Paola Masino, Birth and Death of the Housewife

On 10 December 2021 we read pages from Paola Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia (Milan: ISBN, 2009), in particular from chapter 2 (pp. 14-20), chapter 5 (pp. 98-101), and chapter 6 (pp. 120-123). We used Marella Feltrin-Morris’ translation (Paola Masino, Birth and Death of the Housewife, New York: SUNY Press, 2010; pp. 24-28, 87-90, 107-109).

Masino’s novel, written between 1938 and 1939, was first published as a volume in 1945. It is a fierce attack against marriage and motherhood, and against the confined role of the housewife, or angel of the home, assigned to women for centuries and re-inculcated in them by the early-twentieth-century bourgeois society and the Fascist regime. You could say that it is an early feminist work, yet Masino defies specific labels, and in the 1945 author’s note at the end of the volume, she refers to her book as “this portrait of a woman, which already seems so distant from me that I can barely recognize it.”

What readers never fail to feel is the energy, and irony, and sarcasm, in Masino’s writing, from the very beginning, when the Housewife, from her cradle-trunk full of breadcrumbs and books, questions her mother and investigates the world, making everyone uncomfortable, until the very end, when society, with its values and institutions, has made the Housewife uncomfortable – the Housewife who never rests in peace, not even in her grave.

The novel combines various literary genres and forms, including drama, personal diary, and the fantastic. Among the many passages here is one that is both surreal and vitriolic; but we’ll cut it to the surreal vision, not to make the quote too long:

“the war suggested a dream to me […] I was on the porch, watching paratroopers jump from invisible airplanes. The sky, filled with tiny raining men and white umbrellas, looked like the sea in summertime, when jellyfish migrate. As they came down and sailed around me, the paratroopers remained stuck in taut clothes lines. Kicking their feet in the air, they all yelled at me, while I ran from one to the other showing them the laundry and protesting: “Don’t you recognize your shirt? Here are your handkerchiefs. Who watches over your sleep if not I? Who always makes sure you find fresh laundered sheets on your bed? What are you complaining about? Who are you yelling at? […] You fly, and we remain on the ground. […] And in fact, after dangling for a while on the clotheslines, now with a soft bounce the aviators rose and spread again all over the sky. They looked like round yawns let our by the air.”

[Listen to this extract in Italian:]

 

If it were a painting, Masino’s book would be Max Ernst’s The Angel of the Home or the Triumph of Surrealism, painted in 1937.