From here she could see it all: the great skyline, curving north and south, set off by the dark water, the shiny river reflecting light into the clear, cold night. The wind was dizzying, intoxicating; it was lifting her out of herself. All her life she had been afraid of the odds against her, but her wariness was gone, lost somewhere in the bright night. “Nino. Nino,” she whispered into the cold, “someday I’ll write you a letter.” But it was the bridge arching, the white wind soaring, the chilling purity that made the night right.
Afterword
Escaping the Ancestral Threat?
Josephine Gattuso Hendin’s 1988 novel, The Right Thing to Do, received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, an organization devoted to promoting multicultural American literature. By bestowing this award on Hendin’s novel, the foundation recognized the importance of Italian American writing in the vast cultural mosaic of American life. Within the resurgence of attention to Italian American literature and culture, The Right Thing to Do stands out in its deft evocation of Italian Americana. Seeking to offer a rich, accurate, and thought-provoking depiction of Italian American family life, Hendin felt compelled to “describe the relationship between an Italian American father and daughter in a way that had not been done” (Hendin, “VIA Interviews,” 58).
A professor of American literature at New York University, Hendin wrote her first novel following a career primarily devoted to literary criticism. Her outstanding study The World of Flannery O’Connor (1970) examines O’Connor’s narratives through the lenses of regional, religious, and medical contexts. Her second critical study, Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945 (1978), an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year, analyzes how post–World War II novels characterize people protecting themselves from pain, “mastering the mechanics of behavior” (10). Both studies examine the ways in which characters build defenses against being hurt, an activity with which Gina Giardello of The Right Thing to Do is also quite familiar. Hendin’s commentary on O’Connor’s fiction–“the violence that dominates nearly all of these stories is the slow violence of disease”–presages the illness that oppresses and eventually kills Nino, Gina’s father, in Hendin’s novel (The World of Flannery O’Connor, 112).
Tired of being “in other people’s minds, where all critics must be while working,” Hendin shifted to a genre that would allow her to satisfy her own need for self-expression. Hendin wrote the first draft of The Right Thing to Do over a period of nine weeks during the summer of 1985, working on the manuscript eight or ten hours a day. She remembers this time of writing “as a form of intoxication. It was simply impossible to put it aside” (Hendin, “VIA,” 57). A self-proclaimed perfectionist, Hendin then spent over a year revising the novel. Uninterested in writing about herself (she has never kept a diary), Hendin turned to the neighborhood of her youth for inspiration.1 She has described the novel as a kind of “love letter” to the Italian American community of her childhood (Gardaphé 112). The characters she portrays, however, are all “composites . . . the products of my imagination” (Zucccaro 8).
Born in Queens’s Little Italy, Hendin became attracted to writing by reading. The library near Astoria Park became her home away from home. Enrolling in City College at sixteen, Hendin took a term off during her final year to pursue a job as a social worker in the Bureau of Child Welfare in the South Bronx. Hendin’s father, a former pharmacist turned Depression-era social worker, said she was “finally doing something useful” (Hendin, “VIA” 53–54). Hendin later won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Columbia University, where she completed her Ph.D. in four years.
In a 1990 interview Hendin describes The Right Thing to Do as an examination of “the fate of the family” (“VIA,” 60). She focuses on a crucial strand within the family: the father-daughter nexus. Aligning herself with other Italian American women writers (Tina De Rosa, Dorothy Bryant, and Helen Barolini, for example), Hendin explains that she, too, recognizes the importance of family relationships—particularly intergenerational relationships—in a specifically Italian American context. She also recognizes the role of male authority.2 Italian American women’s lives traditionally have been restricted by male family members. Hendin wanted to write a novel closely examining the extent to which the “war between the sexes” shapes the conflict between generations. She wanted to describe “the nature of [the] longing” for self-realization and trace “its impact on the transmission of values from one generation to another.” From a woman’s perspective, Hendin describes how the conflict between father and daughter affects each generation’s understanding of itself (Hendin, “VIA,” 59).
As one reviewer attests, Hendin’s “slim volume . . . is disarmingly complex” (Lobron). Exquisitely constructed, The Right Thing to Do comprises seven equally balanced chapters in which the struggle between father and daughter takes place. This war is waged in New York City, including a Queens Little Italy, where Hendin was born and raised. Like Octavia Waldo’s A Cup of the Sun (1961), Salvatore La Puma’s The Boys of Bensonhurst (1987), and Louisa Ermelino’s Joey Dee Gets Wise: A Novel of Little Italy (1991), Hendin’s novel reinforces an Italian American emphasis on both the restrictions and rewards of ethnic communities. Each of these narratives examines the painful and enriching experience of growing up in a bicultural environment. Described as both sanctuary and prison, these Little Italys depict young Italian Americans struggling to adjust to the experience of American culture as they seek the adventure of independence through education and work, both places outside the circumscribed world in which they were born.
Faithful in her depiction of Little Italy in Astoria, Queens, Hendin provides an accurate account of life in the community. More than 802,829 Italians of single ancestry and an additional 202,575 of multiple ancestry lived in New York City according to the 1980 census, completed shortly after the novel takes place (Fortuna 27–28). Like other Queens neighborhoods such as Ozone Park and Floral Park, a portion of Astoria was what Giuseppe Fortuna calls an “Italian Island,” where people from Lazio, Calabria, Abruzzi, Naples, Sicily, and other parts of Italy–primarily southern Italy–had come to live and raise their children (44). Working- and middle-class families that had originally settled in the crowded streets of New York’s oldest Little Italy in Manhattan came to Queens in search of quiet neighborhoods and playgrounds where their children could thrive–and stayed there, rather than moving on to the suburbs.3 According to the 1970 census, 16.8 percent of the population of Astoria was Italian; in 1980 it was 16.14 percent (Fortuna 38). That stability cemented a neighborhood that served as a virtual village in a ceaselessly changing New York. For children like the fictional Gina who came of age during that period, Astoria was the equivalent of a stifling small town.4
Although they came from different Italian towns, those Italians who settled in Astoria provided what Fortuna, quoting Émile Durkheim called a “mechanical solidarity.” Fortuna defines this as a shared view of life based on “primary relationships” in which “everyone knew everyone else” (44). Gathering sites such as the Bocce court, a center of activity, were divided by sex. Men who gathered at Bocce courts enjoyed a sense of belonging in each other’s company, and could also find carpenters, contractors, or professionals who could provide essential services and advice within the community, rather than having to seek help from those unfamiliar with Italian habits of mind (Fortuna 44–48).5
The neighborhood provided women with their own cultural meeting grounds from church sodalities to markets to courtyards and quiet streets where women gathered to watch children play. Older women of the neighborhood sat talking in groups in front of their homes, or stopped to converse as they moved down the streets to their errands in the neighborhood. These women, observing the children of their friends and reporting their behavior, served as monitors, charting each child’s infractions through young adulthood.6
In contrast, Manhattan looms in Gina’s imagination as a place of anonymity free from such gazes and
murmurs. The impersonality of Manhattan streets and the joy of being unknown drive Gina to “the city” as a place of adventure and freedom. Her trip to the pavements of Mulberry, Lafayette, and Grand Streets, Manhattan’s Little Italy, reflect her desire for the trappings of italianitá7 and also her need to escape its relentless scrutiny.
Fortuna describes the lack of social and cultural opportunity that, in his view, made ethnic differences the result of class differences (51). A typical working-class father might hold two jobs but did not emphasize to his children the importance of their getting ahead. Their success, on American terms, would require a degree of both assimilation into mainstream culture and independence from the family. Instead he “controls them, preferring to teach respect, obedience, and the ability to work hard in order to survive, rather than teaching them independence of mind and development of talents.” Although the middle-class father would emphasize aspects of italianitá that did not conflict with the larger culture, he might be more “future oriented” (53). Hendin’s The Right Thing to Do combines both tendencies in a contemporary way further complicated by gender.8
The Italian family in The Right Thing to Do reflects the turmoil caused by transitional assimilation. On the one hand, Nino feels compelled to control his daughter, yet on the other hand, he and his wife, Laura, have encouraged her to succeed. Nino’s education makes him middle class in his awareness of the need for upward mobility, but his own choice of a wife and worldview return him to the working-class world from which he emerged and which claims his loyalty. His attitudes toward women are shaped by the street corner world he knew as a young man, a world that rises before him in memory as Gina leads him back through Manhattan’s Little Italy (22–60; 74–87). He implicates himself in its conception of sex as “scoring”: exploiting gullible and ignorant young women. The mixed messages he sends his daughter–to obey and accept his control and to succeed beyond and outside of it—express his alternating desires to protect her and to see her do well in the larger world he fears, complicated by his refusal to come to terms with his daughter’s sexuality and his inability to imagine what female success apart from marriage could be.
The first three chapters of The Right Thing to Do focus primarily on the contentious family relations within the Giardello household, emphasizing the increasingly virulent relationship between father and daughter. Gina longs to escape the neighborhood and the colorless apartment in which Nino has stubbornly remained, despite his wife’s desire to move into a single-family home. Despite ill health, Nino insists on following Gina on the subway and the streets, which make chaperonage nearly impossible. Nino’s former occupation as a truant officer and his knowledge of city streets provide him with the skills he needs to trap his daughter.
The effect on Gina of Nino’s obsession with her private life is the focus of the latter half of the book. After she has left the parental home, the place “of old humiliations and failures” (106), Gina believes she will never return to live in her Italian American neighborhood. But will she ever be able to leave it? In some ways, Gina’s process of transformation parallels the generic features of the traditional bildungsroman as she passes through varied experiences in her movement toward maturity and individual identity. Rita Felski explains that for a female protagonist, increasing self-knowledge requires “a process of separation from a male-defined context” (131). Unlike novels that focus solely on women’s emancipation from a male sphere, The Right Thing to Do also incorporates as a determinant of Gina’s development her working-class background and her ethnicity. As such, this novel is devoted to tracing the protagonist’s efforts to be reintegrated into the family, but with a changed consciousness, which is central to her development of self. Gina’s unsteady journey into adulthood has much to do with Hendin’s focus on Italian American ethnicity as a source and subject of American literature.
Although she remains powerfully aware of her responsibility to the family, Gina Giardello’s feeling of alienation intensifies her need for physical mobility. She has not been prevented from attending college, and thus learns about the benefits and distractions of cultures not her own. Her independence is fostered by her formal education and by her employment outside the home. Even if her father refuses to surrender power, Gina’s status as a second-generation Italian American allows her to explore the meaning of her mobility, a necessary strategy of liberation.
Gina’s mother, Laura, may very well have desired her daughter’s independence, but she ultimately capitulates to the patriarchal assumptions of her husband, who persistently diminishes his wife’s resolve: “‘You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself without being told. . . . Without me, what would you have done? Who would have organized you, given you a purpose?”’ (72). Despite Laura’s covert rebellion against the dictates of a domineering husband, she perpetuates his sexism by informing Nino of her daughter’s liaison with Alex, a twenty-six-year-old undergraduate at Columbia University.
Aware of the fact that something inside her has died as a result of having “to get along with a dictator” (70), Laura realizes that she has been imprisoned by a husband whose wholesale disrespect for women prevents him from treating them as more than potential victims, ripe for exploitation and in need of protection. Gina’s mother has partially internalized her husband’s beliefs about women, which spring from the proverbial past of his Sicilian ancestors. Liberally sprinkled throughout the narrative, Nino’s negative thoughts about women reinforce his abusive nature: “Even if it takes a lot of belt buckle, you have to teach a girl she can’t get what she wants. Otherwise they’re impossible to live with” (54); “An interesting woman is a curse” (57); “Women were no good at these things” (66); “Women were so dumb” (67).
In describing the generational differences between women, Hendin suggests that tensions eventually lessen between mother and daughter because they share the larger problem of male authoritarianism. Both mother and daughter expend excessive energy negotiating the demands of a man. Their “shared impatience” compels each to discover ways to cope with a controlling male figure (Hendin, “VIA Interviews,” 59). Without bitterness, Laura nurses Nino through each stage of his debilitating illness; she refuses to succumb to the severe disillusionment from which her husband has always suffered. In her mother, then, Gina observes “a stream of small satisfactions, a gift for finding amusement and meaning in daily things, that gave her a steady joyousness” (47). Unlike her mother, however, Gina can achieve selfhood only outside her father’s grasp. And ironically, while Gina has absorbed her father’s low opinion of vulnerable women, she has used it to counter her own vulnerability and to construct some armor for herself.
In appreciation of the intensity of this generational conflict, Hendin deepens Nino’s character, refusing to reduce him to a mean-spirited caricature. Nino’s precise, unsentimental shrewdness, and even his cruelty, are saturated with his own disillusionment. Nino must come to terms with a world that diametrically opposes what he considers to be right and good. As a Sicilian immigrant, he is at odds with American culture.9 Nino perceives himself at war with “them,” the designation that he gives all Americans who do not honor what Nino defines as right: “‘personal responsibility for the good of others,’” by which he primarily means family members (20). But by the time the narrative begins, Nino knows he has lost the battle he wages against American behavior: “‘Premarital sex with contraceptives? Marriage vows you can change your mind about three weeks later? Contracts for everything that show you mistrust everyone you deal with?”’ (19–20).
Nino increasingly defines all behavior against his faltering role as the retainer of la via vecchia (the old way) and upholder of l’ordine della famiglia (regulations defining Italian family life).10 Nino’s understanding of good behavior parallels the nineteenth-century model of family life in preindustrial Sicily. In this social world, the concept of family “included all blood and in-law relatives up to the fourth degree; . . . family solidarity was the basic code of such fam
ily life and defiance of it was something akin to a cardinal sin” (Covello 149–50). Secluded and chaperoned in preparation for marriage at an early age, the daughters in such families had their careers as wives and mothers determined for them at birth (Williams 74, 83). Although married women in this world were accorded a great deal of respect for their centrality to the family, mothers and daughters were nonetheless dependent on the patriarchal family structure that gave them their status within it.
Italian immigrants to the United States also found themselves at odds with mainstream, middle-class American values in other ways. John Papajohn and John Spiegel explain that many Italian American immigrants interpreted the “American dream” in terms of “obtaining steady work and providing food and shelter for [their] family.” Unlike their children who often adopted middle-class values from their teachers, working-class Italians did not always believe that “individual achievement, planning for the future, and striving to improve [their] status in the American social system” was necessary to their familial well-being (105).
Living in the United States for half a century has not changed Nino’s devotion to the old ways–loyalty to family above all and submission to male authority–but he does realize when he looks at his neighborhood that “[it] was another country” (4). As Nino observes the immediate changes he sees taking place in his community, he mourns his removal to a foreign life in America. The Italian American poet of the beat generation, Diane di Prima, could be describing Nino when in “To My Father–2” she writes “you were dying of grief from the moment I saw you” (Pieces of a Song, 149).
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