Paola Masino - Subject to Fascist censorship before its first publication in 1945, this novel offers a surrealist criticism of Fascism and the rigid notion of womanhood it promoted

Paola Masino, Birth and Death of the 

Housewife, Marella Feltrin-Morris, SUNY 

Press, 2010.

Introduction (pdf)

read it at Google Books

First English translation of Paola Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia, her most controversial novel that provoked Fascist censorship for its critical portrayal of marriage and motherhood.

Stepping out of her beloved trunk full of bread crumbs, dust, spider webs, books, and ragged funeral ornaments, the young protagonist of Paola Masino’s most controversial novel realizes that her fate is already sealed. She will have to conform to society’s expectations of a woman: her wild imagination will have to be controlled, her intelligence kept at bay. In short, she will have to become a Housewife. Subject to Fascist censorship before its first publication in 1945, Birth and Death of the Housewife offers a surrealist criticism of Fascism and the rigid notion of womanhood it promoted. In her depiction of a woman’s struggle to play a role that simply does not correspond to her desires, Masino expresses a frustration and a rebellious instinct rarely found among her contemporaries. Defying interpretations and standing alone among the heroines of twentieth-century Italian literature, Masino’s Housewife remains an uncomfortable, enigmatic figure whose impudent determination to challenge the bulwarks of traditional female roles reaches beyond historical boundaries and resonates powerfully with contemporary readers.

“The novel’s magisterial combination of forms—from the diary to the drama to the reading journal to the fable—indisputably earns Masino a place in the pantheon of great modernist masters.” — Review of Contemporary Fiction

“The book throbs with almost molecular visions of the world and its materiality, with wandering thoughts imbued with poetry and philosophy, with intimate irony where the body confronts its urges, with dramatised scenes displaying the social animal, with preposterous dialogues unveiling the absurdity of marriage. The book’s varied and biting range of situations allows nonsensical psychodramas and sublime ramblings to succeed each other without warning. […] In her formidably pertinent analysis of women’s issues, which avoids general ideas like the macho plague in order to explore the troubling backdrop of secret emotions animated and stirred by her neuralgic prose, Paola Masino doesn’t only denounce women’s enslavement to domesticity. Diverting the narration from its expected goals (the fable), she takes us in a painful and magical geography of madness that contaminates all the artifices of fiction.” — Claro, Le Monde des livres

“This depiction of a woman who vainly tries to fight against her unavoidable fate is breathtaking in its stylistic modernity.” — L’Obs

“Paola Masino is incredibly surprising and disturbing.” — Livres Hebdo

“A feminist amazingly modern novel” — Femme Actuelle

“This novel is remarkably inventive.” — Le Temps

Massimo Bontempelli, the modern inventor of “realismo magico,” one of the 20thcentury’s most recognized literary genres, made my 2018 “best of” list. I’d been unaware that his spouse, Paola Masino, had been an author of perhaps even greater daring (at age 16, Masino had approached Luigi Pirandello to ask him to produce a play she had written). Masino’s originality is in full display in her best-known work, Birth and Death of the Housewife (Nascita e morte della massaïa, 1945, first published in installments in 1941-42). This dense, lyrical, disturbing, stylistically inventive, even lacerating novel employs the narrative advertised by its title to engage in a borderline surrealistic dissection of the Fascist ideals of womanhood and the centrality of family. The novel opens with the housewife as a child, living inside of a trunk filled with books, bits of bread, spider webs and moss, desperately consumed with the idea that she is doomed to kill her own mother with heartbreak. The housewife emerges from her trunk, is presented to the world at a coming-out party, meets a dark-haired suitor who kisses her and disappears, then marries a distant cousin who plops her into a “wretched” life of idleness and management of servants. Linearity then takes a detour, as the housewife voyages through often nightmarish scenes of domesticity via diary entries, dreams, letters, a dramatic play set within the novel, all the while shifting between acquiescence and rebellion, a journey through a twilit landscape which at times resembles the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, Masino’s colleague and friend, or the lugubrious, stark atmosphere of Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies. Masino’s protagonist is a stunningly compelling character - disquieting, uncontainable, ferocious and sympathetic at once. “This story has no room for general ideas,” states the housewife. The particulars, one must admit, are quite enough. The novel is not easy to find, but well worth the trouble. - http://seraillon.blogspot.com/2019/12/best-of-2019-part-1-italian-story.html

Paola Masino and the housewife against fascism

A versatile intellectual and a remarkable figure in twentieth-century literary and artistic circles, Paola Masino (1908–1989) wrote novels, short stories, poems, librettos, and worked as a translator and as a journalist. Birth and Death of the Housewife is the first of her novels to be translated into English.