Speaking Back: Women in the Works of Cesare Pavese

Though many critics have analyzed woman's role in Cesare Pavese's life and texts, their readings have largely closed off and typologized both Pavese and the women who appear in his work. Reading Pavese's oeuvre as a confession, critics have traditionally conflated author and narrator as Dominique Fernandez does in L'echec de Pavese. Using Pavese's personal life to decipher his portrayal of women and his relationship with them, critics have produced readings that collapse the multiplicity of meanings in the text and misread both female characters and the breadth of Pavese's talent.;This dissertation refutes psychobiographical approaches and follows Foucault and Barthes in positing a fundamental disjunction between text and biography to examine the ways in which the narrators, women, and Pavese defy critical attempts to label and classify them according to types -- misogynist, cuckold, doormat, siren, etc. By carefully "teasing out the warring forces of signification in the text," to use Barbara Johnson's phrase, I examine woman's importance for defining conceptions of power, gender, myth, modernity, and identity (5). Though woman figures prominently in Pavese's conception of myth, female characters are more than plastic sacrificial victims; their unique voices and their acts of resistance break through to the surface of the narratives where they exhibit their multiple subjectivities and speak back against attempts to silence and contain them. In Pavese's texts, woman is not simply "an adult female human being," as she is defined in the first entry of the OED, but she is also an aristocratic man, a goddess, a simulacra, and a modern rebel.