| In my dissertation I analyze the figure of the abandoned woman in Italian literature. Traditionally the abandoned woman has been portrayed as a powerless victim relegated to the margins of society by circumstances beyond her control. However, an examination of this portrayal across a range of texts reveals a development from powerless victim to empowered agent of her own destiny.;Western literature is replete with abandoned women who, while extolled for their heroic suffering, are paralyzed: Penelope weaves by day and unweaves by night, Ariadne weeps on the beach, Dido curses Aeneas and kills herself. These figures are trapped in a binary economy in which the active element is the male whose survival and affirmation as culture maker depend on his distancing himself from the paralyzing feminine. The abandoned woman, pushed to the margins of the social order, inhabits an ambiguous ‘liminal’ space. Following the example of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, who affirms that “a new (female) subject needs new figures in which to recognize herself,” I subject the figure of the abandoned woman to a new kind of scrutiny, thus reinventing her in the light of a new symbolic order and of sexual difference. I contend that the seeds of this development have always been present, even in the ancient Greek myths. However, only in the works of contemporary women writers have changes in the representational modes of the abandoned woman become the starting point for a new feminist resignification of this figure in which the once latent dialectic of power becomes manifest.;My dissertation is structured according to four major models of the abandoned woman, reflecting the dynamic of evolution of the figure: the seduced woman, the widow, the seductress and those that I call “daughters of Medea,” abandoned women conjured up by contemporary women writers, who evade the binary economy. Moving from the early modern period to the present, I consider texts authored, among others, by Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Goldoni, Tarchetti, Sandra Petrignani and Elena Ferrante. |
