A Woman Reflection

Annalysse Mason

FYS: Masterpieces of Italian Literature

11/3/13

                In Sibillla Aleramo’s lightly fictionalized memoir A Woman, Aleramo writes of her emotional and physical struggles of living in a male-dominated, Italian society in the 20^th century. In part one of the memoir, the reader learns that the narrator was raped when she was 15 years old by a man who she later married. The emotional trauma caused by this event contributes to the emotional transitions that happen periodically in the rest of part one.  Perhaps the most significant transition is that in which the narrator transforms from her state as a child, lacking complete ability to produce complex emotions, to that of an adult, particularly her mother. The narrator’s mother, described as “a sick woman, melancholy and weak” (pg 19) leads a life of intellectual and emotional constraint and abuse by the narrator’s father. The narrator’s mother attempts to take her own life by jumping off a balcony at their family’s home, after the event the narrator describes her mother as “more demoralized and crushed than ever” (26) and she later is perceived as “weighed down with shame, heartbroken, yet longing for reconciliation” (pg 27). The narrator, after marrying and having a child with the man who raped her, similarly exhibits these behaviors.   She is physically constrained and abused by her husband, as compared to her mother who was constrained and abused emotionally and mentally. The narrator describes his behavior as making her feel “suddenly that [she] was a tiny, defenceless creature at the mercy of a blind, bestial power” (pg 83). Like her mother, the narrator also tries to take her own life; after being kicked multiple times by her husband, she drinks a phial of laudanum in an attempt to poison herself. The narrator’s husband also abuses her sexually, stemming from their first sexual encounter when he raped her when she was 15 years old. The narrator states that perhaps her and husband weren’t able to quench in the “pleasures of healthy lovemaking” (pg 93) because “he didn’t connect [her] invincible dislike of the sexual act with the way he had violated [her] when [she] was a young girl” (pg 93). Both the narrator and her mother are very unhappy with their lives. In the narrator’s case, she used to commonly describe herself as bold, independent, and curious; after her marriage to this man and after enduring the physical/sexual abuse that followed their marriage, she now described herself as no longer able to “distinguish the sequence of suffering, delirium, and stupor” (pg 85). In the narrator’s mother’s case, after her attempted suicide she gradually began to go mad; eventually she lost her memory and reduced down to the mental abilities of a one year old. In A Woman the men that these women married, and further the abuse that followed in these marriages, is what ultimately lead to their unhappiness; in the case of the narrator’s mother it can be argued that this is what led to her mental deficiencies.