[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_23

Grand Union, Zadie Smith, 2020

“There is an urge to be good. To be seen to be good. To be seen. Also to be. Badness, invisibility, things as they are in reality as opposed to things as they seem, death itself - these are out of fashion”. This is the beginning of one of the stories in "Grand Union." I want to use it as a starting point to tell an episode that changed me profoundly. My story also speaks of things that seem and are not, of things that are out of fashion; it speaks of invisibility and urgency. “Feminism is for losers.” It is the answer that a student gave me to the question: "What do you think about feminism?" I was teaching in a state school at the end of the academic year. The school text included an optional box on the Suffragettes. “Feminism is for losers,” said Sara, a 14-year-old girl. Paradoxically, hers was not a confrontational statement; she was just expressing a great frustration: feminism is for losers because it is useless.

The class had heard the word many times, but no one knew its meaning, although they were confident that it must have a negative connotation ("It's like those crazy people who protest in pink," literally quoting someone). During the discussion, Sara also pointed out how, in the art manual, Artemisia Gentileschi was reported in a couple of lines at the end of the chapter on Caravaggio without even an image of her canvases. And this seemed to cause her an inexplicable anger.

The students' perception that emerged from the debate is that of a school forced to administer yet another academic purge (“the role of women”) to satisfy yet another institutional hypocrisy (“we are all the same”). But deep down, the kids know that it's just a "farce"—in their words—"like fire drills.”

The female issue is like a safety simulation: it is mandatory to do it but not to learn it because it is a "fake thing," a pure formality, "stuff for losers." I thought about this episode while choosing the topic for the essay, so I picked up the Italian Literature manual from Sara's class again to try to reconstruct which vision of women emerges from a particular way of presenting culture. I also picked up my University Italian Literature textbook to see how it addressed the same themes. But – surprisingly to me - in both cases, I didn't need to search inside the text; I could just stop at the index. I chose to deal with this topic by remaining on the surface, on an index, because indexes are a surface when they present their content and indicate its salient elements. I chose to stay on the surface because I find it important: it guides most people, and it too has its – dangerous – depths.

Here, I report the two indexes for comparison: the first is that of my University Italian Literature manual. The second is that of Sara’s class. The University book begins by asking, "What is a classic?" Saint Francis of Assisi is the first author to appear. Following is a list of themes, dates, and names (including the artist Michelangelo Buonarroti) ranging from Renaissance to Postmodernism. Elsa Morante (third to last line) is the only woman to appear.

The second text is intended for a younger and more heterogeneous target that has yet to build a base and cultural references. It is a list of names, divided by century and style of the period, featuring the inventor of the telegraph, Guglielmo Marconi. Grazia Deledda, the only Italian woman honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature, is, here, too, the only woman on the list.

In both cases, the only woman on the list (Morante, Deledda) does not appear as the movement's first or only reference but is buried among other names. Another curious similarity is that both indexes include historical figures outside the ordinary literary panorama (Michelangelo, Marconi).

A few questions arise: why is there strictly only one woman on each list? Where are all the others? And why, when there is an essential gap in literary gender representation, do male characters from other cultural fields appear instead? I am not writing to answer these questions but to ask myself how similar presentations can affect a neophyte in literature, a student, and an average reader. Or on those who simply browse books, choosing and discarding what they will read based on the great names they remember. Or who decides the value of people based on what they have achieved?

If I looked at the index of the school manual with Sara's eyes, wouldn't I suffer from not seeing women's names? Probably not in the way I think. Like a good part of the Italian female population, Sara is used to invisibility, to not find their gender represented, except in an optional box at the edge of the page (like that of the Suffragettes). Female invisibility is a problem precisely because it is invisible: how can I reason about something that is not there? The equal rights of women and men - on paper and in words - make us think that disparity and injustice are a past chapter of our history. The school itself consolidates this vision when it does not remember that the only successful revolution in the Western world is the female one. Schoolbooks written by men about the history of men paint a world in which feminism is not essential. And how could it be if women do not appear in history?

For the younger ones who have just started studying, this contradiction is not perceived except as indistinct frustration (as when Sara complained about the lack of Gentileschi's paintings in the art book) and, even worse, it is just accepted as normality. Partiality - because invisibility is both a product of cultural partiality and its historical legacy - is, in this order, suffered, accepted, and transmitted. No student would doubt that school textbooks are wrong because school is the official custodian of knowledge. For this reason, the problem of invisibility remains invisible even to the university students who find all the Greats they have already studied in high school in their university text. They may think that if other names do not appear on that list, it is because they are necessarily secondary. But they can't think about the “other names”; how could they? They don’t know them.

How can Sara's class perceive that one woman on the list? Like a fire drill: the regulation forces you to tick that box: one simulation per year and one woman on the list. How can the passionate humanist who enrolls at the University perceive that one woman? As an exception. It is a historical exception because it is well-known that men made history. Or a gender exception, because if that particular woman was successful, it was because she was atypical from the rest of her gender. However, the nature of this exceptionality is not linked to a system that does not allow specific categories to emerge.

The freedom of the indexes which, despite the stringent list, choose to include Michelangelo and Marconi also help to reinforce these readings. Two manuals, with such a heterogeneous target of readers, by different editors from different decades, give space to two characters external to Literature and choose not to list more than one great female name. I want to underline not a malicious desire to obscure female contributions to history but at least the obtuse iteration of exclusionary models that reproduce themselves in the reader's gaze and orient it toward a single - partial - perception. What does Italian literature have to tell us about women? Invisibility. Even in the indexes of manuals. I use the word invisibility, but one could also dare say "inferiority" because praising Marconi's very dull and anti-linguistic text on syntonic radiotelegraphy instead of Ada Negri's novels is telling me which text and which author is more worthy of note. Who's on the podium, and who's out? And if this illegible text is in the manual and Ada Negri's isn't, it must mean that her stories are even worse.

As Sara and her class had already clearly perceived, the message that emerges from this approach is: first of all, let's learn the basics of our culture (which is masculine); once this is done, we can see the optional (which is feminine). But what - perhaps - is worse is the impression that female cultural production is "lesser" in quality and quantity, which is why it consequently finds little space in manuals. It is not so.

Someone might say that the index lists the names of those who are most important: who have received greater recognition, those who created something that still has a strong influence today or those who were a true “genius” when compared to their social condition. In this regard, to respectively refute these three points, for each great author who appears in the indexes, I chose a great a woman who was their contemporary. Matilde Serao was the first Italian woman to open and direct a newspaper (Il Mattino, which is still active today). Journalist, activist, novelist, she wrote "The belly of Naples" is one of the metaphors most used by subsequent writers to describe the city: the womb. Serao belongs to the realist genre and  was a contemporary of Giuseppe Verga. Why doesn't she appear on the index? Minor spoiler: she doesn't appear anywhere at all in those textbooks. She has been nominated for the Nobel Prize six times, Verga not once.

Anna Maria Bellonci was the creator and co-founder of the Strega Prize, one of Italy's most prestigious literary competitions still constitute a watershed in the narrative panorama of the peninsula. Acute intellectual, she was the first Italian author to embody the gaze of a female character in historical novels; she returned to Italian history the missing voices and gave a new perspective from which to look at historical events. Why is her name not listed, but that of a winner of the competition she created (Alberto Moravia)? Minor spoiler: the Strega Prize is mentioned in the manuals, but Bellonci's name is not. Anna Maria Ortese, a contemporary writer of Italo Calvino, also won the Strega Prize, but her name does not appear on the list. Unlike her overwhelmingly male colleagues who won the same prize, she did not receive a regular school education: Ortese was entirely self-taught. I would have also liked to add the story of Saint Rita of Cascia to accompany Saint Francis, who stands out so much in the university list, but I'll stop here. The stories are too many; what matters is to note how completely arbitrary the selection of names appearing on the list is. And how the names that appear do not necessarily represent records compared to those that do not appear. On the contrary.

Indexes, presentations, and surfaces are essential. They are the first things we look at; they tell us what is necessary to know; they build our expectations and shape our gaze—or at least condition it. For many students, the names on the index of their secondary school textbooks are likely the only ones they will have dealt with in their lives. The names on the index also represent the names taught and are essential for the professor to remember. Neither the class nor the teacher knows what is so special about the writing on the radiotelegraph, but there must be a reason if it is there.

The female figures integrated into Italian school curricula do not find space in the list; they find space at the end, like small print or in the form of optional focuses. What is perceived is that women are sort of a surplus, not an integral part of the historical and cultural process. And this is a form of normalization of the social and professional invisibility of women to which we are all exposed, men and women, students and teachers. The fact that the only woman to appear in a twentieth-century chapter of Italian literature is the only one to have won the Nobel prize reminds women that it is necessary to reach the absolute ceiling to deserve a mention. Male colleagues, it seems, don't need too many medals to be on the list and represent culture. For girls and boys like Sara, having to read a few lines on the importance of women's struggle after hundreds of pages of male names - and readings - is useless. They perceive the contradiction; they experience it as hypocrisy: it is clear to them that women don't matter much, but since there is the imperative of political correctness, hey presto, we get the matter resolved with the special mention. Kids seem to be asking, “What is the importance of feminism? Show it to us because we can't see it," and I add: "but we want it."