The other Italian question: Gender and the figure of modern Italy in British culture, 1820-1940

摘要

This dissertation explores the political implications of how the aesthetic image of Italy---concentrated in the erotically charged female figure of Italia---circulated in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British culture. It argues that the so-called "Italian question," whether and to what degree to recognize Italian independence, is an analog to the "woman question," whether and how to alter women's political and legal status in Britain. Since Italy was so thoroughly feminized in nineteenth-century British culture, discussions about it were charged with the same sexual politics---and political stakes---that infused the domestic debate over middle-class women's place in society. And reigning ideologies equated both metaphorical and real femaleness with political powerlessness. While nineteenth-century male writers generally maintained a reactionary, sentimental image of Italy as the bel paese during the years of Italian political and military activity, women writers dispensed with the romantic view of Italy in favor of one that recognized and even celebrated Italy's modernity, both political and industrial. Victorian women were more advanced than their male contemporaries in articulating a non-mythic, recognizably modern, and implicitly liberal view of Italy as a developing nation with legitimate claims to independence. By resisting the aestheticizing gestures that depicted both women and Italy in idealized, and therefore depoliticized, terms, British women demonstrated a previously unacknowledged form of Victorian feminism. Browning, Dickens, Ruskin, Arnold, Lear, and James serve as satellite figures for the main test case---the Italian writings of George Meredith. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry represents the most sophisticated contrast to that publicized by male Victorian culture; British women's travel literature on Italy illustrates the scope of nineteenth-century women's commitment to representing Italy antinostalgically. The dissertation concludes in the early twentieth century with an analysis of Virginia Woolf's response to the hypermasculine image of Italy created by Mussolini's fascist regime. Woolf continues the legacy of British women's keen political assessment of reductive gendered representations of Italy by offering an opposing, creative vision of the peninsula as a place of androgynous anonymity.