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donnawomanfemme
Roma, Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1986-
Biographies/feebacks, 1986, n. 3
EDITORIAL, Biographies/feebacks, pp. 5-6
MELCHIORI Paola
On the political use of biography. Virginia Woolf, pp. 7-28
PERROTTA RABISSI Adriana
Assolo. Sibilla Aleramo, pp. 29-35
COLLIN Françoise
Thinking/telling. Hannah Arendt, pp. 36-44
CUSIN Cecilia - D'ANGELI Concetta - FUMI Elena
- PETRUCCI Giuliana
Leda Rafanelli. Anarchist and novel-writer, pp. 45-55
CAMBONI Marina
Gertrude Stein, or of Change, pp. 56-72
EUSTACHIO Marilù
For Emily Dickinson, pp. 73-83
Women's Power and Culture, pp. 85-106
CRISPINO Annamaria
Women's publishing: an international encounter in Oslo,
pp. 107-112
GUADAGNI Annamaria
Women at the center, pp. 113-115
EDITORIAL, Biographies/feebacks, pp. 5-6
A woman's biography written by a woman is a twosome voyage intertwining two persons and two existences; the resulting feedback is due to the encounter of two projects, each of which may reveal the other.
This grants the reader as objects of reflection and knowledge both a life history and the political conceit the interpreter somehow offers of herself and the other, features of an idea of femininity that has doubled in the process. We are presented with the life of a woman as a gendered being, beyond social visibility; an idea of "meaningful life", therefore, which is more consistent with gender, more eccentric as opposed to a presumed model of femininity.
MELCHIORI Paola, On the political use of biography. Virginia Woolf, pp.
7-28
Taking for granted the autobiographical aspect of all biographies, whereby the other, for the woman who investigates her life, becomes not only the mirror, the double, but also the mother "symbolic-of-reality", the writer of this article argues that the political sense of biographies resides in their being "stories of relationships" and in their producing "a particular kind of knowledge".
This is why the life of Virginia Woolf can be used to illustrate both of the above aspects through a different line of approach which involves "re-reading" Virginia Woolf and trying to "reassemble her various voices and styles in relation to the meanings she attributed to the various pieces of her living-and-writing".
An analysis of the passages in the Diaries or Letters where she most explicitly tackles the writing/life theme reveals that her life and her writing were fused in a total relationship, as if writing were the only instrument capable of grasping life and expressing it in the one form that rendered it acceptable to be lived. The contradictions she found in creative work - life/death, joy/pain - are thus transposed into a dialectic of symbolisation-sublimation.
This leads her to perceive "the shaping of writing as the sensation of beauty", as a "certain kind of relationship with the body", with all that this implies for Virginia Woolfs interpretation of the concepts of maternity, fecundity, sickness and resurrection. Hence her idea on "the androgyny of the mind", that reassembling of her being that she seeks and experiences in her writing.
However, this rereading of Virginia Woolf does not aim at being the most rigorous interpretation: rather, it is offered as a reconsideration of "what comes before and during the reading and writing of biographies", and of "the way these are related, and the deepest needs of our search for identity".
PERROTTA RABISSI Adriana, Assolo. Sibilla Aleramo, pp. 29-35
While collating Sibilla Aleramo's printed diary with the original manuscript the author of this article reconstructs the writer's experience of "reader" of the many books by women which she reviewed, and her analyses, sometimes felicitous, sometimes less happy, of the women who wrote them.
Together with Aleramo's judgements (not all of them previously published), on famous women such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein the article mentions more intimate comments, such as those on young Italian poetesses and on the personality of now widely appreciated women writers like Fausta Cialente or Alba De Céspedes.
Aleramo's reading of her "colleagues" is of a piece with her writing and her life. As the writer herself admits, although she did not use any of the women she met as materials for narrative, the "I" at the centre of her books was gradually enriched "almost imperceptibly… by so much complex human experience".
COLLIN Françoise, Thinking/telling. Hannah Arendt, pp. 36-44
The article takes its departure from Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen. which remained unfinished and was published long after it was initially drafted. The first question that comes to mind is obvious: when Arendt writes the life of another woman, does she in any way "write herself"?
An answer is provided by a brief outline of the central ideas of Arendt's philosophy: her particular conception of individuality as an expression of singularness visible in the multiple relationship with others; the difference between zoe and bios, between natural life and the birth-to-life of an individual, the idea of man not as the author but as the actor of his own life; the need to speak about life through the examples of lives.
From this derives a clearly defined notion of history as the antithesis of totality, and of the story as a more reliable mirror of reality. And from this, above all, derives the meaning that to "write biography" assumes in Arendt's thought as a whole, namely, to capture singularness in its relationship with plurality, to stress the value of birth as beginning, and to narrate.
CUSIN Cecilia - D'ANGELI Concetta - FUMI Elena - PETRUCCI Giuliana, Leda
Rafanelli. Anarchist and novel-writer, pp. 45-55
Leda Rafanelli is a minor figure both in Italian literature and in Italian politics. Here she is investigated partly in relation to the search for a "female cultural tradition in Italian literature", and partly because, more than for other women, her beliefs are closely reflected in her public and private life.
An anarchist associated with the individualistic element of Italian anarchism, she professed free love, only to be converted to Islam, after a trip to Egypt, and accept Islam's particular view of woman and her role. For her there is apparently no contradiction between choices which to the majority of people seem to be mutually exclusive. She achieves her own brand of coherence by transforming both these choices in a style of life, first the one and then the other.
Her literary output rather than her biography in the narrow sense is explored here, with a view to supplying a category for interpreting women and their history - namely that of exemplariness, a category that encompasses both the exceptionality of the given case and its more general representativity.
CAMBONI Marina, Gertrude Stein, or of Change, pp. 56-72
In this essay Gertrude Stein's work - and in particular her narratives Melanctha, Ada, Ida - are interpreted in the light of two related concepts/terms: chance and change, which are considered central to her idea of life-knowledge-art.
After acknowledging Stein's point of view, namely, that "Nobody enters the mind of someone else", M. Camboni selects clues and elements in the writer's later work that make up the change-chance paradigm. By using contemporary definitions of the two terms, she points out how Stein's conception of a creative mind is the result of her accurate analysis of a woman's ways of living and knowing.
EUSTACHIO Marilù, For Emily Dickinson, pp. 73-83
In the Summer of 1985 the author began a series of studies on love, mostly pastels on paper, but also oils and drawings. Feeling an intimate consonance with her she dedicated many ink and graphite drawings - five samples are shown here - to Emily Dickinson, of whom she tried a parallel interpretation.
Women's Power and Culture, pp. 85-106
[This essay is the result of an interdisciplinary
research on the problems of masculinity/femininity. It was framed by Cecile
Dauphine, A. Farge, G. Fraisse, C. Klapisch-Zuber, R.M. Lagrave, M. Perrot,
P. Pézerat, Y. Ripa. P. Schmitt Pantel, D. Voldman]
The history of women has been made to sway between various systems of exclusion, tolerance and, actually, one that renders things commonplace. By highlighting this course, the necessary connection between this field of study and the rest of historical research may be questioned in a new light.
The idea of a woman's culture sprang from the success of the history of culture and representations; women's exploits and experience are now studied in their own right. The efficacy of such a notion and the great amount of works based on it mask the deadlocks that arise when exploiting it.
Reconstituting women's discourse and specific
skills is not enough. It must be grasped how a woman's culture may be built
up within a system of uneven, conflicting and contradictory relationship; the
political side of the question should also be part of the reflection on male-female,
and the usual divisions between social power and political power ought to be
reconsidered.
CRISPINO Annamaria, Women's publishing: an international encounter in Oslo,
pp. 107-112
The second international Fair of the feminist book which took place in Oslo, an event, the author points out, the Italian press gave very little importance to, is the occasion for a serious reflection articulated in five points: women's book trade in Italy is still a very fragile enterprise; the big publishing houses' policy in Italy is still to pursue authorship, without taking much notice of women as authors or readers; culture produced by women in Italy doesn't circulate much abroad; an urgent reflection is needed on the way differences between women interact, within a frame by now become quite wide: they are generational differences, difference of sexual political choices, difference of possibility and culture between women of the First and Third world.
GUADAGNI Annamaria, Women at the center, pp. 113-115
She reports on problems of politics, organization, identity, cultural function, as debate topics discussed during the first national encounter of currently active Italian Women's documentation and research centers, held in Siena in September 1986.
More than a hundred centers are engaged in the
precious job of preserving documentation, they are provided with archives and
libraries, entertaining more or less conflictual relationships with local institutions
and contributing to the production and circulation of ideas within a female
political context.