not to mention dangerous) decision. We give up our own lives, breaking up what Maraini calls “patto d’amore,” a pact established between women and her fetus, for a strange, and yet, at times mandatory, kind of “survival law.” I call it a strange “survival law” since many abortions in Italy today are not always strictly motivated by economic necessities such as need or starvation. On the contrary, it is not unusual that, in certain classes, abortions are often determined by a woman’s desire for success, for a career beyond the traditional role of caregiver, a task which has always been of great importance to Maraini. At the Turin Book Fair, in 1996, while reiterating her position on the gendered aspect of writing, Maraini also expressed renewed concerns for women’s condition. Further, she poignantly demonstrated that women are forced to make choices in order to pursue a career (she prefers to call it “professione”) because jobs are still modeled after male ideals and needs, completely unfit to meet women’s needs at all.[13] The writer’s message is that a woman’s option to refuse to give life is a choice must be warranted politically and legally. Yet, Maraini asks, what is the price women pay for this kind of choice for us in a male social order?
Though written in different genres, the essay Un clandestino a bordo (1996) and the detective novel Voci (1994) are parallel and complement each other in their intent and scope. Voci is a novel about a mysterious murder which is loosely based on a true case. The plot revolves around the intricate relations between the members of the murdered woman’s family and the narrator’s efforts at self-discovery. After the murder of her mysterious and beautiful neighbor Angela, Michela, a radio journalist, begins a series of investigations on unsolved murders of women, whose voices still demand to be heard. Through these investigations the truth about many people emerges. The story of an abortion, caused by Glauco, an incestuous stepfather, is the source of Angela’s insecurity, who, as Michela discovers, has slowly lost control of her own life, becoming estranged from her family. The real tragedy of the woman’s family is unveiled only after Angela’s death: as adolescents, she and her sister Ludovica were forced by the stepfather to participate in perverse sexual relations that lasted for years. At this point, the unbalanced sense of conspiracy that ruled Angela’s and Ludovica’s lives surfaces, as does their habit of defending themselves against men. The abuse perpetrated upon them by the stepfather is shown to have continued beyond adolescence, and to have extended to other men in their lives, husbands, pimps and so forth. These issues are especially privileged in the passages where the narration deals with the abortion experience. A case in point is Ludovica, the surviving sister, who, in order to conceal the shared tragedy of incest experienced in their youth, does not hesitate to lie and invent a different culprit for the abortion Angela underwent as an adolescent. Such dynamics reconfirm the relationship of dependence (mental and/or physical) to which women are subjected in youth and are later unable to overcome, thus explaining the difficulty of “making choices” for ourselves. But the matter becomes even more tangled for the journalist as, while in Florence, she finds out from the mother of the two women, that Ludovica, and not Angela, was the sister who had been hospitalized for an abortion. When Michela confronts Ludovica she replies by explaining the blurred limits of the relationship with her sister. The enmeshment of the two sisters in the events of each other’s lives, the confusion arising from Ludovica’s narration, and her love/hatred for Angela, are a cover up for the narrative of rape and incest perpetrated by their stepfather. This is an event that has literally destroyed both lives, more literally so in the case of Angela. In Voci, then, and against Judith Wilt’s theorization,[14] abortion in narrative does not function as a medium to subvert the plot. I suggest, instead, that it follows the traditional path of passiveness and fear women suffer, stressing the physical aspect of abortion rather then its means of subversion. In the novel, such a pattern is eloquently suggested in Ludovica’s lines, when she tells Michela about her mother’s admission of her obvious knowledge of the father’s unremitting incestuous rape. As in a Greek myth, the father will kill his daughter. It is a tragedy indeed. In the case of Voci, there exists no possibility for maternal choice: the girls are victims of incest and the stepfather sees abortion for both, aged eleven and fourteen respectively, as the only solution for his problem. Here, the love for the father, such a frequent theme in Maraini’s writing, is taken to its extreme consequences. The plot of this novel does not entail any maternal loss. And there is no desire for a continuing female genealogy, since the reproduction of a self would be inconceivable for these characters who have no self-esteem. There is only concealment of guilt, a sexual guilt in relation to society. Abortion is again an act of violence perpetrated by men against impotent women as Maraini represented in L’età del malessere. In these novels abortion, originally a woman’s private responsibility, is treated as an ethical concern whose discussion must involve the analysis of problems concerning the behavior of a society as a whole, including both women and men.
In Un clandestino a bordo, published two years after Voci, Maraini revisits a map of the female body, this time unrestricted by the actual motivations for the loss of life within the womb, be it abortion or miscarriage. To voice her analytical argument, Maraini chooses a genre more suitable than the novel. Her letter is intertextually mindful of, and inevitably different from the famous Oriana Fallaci’s Lettera a un bambino mai nato. The text is followed by a series of shorter essays. Maraini privileged this genre to the novelistic and therefore fictional writing for its highly effective rhetoric. Indeed, although Maraini’s entire novelistic production has always possessed a strong programmatic stance, in her latest works a stronger necessity to deliverer reflections on abortion surfaces, making non-fictional writing almost a mandatory decision. Even if Maraini’s argument might suscitate controversial interpretations, I suggest that, in her maturity period, namely after Marianna Ucrìa, Maraini does not contradict her previous statements about abortion as a writer nor as an activist. The first part of Un clandestino a bordo, “Lettera sull’aborto,” is a long reflection on one of the most important struggles for women’s liberation, the issue of maternal choice. In this context, the female writer can more openly and pragmatically examine the issue and propose it to the reading public, since no distractive narrative structure is at play. In remembering her own experience, Maraini notes that
the loss of a fetus can be both active and passive. We can want the liberation of her womb from an intruder, and we can want the intruder to remain, desperately want for him to remain with us. At that point, I suddenly discovered that I was thinking of the child that was never born as the stowaway on Conrad’s ship who is welcomed on board by the captain. (3)[15]
In this text Maraini utilizes a trope deployed by Joseph Conrad in his story The secret sharer[16] as a rhetorical tool to explain the moral choice a woman faces during pregnancy. Utilizing the metaphors of the vessel[17] for the mother and of the clandestine for the fetus, Maraini creates a very effective discursive space for the vicissitudes of pregnant women. She focuses on our obligation to decide, in one way or another, of our own moral existence as well as of someone’s life. As Maraini contends, a sense of innate familiarity between the mother and the fetus is established immediately. The fetus is our own life within ourselves, and we know who is in our vessel. The secret of this pact belongs only to the two interdependent beings. It is a further development of the “pact” between Armida and her baby fictionally explained in Il treno per Helsinki, and between Bianca and her baby in Lettere a Marina: “It is the secret of a bond born of a deep carnal knowledge, unutterable, that precedes reason” (Un clandestino a bordo 7). Maraini reiterates the physical and psychological suffering that the decision, and the allegedly “free” choice, of getting an abortion brings to a woman’s life of. With the euphoria of the feminist years being over, many feminists of the first wave as Maraini, have realized that this “choice” is always related to a woman’s need to “get rid” of a cumbersome weight that could put her future at risk in a world where androcentrism is still both dominating and pervasive. According to Maraini, this phenomenon is particularly evident in those female subjects whose lives are part of industrialized and advanced western societies as the “wish to have abortion starts with the advent of prosperity” (Un clandestino a bordo 11). Maraini reminds us that abortion is not simply the decision to terminate a life because of all the above-mentioned reasons. In some cases, the clandestine passenger is forced to “get off” the boat, to leave a mother who does not want to let go of him with feelings of betrayed with respect to the love pact she established with her fetus at the onset of her pregnancy. In those cases, suffering is pervasive, and taking one’s life becomes an option. As the Italian language uses the signifier aborto to cover the two English semantic areas of “abortion” and “miscarriage,” it also determines a lack of lexical distinction that facilitates Maraini’s job. In Italian, attributing the responsibility to the mother simply corresponds to the act of adding the qualifier “voluntary” to the noun aborto. The wide spectrum of images of loss in Maraini’s narrative refers both to abortion and to miscarriage, thus inscribing the notion of activity and passivity with respect to abortion into the cultural, legal, and symbolic discursive space. The captain in Conrad’s story represents the mind of the woman who accepts the clandestine, facing the danger of wrecking his ship in order to save him. But what if s/he did not save him? Maraini wonders “But what if the captain f the ship did not want the castaway on board?”(17). Maraini suggests that is dangerous to speak of liberation in connection with abortion. It is with this concept that she struggles when she speaks of leaving a child behind. Are we as women more liberated after an abortion? In “Monstruous Mothers,” Marina Warner accurately reminds us that in the area of motherhood women’s authority is uncontested, as demonstrated in Medea’s tragedy (Six Myths 3–23). Adriana Cavarero reads a representation of the feminine power in the Demeter’s myth:
The myth [Demeter’s myth] says in fact that maternal power is the full power both to generate and not to generate: she does not have to generate, but she has generated already and she can generate again. This is because she carries in her womb the past and future infinity of human existence, as well as nothingness in the future sense of “no longer.” And right here lies the deepest meaning of the feminine “secret” of life, which archaic cultures attribute to the Great Mother: to generate is an exclusively female experience, but it is not an automatic and obligatory process where women are mere vehicles. (64)
It is one of the few terrains where women’s decisional power can be exercised without recriminations on anybody’s side. Also, as Braidotti notes, women’s reproductive power is constantly being put at stake by modern reproductive technology, since “contemporary bio-technology displaces women by making procreation a high-tech affair” (“Women, Monsters, Machines”63). Maraini echoes Warner’s considerations on women’s reproductive power, although notes that “it is a power that has lost its real force, but that remains in the shadows like the myth of a concealed and vital strength (Un clandestino 8).” This kind of power fires[18] back at women like a boomerang, and it does not take us far because children quickly become a difficult burden to carry. Regardless of the theories that claim that gender, unlike sex, is a social construct, gender discrimination is still rampant in the work place. Men have women who carry children for them. They do not need to give up anything in order to have a family life, whereas, as Maraini alerts us, women pay a very high price for our freedom from reproductive obligations:
Historically, abortion seems to be the damned realm of female impotence. It represents the repeated loss of control on the reproduction of the species. Abortion is grief and impotence turned into action. It is the self-consecration of a defeat—a burning and terrible historical defeat that finds expression in a brutal gesture against oneself and the conceived child. For women who practice it abortion is a sign of malaise and war against oneself. It is the signal of a breakdown in the delicate relationship that ties a mother to her child. [...] The more women are mistreated, scorned, relegated to the margins of society, the more they feel the need to demonstrate, in a tortuous, desperately masochistic and risky way, that power that the history of the fathers has obliterated from their lives. (12)
For women, the experience of abortion is inevitably linked to the other side of the coin, to the reproduction and the act of giving birth, and becoming a mother. Indeed, for Maraini is impossible to speak about abortion independently of maternity, as the physical concavity of the empty womb must necessarily be integrated with the convexity of a pregnant belly. Maraini’s fictional narrative affirms this interdependence first. Later, the author’s letter to Siciliano openly exposes it in all its implications. Abortion necessarily evokes motherhood, with the implied act of rejection or acceptance of the “clandestine” passenger women carry in our wombs. Maraini, in addressing her friend Enzo Siciliano, states such inevitable complementary properties of the two concepts [9].
The border between abortion and miscarriage become even more fuzzy when abortion is so blatantly counterpoised to motherhood. What really matters in Maraini’s letter, which is completely devoid of political rhetoric, is not how and why a child was lost, but the loss in itself, the fact that a woman has been deprived of her own life, of the re-union with the self represented by her fetus. This realization is what, in 1996, inevitably causes Maraini to speak of loss in connection with abortion and of life in connection with motherhood, even though she spent years conducting pro-choice campaigns in the working-class Roman suburbs, where she worked with culturally-deprived women who desperately needed to give up their cumbersome “authority of motherhood.” By losing a child, by giving up the pact with the unborn, a woman loses yet one more chance to discover her identity, and she does so in obedience to laws that are not hers, that do not belong to her body, al suo corpo.
Maraini shares with Simone de Beauvoir many of the views on pregnancy and abortion of the controversial but still canonical The second sex. A common ground between the two writers is established as they emphasize contraception rather than establishing the fairness of abortion. Another is the interdependence between pregnancy and abortion, which de Beauvoir qualifies as always an “especially desperate remedy” (The Second Sex 484). Well before Maraini and other Italian feminists, de Beauvoir clearly indicated that for women abortion is an issue[19] fraught with social problems, and like Maraini, she argued that for the woman an abortion is always a difficult and hard choice.[20] Maraini’s wrote her letter in her 60’s, when, with her fertile years behind her, she could speak of her condition in a very pragmatic way. The ghostly image of her unborn child is what brings together abortion and loss, pregnancy and loss in her prose. Maraini considers these topics in a different way from Oriana Fallaci in Lettera a un bambino mai nato, which is structured like a conversation between a mother and an unborn child, that reveals all her weaknesses, fears, and ambitions. Fallaci deals with a woman’s dilemma of having to choose between having a baby and having a career, with all the negative and positive implications of each option. Maraini’s “Lettera sull’aborto” is an appeal to women who want motherhood but want it redesigned in different terms. It invites a serious reconsideration of women’s position in society, in view of what “having rights” really signifies for a person of the female gender.[21] Maraini’s letter is an open invitation to rethink the natural sources of the term `difference’ with an open mind, rather than an alignment with outmoded essentialisms. The author confirms that women’s `forms,’ that our `discourses’ are strictly related to our embodiment, and not a simple reflection of our social roles. Regardless of how many individual women choose to become parents, women must voice our needs as birth-givers and mothers, and these needs must become socially acceptable. I hope I do not sound rash in my assertion that, essentially, what Maraini always theorized about abortion, both as a writer and as an activist as feminist, is the non-contradictory necessity for Italian women to break the all-encompassing internalized Catholic prohibition on contraceptives.[22] In her programmatically engaged narrative, in her theatrical works, and most notably in her latest essay “Lettera sull’aborto,” Maraini suggests that sexual players need to undergo a process of maturation in order to use contraceptives in a more responsible way, which automatically prevents abortion. Only as women gradually generate a new concept of sexual life, can a truer diritto alla sessualità be claimed, which will enable us to transform the world give it a new symbolic order paced on women’s rhythms:
Prevention, in any case, is a difficult victory that presumes awareness and maturity. Those who do not have this awareness allow themselves to be tempted by the harrowing “test” of pregnancy. They secretly enjoy being the masters of a wild force that bursts from their bodies. But then, they immediately intervene in a drastic manner to wipe out the fruit of their “test.” This process is a brutal contradiction that reveals, as if we still needed to prove it, the difficult story of a woman’s body, a body caught between taboos and restrictions, continuous pleas of abnegation, of sacrifice but, at the same time, drawn towards emancipation. (13)
The story goes back to centuries of womanhood in the patriarchal symbolic order, where it functioned as a system for the reproduction of the male. Something is inherently wrong with considering a person only as birth-giver. Even though in the generative process women are blessed with the choice to give human kind reproduction, for a mother not being able to look at your child is still terribly painful. To paraphrase Conrad’s lines, “To make you hear, to make you feel it is before all to make you see,” only women who have experienced pregnancy and abortion can really understand this. Maraini, as a writer, makes women see their experiences. She possesses an incredible ability to make women see what they should have seen from the beginning. Maraini’s paratactic style of writing makes deliberate use of simple lexicon and syntax, but her conclusions are far from being simplistic. Throughout her works she maintains that, although abortion is an indispensable right in a society that values women’s contributions, it nevertheless constitutes a dramatic moment of subjection to needs that might be foreign to the woman involved. In short, I do not believe that Maraini, in her revisionist effort, betrays feminist beliefs when restating the natural necessity of becoming mother for a woman in “Lettera sull’aborto.” Men have used our natural desire of mothering to subject us to a symbolic patriarchal order that sees only its own advantage in that desire.[23] However, these findings can not possibly prevent women from giving birth, especially now that the goals of economic independence and professional development are about to be reached. Maraini seems to say that surrendering our choice of motherhood in the name of equality would be evidence of weakness on our part. As seen from Maraini’s perspective, in feminist politics abortion no longer entails self-determination. Rather, it prevents women from exploring new avenues for self-discovery. After all, we are still “donne in guerra,” even when being at war signifies renewing our personal pact with life.
Works Cited
Bono, Paola and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Braidotti, Rosi, “Women, Monsters, Machines,” in Writing on the Body: Feminine Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury, eds. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 59–77.
Cavarero, Adriana. In Spite of Plato. Trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Chiavola Birnbaum, Lucia. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1986.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Sharer. New York: Dover, 1993.
de Beauvoir, Simone . The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. 1953. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Elam, Diane. Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Felski, Rita. Beyond
Feminist Aesthetic: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
Il Nuovo Zingarelli. Vocabolario della lingua italiana di Nicola Zingarelli. Miro Dogliotti and Luigi Rosiello, eds. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1986.
Irigaray, Luce. Thinking the Difference. New York: Routledge, 1994.
–––. “Come diventare delle donne civili?” Reti 3–4 (May-August 1988): 6–16.
Jeuland-Meynaud, Maryse. “Dacia Maraini: Polemique ou littèrature?” Les femmes ècrivains en Italie aux XlXe et XXe siècles. Actes du colloque international. Aix-en-Provence, 14–16 Novembre 1991. Marie-Anne Rabat di Mèrac, ed. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universitè de Provence, 1993. 205–38.
Maraini, Dacia. Donna in guerra. Turin: Einaudi, 1975. [Woman at War. Trans. Mara Benetti and Elspeth Spottiswood. New York: Italica Press, 1989.]
–––. Il treno per Helsinki. Turin: Einaudi, 1984. [The Train. Trans. D. Kitto and E. Spottiswood. London: Camden Press, 1988.
–––. La vacanza. Rome: Lerici, 1962. [The Holiday. Trans. Stuart Hood. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966.]
–––. La donna perfetta. Turin: Einaudi, 1975.
–––. L’età del malessere. Turin: Einaudi, 1963. [The Age of Malaise. Trans. Frances Frenaye. New York: Grove Press, 1963.]
–––. “Lettera sull’aborto.” Nuovi argomenti, 1–2 (Jan. 1996). Reprint in Un clandestino a bordo. Milan: Rizzoli, 1996. 9–34. [Translation provided by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto.]
–––. Lettere a Marina. Milan: Bompiani, 1981. [Letters to Marina. Trans. D. Kitto and E. Spottiswood. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1987.]
–––. “Riflessioni sui corpi logici e illogici delle mie compaesane di sesso.” La bionda, la bruna e l’asino. Milan: Rizzoli, 1987.
–––. Voci. Milan: Rizzoli, 1994.
Maraini, Dacia and Piera Degli Esposti. Storia di Piera. Milan: Bompiani, 1980.
Masland, Lynn. “In Her Own Voice: An Irigarayan Exploration of Women’s Discourse in Caro Michele (Natalia Ginzburg) and Lettere a Marina (Dacia Maraini).” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. 21 (Sept. 1994) 3:331–40.
McDonagh, Eileen. “Abortion Rights Alchemy and the United States Supreme Court: What’s Wrong and How to Fix It.” Perspectives on the Politics of Abortion. Ted G. Jelen, ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995. 21–53.
Michetti, Maria,
Margherita Repetto, Luciana Viviani, eds. UDI. Laboratorio di politica delle
donne. Rome: Cooperativa Libera Stampa,
1984.
O’ Brien, Mary. Reproducing the World. Essays on Feminist Theory. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989.
Pallotta, Augustus. “Dacia Maraini: From Alienation to Feminism.” World Literature Today 58 (Summer 1984) 3: 359–62.
Tamburri, Anthony. “Dacia Maraini’s Donna in guerra: Victory or Defeat?” Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance. Santo L. Arico, ed. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990. 138–51.
Warner, Marina. Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More. New York: Random House, 1995.
Weinberg, Maria Grazia Sumeli. Invito alla lettura di Dacia Maraini. Pretoria: U of South Africa P, 1993.
Wilt, Judith. Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of Maternal Instinct. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
Wood, Sharon. “The Silencing of Women: The Political Aesthetic of Dacia Maraini.” Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994. London: Athlone, 1995. 216–31.
[1]Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, xiv. Also by Irigaray, it is also to be mentioned, within the context of Italian political engagement to women’s rights, her lecture “Come diventare delle donne civili?” given in Rome on April 8, 1988 to the Italian Communist Women, later published by Reti 3–4 (May-Aug. 1988) 6–16.
[2]For the development of Italian Women struggles for the abortion law, see “History of two Laws,” (211–33) in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, eds. Bono and Kemp translated relevant documents on the abortion issue such as the Manifesto, 1978, offering also their point of view of the “questionable links” of abortion with sexuality and how solidarity among women was strongly fuelled by the “repressive nature of the legislation which considered abortion a crime”(211).
[3]The double condition of Dacia Maraini as a writer and as an activist in the Movement is rooted in her conviction that only a woman can speak about another woman as Maryse Jeuland-Meynaud pertinently points out in her article “Dacia Maraini: Polemique où litterature?” in Marie-Anne Rubat di Mérac, ed. Les femmes écrivains en Italie aux XIXè et XXè siècles. Actes du colloque international. Aix-en-Provence, 14–15–1–6 Novembre 1991. Jeuland-Meynaud states: “Dacia’s feminism is engagement plus writing. The writer delivers us a pressing message whose constituents will immediately be seen to later evaluate their literariness” (206; trans. mine).
[4]Sharon Wood uses this syntagm in the title of her essay on Maraini “The Silencing of Women: The Political Aesthetic of Dacia Maraini (born 1936)” (216–31) in her book Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994. Wood stresses, in fact, how, starting “by the late 1960s aesthetics had clearly become a branch of politics” of Maraini’s work. She analyzes the three different stages of Maraini’s career (the first years, the feminism, post-Marianna Ucría), pointing out especially the differing portraiture of the female characters, progressively mutating from sort of odd amebas, devoid of any ability in making personal choices (i.e. Anna in La vacanza, Enrica in L’età del malessere) to the painful acknowledgment of the Self (Vanna in Donna in guerra).
[5]“As long as Maraini’s work is nurtured by this belief, [for a woman every literary discourse becomes immediately a social and political discourse] we can continue to expect what is essentially a simplified, sexually stratified view of the human condition that ultimately will prove of limited value even to the selected audience it is meant to serve”(Pallotta 362).
[6]Dacia Maraini, “Lettera sull’aborto,” Nuovi argomenti, 1–2 (Jan. 1996), later republished in D. Maraini, Un clandestino a bordo, (Milano: Rizzoli, 1996), 9–34. The English translation is by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offresi Poletto.
[7]Social protest appears to Maraini as the tool for a concrete change of the woman’s conditions. The parola is the medium through which Maraini chooses to reconsider the role of woman in the Italian society. As Weinberg writes: “In women’s case, victim for centuries of seclusion, the word serves to relate the unsaid and to reveal in a more open and flexible speech all that society has always forbidden her: the existence of her own speaking body, in other words, of a legitimate feminine representation (21; translation mine).
[8]I believe Isolina, the story of a young woman who was literally cut in pieces and thrown in the Adige to save an officer’s honor is representative of Maraini’s moral standpoint in her accusations against a society in which women are “used” for men’s benefit, and is thus closer to her activism of the ‘70s.
[9]These are the corresponding years of Maraini’s most active engagement in the Feminist movement, a period which began with her Manifesto dal carcere (1969).
[10]In this vision of abortion, Maraini’s Vannina conforms in its articulation to the Italian feminist definitions of maternity. Adriana Cavarero in In Spite of Plato words the issue of maternity in the same terminology: “[T]he mother is the container of the unborn child”(67).
[11]Anthony J. Tamburri underscores the transcendent sexual imagery utilized by Maraini as a linguistic and rhetorical technique for showing repression, rich in its mimetical, yet metaphorical meanings, as well as Giacinto’s role in exemplifying “male objectification of a female and society’s expectations” for submissive creatures apt to reproduce, since “motherhood is the essence of a female’s nature” (146). While this novel is widely considered by Maraini’s women scholars the most programmatic of narrative works, a response and a follow-up to Sibilla Aleramo’s Una donna, Tamburri curiously states, at the end of his article: “Donna in guerra, an extreme expression of the woman’s plight in early 1970 Italy, assumes no antimale stance. Although Maraini makes blatantly evident the problems inherent in gender stereotyping, she does not advocate separatism” (148). In Weinberg’s view, instead, Maraini “openly denounces the program of rescue of women’s autonomy” obtained through the narrative strategy of a diaristic form (62). To this purpose she quotes the statements the writer made soon after the release of Donna in guerra: “This is my most consciously feminist novel. I have always spoken about women in my novels. But I would see their problems as individual, existential facts. The feminist consciousness consists of recognizing what is common in the mali affecting women; it consists of understanding the political nature of the relationship between woman and man, between woman and institutions, between woman and culture” (Weinberg 62; translation mine).
[12]As Felski states: “The figure of a female friend or lover invariably plays a symbolically important role in the protagonist’s development. This transference of allegiance from a heterosexual relationship to one of intimacy between women involves overcoming the negative value which women have been conditioned to place upon their own sex; the recognition of the other woman serves a symbolic function as an affirmation of self, of gendered identity” (138).
[13]These statements, not yet published were taped and graciously provided me by Silvia Verdiani of Turin.
[14]In her analysis of contemporary novels that employ the abortion motif, Wilt remarks: “Abortion, a malleable topos, seems to work most often under this law of plot: if abortion represents the unholy domain of control, the plot will dissent from, perhaps thwart it. To support abortion, which lends itself so easily to the unholy domain of control, the novelist will have to place the act in the domain of surprise, resistance to control. If a man attempts to control a woman through pregnancy the plot will resist with abortion [...]; if a man attempts to control a woman through abortion, or a woman attempts to control “nature” with choice, the plot will resist with pregnancy” (Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction 4). Maraini seems to resist this notion of surprise, and prefers to engage her characters in more traditional narratives of power and subjection.
[15]Dacia Maraini, Un clandestino a bordo 10–11. All passages from Un clandestino a bordo are taken from the English translation by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto (work in progress).
[16]Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer (New York: Dover, 1993). An interesting study could be undertaken in regards to Maraini’s account of Conrad’s story, to be found in Voci (272–73). The narrating voice employs this plot to justify and explain to herself the sense of interpenetration in what is Angela’s tragedy. The similitude between a woman and a vessel is, of course, nothing new, but what probably makes Conrad’s story so striking for Maraini is the possessive, that in English makes clear the possessor of the object. In this case is the she-ship keeping on board the her-clandestine, a verbal game that would be impossible in Italian, as Irigaray reminds us in her aforementioned “Come diventare delle donne civili” (12).
[17]In “Abortion Rights Alchemy and the United States Supreme Court: What’s Wrong and How to Fix It,” an article dealing with the Roe vs. Wade decision of the America supreme court, McDonagh argues that, in the making of that decision, the Court did not carefully analyze the condition of pregnancy. Through her in-class discussions with her students, McDonagh was able to identify five different perceptions (and definitions) of pregnancy, namely that of 1) women as vessels, 2) the one regarding the fetal development, 3) pregnancy as result of sex, 4) burdensome condition, and 5) its value to society.
[18]Cavarero would strongly object to Maraini’s present re-considerations on abortion and the power of women. The phylosopher writes in her analysis of Demeter’s myth: “Regardless of how the law addresses the problem, it is clear that by now birth has been removed not only from sovereignty of maternal power but also from the basic feminine experience of maternity. Here indeed not only maternity, understood as reproductive function, and the fetus, understood as a legal subject, are concerns of the state, but so is the ovum, in its aseptic separateness and unpredictable wanderings through more or less compliant wombs. [...] Risking their lives and breaking the law, or, more precisely, risking their lives because they are breaking the law, women demonstrate that they know that maternity is indeed their own concern, not an issue of public law. It is a question of the irreducible individuality of every woman as a living whole made of body and mind. [...] When she decides to have an abortion she decides for herself and for no one else (she does not decide for the embryo that as such is still within her body, not yet born). In any case, she is alone and entirely responsible for her decision” (78).
[19]As de Beauvoir states in The Second Sex in the introductory part of the chapter titled “The Mother,” reproduction has never been a mere “biological chance”—but, rather—“it has always come under the voluntary control of human beings. [...] There are few subjects on which bourgeois society displays greater hypocrisy; abortion is considered a revolting crime to which it is indecent even to refer” (484–85). In the same fashion as Maraini and latter feminists, Beauvoir formulates specific accusations to the hypocritical attitude of society abhorring the representation, as much as the problematic presence, of the abortion, in respect, then, to the children, unwittingly protagonists of all sorts of abuse.
[20]“In her heart she often repudiates the interruption of pregnancy which she is seeking to obtain. She is divided against herself. Her natural tendency can well be to have the baby whose birth she is undertaking to prevent; even if she has no positive desire for maternity, she still feels uneasy about the dubious act she is engaged in. For if it is not true that abortion is murder, it still cannot be considered in the same light as a mere contraceptive technique; an event has taken place that is a definite beginning, the progress of which is to be stopped”(The Second Sex 490).
[21]Maraini’s reflections mirror the considerations on abortion and on the actual meaning of the term “right” that Diane Elam presents in her very insightful Deconstruction and Feminism. There is danger in utilizing the term “rights” which, created by male subjects, is observant of categories that do not reflect what women’s rights might be. Invoking deconstructionist theory, Elam invites us all to reconsider how “rights” actually construct the political subjects who are entitled to those “rights” in the conviction that, “the appeal to rights is always an appeal to a certain description of the human as more human than other descriptions.[...] No balance can be struck [between the language of the fetus and that of the mother] since there is no common language that can express the rights of both sides without prejudice. And to appeal to rights in such a case risks hiding the fact, claiming that the prejudices of one side precede argument because they are natural” (78–79). And Elam continues further: “Indeed, to continue arguing in terms of rights may well be anti-feminist. An abortion is each woman’s choice. To seek to enshrine it as a `right’ risks neglecting the sentiments of the woman who chooses not to have an abortion, or who has an abortion and regrets it, or who has or doesn’t have an abortion and can’t decide whether she did the right thing. An abortion, that is, is not like a vote. You don’t use it to express yourself, to feel one with yourself. Abortion is no more or less natural than sex—and feminists know how the notion of “conjugal rights” has served to enshrine marital rape for centuries in the West” (79). In Elam’s view the meaning of “rights” in politics seems to always turn out to be based on universal notions of “what it means to be a male subject” (80).
On different ideological premises, Mary O’Brien also detects a certain inconsistency and deficiency in the definition of “life” and “rights:” “Neither pregnancy nor abortions are rights, but are existential choices related to the historical relations of reproduction which partiachs (sic) pretend are not historical but natural” (Reproducing the World 303).
[22]In talking about the reticence of Italian women in using contraceptives because of religious reasons Maraini states in fact: “But it is possible that the teachings of the Church, that carry so little weight as far as sexuality in general is concerned, could be so influential in this matter of contraception?” (8). And few pages later she rhetorically asks the question : “Why not prevent something that then becomes a source of grief, a risk, a cause of depression and guilt trips?” (11).
[23]Nancy Chodorow draws a correct representation of what gender differentiation has meant for centuries: “The social organization of gender, in its relation to an economic context, has depended on the continuation of the social relations of parenting. The reproduction of these social relations of parenting is not reducible to individual intention but depends on all the arrangements which go into the organization of gender and the organization of the economy” (34). She explains further: “[I]n the case of mothering, the economic system has depended for its reproduction on women’s reproduction of particular forms of labor power in the family. At the same time, income inequality between men and women makes it more rational, and even necessary, in any individual conjugal family for fathers, rather than mothers, to be primary wage-earners. Therefore, mothers, rather than fathers, are the primary caretakers of children and the home” (35). Chodorow’s conclusions, that “women’s capacities for mothering and abilities to get gratification from it are strongly internalized and psychologically enforced, and are built developmentally into the feminine psychic structure”(39) are right in that they are indeed some of the reasons why women still accept the traditional role in society. I argue, however, that these reasons do not justify entirely women’s desire for having children.