With the newspaper, the novel by the Sardinian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for 1926: the story of a woman who has achieved wealth and does not yield to convention
Marianna Sirca and the story of a woman who commands. And the consequences that this assumption entails. Grace Deledda, who writes this novel between 1913 and 1914, has enough experience on the subject. She is a very successful author, and she is training to become a woman of enormous media power. Therefore, in telling Marianna Sirca, she tries to explain what it means for a woman, in terms of sacrifice, to put herself in the conditions of self-determination after having survived the paramatriarchal, and therefore illusory favorable world from which she comes. World in which it is possible to exercise either the status of slave, servant, or that of mistress under guardianship.
Deledda knows well, on her own flesh, that women are allowed to represent at most a “sweet”, virtual power, limited to the control of the male on duty: husband, father, guardian. And he describes a heroine, Marianna Sirca, as a reckless woman who really wants to rule. One for whom the title of mistress is not enough, but she aims at the exercise of power. Just like a man would do instead of her.
A novel that is born, and feeds on, from this basic disobedience. It is no coincidence when the story begins, when that is Marianna takes possession of what is due to her by bequest, her first decision concerns the man with whom she decided to live her life. That he is not the man capable of guaranteeing her power to her and certifying it, but the one she is in love with. Setting a story on a woman’s right to choose and decide for her own happiness is an act of sacrilege that she has.
“I want ahead a man who needs wealth than wealth that needs man.” Thus, paraphrasing Monna Giovanna, in the ninth story of the fifth day of DecameronMarianna Sirca could have answered those around her invited her to marry “the trustworthy”, “Rich” and “pierced”, cousin Sebastiano, who would give substance and virile authority to his virtual function of command, rather than “the unreliable”, and “Poor”, Simone Sole, that in her feminine sensibility, “the white breast like that of a woman”, would leave her, without interference, the undisputed master of her patrimony.
The latter is also a fugitive who does not want to pay his debt with a justice that does not consider it concerns him, being the result of forced external imposition. A bright sun, nomen omen, Robin Hood barbaricino, around which all the interests of the whole affair gravitate. Very shortly thereafter, we are in 1915, he too will be recalled overseas to participate in a war, “the War”, from which we thought we had escaped.
From here, from the mistress woman who chooses, from the male servant who is chosen, comes the first important reversal that characterizes this extraordinary novel. But not the only one, because in the choice of Marianna there is the conscience of a woman who does not consider a man to be simply complementary, nor, much less, the depositary of all the actions that she would not be allowed to perform.
Marianna Sirca, therefore, is immediately a novel of reversed perspectives. The protagonist is nominated by an uncle, a priest who is the universal heir of a very substantial patrimony. An unsurprising outcome, considering the fact that the woman was placed at the service of the very rich religious precisely in the hope that, out of gratitude, he would make her rich by making her his universal heir. Once she was rich, as a woman, she would be entrusted to the tutelage of a male capable of managing her wealth.
However Marianna, “Who had always obeyed”, opposing the scheme, she decides in order to personally manage what has been left to her and to marry the man she has always loved. You now you can afford precisely “a man who needs wealth”.
However, that man, that luminous star, is threatened by complex pressures and by satellites that revolve around him.
On the one hand, the ambiguous possessiveness of Costantino Moro, his adoring and jealous companion. Moro too, as is evident, bears his own destiny in his name. Similarly to the Shakespearean Moor, in fact, he strives to keep himself in the orbit of man the planet Simone Sole of whom he is very jealous. And of which he fiercely fears abandonment. «Simone remembering that, jealous and meticulous as he was, it was necessary to take Costantino with violence or with sweetness, he lay down beside him and lightly touched his foot with his foot».
In addition to Marianna, Moro’s jealousy extends to all those who have to do with Simone. Even that Bantine Fera, “a very young bandit, even younger than Simone and more daring, unscrupulous, independent” who sought him out to join her gang of thugs. Eighty-two years before Brokeback Mountainthe morbid, homoerotic, unacknowledged attraction of Costantino Moro towards Simone Sole is another of those elements that make Deledda a dangerous and ingeniously unreliable anticipator on the level of literary conventions.
Like the commemorative fury of the servant Fidela, faithful to the memory of Marianna’s very wealthy uncle priest. However, he fails to approve of his holy master’s decision to have that niece his universal heir. But Fidela is even more faithful to an idea of the world where women are allowed to command with discretion, without undermining established schemes, without producing too eccentric alternatives. Fidela is it the status quo in its magnitude.
In this novel, the one who took a vow of chastity, “not even a kiss”, the Lucia Mondella of the situation, is him. In no novel of his time, and even in a few of future times, does it exist a scene of pure physical attraction like this: «Without answering Simone threw off the hat with a movement of the head and rested his head on her infantile and tired lap. Her thick hair, short, in little black waves silvered by the moon, smelled of grass, of dust, of sweat; a wild and fragrant smell at the same time, which disturbed Marianna more than his gesture. She felt her heart melt; She… she seemed to be able to protect him, to save him, to collect him within her bowels as a child of herself ».
Here then “Angelica who runs away” is the magical Simone, the virginity to be undermined is that of a big brown boy who leads a macho life and has a feminine sensibility. He grew up with his mother and sisters. A male who, fifteen years before David Herbert Lawrence’s gamekeeper, appears naked in the pages of a novel, complete with moles and hairs.
While “The traveling hero” she is a female who does not yield one millimeter compared to those who would like to invite her to give up the position of acquired power.
A celebratory edition for the 150th anniversary of the birth
The novel by Grazia Deledda is on newsstands for a month with the Corriere della Sera Marianna Sirca, on sale at the price of € 9.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. The text published above is the initial part of the unpublished introduction written by Marcello Fois for this edition of the book, created in collaboration with the publisher Il Maestrale. The initiative is part of the activities set up by the Committee promoting the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Grazia Deledda, chaired by Fois himself. The writer was born on 27 September 1871 in Nuoro and died in Rome on 15 August 1936. In 1927 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1926, the year in which it was not awarded: she was the second woman ever and the first Italian to obtain that prestigious award. The novel Marianna Sircapublished in 1915 when the author was now an established figure of literature not only in Italy, was initially published in installments by the literary magazine of the Corriere, La Lettura, before being collected in volume by the publisher Treves.
September 21, 2022 (change September 21, 2022 | 21:37)
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