Spokane, Washington
December 1998
NOTES
1. While Hendin has not pursued autobiographical writing, several Italian American women have published memoirs in recent years. Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo (1996) and Marianna De Marco Torgovnick’s Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter (1994) both describe the intricacies of a specific Italian American milieu during the authors’ childhoods. Helen Barolini’s Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity (1997) includes autobiographical pieces on the writer’s decision to wend her way back to Italy by learning the language and eventually moving there. Diane di Prima’s account of her younger life in the beat movement, Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), has been reprinted (1998), and her longer memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, will be published in 1999. Mary Cappello’s memoir, Night Bloom (1998), incorporates her analysis of the intersection between sexual and ethnic identity.
2. Over the last decade, writers, scholars, and readers have increasingly recognized the existence of a distinct Italian American women’s literary tradition, and paid homage to the commonalities found in this tradition. A milestone in the recognition of this tradition was the volume edited and introduced by Helen Barolini, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985), which drew together work by fifty-six writers over five decades. More recently, The Feminist Press has strengthened the tradition of Italian American women’s writing through its dedication to republishing works in this area. Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish (1980, reprinted 1996) was the first novel by an Italian American woman to be republished by The Feminist Press, followed by Dorothy Bryant’s Miss Giardino (1978, reprinted 1997) and Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1979, reprinted 1998). Guernica Editions, a Canadian publishing house, has also devoted much energy to publishing creative works of Italian American writers such as Diana Cavallo’s A Bridge of Leaves (1961, reprinted 1997) and Giose Rimanelli’s Benedetta in Guysterland (1993).
3. Part of the reason for Nino’s stubborn insistence on remaining in his bleak apartment and refusing to move has to do with his residual sense of campanilismo, an interest in maintaining the physical and social boundaries of one’s neighborhood (village or town in Italy). Derived from il campanile (church or bell tower), the term campanilismo suggests that the boundary of one’s world ends when the bell no longer can be heard. Despite the fact that Nino’s neighborhood is not the tight-knit Italian American enclave of the past, he maintains a loyalty to the idea of village-mindedness.
4. Studies of other Italian American enclaves in New York include Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963); Thomas Kessner’s The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915 (1977); John W. Briggs’s An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890–1930 (1978); Donald Tricarico’s The Italians of Greenwich Village: The Social Structure and Transformation of an Ethnic Community; and Salvatore J. LaGumina’s From Steerage to Suburb: Long Island Italians (1990).
5. Felix Stefanile’s poem “The Bocce Court on Lewis Avenue” in The Dance at St. Gabriel’s (1995) is a “praise-song for the old neighborhood” of Corona, an area of Queens (39). The poem recounts the struggle and triumph of the community that fought to retain its homes, which were being condemned by New York City.
6. In Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars (1985), Elizabeth Ewens describes the cultural universe of Jewish and Italian immigrant women on the Lower East Side during the period of mass immigration (1890–1925) in which homes and neighborhoods were created out of “the values and principles of their own world” (203). For parallels between the watchful eyes of Gina’s neighborhood women and other women in Italian American novels, see Waldo’s A Cup of the Sun and De Rosa’s Paper Fish.
7. In their edited collection From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (1981), Anthony J. Tamburri, Paolo Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé usefully describe italianitá as “the way of life, the values, and the cultural trappings of [our] ancestors.” A sense of italianitá also includes language, cuisine, family structure, and religion.
8. For a recent example of the way in which sex segregation is maintained by men in the neighborhood, but defied by an Italian American “daughter” of this community, see Torgovnick’s “On Being White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst” in Crossing Ocean Parkway (3–18).
9. Mass emigration from southern Italy and Sicily during the period of 1880–1910 increased hostility toward “low” Italians (Italians of the Mezzogiorno, areas south and east of Rome) by the host citizenry. According to Leonard Covello, Sicilians bore the brunt of the prejudice toward southern Italians. Sicilians represented “a fourth of all Italian immigrants to America. . . . With their dark skin pigmentation, habits of dress, and ‘foreign’ mannerisms, [they] were readily endowed by Americans with all the characteristics of the banditti, the Black Hand, and the wielders of a traditional stiletto. They afforded a striking group upon which to concentrate a growing hostility toward all southern Italians” (20–21).
10. Nino’s loss of familial control is announced in the very first chapter of The Right Thing to Do. Hendin originally imagined that her novel would take the form of a “black comedy,” but she limited the darkly humorous depiction of family relations to chapter one (Zuccaro 8). In this chapter, Nino’s sister Maria has died without receiving last rites, a sacrament integral to Catholicism. As head of the family, Nino is embarrassed by this omission and seeks to rectify it against the objections of others. The secretive way in which the family must secure Maria’s proper burial emphasizes Nino’s failure to influence his family or the community around him.
11. Although he comes from northern Italy, the father in Bryant’s Miss Giardino parallels the Sicilian Nino in his refusal to accept or respect his daughter’s American-born status. Refusing to call his youngest daughter by her first name–Anna–the father instead calls her “the American,” identifying her with the culture that he loathes.
12. Leslie Fiedler refers to Dante’s inscription in order to examine the way in which the city has been used in literature as a “prototype of Hell: a symbol of absolute alienation rather than total fulfillment, of shared misery rather than communal bliss” (115). For a trenchant example of the intersection between madness and the “city” of the insane asylum, see Cavallo’s A Bridge of Leaves, in which the narrator compares his situation to Dante’s experience on the threshold of the Inferno.
13. In describing the Black writer’s perception of cities inhabited by “a dispossessed, a disenfranchised people,” Morrison explains that the “affection of Black writers . .. for the city seems to be for the village within it: the neighborhoods and the population of those neighborhoods” (37). Similarly, Hendin examines the pattern of settlement that Italian immigrants re-created in the New World in regionally designated neighborhoods: “Little Sicilys” or “Little Calabrias” for example. As Richard Alba points out, such colonies provided “a buffer against the shock of the new surroundings and thereby. . . permit[ted] the gradual adjustment of the immigrants (49).
14. This myth, which recurs so frequently in Gina’s thoughts, has roots in Sicily. By the sixth century B.C., much of eastern Sicily was colonized by the Greeks, who for three centuries populated the region, building ports and cities that became one of the great centers of Hellenic culture. Inspired by the magnificent landscape of eastern Sicily, the Greek myth of the seasons locates Persephone in Aidone when Hades kidnaps her, carrying her away to the land of the dead. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum includes commentary on the Persephone myth in her study Black Madonnas. According to Birnbaum, Demeter’s cult as virgin-mother-crone and creator-preserver-destroyer was centered at Eleusis in Greece and at Enna in Sicily. In her unpublished essay, “Persephone’s Daughters,” Edvige Giunta traces Persephone’s influence on the writing of Italian American women, explaining that the myth of Demeter and Persephone is “perha
ps the myth that resonates most powerfully for women of Southern Italian ancestry.” Noting that there were several temples devoted to Demeter and Persephone throughout Sicily and Southern Italy, Giunta speaks to the continuing power of the cult of Demeter in Sicily, and identifies its function as “a symbol of libertá populare–freedom of the people. . . .”
15. This deathbed recursion to the dialect of one’s homeland is a familiar scheme in Italian American fiction. In Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods (1949), the dying Italian father returns in memory to his Italian village, speaking his native language. Carole Maso focuses part of her first novel, Ghost Dance (1986), on the narrator’s Italian grandparents. On his deathbed, the paternal grandfather speaks Italian, the forbidden tongue which he had renounced after immigrating to America.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Jo Hendin for her insightful responses to this afterword, for her continued support of my work and the work of Italian American writers. My gratitude also goes to Jane Rinehart, Fred Gardaphé, and Beth Cooley for their keen literary insights and their close reading of this work.
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