Merging Territories: (Anti)Feminism in Neera’s "Una giovinezza del secolo XIX"

This article reflects on the ideological ambivalence of Neera’s autobiographical work, "Una giovinezza del secolo XIX" (1919): on the one hand, the narrator openly disapproves, in the name of moral values and tradition, of those trends meant to expand women’s domain beyond the domestic space through education and paid labor; on the other, the «narrated I» is insistently depicted as victim of her limiting domestic space. Such duality brings to mind the notion of ‘contradictory consciousnesses’ as coined by philosopher Antonio Gramsci in his theory on the birth of a new culture. He argues that any given historical moment is never uniform but composed of numerous contrasting forces (some predominant while others remain regressive) that are equally significant when representing the socio-historical picture as a whole. In Gramsci’s view, a gifted writer must be able to capture indistinctively in his/her work all these forces. After briefly showing how Neera is indeed a writer of her period, given that "Una giovinezza del secolo XIX" echoes the various contrasting tendencies that its author witnessed, I turn to the progressive component of her work and consider how Neera in fact implicitly proposes an alternative Feminism when overtly rejecting the feminist and socialist ideology of her times. Drawing on Cavarero’s discussion of female autobiography as a locus that privileges the uniqueness of the sole individual over its multiple identities in the public sphere, I indicate how this situation applies to Neera’s autobiographical narrative through the relationship with her readers and her father. In the final point of my analysis, I emphasize once again how Neera undermines her declared antifeminist position by means of ingenious narrative devices. I conclude by reiterating that the tension generated by the above-discussed dichotomy constitutes an innovative element and the force that propels Neera’s work ahead of her times from an ideological point of view.