Strong Women
And some men who wrote them. (Includes spoilers)
The Leopard—Il Gattopardo in the original Italian—is the only and celebrated novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, published posthumously in 1958. Now it is a fine limited series on Netflix, gorgeously filmed on location in Sicily, with one episode in Torino. Il gattopardo, the predator of the title, is Don Fabrizio, the Prince and patriarch of the Salina family of Palermo. Owner of lemon groves and two homes with many rooms, Fabrizio has lived a life of unparalleled power and privilege. He has a subservient religious wife, mistresses, sons and daughters, and an orphaned nephew whom he values more than his own sons. In another time, he might have lived out all his days in ease, but in 1860, times are changing. A revolution has begun as Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army of Redshirts forcibly unite the separate territories of the peninsula and the island of Sicily into one nation, taking power and influence away from the aristocracy in the former city/states. In the face of upheaval, Don Fabrizio tries to maintain his life in accordance with time-honored traditions. Soon enough, as in all revolutions, the idealism of unification falters in the face of corruption and greed.
The book is translated in English as The Leopard, but the animal on the Salina family crest is not a leopard, but rather a smaller feline species called a serval. This is a hint that Don Fabrizio’s eldest daughter Concetta is the one to watch. When we first meet her, she has just returned from convent schooling. Her goals in life are limited in such a traditional, Catholic society. A woman in Sicily can marry, enter a convent, or, as in the case of Fabrizio’s mistress, find a wealthy patron. In fact, as shown in the series, his mistress is much more comfortable in her looser clothing than the buttoned-up, tightly-corseted, and hoop-skirted women of the upper classes.
(As a side note, some gratitude here that we women are no longer so confined by our clothing. Our fashion is now comfortable enough that many men choose to wear it. I love trousers and dresses alike and I love that men can ditch a buttoned-up shirt and tie for a dress if this pleases them. The amount of time conservatives spend fussing over who chooses to wear what and how individuals choose to be addressed pronoun-wise is only a hint of their agenda to send us all back to the 1950s, when women, including my mother, were still wearing girdles and corseted bras and anyone whose life did not conform to rigid notions of gender and sexuality was forced to hide. I love photos of my mother from the 1960s when she ditched the girdles, got a pixie cut, and availed herself of birth control.)
As the daughter of a noble family, Concetta seems destined for marriage to a man of her own social class and that would be an end to her story. Lampedusa was criticized by many for writing an apologia for the nobility, but I see a different arc, one in which a woman, reluctantly, but finally heroically, makes a life for herself and finds her power. As Fabrizio whispers to Concetta as lays dying, her younger brother will hold the formal title, but she will be the force that keeps the family together.
This determined woman brings to my mind another reluctant heroine, Margaret Schlegel in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. In Edwardian England, Margaret and her younger sister Helena are fortunate to have inherited sufficient money to enjoy an independent and intellectual life. They gather with friends to discuss suffrage rights and the latest books. They attend concerts and lectures where they meet an idealistic but impoverished bank clerk. They can travel without a chaperone, which is how they meet the wealthy Mr. Wilcox, his wife, and children, who live in the house of the title. Hoop skirts are gone, corsets have relaxed, but women’s lives are still circumscribed. While marriage is still the normal expectation for most women, Margaret and Helena, as outliers, are not compelled to do so. Margaret’s biggest worry is finding a new house to live in, as her family’s lease is soon to expire (a familiar tale for any renter). The novel is about the literal intersection of social classes, and the surprising possibility of connections in a changing, but still stratified society. Younger Helena is more openly passionate in her opinions than Margaret, rebellious and impulsive in some of her choices. As contemporary women we might find her more to our taste—a woman who does as she pleases and fuck the consequences. But it is thoughtful Margaret who makes peace and creates a new way for them to live as an unconventional family at Howard’s End.
It takes a lot to create any fictional character with the stuff of imagination. It is a special achievement to fully realize characters of a different gender. E. M. Forster may have had particular insight as an outsider himself, a closeted gay man living in a country where homosexuality could land you in prison.
I do not know enough about Lampedusa’s life, except that he modeled Don Fabrizio on his grandfather. I am guessing that somewhere among his ancestral women, there were models for Concetta.
On the flip side, there is Pat Barker, author of the Regeneration trilogy about men trying to survive the horrors of World War I. She includes very few female characters in these novels. This is a world of traumatized young men fighting a war triggered by complex treaties signed by politicians whose own lives are never at risk. She brings a remarkable level of empathy for the patients recuperating in a psychiatric clinic for “shell-shocked” soldiers. In particular, we meet a pacifist poet and an avidly bisexual man from a working-class family, who despite the rigid class system that exists in the army just as it does at home, has nevertheless made it into an officer rank. The futility of “treatment” is central to the novels: what is the point of healing a traumatized soldier only to send him back to the battlefield as cannon fodder? One of the young men chooses to return in spite of being offered a safe office job, a kind of suicide, a way to end the absurd and nightmarish cycle.
For Concetta and Margaret, there is no bloodshed, but they fight all the same for dignity and independence in the face of heartbreak and disillusion. Margaret is wounded by the careless self-regard of her upper-class husband, but she never loses her commitment to love and joy. She rejects the mores of her own social class in accepting Helena’s out-of-wedlock child. Love is all that matters in the end. One could see Concetta’s final decision to forgo marriage as self-punishment. However, having lost her true love to another woman, and having witnessed the devastating spiritual and emotional costs of his ambition, she accepts a new role as the guardian of her family. Property laws in Italy at the time did not permit women to inherit titles and palaces on paper, but in every meaningful way, she becomes the ruler of the house, the new gattopardo.
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