62 See Giunta, ‘Persephone’s Daughters’, p. 774. 63 Giunta, ‘Persephone’s Daughters’, p. 774.
64 Introduction to Myth, ed. by Peter R. Stillman (Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden Book, 1977), p. 5.
65 For a further reading on the relationship between mythic archetype and memoir, see Maureen Murdock,
‘Memoir as Contemporary Myth’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, 2010).
According to the most common version of the myth of Persephone, the story begins with the goddess’ abduction carried out by her uncle Hades. While the young virgin is plucking a beautiful narcissus, created with the purpose to attract her and trick her, the earth opens wide below her feet and Hades appears on his golden chariot. He abducts Persephone, who screams with fear, and drags her to his kingdom, the world of the dead, to make Persephone his wife and companion against her will. Although the abduction is an act of violence, this marks a moment of change for the young child, who will become a wife and the Queen of the Dead. Taken away from her mother and with no female point of reference in the underworld upon which to construct and relate her womanly identity, Persephone will have to pave her own path of self-assertion.
Italian American women’s memoirs often originate from a condition of discomfort perceived by the authors. Their struggles in relation to their Italian American hybrid identity lie at the core of their stories which unfold a narrative of the quest for roots. As Gardaphé argues, what is crucial for Italian American writers is their attempt at recreating and establishing ‘a connection with [their] Italian ancestry’.66 Consequently,
these authors’ narratives begin with a departure from the American scene; this is a journey – either physical or metaphorical – to the land of their ancestors, aimed to explore their Italian identity and to answer to the question: ‘Was I Italian because my name sounded strange, or was I American because I was born here?’.67 With regard to the issue of identity, Zygmunt Bauman explains:
To be wholly or in part ‘out of place’ everywhere, not being completely anywhere … may be an upsetting, sometimes annoying experience. There is always something to
66 Gardaphé, Italian Signs, American Streets, p. 86.
explain, to apologize for, to hide or on the contrary to boldly display, to negotiate, to bid for and to bargain for…68
This is the experience of Italian American women who have too often perceived their identity as something to figure out, to negotiate, something that makes them stand out, and is always a marker of difference in the eyes of the other, holding them back from personal achievement. In most of the cases, this sense of insecurity comes from their very own Italian community and is instilled in them from their families. For instance, in her memoir, Diane di Prima remembers her father’s words:
The week I was leaving for college, my father turned to me […] Held me by the shoulder […]: ‘Now, don’t expect too much. I want you to always remember that you’re Italian’. Not that we weren’t as good, but however good we were, we would be held down. Or back. An underclass. 69
Like modern Persephones, these women venture into the realm of darkness to shed light on a daunting past, to create a different narrative for their stories, and to be able to achieve independence and selfhood, an identity other than ‘underclass’.
Like the earth opening wide beneath Persephone’s feet to create a passage in order for Persephone to travel between her joyful and familiar world of light and the dark, mysterious kingdom of the husband – her new home – Italian American women experience a similar condition of displacement that begins with a moment of fracture cracking the shell of their hybrid identity. This moment could be summed up by DeSalvo’s declaration of intents in the prologue of her memoir, Vertigo:
68 Zigmunt Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013), p. 13. 69 Diane Di Prima, Recollections of my Life as a Woman (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 72.
I am, inescapably, an Italian-American woman with origins in the working class. I come from a people, who, even now, seriously distrust educated women, who value family loyalty. The story I want to tell is that of how I tried to create (and am still trying to create) a life that was different from the one that was scripted for me by my culture [...] It is the unlikely narrative of how a working-class Italian girl became a critic and writer.70
From these lines, we can see how distrust in education, the family, and the Italian American community in which these writers were raised, underpin the difficult ascension and affirmation of an Italian American literature written by women. This is due to the fact that these very same factors, indeed, contributed forms of anxiety that prevented these women from knowing themselves and their potential as historical and political agents. The resistance towards the educational system in America that characterized earlier generations of Italian migrants can be attributed to the racism these people found in the host country, as well as to the exploitation of the Italian people by American society. According to Barolini:
When your frame of reference is a deep distrust of education because it is an attribute of the very classes who have exploited you and your kinds for as long as memory carries, then you do not encourage a reverence for books among your children. You teach them the practical arts not the abstracts ones.71
Further evidence can be found in Marianna De Marco Torgovnick’s memoir, Crossing Ocean Parkway (1994). Torgovnick writes about a moment in her school career when
she wanted to pursue her studies but had to fight against both her parents and the school advisor. The school advisor recommended that the girl pursue the secretarial track rather
70 DeSalvo, Vertigo, p. xvii. 71 Barolini, The Dream Book, p. 5.
than the academic one. This decision, Torgovnick argues, was based solely on her ethnic Italian background – an experience that echoes the abovementioned Di Prima’s story. Torgovnick’s parents agreed with the school advisor and pushed the daughter to conform to the idea that it was the right thing to do. Torgovnick, however, managed to convince her parents to change their minds by appealing on the fact that if she was a Jewish girl ‘I would have been placed, without question, in the academic track’.72
Starting from rebellion and thus creating friction between the opposing value systems that they had to live by, Italian American women enact strategies of resistance signalling a turn in their future. Choosing education over a worn-out script, Italian American women are seeking individuality and intellectual freedom – elements of fracture from their Italian heritage, and the idea of the Italian woman as mere ‘helpmate, mother of their children, bearer and tender of the old culture’.73 Following this moment of departure, the journey takes shape as one of self-discovery and self-definition during which Italian American women learn to know themselves, to know each other, and to create a literary space that can best represent their experience.