Neorealist novel, partisan short story, proto-feminist diary, psychological memoir and metanarrative reflection on writing: all this – and much more – is Dalla parte di lei. First published in 1949 by Mondadori, in the heart of an Italy still stunned by the end of fascism and the war, Alba de Céspedes’s novel remains a marginalized work in the official canon (still all-male), despite its anticipatory force and its profoundly modern voice. Like many novels written by women, it is still too little read, too little discussed, too little at the center. And yet it is a novel that speaks to entire generations of women, and perhaps, today more than ever, returns to demand a hearing.
The protagonist and first-person narrator, Alessandra Corteggiani, is the broken heart of a novel divided into two parts, as broken as Rome was under fascism, as fractured as the identity of those who seek, in a world made by men and for men, an authentic place to inhabit with their own bodies.
The first part will transport you into the claustrophobic confines of Alessandra’s childhood and adolescence, lived in a petty bourgeois apartment devoid of love and enthusiasm, where the only light illuminating the old paternal furniture is that of her mother Eleonora. A woman of the last century, Eleonora remains chained in the illusion of the fairy tale of saving love that, in the end, will lead her to suicide.
My mother was made for sweetness, for tenderness, for caresses. She was a woman who could have been satisfied with very little affection, and who instead never received anything.
Attorno ad Alessandra, una galleria di figure femminili che la formazione patriarcale cerca di trasformare in archetipi, ma che De Céspedes restituisce nella loro complessità: la nonna abruzzese, matriarca intransigente e fredda custode dei “doveri femminili”; le zie Sofia e Violante; ma soprattutto Lydia e Fulvia, amiche e vicine di casa dalla vita frivola e superficiale, arrese al potere del desiderio maschile nel ruolo di amanti, vittime inconsapevoli di un destino già scritto.
Around Alessandra, a gallery of female figures that the patriarchal formation tries to transform into archetypes, but that De Céspedes returns in their complexity: the grandmother from Abruzzo, an intransigent matriarch and cold guardian of “female duties”; the aunts Sofia and Violante; but above all Lydia and Fulvia, friends and neighbors with a frivolous and superficial life, surrendered to the power of male desire in the role of lovers, unaware victims of a destiny already written.
The second part of the novel is instead crossed by a new rhythm, more pressing and feverish: these are the years of the Resistance, of political commitment and of the dream – already shattered – of a new society. It is in this time of rubble and reconstruction that Alessandra meets Francesco Maselli, a young university professor and anti-fascist militant. The love between the two, initially experienced by Alessandra as redemption and liberation from an oppressive family situation, gradually turns into a new prison, a “moral murder” from which the protagonist cannot escape, except with a final, definitive, conclusive act. The illusion that the anti-fascist man is also a man liberated from patriarchal culture is slowly deconstructed: Francesco, despite being cultured and politically progressive, proves incapable of truly seeing and listening to the woman next to him.
I can’t live in two: one who is alive and the other who is dead. I can’t pretend nothing is happening. Don’t you understand that something in me is dead and that you continue to hold a body that no longer exists?
Of him, only the night wall remains, a metaphor for an irreparable distance, in bed as in life.
I couldn’t let him get close to me just because he was my husband, or because he had been in prison, if I hadn’t let Tomaso, who understood everything and loved me, do it. I thought this and in the meantime I welcomed him into my arms. “Francesco” I whispered lovingly in his ear.
“Francesco” I murmured during the night while, awake behind the mute, I listened to the monotonous ticking of the alarm clock measuring the time of my solitude.
“The story of a great love and a crime”, this is how the author defined her novel. But Dalla parte di lei is also a political and literary gesture at the same time: Alessandra in fact refuses to fall into the same maternal destiny, the sexist impositions of her father, the male prejudices towards women’s work, the classism of her mother-in-law, increasingly aware of herself and of the women’s issue. “Alessandra is me”, the author states in the page of her diary, and through this “me” Alba de Céspedes unmasks the natural position of marginality and submission of women according to patriarchal society, transforming this novel into a rebellious harangue, speaking and writing on behalf of all of us.
I hope you read this book and this author, to be able to feel, as I felt, always and only on her side.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
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Alba de Céspedes, Dalla parte di lei, Mondadori, Milano, 1949