2023-12-31 12:38:36
by Teresa Ciabatti
The writer’s feminist manifesto is one of the three titles that “extend” the collection edited by the writer Sandro Veronesi
“When my mother was young, every morning a man followed her as she went to work and masturbated behind her back,” writes Lisa Taddeo in the book’s prologue. After her mother’s death, the author searches for her answers to her doubts in other women’s stories: why didn’t my mother react? And finally, what did you really want? In the reconnaissance of her feminine, Lisa Taddeo does not solve a mystery, but rather she finds the echo of her of her mother of her, the little girl of the Sixties who worked at the fruit and vegetable stall in Bologna. To understand it, she chooses three women who have lived experiences of abuse and submission, of unexpressed or repressed desire. She follows them for eight years, she lives for long periods in their cities, in their neighborhoods. She breathes the same air, the idea that society has of them. Three Women is a live story, a testimony faithful to the truth even in unexpectedly neutral tones and therefore even more painful.
«This is not a work of fiction» Taddeo declares in the note, in fact Three Women intercepts the lessons of Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Emmanuel Carrère, establishing possible new canons where the novelistic is the choice and focus of the ‘object that occurs gradually and precisely as seen under a microscope.
The names of the protagonists are Maggie, Lina and Sloane. Of the three, Maggie’s is perhaps the story that most clearly places female desire at the center (how much girls can afford to desire today), and the female question in general: the nuances of violence, the abuse of power, the concept of adequate victim.
At seventeen Maggie has an affair with her teacher, the brilliant and esteemed Aaron Knodel. Married, two young children, a dog. Keep the dog in mind because in the final scene Knodel, once acquitted of the charges, will find himself in the car with his wife and children, and with the poodle on his lap. An important detail because the poodle completes the reassuring image of the American family: the so-called big picture as Joan Didion defined it (In the Land of the Fisher King). It is in the decade between the end of the Seventies and the Eighties, under Ronald Reagan, that political communication changes by instructing citizens to transform the personal into public representation.
Maggie and the professor exchange thousands of messages, words and unequivocal actions that show a relationship that is certainly sentimental but which is nevertheless never fully consummated. The professor refuses to penetrate her (“I want to wait until you are eighteen”). Jealousy, possession, manipulation, it’s all there, except penetration.
In Leaving Neverland by Dan Reed, a documentary on Michael Jackson, one of the two men who claims to have been sexually abused by the rock star remembers a detail: at eighteen, having met Jackson again, what had never happened in Neverland, the ranch of wonders of Jackson, where there had been games in the pool and those under the sheets. In a hotel room in Los Angeles (deliberately not in Neverland) a complete relationship takes place between the two for the first time. According to the victim, it is an insult to childhood: the rock star does what she would not have done to her beloved child, she punishes him for growing up.
Once again to document that abuse has many faces, often not recognized by the victim – let’s think of the children in Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim, one of the novels that best describes the infinite variety of trauma processing. We think of Neil who transfigures the violence suffered by the baseball coach into the first great love of his life. The coach is the only one who truly loved him.
So the professor abuses Maggie, subjugates her even by withdrawing. (“It’s not penetration that causes rape” states Lisa Taddeo in an interview. “There are the girl’s feelings, there is the professor who authorizes her, and gives her attention from which she gets credit. Finally denial: I don’t see you, you don’t exist”).
Seven years after the end of the relationship, Maggie denounces Knodel who has just been elected teacher of the year in North Dakota, “considered the best ever”.
The time to report is a crucial topic in the debate on violence against women as it varies from country to country: in France the report can be made within thirty years, in America ten, in Italy within twelve months (until 2019 it was six months) . It takes time for the victim to rationalize, sometimes remember, and overcome the fear of not being believed.
In Three Women, by staging the trial of the professor, Lisa Taddeo shows the development of the patriarchal system of oppression and blaming of the victim (secondary victimization): judges, lawyers, colleagues, former schoolmates, male and female alike, take sides on the professor’s side.
How credible is an overweight, sloppy, undesirable, careless, aggressive girl on psychotropic drugs? How credible is a girl who dropped out of school and is a waitress, someone who lost her virginity at sixteen to a thirty-one year old she just met?
No credibility, given that it is the image of an infected America. Maggie does not have the qualities of the victim, to the extent that the professor well integrated into society, with wife, children and dog is the face of healthy America.
«The same world that continues to praise those who have already been praised, those who have historically already been accepted» writes Lisa Taddeo.
“The world wanted to think that that good-looking guy didn’t do what he did. Defending him made them feel protected »says Arlene, Maggie’s mother who, like the author’s mother, represents an almost genetic inheritance for her daughter.
«I think about the fact that I am the daughter of a woman who allowed a man to masturbate in front of her every day» writes Taddeo, exhibiting the power of descent. In the mother-daughter passage there is the story of female emancipation that does not come suddenly with rebellion. The possibility of rejecting subjection was developed inside, in the interiors of homes, even through exercises of endurance.
This is visible today in Iranian girls, and Barbara Stefanelli captures it in Love Harder (recently published by Solferino). It is an underground continuity between generations without interruptions, they are the seeds that germinate. The girls who burn their headscarves in the streets have the approval of their mothers. They complete a gesture begun imperceptibly by those who generated them. The same genealogy will lead Maggie’s mother at the end of the trial and the professor’s acquittal to continue the battle in place of the daughter she has ceased to desire.
If Emmanuel Carrère takes exceptional lives (The Adversary, Limonov), Lisa Taddeo tells small stories, newspaper clippings. And it is precisely the non-exceptional nature of the stories that makes this book a feminist manifesto.
In Little Women the sisters are continually distinguished: hair colour, passions, even singing voice (Meg flute-like, Amy “squeaky like a cricket”, Jo out of tune). These are the dawn of a feminism where it was revolutionary to make women different. Then comes Mary McCarthy’s The Group in which the eight protagonists express their shared desire for independence in different ways.
Then at a certain point comes The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and the Lisbon sisters, looked at by the boys, are a single “dazzling halo”, an “angelic choir”, the same blond hair and blue eyes, the same overlapping teeth, only the methods of suicide differ . Going back to the males, their gaze and love, even if idealized, Eugenides frees the women.
Over one hundred years after Little Women, the need for feminism is to identify the constant that cuts across countries, ages and levels of education. Trace a common objective level starting from reticence. Years of female subordination have shaped a character. This is what happens in this book, in the story of Lina who, no longer wanted by her husband, searches for Aidan, the love of her youth. A love ended due to a night spent with three boys. In reality it is just a rumor, the truth that she wanted Aidan to believe. In reality Lina was the victim of abuse: her three drugged and raped her. But Lina doesn’t speak. What’s more: «To be honest, I discovered that things had really happened that way years later» she confessed. The fact that Lina’s account does not make violence the heart of what happened, but rather the misunderstanding that drove Aidan away, a stumbling block to the love story, can only illuminate the dark shadow of the condition of submission.
Feminist power does not only lie in the aware and combative protagonists of #MeToo. Here, in Three Women, we are at an earlier stage of consciousness, despite being the same era. «That thing stopped obsessing me. I didn’t get any illnesses, I didn’t get pregnant. One way or another we grow. We change» says Lina. Her resignation is not personal, but cultural.
Lisa Taddeo’s book teaches that the problem of violence against women must be eradicated from the thoughts of women themselves, indicating the unacceptable and at the same time recognizing the desire, any desire, be it for emancipation, freedom, be it that of Meg (Little Women) : «Carriages, ice cream, high-heeled shoes, bouquets of flowers, and red-haired boys to dance with». In desire, there is no hierarchy.
The next releases
The next issue of «Americana», the series edited by Sandro Veronesi which is an immersion in American literature, will be on newsstands on Wednesday 3 January. The upcoming title is Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, with a preface by Sandro Veronesi and a translation by Riccardo Duranti, on newsstands with the «Corriere» at €8.90 plus the price of the newspaper. It is the 27th publication, the one that was supposed to be the last in the series. But given its success, here is the extension (three additional books) that leads «Americana» to develop into thirty volumes: it is Three Women by Lisa Taddeo on January 10 (preface by Teresa Ciabatti); Burning the days by James Salter on the 17th (preface by Edoardo Albinati). Jonathan Safran Foer closes on January 24th with Everything is illuminated, introduced by Emanuele Trevi. Lisa Taddeo (1980), originally from New Jersey, has written for the «New York Times», «New York Magazine», «Esquire», «Elle», «Glamour» and many other publications. Her nonfiction has been included in the anthologies Best American Political Writing and Best American Sports Writing, and her short stories have won two Pushcart Prizes. Three Women, which appeared in 2019, became a bestseller. In 2021, her debut novel, Animale, was published in Italy by Mondadori as Tre donne. «Americana» was inaugurated on July 5 by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, with a preface by Veronesi. The graphic project is curated by XxY Studio: on the covers shots from The Anonymous Project by filmmaker Lee Shulman.
December 31, 2023 (modified December 31, 2023 | 11:58)
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