Conduct Unbecoming: Gender Norms and Social Mobility in Interwar Italian Literature

As a marker of social class, decorum was frequently used in Italian literature of the Interwar period to delimit a narrative space within which the issues of sexuality and normativity could be articulated. It also provided a discursive hinge for creating “overdetermined bodies” – characters whose actions are imbued with moral didacticism or are exemplary of a particular ideology or social condition that allow the writers to make indirect social commentary.

This paper analyzes Cesare Pavese’s novels, The Fine Summer and Women on Their Own. I probe Pavese’s narrative insistence on exterior markers of social class (sartorial choices in particular) of the female protagonists as their sentimental and sexual comportments intersect. Seamstress Ginia of The Fine Summer and dressmaker Clelia of Women on Their Own appear to have agency only within a discursive zone delimited by “seeming” and the indecorous, or “unseemly,” which proved an ultimate barrier to their attempts at personal transformation that would erase humble origins and working class provenance.

My reading questions previous appraisals of Pavese’s narrative which coalesced around two opposite views of gender relations, alternatively labeling his work as flatly misogynistic or as a disguised “countertechnology” aimed at subverting traditional gender roles and their pressing into ideological service by the fascist regime. Specifically, I argue that a literal over-styling of femininity underscores the limitations of women’s self-fashioning even as it allows momentary glimpses into non-normative sexual and social configurations, in particular lesbianism.