Many don’t know it, but Luigi Pirandello’s L’esclusa (The Excluded) represents the Agrigento-born author’s first true novel. My advice is to approach this book without thinking about the existentialism of Adriano Meis or the identity crisis of Vitangelo Moscarda, and to expect nothing. Because the truth is that this title stands out from all of Pirandello’s fiction for one very simple reason: its protagonist. A completely unconventional female protagonist, stronger than any other figure portrayed in the novel, as fragile as she is authoritarian and emancipated—within the limits of the emancipation that late-nineteenth-century Sicily can offer—in a constant and desperate search for her own freedom and that of her family.
The title perfectly reflects the story told, which opens with Marta’s marginalization by her husband Rocco and, soon after, by her father Francesco Ajala, both of whom are convinced—without any proof—that she has committed adultery. The paradox, typically Pirandello-esque, lies in the fact that Marta is welcomed back first by her husband and then by the Sicilian community only after she has actually committed adultery.
The Pirandello elements are all there: the identity crisis, the ridiculous, the masks, the critique of the bourgeoisie, patriarchal violence, pure atheism, Sicily in all its forms and traditions. However, as mentioned, this novel manages to go further, showing readers another side of the author. A previously unseen side—perhaps still too little known to the public and critics—but one that is absolutely fascinating, capable of a surprisingly empathetic and modern perspective.
Among the modern elements that help shape this novel and distance it from typical Pirandello rhetoric, one, above all, struck me particularly: the sisterhood of the female characters. It’s a surprising element, because you don’t expect it, and you don’t expect a male writer to be able to describe it with such depth. The sisterhood that unites Marta with her mother Agata, her sister Maria, and her family friend Anna Veronica, however, is not born of belonging or blood, but of necessity. Pirandello portrays a bond that matured in the pain of loss, the loneliness of exclusion, and the misery of populism. A closeness that transcends even the generational and temperamental divide, which is inevitably reflected in Marta’s relationship with her mother Agata, summed up by the author in one of the novel’s most authentic scenes:
In the evenings, Marta watched her mother and her friend’s loving labor; and often, gazing at those swaddling clothes, those little vests, those bodices, those bonnets in the basket, her eyes grew dark or filled with silent tears.
How can one not see oneself reflected in Marta’s silent tears? In the wall that separates her from a generation of women she feels has now been surpassed? How can one not defend, like Anna Veronica, her cry for freedom?
I praise Marta and admire her! Because I enter into the conscience of that poor girl, and if I see remorse for others who suffer unjustly for her, I find neither stain nor sin before God! I find the burning of the offenses, the outrages she has suffered; I hear a cry: “Enough!”
And perhaps Marta represents a critique and a rewriting of the Sicilian family and its moral laws? Doesn’t the author, still very young, use his protagonist to humorously undermine traditional norms and social conventions? To ridicule the hypocrisy of society, male violence, and the grotesque difficulty of redemption? I want to believe so.
The powerful empathy that Pirandello himself establishes with Marta Ajala remains on the page, elevating his protagonist to a role model not only for female figures, but for the entire community around her.
All this alternates with moments in which the novel is essentially and completely humorous, a characteristic the narrator claims as the most original element of his work:
Here, all will is excluded, even though the characters are left with the full illusion that they are acting voluntarily; while a hateful law guides and drags them, hidden and inexorable.
A timeless classic of nineteenth-century Italy, a different book, yet capable of making one rethink Pirandello. And this, for me, is enough to recommend it.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
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Luigi Pirandello, L’esclusa, Mondadori, Milano, 2001 (prima edizione Fratelli Treves, Milano, 1908).