[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_11

The solitary ones, Ada Negri, 1917

There are many things I would like to write about “The solitary ones.” Too many, perhaps. There is a piece of me in every character in this book; there is a piece of every woman I know in every story. For this reason, I will not choose one of the many topics covered, some of which remain taboo in Italy even after a hundred years. I will not tell the story of Ada Negri, emblematic and controversial for her relationship with the fascist party. Instead, I will write about her Wikipedia page.

A little game that I have been playing for some time is to change the language and compare the contents between the Italian and English Wikipedia pages. Exciting differences emerge, reflecting two different ways of providing information and two different ways of conceiving culture. For example much more details on some Italian female authors appear in the Anglophone page than on the Italian one. Fun trivia: I have not found this omission of data on celebrities where, instead, the Italian page stands out for its abundance of details.

Comparing the Wikipedia page on Ada Negri, I found a significant difference. The Italian page dwells on the merits of the Italian musicologist Mario Genesi, who did important work in recovering Ada Negri's verses that had been set to music. It should be noted that the paragraph focuses not on Ada Negri, novelist, and poet, but on the activity of a man responsible for unearthing submerged musical productions; this paragraph represents a quarter of the entire page, bibliography, and website.

A paragraph appears on the English page, which is absent in many of the Italian Wikipedia pages relating to authors of the past: the "reception" paragraph. Under the Reception heading, it is reported: “Benedetto Croce described her work as "facile, tearful, completely centered on the melodiousness and readiness of emotions—poetics that are somewhat melancholy, idyllic- elegiac." He dismissed her, writing that a "lack or imperfection in artistic work is most particularly a feminine flaw (difetto femminile). It is precisely woman’s maternal instinct, her 'stupendous and all-consuming' ability to mother a child, that prevents her from successfully giving birth to a fully realized literary work."

Sexism in three simple steps: bringing women back to their place (that of having children and not writing books), remembering that different social roles are sanctioned by nature (maternal instinct is what prevents women from doing what men do), describe women's work with the same adjectives used to discriminate against women (tearful, emotional, irrational). A misogynistic ABC as blatant as it is trivial, which reveals a hint of annoyance disguised as contempt, which you could expect from anyone but not from Benedetto Croce, one of the spearheads of twentieth-century Italian thought; at least, that's how they continue to present him. I was hurt when I read these lines because I grew up in his philosophical writings and under his mythological aura.

The fact that the gender issue and a postcolonial reading of History struggle to enter Italian schoolbooks explains well how we struggle to question the dinosaurs of our culture, even when they are already more wrecks than monuments of greatness.

I don't think that the omission of Croce on the Italian Wikipedia page is a Casual oversight, I think, can easily be included in the long list of oversights expected when the women's issue knocks on the door.

It’s this kind of omissions that allow the strengthening of historical falsehoods, the idea of intellectual perfection of the spotless man contrasted with the killjoy woman; it is these omissions, more severe than lies, that calcify the already written history as untouchable tradition as holy and everything that is "different" as dangerous. Croce's misogynistic ABC is not a line of little importance among the thousands of enlightened pages that have made the history of thought; it is a training that remains because Croce was a Great Master in every field. It is sufficient to read any Italian newspaper to understand how what may seem like aberrant discrimination is instead an everyday communication practice by women who are called with the definite article in front of their surname, as is done with objects (for example, "the Meloni”) to those who are traced back to their biological functions to shift attention from their professional goals (the astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti called “the astro-mom”).

Ada Negri titled her collection of stories "The Solitary Ones" because being a woman, thanks to all the Benedetto Croce and all the Wikipedia omissions of Yesterday and today, it still and always makes women feel alone.