especially to writing.
Maraini's choice of eighteenth-century Sicily as the setting for her novel has perhaps to do not only with her own origins but also with the fact that it was home to an extraordinarily arrogant and hypocritical aristocracy, remarkable, even for that time, in the cruelty of its oppression of both the poor and women--a society so corrupt and unjust that someone like Marianna might be rendered silent in response.
The Sicilian aristocracy of the time showed little concern for improving the economic and social conditions on the island, worried instead about maintaining its own privileges during a particularly tumultuous period in history. More than a century before unification, Italy was still divided into numerous city-states, vied over by various foreign empires. The removal of Sicily from the hands of Franco-Spanish Bourbons and its passage under the Savoy-Piedmontese and subsequently the Austrian Hapsburg empires made an already quarrelsome and powerful Sicilian aristocracy very suspicious of new foreign rulers and kings. Finally, the return to power in 1713 of the Bourbons, who declared Naples the new capital of the kingdom and governed the island for the rest of the century from that city on the mainland, encouraged the inefficiency and the absenteeism of Sicilian nobility.
In a very outdated form of feudalism, the aristocratic families maintained their ownership of latifondi--large expanses of land not cultivated to their full potential--and continued at their very costly standard of living, obsessed with excessive formality and pompous etiquette. Sicilian society, due to the immobility of its aristocracy, showed traces of archaic habits and costumes that even in the city-states of the mainland were slowly beginning to fade. Since the majority of nobles had no idea how to improve or manage their family fortunes and commerce and industry offered no attraction to them, impoverishment soon became a problem, for money was spent more on prestige than on productive investment. Nevertheless, those who had dominated the island prior to the return of the Bourbons, and who had tried to change the renowned affectation and inefficient habits of Sicilian aristocracy,
were fiercely opposed by the barons who owned most of the land. In A History of Sicily, Denis Mack Smith describes how this entrenched feudal system affected family dynamics and the condition of women:
Since family pride was one of the most impelling motives in this society, the great estates continued to be kept intact wherever possible by deeds of strict settlement. Daughters and younger sons were commonly put inffconvents and monasteries about the age of ten (nunneries would accept girls even at four or five) so as to keep the family possessions in one hand; the ecclesiastical life at least had its own privileges and would not mean loss of caste. ... The head of the family and the eldest male child alone were of much importance. ... Woman's only alternative to the nunnery, however, was to get married and for the father to provide a dowry, since without a dowry no girl in any class was likely to find a husband: dowries were themselves so expensive that they were called a prime explanation of the low birth rate, and not without reason did reformers suggest that they were as much an impediment as primogeniture to the development of a more mobile and liberal society. *22
The lives of women, even noble ones, were particularly unhappy. In this very conservative world, in fact, they had no opportunity to manifest their voices and even less to make choices about their lives. The privileges of the aristocracy would have allowed Marianna Ucr@ia a standard of living that no female commoner could afford, but she would have had no more autonomy--and if anything, less personal mobility--than any peasant woman. In this context, Marianna's personal behavior and actions, and even her way of thinking, were very radical and courageous for her times.
Marianna's shy but curious personality, her hunger for knowledge, and her love for books--one form of communication available to her in her silent world-- lead her to the reading of English and French philosophers of the eighteenth century. These writers make her aware of the narrow-mindedness of the Sicilian aristocracy's way of thinking, which for the most part fiercely opposed any idea of tolerance and reform typical of the Enlightenment (which
would soon give birth to the great social upheaval of the French Revolution). Her reading and consequently her thinking free her from the prejudices with which she was educated. Marianna's journey toward freedom and self-awareness is one with which Maraini herself identified.
Maraini describes her experience with the figure of Marianna Ucr@ia in her autobiographical work Bagheria. Although Bagheria was published in 1993, after The Silent Duchess, it was inspired by a trip that took Maraini to Bagheria, Sicily, after many years of absence from her maternal homeland--the same trip that led to the composition of the novel that recounts the life of this Sicilian noblewoman.
For Maraini, Sicily represented her childhood's happy years, when her father and mother were united and young and when she lived freely in close contact with uncontaminated nature. Yet then, as today, there was also the plague of the Mafia with which to contend. "No one ever spoke about the Mafia at that time," Maraini writes. "Everyone knew about its evil presence, which was able to impose its power with knives and guns. But no one knew who they were. It was better for the ones who knew to pretend they never knew anything." *23
Maraini also recalls the "jasmine island" as a very conservative society. The proverbial arrogance of the aristocracy, of which her relatives were a part, had served, during the previous centuries, to restrain any social or economic improvements, reforms, or a more open mentality on the island. "I hated their atavistic incapacity of changing, of seeing the truth, of understanding others, of stepping aside, of acting with humility," Maraini wrote. *24 This retrograde social structure had a very strong impact on women's subordinate position throughout the centuries. It also contributed to the writer's first experience of sexual abuse-- an incident of molestation by a family friend--and to her difficulty, during her years of adolescence, with being fully integrated into Sicilian society.
But years later, upon her return to her family's mansion outside Palermo, Maraini became fascinated with a portrait of a distant ancestor, Princess Topazia Alliata, and learned what she could of her story. "I felt I
was living a novel by Pirandello,"
Maraini later said. "She seemed to stare at me, asking for her story to be told. It was a most extraordinary encounter." *25 Maraini's fictional version of her ancestor, Marianna Ucria, whose life was lived amid the repressive Sicilian aristocracy and who was a victim of the most terrible type of violence, brought the author back to a place she had sought to forget. Maraini describes her stubborn reluctance to confront her own past in Sicily, and the rediscovery of her roots:
I had written eight novels before The Silent Duchess, but I had always avoided that island of jasmine flowers and rotten fish, of sublime hearts and razorsharp knives, like the plague. ... To talk about Sicily meant to open a door that had been bolted shut--a door that I had camouflaged so completely with crawling vines and tangles of leaves that I had forgotten it had ever existed; a wall, an impenetrable, closed thickness. Then a hand, a hand which I did not recognize as my own, and which extended from a ragged and forgotten sleeve, daring and full of curiosity, began to push against that door, tearing away the spiderwebs and the clinging roots. Once it had been opened, I confronted a world of memories with suspicion and a slight sensation of nausea. The ghosts that I saw before me certainly did nothing to encourage me. But I was here, and I couldn't turn back. *26
The past that Maraini had intentionally left behind demanded its due within the writer's memory, and pushed her toward a self-awareness that led her again to take up writing. Maraini's return to Sicily, in fact, not only coincided with a rediscovery of family origins, but also brought the issue of women's writing--and female subjectivity in general--into full focus. Maraini's dual link with this Sicilian ancestor--which derives first from the familial relationship and second from the fact that Marianna, like Maraini, is a woman writer--makes this character a symbol for maternal origins, and consequently, for women's relationship to writing.
Yet if Marianna is, symbolically, Maraini's mother, she is also, in another sense, Maraini's daughter. Born of the writer's
imagination, she becomes, on paper, a symbol of the forces which impel women's creative process. Marianna represents the contradictory relationship between living through the senses and writing--exalted by Maraini, in other works as well, as the privileged condition of women's expression. Marianna's silence is accompanied by a heightening and interchange of her other senses, representing an attempt to reappropriate the expression of her body. The entire novel renders a life seen, smelled, tasted, and touched. The reader experiences, with Marianna, the color and fragrance of fields of spring flowers and of the Sicilian sea, the enticing smells of both elaborate meals and the daily fare served at her table, and the sharp or sensual smells of the bed chambers. The reader takes part in Marianna's passion as she discovers that the male body not only bestows the "torment" that she has always experienced but also "goes to her confidently and gently. Here is a body that knows how to wait, that takes and knows how to be taken without any kind of force" (429). But before she can fully rediscover the joys of the body, Marianna must come to know her own body's history of violence and abuse.
At the very beginning of the novel, seven-year-old Marianna is brought to the public hanging of a young boy. Members of the Sicilian nobility traditionally assisted people who were condemned to death in order to comfort them before execution; they belonged to the confraternity of White Brothers, of which Marianna's father was part. The father's decision to bring the child along with him and to force her to witness such horrible spectacle is intended to shock her into regaining the power of speech. After the hanging is over, "he touches her mouth as if he were waiting for a miracle. He catches hold of her chin, looks into her eyes, imploring, threatening. "You must speak," say his lips. "You must open that accursed fish's mouth." The child tries to unstick her lips but she cannot do it. Her body is seized with a violent trembling, her hands, still grasping the folds of her father's habit, are turned to stone" (30). According to Marianna's father, witnessing this violent and terrifying act should erase another violent and terrifying act she experienced when she was five, with his complicity: she was raped by the same man who later became her husband.
Unaware that she was not born deaf and mute,
Marianna believes her father: ""You were born like this, deaf and dumb," he had once written in an exercise book, and she had tried to convince herself she had only dreamed up those distant voices, unable to admit that her sweet gentle father, who loved her so much, could lie to her" (20). From the beginning of the novel, she is haunted by a shadow of violence, which appears at various moments and in almost every chapter. But it is only at the end of the novel, after she has regained power over a violated and abused body and learned to communicate her sexual desire and passionate love, that Marianna becomes aware of her betrayal by the person she most trusted: her beloved father. Leaving the island in a boat and seeing again the prison, in front of which a gallows is being constructed, she remembers that day: it is "like that gallows to which her father the Duke dragged her out of love in an attempt to cure her dumbness. She would never have imagined that her father the Duke and uncle husband shared the same secret concerning her; and that they were in alliance to keep quiet about the wound inflicted on her child's body"
(439-440).
Just as Marianna's father, representative of the patriarchy, has stolen her past and imprisoned her body, he has also stolen her voice, her language, and imprisoned her in a world of silence. When she is finally liberated by the truth about her past and understands that she is able to express herself through her body, she realizes that the written word, the body of literature, can be rescued from the father's betrayal through a love for knowledge and through a journey that constitutes the process of writing.
As a deaf-mute, Marianna has, in fact, always had to express herself through reading and writing, an alternative means to the spoken language of communicating with the world. Marianna's love of reading, so voracious that she reads even during the night, is set against the reality that has subjected her to innumerable abuses. This thirst for knowledge, and thus for freedom, is for Maraini the basis for the construction of a different reality at both the individual and collective levels. Marianna reflects:
To leave a book is like leaving the better part of oneself. To pass from the soft and airy arcades of the mind to the demands of a graceless body always grasping for one thing or another is in any case
a surrender: a renunciation of characters one has studied and cared for in favour of a self one does not love, confined within a stupid succession of days, each day indistinguishable from the last. (222-223)
In addition to reading books, Marianna eventually develops the ability to "read" the thoughts of others. This is another, even more extreme example of the heightening of her other senses in the absence of sound and speech. Reading and writing become for Marianna a sixth sense, an alternative--and particularly female--path to the language of which she has been deprived. Although Marianna's silence has been brought on by male violence, oppression, and betrayal, she finds within her silent world other forms of understanding and expression. Her silence coincides both with the expression of her body and with the affirmation of the written word. Maraini confirms the power of Marianna's silence, and, by implication, of women's literary endeavors: