SOURCE: Giorgio, Adalgisa. “Natalia Ginzburg's ‘La madre’: Exposing Patriarchy's Erasure of the Mother.” Modern Language Review 88, no. 4 (October 1993): 864-80.

In the following essay, Giorgio examines “La madre” to illustrate “how Ginzburg succeeds in putting forward a powerful criticism of society's oppression of a mother, without directly expressing any such criticism.”

In the course of a writing career spanning almost sixty years, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91) focused exclusively on the representation of the Italian family, the relationships between its members, and women's alienation within it. With reference to the latter theme, it has become customary for critics to emphasize how Ginzburg's declared opposition to feminism did not prevent her, especially in the early part of her career, from producing powerful representations of the condition of women in our society.¹ In order not to make her say what she did not intentionally put into her novels, it is often remarked how...