• Repressed Memory and Traumatic History in Alberto Moravia's The Woman of Rome

    Author(s):
    Charles L. Leavitt IV (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    LLC 20th- and 21st-Century Italian
    Subject(s):
    Italian literature, Twentieth century, Prostitution, History, Comparative literature, Literature, Modern
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    20th-century Italian literature, History of prostitution, Modern Italian literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/j4x4-vp43
    Abstract:
    In composing The Woman of Rome (La Romana, 1948), I argue in this chapter, Moravia was attempting to redress the twinned traumas of national history and personal memory. The novel's protagonist, a Roman prostitute, serves as the symbolic incarnation of-as well as the developing resistance to-bourgeois corruption and Fascist coercion. An intricate intertextuality facilitates this social critique, allowing Moravia not only to reclaim his repressed memory but also to redeem it, reexamining his own experience from the prostitute's perspective. Moravia imbued his protagonist with a host of figurative associations that lent her narrative-and her narrating voice-a profoundly transformative significance. Through her, he not only reclaimed his repressed memory but also revealed the structures of bourgeois social domination and bourgeois morality. More significantly, he explored the power of literary symbolism to transcend those structures, and to dismantle them. As the subjective center of his fiction, and as the symbolic embodiment of the confluence between his remembered encounter and his intertextual exploration, the protagonist of The Woman of Rome can be said to signify Moravia's renewed commitment to unseating the established order through the unfettered representation of uncensored reality.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Publisher:
    Fairleigh Dickinson University
    Pub. Date:
    2018
    Book Title:
    Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas, and Nostalgia in Post–World War II Italian Culture
    Author/Editor:
    Patrizia Ssambuco
    Chapter:
    3
    Page Range:
    39 - 54
    ISBN:
    9781683931430
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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