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From Female Archetypes to Female Stereotypes.

Myth and Fantasy: Alienating Modes of
Representation. An Interdisciplinary and
Comparative Approach to “le fantastique féminin”.

Gloria Alpini
(M.Phil, Ph.D University of Cambridge)

For Plato, fantasy was a silly self-indulgence, even a

perversion.
Kathryn Hume

The literature of the fantastic is concerned to describe

desire in its excessive forms as well as in its various
transformations or perversions.
Tzvetan Todorov

Perversity over utopia or magic…

Rosemary Jackson

In this article (based on two papers: one produced for a Conference on The
Representation of Women, held at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, in
UK, in May 2002; and another paper selected for the Seventh Annual Conference on The
Fantastic, the Monstrous, and the Marvelous in Western Culture: Deformed Imagery and
the Cultural Discourses, held at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of
Chicago, on Saturday, February 8, 2003, Panel V: The Body Feminine; original title of
my paper: Mermaids, Dolls and Devils: Fantastic Representations of Women in
European Literature and Theories of the Female Fantastic), I draw attention towards the
Literature of Fantasy. Indeed this is a vast field which comprises a great number of
modes of representation. However, I shall only focus on two modes: ancient myth and
modern Fantastic Literature whose origin and development are in nineteenth and
twentieth century literature.
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This article consists of three parts: I shall first concentrate on the modern
Fantastic which is still ‘obscure territory’ despite various critical attempts to define it.1
Secondly, I shall briefly analyse the way women are represented in ancient myth in order
to establish whether the mythical mode of representation has had any influence on the
modern Fantastic. Throughout the analysis, my main argument is that there are indeed
similarities between myth and the Fantastic produced by modern male writers in so far as
they likewise offer alienating modes of representation of women.2 Finally, I shall focus
on a Fantastic short story written by a twentieth-century Italian writer, Anna Maria
Ortese, who, according to me, transforms the Fantastic from an alienating mode of
representation of women into a liberating one by simply turning female supernatural
perfection into ‘perversion’. I shall argue that this transformation was mainly inspired by
both Katherine Mansfield and Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, an interesting combination of
authors who respectively inspired the young Ortese reader to concentrate on the female
subject (from a different perspective) and on the Fantastic as a literary genre.3
Most of Ortese’s writing has a fantastic vein: L’infanta sepolta4 (1950 collection
of short stories, for which she was awarded the Soroptimist Prize, «ma per la critica il
libro resta ‘invisibile’»5 [but for critics the book remains invisible]); I giorni del cielo
(1958 collection of short stories); L’Iguana (1965, a novel); L’alone grigio (1969, a
collection of short stories); Il porto di Toledo (1975, a novel where she inserted the first
nine short stories of Angelici dolori); and finally, In sonno e in veglia (1987, a collection
of short stories). Here, I shall pay particular attention to one short story which best
encapsulates the Female Fantastic as a poetics of perversity: L’infanta sepolta whose
importance is underlined by the fact that it gives the title to the collection.6

1
J. ALAZRAKI, En busca del unicorno: los cuentos de Julio Cortázar. Elementos para una poetica de lo
neoFantastico, Madrid, Editorial Gredos, 1983.
2
N. BONIFAZI, Il racconto fantastico da Tarchetti a Buzzati, Urbino, S.T.E.U., Ravenna, Longo, 1982.
See also L. LATTARULO, Il vero e la sua ombra. Racconti fantastici dal Romanticismo al Primo
Novecento, Roma, Quiritta, 2000.
3
Anna Maria Ortese was born in Rome in 1914. She had economic difficulties and, at a young age, gave up
school. She wrote that reading books by Katherine Mansfield and Edgar Allan Poe changed her life and
inspired her autobiographical, fantastic writing. In 1933, she published Manuele, a poem dedicated to her
dead brother. Ortese was self-taught and thus was surprised when a magazine published her poem. She felt
encouraged and kept on writing but she abandoned poetry for short fiction choosing the Fantastic as a mode
of construction. «La Fiera Letteraria» published a number of her short stories. Massimo Bontempelli, at the
time the director of this periodical and master of a genre called ‘magic realism’, recommended her work to
the publisher Bompiani. In 1937, Ortese’s first collection of fantastic short stories, Angelici dolori, was
published. Some critics, who had attacked Bontempelli for ideological reasons, attacked Ortese (see G.
BORRI, Invito alla lettura di Anna Maria Ortese, Milano, Mursia, 1988).
4
A. M. ORTESE, L’infanta sepolta, Milano, Sera Editrice, 1950.See M. FARNETTI, Nota al Testo in
L’infanta sepolta by Anna Maria Ortese, a cura di M. Farnetti, Milano, Adelphi, 2000.
5
G. BORRI, p.18.
6
In my view, in this collection, there is another fantastic short story, entitled Jane, il mare, which can be
equally considered as representative in terms of this poetics.
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Let us begin with the way critics have defined the modern Fantastic. Major
literary theories on the Fantastic as a literary genre have been formulated by Sigmund
Freud, Tzvetan Todorov and Jamie Alazraki.
In his famous essay on The Uncanny7 (1919), Freud combines an aesthetic
analysis of the quality of a feeling, Das Unheimlich, with a psychoanalytic reading of a
fantastic tale, The Sandman by Hoffmann.8 On the basis of this, he defines the Fantastic
as related to an uncanny experience which brings back to the surface (e.g. memory)
something familiar which appears to be unfamiliar but, in fact, is the return of something
known and repressed. For example, in the fantastic tale, The Sandman, Freud sees the
main character as suffering from hallucinations.9 According to Freud, the main character
is a victim of fantastic visions because of his repressed desire to kill his father.
On the other hand, in his influential essay, Introduction à la littérature
fantastique, Todorov rejects psychoanalysis and prefers a structural approach to define
the poetics rather than the meaning (sens) of the Fantastic.10 In terms of structure, he
affirms that a tale is Fantastic only when its ending does not solve but reinforces the
character/reader’s doubt or ‘hesitation’ between a supernatural and a natural explanation
of an event. According to him, the uncanny is a genre in itself different from the Fantastic
as it provides a natural explanation of an event. Todorov affirms that the first example of
the ‘pure’ Fantastic is Cazotte’s Le diable amoureux.
Finally, Alazraki agrees with Jean Paul Sartre and affirms that nineteenth-century
Fantastic literature differs from the neo-Fantastic of the twentieth century.11 In fact, in the
latter, the supernatural is regarded as ‘natural’ and the main character becomes an
ordinary man. Alazraki then defines the neo-Fantastic as the rebellion of the irrational
against the rational.
As we can see, there are various problems related to these theories since they are
contradictory and confusing.
However, what I am most concerned with is the fact that they all analyse the
Fantastic from a male perspective.
These critics adopted paradigms with male-shaped psychoanalytic or structural
theories. As a result, we have a male-centred analysis of the Fantastic.
Freud focuses on a male author and his male character and he is not at all
bothered by the fact that in Hoffmann’s Fantastic tale a woman is represented as a doll.
Todorov also focuses on a male author, Cazotte, and on a male character who ‘doubts’
whether his wife is a woman or a devil. Todorov’s attention is on ‘doubt’ itself and not at
all on the problematic and sexist issue that a woman is represented as a devil. Yet again,

7
S. FREUD, Il perturbante (1919) trans. by C. Calducci, in Sigmund Freud. Opere 1905-1921, Roma,
Grandi Tascabili Economici Newton, 1992, pp. 1049-1070.
8
S. FREUD, Das Unheimlich in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, a cura di J.
Strachey, London, The Hogarth Press, 1978, vol. XVII, pp. 219-252.
9
E.T.A. HOFFMANN, Racconti, trad. It. di S. Vastano, Torrania, Orsa Maggiore Editrice, 1990.
10
T. TODOROV, Introduction á la littérature fantastique, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1970.
11
J.P. SARTRE, Aminadab or the Fantastic as a Language in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trad. di
A. Michelson, London, Radius Book/Hutchinson, 1969.
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Alazraki focuses on a male writer, Julio Cortàzar, and only mentions en passant a female
master of the Fantastic such as Silvina Ocampo.12
To counteract this tendency of enclosing the Fantastic within an exclusively male-
centred analysis, let us shift the attention on women’s recent contribution to the debate on
the Fantastic. Let us focus, for example, on Ann Richter who regards le fantastique
féminin as a mode of representation of women rather than a literary genre.13
Richter believes that women need to get rid of fantastic female characters (e.g.
dolls or devils) represented by male authors as stereotypes of the femme ideale or femme
maléfique et fatale. According to her, masters of the Fantastic, like Hoffmann, Villiers
d’Isle-Adam, Poe and Maupassant, give deformed and unreal images of women because
male fantasy is either amplificatrice or réductrice. Richter states that such an attitude
brought men towards anti-naturalism, the cult of artificial paradises and the flirtation with
death.
According to Richter, female imagination is strangled by these literary
representation of women based on religious, moral and social laws. In her opinion, to free
women’s imagination we need to embrace the Fantastic in order to recuperate mythical
female figures. Richter formulates her definition of the female Fantastic on a male-
shaped psychoanalytic theory adopting Jung’s idea that our Collective Unconscious is the
domain of the Great Mother. On the basis of this, Richter affirms that the function of the
Female Fantastic is to recover female archetypes that represent women as ‘half divine’
and ‘half animal’. Richter regards both myth and the female Fantastic as liberating modes
of representation of women as they exalt primordial, female features such as wildness,
irrationality and thoughtfulness. Like Jung, she claims that society is based on the
alternation between the male principle (Logos) and the female principle (Eros). She
proposes l’éternel féminin as seule promesse de libération.
In my opinion, Richter reduces the Female Fantastic to a women’s campaign to
defend nature against men’s desire to destroy it. Thus, she also confines the female
Fantastic to an old-fashioned system of binary oppositions: male/female,
intellect/instinct, rational/irrational, Homo sapiens/Mother-Nature (failing to take into
account Alazraki’s definition of the male Fantastic as a rebellion of the irrational against
the rational). If this is the case, then we are left with no real difference between the male
and the female Fantastic.
On the contrary, I think that female archetypes of the Great Mother found in myth
are no promise of liberation but they are ‘responsible’ for the creation of female
stereotypes (doll or devil) present within the male Fantastic.14
An interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the subject does support my
argument. Throughout my study, I noticed that Fantastic female stereotypes retain similar
characteristics and attitudes of ancient goddesses like the Egyptian Isis, the Sumerian

12
J. L. BORGES, S. OCAMPO, A. B. CASARES, Antologia della letteratura fantastica, Roma, Editori
Riuniti, 1998.
13
A. RICHTER, Le fantastique féminin, Bruxelles, Éditions Jacques Antoine, 1984.
14
M. GIAMMARCO, Sirene, bambole, mannequins. Aspetti del femminile in Antonelli in Luigi Antonelli. Il
lirico e il fantastico, Atti del Convegno Nazionale, Documenti Sipario Edizioni, supp. n.529 – dic 1992.
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Mami or Inanna, the Babylonian Ishtar, the Assyrian Tiamat, the Hebrew Lilith and Eve,
the Greek Aphrodite, the Roman Cybele and the Catholic Virgin Mary.
They are all represented as virgin mothers, whores or demons.15
To prove that these fixed identities of the feminine trinity are alienating rather
than liberating let us look at one of these Great Mother figures: the Sumerian goddess
Inanna.16
In the Sumerian myth about Inanna’s descent into the underworld, the virgin
Inanna is first represented as a mater dolorosa who lives in the sky with her Father and
takes pity on the primitive people who inhabit the earth.
She decides to provide them with civilisation and to live on earth.
Here, she finds a lover, Dumuzi, the god of vegetation.
Then, it seems that, either for curiosity or for ambition, Inanna decides to visit the
underworld where her sister, the black and beautiful (but for her feet which are like paws)
goddess of death, Eriskegal, reigns.
Inanna has to striptease in order to enter the seven gates of the underworld and at
each gate an item of her clothing goes.
In the end, the sight of her sister causes Inanna’s death.
Every sexual activity on earth stops.
Inanna’s father, the great god in the sky, saves her from death.
Now, Inanna, the goddess of fertility, can come back to earth and restore life.
Yet, she is followed by the demons of the underworld and thanks to them she can
now also cause death.
Her first victim is Dumuzi, her lover, who has become an arrogant ruler.
Inanna lets the demons take him to the underworld.
Yet, Dumuzi’s sister, Gestinanna, goes to the underworld and obtains from
Eriskegal to have her brother back on earth for six months a year.

Later on, in the Babylonian myth, Inanna becomes Ishtar a warlike, lustful and
promiscuous goddess who causes the death of many male and animal lovers.

This myth reveals that woman represented as the Great Mother was first idealised,
then reduced to a sexual object, and eventually demonised.

Thus, it seems to me that female archetypes are the matrix of female stereotypes
represented as dolls or devils.

By taking us back to myth and its female archetypes, Richter fails to acknowledge
one of Freud’s most appropriate definitions of the modern Fantastic as a passage from
mythology to psychology.
15
See L. E. DOHERTY, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth, London, Duckworth, 2001. See
also C. ELLER, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future,
Boston, Beacon Press, 2000.
16
Myths from Mesopotamia. Creation, the flood, Gilgamesh and others, trad. di S. Dalley, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1989.
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In fact, despite his male centred approach, Freud is right to see the Fantastic as a
moment of transition when after the impact of the scientific revolution writers begin to
doubt their own beliefs and cultural myths.
Freud explains that, in the mythical stage, the supernatural is seen as something
that takes place in the external world; instead, in modern times, the supernatural becomes
nothing but a projection of our fear onto the external world.
In other words, in the modern Fantastic, the supernatural acquires a subjective
dimension.
However, I think that if, on the one hand, male writers themselves did manage to
get out of the primitive, magic circle as they recognise the psychological implications of
the supernatural; on the other, they did not bother to take their female characters out of
that circle.
In fact, they keep on representing women as unreal characters trapped within the
supernatural.
They create female characters out of a male imaginary which has a tendency to
universalise female identity and make it supernatural.
They do not seem aware of the fact that their way to represent female identity is
also created out of their fears or desires.
Thus female readers, who identify with female characters created out of a male
imaginary, are alienated from their desires in so far as they are not authentically their
own, but assail them, as it were, from without.
Women are alienated from reality because their universal, supernatural
representation inadequately reflects their identity.
Both archetypes and stereotypes alienate women from themselves as they offer a
model that is too distant, too perfect or too fixed to suit them.

In my opinion, the Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese has the merit to transform the
Fantastic from an alienating mode of representation of women into a liberating one.
Her poetic technique is to turn female, supernatural perfection into ‘perversion’.
Perverting female characters means leading them into way of thinking or behaviour that
is considered wrong, unreasonable, and unacceptable.17
In her Fantastic short story, published in 1950, entitled L’infanta sepolta, Ortese
achieves this by giving a perverted that is twisted representation of the Virgin Mary.
I believe that it is by reading Mansfield’s short stories that Ortese learned to
master brief literary forms and realized that the aim of memory is that of reviving the
past, history and reality from a new perspective.18

17
R. JACKSON, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London and New York, Methuen, 1981, trad. di
R. Berardi, Il fantastico. La letteratura della trasgressione, Napoli, Tullio Pironi Editore, 1986).
18
In Isola, she treated the theme of existential solitude («agghiacciante solitudine», p.11) and appealed to
memory to find some confort. Borri defines this short story as a fairy tale where a girl meets her prince. I
would argue that this is no fairy tale but the tale of a female quest in the underworld, where for a brief,
lonely moment the I-narrator remembers her dead grandfather. For Ortese, the underworld is her memory.
It is difficult to confuse the dead grandfather in the story with Prince Charming. In this tale, we have a
revelation: the dead grandfather paradoxically discloses the fact that there is no life after death. This is
because the I-narrator knows that he is only the product of her dream/fantasy:
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At the same time, by reading Poe, Ortese, recognizing that reality has many
facets, espoused the Fantastic as a genre whose function is not mimetic but rather
distorting.
Distortion turned out to be a useful tool, necessary to change fixed, immortalized,
and universalized images of women.
Ortese’s aim was to create a female fantastic art that does not reproduce past
images of women but rather stimulate doubt/reason by questioning, deconstructing,
perverting, and distorting traditional representations of women to allow a multiplicity of
female images and viewpoints so as to adhere to the reality of woman and shun any
mystical aura.
The word perversity itself appears in the second paragraph of Ortese’s fantastic
short story and is unusually, but in a significant way, associated with ‘sun’ and ‘light’ and
opposed to the ‘holiness’ of the church.
In fact, as the mind (light) of our female narrator penetrates the church (the holy
place), we find a Virgin Mary full of perversions. Or rather her statue is represented in a
perverted or twisted form that distances the Virgin from the archetype or stereotype of the
perfect mother.
Ortese’s poetics of perversion involves linguistic and descriptive devices such as
the use of the plural and of the colour black.
For example, right from the start of her short story, Ortese uses the plural noun
‘Virgins’ to make us aware that there are many representations of the Virgin Mary.
To add multiple identity to an icon is to break it into pieces and give to each piece
an individual value and a name: the Virgin Mary described here is the Lady of
Montemayor. To give a name is to deny the possibility for one statue alone to represent
total femininity and thus pervert/distort the monolithic representation of woman as
established by what Ortese calls the superior religious Authorities.
To invest an archetype or stereotype with multiple identity is to replace male
fantasy with the fantasy of a female narrator.
Our female narrator does not identify with the Virgin Mary as representative of a
single, universal aspect: the maternal one which is considered right, reasonable and,
acceptable. Instead, our female narrator projects her own liberating fantasy and desires
onto the icon.

«Tu vieni certo dal mondo dei Beati.» Io dissi.

«Forse» mi rispose con una certa tristezza, «la tua mamma vi crede.»
«Oh, nonno, nonno, e da dove vieni allora… Da che recessi del sogno… soltanto la mia fantasia ti
dà voce…?»
Egli sorrise… con qualche lagrima… (p.16)
Ortese’s female character is similar to Mansfield’s female figures: «ragazzine che giocando con gli dèi del
ritorno, stringono furiosamente la nonna di trina intimandole di non morire mai ‘Dí mai… dí mai… dí
mai…’» (quoted from L. D. Demby, Tutti I racconti di Kathrine Mansfield, Milano, Adelphi, 1990, p.xx).
Despite the desperate need to fantasize/dream about life after death, here, there is no spell, no happy ending
as in fairy tales. Instead, we are confronted with death: by the end of the story, the grandfather disappears.
We realize that death is an inescapable fact of life.
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The colour black of the statue is symbolic as it establishes its historical identity:
among the various virgins of the city of Naples, we have our Lady of Montemayor,
brought by devoted monks from Spain in 1840.
Those monks are seen as male perpetrators of a female identity.
The colour black is also used to juxtapose our statue with the more popular white
statue of the Virgin Mary.
The colour black also reminds us of Eriskegal, the Sumerian black goddess of
death. Like her, our Infanta has bird-like hands.
As we are told in the short story, our Lady of Montmayor is an ‘ambiguous’
character: she is supposed to represent the Virgin Mary but she is not maternal at all as
she is totally indifferent to her son.
She echoes the physical beauty of the black goddess of death and yet she is ‘alive’
and eager to get off the pedestal, get out of the church and enjoy her youth on earth.
Because of this ambiguity, nobody likes her in Naples.
Therefore, she is left alone, prisoner in an ‘artificial cave’, a kind of ‘tomb’, to
represent ‘the symbol of superhuman virtues’.
Half way through the short story, the female narrator becomes aware of the fact
that she is projecting her own fantasy onto the statue.
Yet, she suddenly feels more and more attracted to her and climbs a stair to hold
her paw-like hand.
The hand is ‘warm’.
We have a moment of revelation or epiphany as we are told that in fact the Lady
of Montemayor was a ‘woman’, not a ‘statue’.
Now, we penetrate the psyche of this icon-turned-woman and we hear that our
black lady, this particular Virgin Mary, doubts that her suffering is reasonable.
In fact, she feels trapped in a fixed identity; all her accessories keep her immobile:
her long dress, her feet bandaged in gold and, on her right hand, her Son as heavy as a
dead thing.
By the end of the short story, we learn that this black lady, this Virgin Mary,
would rather be identified with the changing ‘sea’ outside the church.
The sea is meant to represent her longing for transformation, a necessary aspect
of life. Her wish is to get off the ladder, that pedestal that confines her in an eternally
fixed icon.
The laconic ending of the short story reveals that the World War II has destroyed
the female narrator’s favourite little church in Naples and its lady of Montemayor.
However, the narrator feels that such destruction is sometimes longed for.
Thus, Ortese’s poetics of perversion is a tool of destruction to get rid of that
supernatural perfection that causes the alienation of women represented as icons.
What marks out Ortese’s female characters is that they are less about physical
traits than about a sensitivity to change.
They have a certain set of psychological characteristics: they tend to be restless,
dissatisfied but at the same time they have a great inner awareness, an aptitude for
recognising the opportunity arising from changes.
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Unlike Richter, Anna Maria Ortese believes that to fulfil their own needs women
must change by destroying past myths.
Only transformation allows women to be alive and get rid of that supernatural
aura which prevents them from exploring and fulfilling their own wishes.
The identification of a woman with the changing sea is fully developed in
Ortese’s poignant short story Jane, il mare where the coma between Jane and the sea
represents a mirror for the doubling of Jane’s identity.
But that is another story…
Women are represented as mermaids, dolls or devils over and over again within
male production of modern, fantastic short fiction and not only in Italy.
However, the Female Fantastic as a counter mode of representation has the merit
of denouncing a number of male perversities, such as fetishism.
Instead, the Female Fantastic focuses on female perversities identified by Ellen
Moers as the core theme within the Female Gothic and later expanded in the modern
Female Fantastic.19
Unfortunately, Moers did not develop this idea further but her insight has been
adopted as a matrix for our survey.
I have verified her hypothesis with textual analyses and found there an a
posteriori corroboration of it. The Female Fantastic involves a ‘poetics of perversity’ that
does not celebrate but rather rejects and ‘perverts’/distorts/misrepresents/changes the
traditional representation of women as something perfect/abstract/idealised.
Thus, the female voice chooses paradoxically the Fantastic to assert that a woman
is no fantastic, silent creature.
The Female Fantastic paradoxically fills in the lack of a discourse by woman on
herself as a ‘real’ creature.
The reasons behind the birth of the Female Fantastic are to be found in a kind of
reaction against Little Red Riding Hood’s straight paths and given models of femininity.
The Female Fantastic ironically mirrors the emerging reality of a New Woman and
becomes an instrument of distribution for a new female conscience subtracted from the
mystification of phallocratic culture.
Throughout my study, I noticed the fact that the invitation to avoid the ‘straight’
path involves narrative strategies such as:
1. the cultivation of female memory,
2. the construction of the female double (see The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Boston, 1899),
3. the celebration of the pleasure principle (see Angela Carter’s The Company of
Wolves, 1979),
4. the poetics of perversion and defamiliarization (see Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
or The Modern Prometheus, 1818),
5. the use of another only apparently incoherent logic (see Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando, 1928),
6. and the use of paradox/irony among others.

19
E. MOERS, Female Gothic in Literary Women, London, W.H. Allen, 1977, pp. 90-110.
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These highly sophisticated literary techniques, used to stimulate mental change and the
ability to look at reality in the face, force rethinking of charges that the Female Fantastic
is an ‘irrational’ mode of writing.
During their quest as they try to change the projection of their image, women run
the risk of being left on the verge of an abyss, a void.
The increasing capacity to stare at the void, the only space where women can get
rid of traditional roles implanted in their mind, distinguishes the steps forward made by
modern women writers in the deconstruction of logo-centrism and bourgeois memory, the
vessel of a fixed female identity, in favour of the construction of a new female
memory/identity.
Female memory paradoxically wants to generate the oblivion of traditional
feminine roles.
Female memory attempts to undo gender identity as a social construct.
By deconstructing female identity, women writers develop a female consciousness
increasingly able to produce «uno spazio bianco»20 [a white space] after «new
imaginative resources combat old ones»21.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman indicated the path to overcome identity formation by

deciphering the ‘other’ female self, prisoner of the ‘I’, and thus marked the emergence of
a phenomenon often cited as the otherness of women. However, she was paralyzed by the
increasing awareness that her identity was not just the result of the expectations of men
but also the effect of constraining self-expectations whose metaphor is the yellow wall
paper. As a member of the first generation of modern women writers, she is not very
transgressing but rather blends the traditional images of woman with the representation of
another, uncanny, and still unknown woman.
A second generation of modern women writers represent a crossroads.
In Italy, Anna Maria Ortese allows the metamorphosis of female characters out of
fixed, conventional images. She refuses a set female identity and explores female double
memory/subjectivity identifying the part of the female self that has been lost and
therefore has remained unexposed, unseen.
Ortese studies the actual formation of identity aspiring to self-transformation. She
operates a self-deconstruction that literally means the destruction of the mould used for
fixing female identity (see L’infanta sepolta and Jane, Il mare). The Female Fantastic
destabilizes traditional, patriarchal memory of women by equivocating the reader’s
expectations as in Ortese’s work leading the way to a postmodernist experimentation with
form, style, and language.
Ortese claims back the narrator’s freedom to alter female stereotypes. Thus, the
female Fantastic is not just about the metamorphoses of female identity but also the

20
R. CAMPRA, Territori della finzione. Il fantastico in letteratura, Roma, Carocci editore, 2000, p.97.
21
M. WARNER, From the Beast to the Blond. On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, London, Chatto &
Windus, 1994, p.54.
«Annali della Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione», I, 2 (2005), pp.35-46
© 2005 eum (Edizioni Università di Macerata, Italy
_____________________________________________________________________________

changeability of narrative structures necessary to dismantle the collective/male imaginary

and create a new imaginary for women.
Women writers of the Fantastic prefer, as Sibilla Aleramo put it, «voler vivere una
nobile vita, intera e coerente alla luce del sole» rather than «l’innaturale scissione
dell’amore…consuetudine letteraria che per secoli [ha] imprigionato la figura
femminile».22 Ortese, a master of the Fantastic, paints a perverse, intellectual woman that
seeks the unity of body and soul rather than a traditional picture of «femminilità
dimezzata»:

…per chiamare ad una riconsiderazione integrale del femminile… alludere alla condizione della
donna reale in quanto soggetto attivo della crisi dell’individuo novecentesco, presente e partecipe
di quella perdita d’identità tanto più lacerante per chi [patisce] un antico destino di esclusione.
Giammarco, p.42

Unlike Richter, I think that the Female Fantastic is not the celebration of ‘the irrational’23
but rather the construction of a different logic that values uncertainty, multiplicity, and
fluidity, demanding une verginité d’imagination and une intelligence matérialisé.

This different, other logic is the most fascinating aspect of the autobiographical
female Fantastic, which refuses «il pensiero astratto... [basato sulla certezza, dualismo e
fissità, perché] non può esistere processo di pensiero senza esperienze personali» and
embraces «il rigore del pensiero [femminile] poetante in una poesia pensante».24 This
literary phenomenon takes place when:

…appare sulla scena [letteraria] la cosiddetta New Woman: né angelo né prostituta ma

inquietante… perché mette in discussione il potere maschile, contesta i rapporti esistenti tra uomo
e donna, minaccia di sovvertire un ordine e uno status quo consolidati.
Billi, p.211

The New Woman, represented by women writers of the Fantastic, is ‘perverse’ because
«si macchia del peccato di Eva forse più grave, quello di disubbidire, di voler conoscere,
di parlare, di essere, anche lei, logos».25

I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I

don't feel able. And I know John would think it
absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some
way - it is such a relief!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

22
S. ALERAMO qtd. by Giammarco, 1992, p.42.
23
An approach that in Italy has unfortunately been supported by Monica Farnetti, see M. FARNETTI,
Camera oscura. Appunti sul fantastico femminile in L’irruzione del vedere nel pensare, Pasian di Prato,
UD, Campanotto Editore, 1997, pp. 173-180.
24
H. ARENDT, Il pensiero secondo, Milano, Rizzoli, 1999, pp.22-23.
25
BILLI, p.211.