Sibilla Aleramo

The Italian writer Sibilla Aleramo lived between the end of the 19th century and the second half of the 20th century. The work that made her famous is the autobiographical novel Una donna, published in 1906. The novel tells the first phase of the writer’s life, from childhood to the separation from her husband. Her childhood and her early adolescence are dominated by the figure of the father. At first, Sibilla identifies herself with the father figure, cancelling her own femininity both on the physical level and the behavioural one. The relationship of complicity between father and daughter, who enjoys the same status as her father and is involved in the management of his factory, coexists with the authoritarian and patriarchal imprint impressed to the family: the father is the one who guides his children’s studies and readings, instead the mother, although she is a refined poetry and music lover, has no freedom of expression.

A rude and brutal figure is, also, Sibilla’s husband, an employee met while working in the factory, who seduces and abuses her. Sibilla is a teenager of only fifteen when she’s forced to marry her very perp, by means of the “shotgun marriage”. Shortly, the young man manifests a tyrannical jealousy towards his wife and Sibilla feels she’s reproducing the same story of nullification that her mother and many other women have lived beforehands. Confined by her husband to the home sphere, she lives problematically her own motherhood: the happiness for her baby is contrasted with the despair of the sacrifice required in the name of motherhood. Moreover, the Italian laws at that time prevented the woman from getting custody of her children in the event of separation; so it’s the love for her child that, at the beginning, keeps her from severing the bond to her increasingly violent husband.

Later, Sibilla has to face a hard choice: either continuing her role of “mother of sacrifice” or being “a woman”: in front of law that disclaims any right of hers relating to her son, and that regards him as his father’s “property”, Sibilla formulates her own revolutionary law, leaving both her husband and her son. So she will choose “the woman”, renouncing to “the mother”.