The Struggle Towards the Female Ideal: Internalized Insecurity in the Works of Natalia Ginzburg

10 May 2022

In a patriarchal society, a woman is never free. The concept of the female ideal is an overbearing, unachievable concept that, in the eyes of society, sits as a barrier between women and success. The insecurity associated with the overbearing concept of femininity is internalized, whether she is conscious of it or not. In Natalia Ginzburg’s works, the female characters consistently remain hostile toward their own self. While some tales are filled with more tragedy than others, her stories all follow a similar outline – a relationship between a woman and man who are chronically unhappy together but stay together to maintain an unblemished public persona. The female character is uncomfortable with herself and her place in society, which leads her to seek refuge in the presence of a male, who inherently represents a safety and sureness for the future. These female characters, indifferent in their situation, represent an uncertainty within themselves, an internal disturbance in the path to individuality and determining their place in the world, either as a woman who is used or as a human. Published in 1963, Ginzburg’s personal narrative Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings) illustrates her growth from young girl into distinguished writer and wife. Her autobiographical piece highlights how the bond between a close-knit family is sometimes the strongest, and how the family she was born into prepared her for the family she would later form with her husband, Leone, and their son, Carlo. Her personal story, although filled with sorrow and isolation, differs extremely from those of her characters. Her stories, which almost always feature a female writer, like herself, represent a foil of Ginzburg’s life – would what she be if she did not have the support from her mother and the reliant relationships with her siblings? In Natalia Ginzburg’s body of work, the female protagonist struggles with her own insecurity in not being able to live up to and/or balance the expectations of being both a mother and a wife, while also still maintaining her own identity.

In the patriarchal husband and wife relationships which exist throughout most of Natalia Ginzburg’s works, speaking from the woman’s perspective grants the audience a view from the inside. In so many of her pieces, the female character plays the same role: a woman who does not see anything of herself outside of the family that she has created, whether it is the relationship between her and her partner or her offspring. In each unique story, the woman is isolated, even though she may have friends or hobbies on the outside. The husband has trapped his wife into exclusively tying her self-worth to the well-being of the family, therefore its demise or lack thereof is purely her responsibility. The role of the mother in relation to the power of the father is no new concept. The ruling system of patriarchy in combination with the common cycle of emotional abuse has fostered the concept of the idealized woman: an exalted mother and wife who cares for the family selflessly, without taking her own needs into account. Quite often, the daughter directly follows in her mother’s footsteps, being handed off to a husband the instant that she is no longer considered the property of her father. In White Whiskers, the main character sees herself as a burden to her parents, which is reinforced when she begins to attend a public school and is set further apart from her peers. Her parents are overly protective of their daughter, but she seems to enjoy the atmosphere, referring to her time at home as “quite pleasant” (Ginzburg 131). However, once she begins speaking to the girls her age at school, she learns how different her family is from the others, mostly due to their difference in financial situation. The protagonist’s family seems to be less well-off than her classmates, although her family is not at all poor, she is still caught off guard by this difference. Her relationship with her mother deteriorates, as she compares her own mother to those of her classmates. When she returns home for lunch after her first day:

I didn’t answer [mother]. I was punishing her with cold silence. I was punishing her for sending me to school alone, for having bought me a fountain pen that leaked, for making me wear an overcoat she thought was ‘still good’ and I found horrible… and for not having an ‘at home’ day, as, to my deep desolation, I had found that all the other girls’ mothers had. (Ginzburg 133)

She becomes enraged that her mother could not have provided better for her, even though earlier that morning, the protagonist was not even privy to these variables which are so affecting their relationship. She becomes so consumed with the fact that “My mother didn’t have this ‘at home’ day” (Ginzburg 135), that she blames the fact that she has no friends at school on the belief that her mother is not proper enough to socialize with those of her schoolmates. Next, she begins to distance herself from her mother, realizing that “my mother had become something so poor and inattentive” (Ginzburg 138). She develops feelings of superiority over her mother, villainizing her mother due to her lack of formal education. Her father, too, becomes detached from the family dynamic, and the protagonist begins to see her teacher, who she refers to as “white whiskers” (Ginzburg 138) as a more fit paternal figure: “I made [the teacher] a symbol of all the things that were unknown to me and filled me with horror. He was my everything: … he was my loneliness, my inability to make friends, my difficulties with homework, my regret at growing up, the melancholy I felt when darkness fell over the city” (Ginzburg 139). Her teacher, presumably a distinguished and well-educated man, has replaced the role of her parents, leaving her home to become a place of darkness in her mind. Feeling that she has outgrown the abilities of her father and “mother, inadequate as ever” (Ginzburg 139), when she is not at school, “the melancholy never disappeared” (Ginzburg 140). Because her own mother does not fit the standards the mothers of her classmates follow, her own ego, boosted only by her taking part in formal education, has led her to distance herself from her parents, her only companions. In her book Italian Women’s Writing, author Sharon Wood breaks down the writing structures of various famous female Italian writers such as Anna Banti, Grazia Deledda, and Matilde Serao. In the chapter for Natalia Ginzburg, Wood speaks highly of how Ginzburg’s personal life and heritage have seeped into almost every piece she has created. The tragedy present in Ginzburg’s pieces, Wood says, is written with such casuality and consciousness in a way that is unique from other female writers of the 1860s to 1990s, as is the time period focused on in Wood’s book. In addition, Ginzburg highlights the passivity present in her characters’ relationships: “The failure of women in Ginzburg’s early stories to realize themselves, or even to comprehend their own feelings, is matched by the failure of their men to offer relationships which are anything more than superficial or casual” (Wood 139). The women that Ginzburg creates act solely for others, isolated by the identity that they strive to achieve, and seemingly will never live up to. These women are spurred on by the pressure to find a husband, in a world where marriage is a hypothetical promise for a content family and happy future. With the “...common female destiny of subservience and double standards…” (Wood 138), Ginzburg’s female characters do not marry out of love but instead out of necessity. Even still, Ginzburg does not put the prospect of a predestined failed marriage, such as is the case with so many of her characters, solely on the fault of the wife who is not attentive or on the disloyal husband but because of the combination of the two. Ginzburg says of the unstable relationships she paints so often, quoted in Wood’s book:

It is wrong to think that the humiliations suffered by women are the single essence of the relationships between women and men. It is a crude, impoverished, reductive and limiting vision of the world. It is a vision of the world which does not reflect reality. The world is a complicated and multiplatform: particularly complicated, multiplatform and dramatic are the relationships between women and men. (Wood 140)

In every failed marriage, both partners are to blame, says Ginzburg. Even still, she argues, in the cases that are present in her stories where one partner is so horrible to the other that you can not help but feel bad, the downfall of the relationship was due to the actions of both parties. Vocally an anti-feminist, Ginzburg’s passive female main characters are so often lost in a world where one’s status is only defined by their relationship to males and they choose to remain in this world, in spite of their own well-being.

The role of a mother has not shifted much over time. The woman at home is, ideally, unemployed except for taking care of children, husband, and the home. She has to act flawless at all times so as not to dirty her own image in the eyes of her children. The rigid social structure of the Italian nuclear family combined with the societal expectations placed upon the maternal figure come together to form the sublime image of the mother, a woman that can do no wrong, that will sacrifice everything to care for her family, and is never unhappy. In The Mother (1948), the mother of two small children is examined through their young eyes, who cannot grasp that their mother is unlike those of their friends. The reader assumes that she is a young mom, so much so that the boys see her more like a sister as their grandmother takes the role of a maternal figure, but still, “[The boys] didn’t know how old she was” (Ginzburg 77). Since she does not physically or possibly even psychologically fit the societal maternal ideal that has been placed in the boys’ minds, they have instead pushed her away: 

Their mother was not an important person. The important people were their grandmother, their grandfather, and Aunt Clementina, who lived in the country and came to visit every now and then, bringing chestnuts and maize flour; Diomira the maid was important, and so was the frail porter Giovanni, who made cane chairs. They were all very important to the two boys because they were strong people who could be trusted, who knew the difference between right and wrong, who were very good at everything they did, and were always full of common sense and strength…. When the boys were left alone in the house with their mother they felt scared just as if they were all alone. (Ginzburg 77)

The boys do not really understand her and why she acts differently. Conversely, she does not trust them either as “She would tell them to turn their backs while she got undressed” (Ginzburg 77), even though these are the same children that fed themselves from her breasts just years ago. As the boys have grown older, their mother acts as if she is still young, leaving the boys at home to go out at night, and dodging their questions about her whereabouts when she returns. In Memory & Melancholy, Wood comments on the instability that the boys discover within their mother:

Her vitality and sexuality earn her the disapproval not only of her parents but also of her children: she no longer represents the clarity and natural authority which they seek and which lends order to their world. This volatile mother, who stays out late, plucks her eyebrows, puts yellow powder on her face and smokes in bed, earns only their contempt and mistrust. Traditional life is represented by the more solid grandparents and the family servant, Diomora. (Wood 141)

Rather than caring for her sons, she has seemingly passed the responsibilities off to her own parents, who also seem to have given up on her. The boys’ father is absent, but only because he passed away when they were young. Therefore, instead of having a stable marriage, the mother is seeing men that she is not dating, which further distances her from the maternal ideal. Having both a vibrant nightlife and no consistent partner, she is further ostracized, not just from her family but from the other mothers. The idea of the mother is seen as an inherently nonsexual being, only performing intercourse for the purpose of repopulating, while the unmarried woman participates in casual sex. The “tension between woman as sexual being and woman as mother within a rigid family and social structure” (Wood 142) produces a unique type of isolation from the mother’s perspective, which the reader never sees. The only person she is able to be herself around is the men whom she presumably surrounds herself with. However, if this is brought up, she becomes instantly ashamed – her younger son reports back to her “‘we saw you and there was a man with you.’ Their mother turned around with a jolt and looked at him angrily…. Both boys understood that they must forget about that memory, and they both tried as hard as they could to get rid of it” (Ginzburg 82). She is still able to produce in them a sense of shame – “the boys would feel ashamed” (Ginzburg 78) and embarrassed of their mother’s actions – even though she stands before them as their adult figure and they have nothing to do with her. The boys internalize their opinions on their mother: “[the older boy] felt there was something disgusting about his mother crying into the wet pillow – ‘a boy feels disgusted with his mother when she cries,’ he thought” (Ginzburg 80). The older boy has to rapidly mature in order to deal with his mother and also play a parental role for his younger brother, resulting in his giving in to societal norms and internally belittling and disrespecting his mother. One night, the boys discover that their mother has died, which is revealed to the reader as a suicide, but not to the boys. At her funeral, Aunt Clementina, Diomira, and their grandparents all come together in one place, whom the boys view as strong figures, and who would presumably never act so selfishly as to take their own life. Aunt Clementina adopts the boys and “Everyone was very good to them, and kissed and cuddled them, and they felt very ashamed. They never spoke about their mother” (Ginzburg 85). The family chose to gloss over her passing rather than reflect on the death of the boys’ birth mother, which seems to not affect the two boys at all. Here, the mother who strays from obeying society’s maternal expectations is pushed away by even the sons she has birthed and the parents who raised her. The Children (1934) is another story told from the perspective of two children, Giorgio and Emilia, who also cannot comprehend their mother. In this story, however, the children meet and have a parental-type relationship with their mother’s ‘boyfriend,’ while in The Mother the presence of a boyfriend is only alluded to and barely even picked up on by the boys. The infidelity is hidden to the children by her referring to the boyfriend as Uncle Bindi, and while it is unclear if this man is actually the children’s uncle, it is certain that they are having an affair. The presence of their own mother is a fearful experience for the children: “They had always been afraid of her. Everything that belonged to her… all of these things took on a strange and evil meaning in their eyes” (Ginzburg 39). Obviously, the mother and her children have an unhappy relationship. She acts erratically when alone with her children. Her temperament evens out when Bindi is over, but she returns to her impulsive self when he leaves. The children seek refuge in their own imaginations, comparing their mother to those of their friends: “They tried to invent a new mother; they wanted her to be plump and blonde like the mother of their little friends – the Oppenheims” (Ginzburg 39). Ms. Oppenheim serves as a foil for their mother, acting in this case as the perfect societal maternal figure, therefore everything that their mother is not. The children “lived the frenetic and difficult life of children who go to school, and whose existence is really quite similar to the grown ups” (Ginzburg 39). With their father “always away on business” (Ginzburg 39), the children have no solid relationship with either parent, but do not seem to be bothered by it. Even when their father is home, they still barely see him and even still do not know much about him. The narrator adds “The children realized quite soon that [their father] too was afraid of their mother” (Ginzburg 40), revealing that even the relations between their still-married parents is dramatically distant. Therefore, Bindi is the sole person that brings joy to the mother –of which her own children are not even capable of – with the narrator saying “Nobody made her laugh like Uncle Bindi did” (Ginzburg 40). Like their mother, Emilia and Giorgio adore Uncle Bindi, and the entire mood of the household seems to lift when he comes over to visit. Giorgio reminds his sister “‘Mamma will tell us off’” (Ginzburg 41) if they go try to talk to Uncle Bindi without their mother present, while Emilia replies to him “No, [Mamma] won’t tell us off, she’s always in a good mood when Uncle Bindi is around. Don’t you remember that day, it was Christmas day and you dropped a glass and she didn’t say anything?” (Ginzburg 41). These lines highlight two of the more important characteristics of the children’s relationship with their mother – firstly, that the children are aware of the change that Uncle Bindi brings to the mother’s attitude, and secondly that the children call her ‘mamma’ even through her tense moods. Next, the children burst into their mother’s room, where Bindi has since left. Instantly, they can tell of her mood switch, yet still lovingly refer to her as ‘Mamma:’

She picked up the clothes the children have left on the floor, folded them up and piled them on the seat. ‘No more, I can’t take any more from you. This is too much – I don’t want you in the house any more. I shall send you away to boarding school; when it comes to this, boarding school is the only thing left. I shall tell your father as soon as he comes home. Enough is enough, I’ve been too soft and now you’ve exhausted me and I don’t want anything more to do with you.’ The children looked at her bewildered; they had never seen her like this before. As she spoke she swallowed her words, her lips quivered, and she beat her chest. ‘It’s too much, it’s too much. You’ve exhausted me, I’m being punished…’ (Ginzburg 42)

Her feelings of overwhelm turn to fear, realizing that her children could be finding out the truth about her affair after seeing the pair kiss, while in reality, the children still have no idea about the truth of their affair. The children and their mother are both silently in tears, in fear of this new facet of their mother’s anger, however, they still “called to her quietly, ‘Mamma’” (Ginzburg 43). The children are more innocent than the mother perceives, projecting a negative intent onto them when all they truly want is affection from a parent. She turns to them, noticing their naïvety, and says “‘You’re little and can’t understand… it was just a joke…. Can I trust you? You’re big enough to know how to keep a secret now’” (Ginzburg 43). Only now that her children have something to hold against her and could get her in trouble for (even though they are not aware of what occured) is the mother able to hold them in her lap and give them attention. She continues cajoling them: 

‘Come here, close to me. I don’t have anything but you, nothing else in the world. I won’t send you to boarding school, I want you to stay close to me. Tomorrow you don’t have to go to school, and we’ll spend the day together. You’ll see, it’ll be wonderful … but you musn’t say anything to anybody’…. The children didn’t know what else to say except ‘Mamma, mamma.’ (Ginzburg 43)

The children are not able to grasp the unhappiness and the loneliness of the mother, who is drowning in her unfulfilling marriage. Instead, they receive a bout of temporary love from their mother, “They closed their eyes. Tomorrow… the good Lord was preparing a beautiful day for them, full of delightful new things… In the afternoon, they would all go out, all three of them together holding hands, and who knew where they would go? Perhaps the cinema? Now their mother had really changed” (Ginzburg 43-44). The children, trapped in their young minds, confuse receiving gifts from their mother as receiving love. The last line of the passage, referring to their mother “really changing,” offers that the children believe this is a step forward – now, their mother will be like Mrs. Oppenheim, they’ll become a happy and picturesque family, or even see their father more often. However, this act of love is temporary and may only flare up again if she engages in another act that she could get caught for. The story ends with the line “They fell asleep, their hearts aching with happiness” (Ginzburg 44). While the reader never sees whether or not the children are taken out for a day of fun, it is implied that it will not even happen. Due to the treacherous mood of the mother and her constant falling through with promises, the mother will disregard their reward and instead continue the cycle of coldness. In Memory and Melancholy, Wood offers that as the mother, whose role is to uphold the innards of the family, falls apart within herself, “The women are no longer passive victims, no longer the centre of home and family, but neurotic, disordered and aimless:… They talk about themselves, continually, monstrously, while their husbands and lovers serve them, betray them, abandon them. And hit them – out of virile weakness” (Wood 150). While the wife and mother is fighting the struggles within herself and her own personal life, the uncaring husband and father does nothing to uplift and support. Instead he plays the role of the narcissistic and self-serving man who only wants his wife and family to fit the picturesque concept of a classic Italian nuclear family, without putting in any effort to understand her needs as a woman. There is a visible disconnect between the then-present generation of parents and their parents of the past, of which, Wood says “Their parents, remnants of a previous generation, offer useless, irrelevant advice” (Wood 150). These women of the past generation, who worked dually as wives and mothers, had grown so accustomed to the disregard of their needs, they may not have recognized it as unhealthy or even abusive. It is up to the current generation of mothers to attempt to overcome these traditional roles and boundaries. In The Son of Man, Ginzburg does not tell a story but instead her personal thoughts of her own country recovering from war, and the toll that takes on the people as they rebuild their culture amidst tragedy. In the titular line, she suggests that the current adult generation is more strong-willed than their parents’ generation, saying “There is no peace for the son of man…. the certainties of the past have been snatched away from us, and faith has never after all been a place for sleeping in. And we are a people without tears” (Ginzburg 51). The women of today, Ginzburg implies, have the ability to stand up for themselves, while the mothers of the past were restricted to the rules of obedience set by the patriarchal society of their generation. The ode closes with “There is an unbridgeable abyss between us and the previous generation…  Everyone thought and studied and managed his life quietly. It was a different time and probably very fine in its way. But we are tied to our suffering, and at heart we are glad of our destiny as men” (Ginzburg 4). The present generation is tied to their suffering and they must use the knowledge of the past combined with the cautiousness of the future to uplift the current women. 

As a wife, a woman is expected to care for her husband in every aspect. During the 1940s when these pieces are set, this means that even through infidelity, the wife shall tend to the needs of the husband. This places the wife in a role where she exists as a tool, not a person. In a time where marriage is the only thing that women should strive for, this feeling of being used is conditioned in the woman. Even if she is in an unhappy relationship, she feels lost without a husband to tend to. Even when the issue of the unloving husband is erased, she is lost disoriented without a man, even in a detached marriage. In The Dry Heart (1947), the unnamed female narrator is struggling with an unhappy marriage with a man named Alberto. The narrative opens with her killing Alberto, then trails off and recounts how they began their life together, eventually culminating with the same description of his murder. As the emotional narrator describes their journey, she sways from falling in, out of, and back into love with him as he shifts from a random older man into the father of her child and back into someone she no longer knows. She is notably inexperienced with receiving affection, citing that “...and I liked Alberto, too, and continued to see him. After 26 years life had seemed empty and sad because no man had ever paid any attention to me, much less given me gifts” (Ginzburg 77). Even though he seems “unwilling” (Ginzburg 76) to share any personal information about himself with her, such as tales of his childhood or even facts of his job, Alberto still stood out as her sole admirer. In addition, she is considerably younger than Alberto – she refers to herself as ‘a girl’ and Alberto as an “old man” (Ginzburg 73). She reflects “When a girl is very much along and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenseless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her” (Ginzburg 75). Due to her youth and naïvety, she thinks of him dreamily in her spare time and even yearns for him to visit her while she is vacationing, suspecting that their relationship is more intense than he is aware. In Memory and Melancholy, Sharon Wood says that “Ginzburg probes the narrator’s conviction that she is in love with him, a conviction based largely on fantasy, lack of experience and loneliness. The narrator – unnamed, like so many of Ginzburg’s women – succumbs to a degenerate Bovaryism, falling prey to the most banal and clichéd of romantic fantasies and illusions” (Wood 140). Soon, her attraction towards him falls towards obsession, they marry, and she finds out that he has been in love with Giovanna, another married woman, for years, and that he only got married to have a sort of leverage against her. At this time in Italy, adultery was something assumed to happen, and ignored. With Alberto going into the marriage knowing that it was not going to work, he has no concern for her emotions, and acts childish, closed off, and unavailable towards her. Continuously, she watches him go for weekends with Giovanna while she is at home with their baby daughter. However, Alberto remains the only man she has ever loved, and she still is desperate for his validation: “I looked in vain for something amusing to say to him so that he wouldn't be too bored with me” (Ginzburg 96). After having dropped her parents and her closest friend Francesca for home life with Alberto, the baby whom she has become so close to in her involuntary isolation falls ill with a fever and soon passes away. This tragedy is revealed to the reader bluntly,  “Then he told me it might be meningitis. At 10 in the evening the baby died” (Ginzburg 136). She uses the same dull tone in describing the moment she killed Alberto, to the point where it is arguably unclear to the audience whether she truly shot him or not:

‘Tell me the truth,’ I said.

‘What truth?’ he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook… himself leaning out of a window to wave a handkerchief.

I shot him between the eyes. (Ginzburg 71)

The narrator describes her crises using the same sparse language with which Alberto managed to enchant her. The family she yearned for has been wholly destroyed, and while she now feels empty, she had actually been feeling empty for quite some time:

But when one day I finally said something he seemed displeased and explained to me at length why I was wrong. I could have bitten off my tongue for having spoken. I remember the time before we were married when we sat endlessly in cafés and I babbled on without stopping. Then it was easy enough for me to talk. I said whatever came into my head and moved before him with all the confidence of youth. Now that I had had the baby and the baby was dead I couldn't bear the idea of his leaving me. (Ginzburg 140)

Though they have fallen out of love, her world is empty and all she can do is cling to Alberto, who is still actively seeing Giovanna, even in the wake of his daughter’s death. Having never known love, the narrator holds onto whatever is still hers, even if it is just in the sense of a legal marriage. After she kills him, the final sentence of the piece is “I felt that the time of conventional and clear-cut answers had come for ever to a stop within me” (Ginzburg 149). Though she has been lifted from the weight of Alberto’s husbandly manipulation, his impressions still lie with her, and it is implied that she kills herself right after taking his life. While she was undoubtedly aware of the game of exploitation that Alberto would constantly bait her with, she still stayed with him, still had love for him, and still cherished his attention. Similarly, in My Husband (1941), the unnamed narrating young woman is caught in an adulterous marriage with an older man. She is married off without first meeting her husband-to-be, motivated by the expectations to grow up and move out of her aunt’s house. However, the intimacy that she expected from their marriage falls short: “I barely spoke to him at all when we got married. He never kissed me or brought me flowers; indeed, he has done none of the things which fiancés usually do… I felt ready to love that man, if he would only help me. He had to help me. I had to make him do this. Yet when we left the next day nothing had changed at all. We barely said a word to each other” (Ginzburg 55-56). As a young woman with dreams of having a loving husband, the lack of intimacy or even communication shocked her. The couple were never happy with each other, just physically attracted. Ginzburg’s writing paints both the husband and wife as responsible for the failure of their marriage: both parties are seeking refuge from their past. He is not forthcoming with her, and is trying to find an escape from his obsession with his underage lover while she wants to be clean of her life of poverty. Almost as soon as they got married, he tells her that he is in love with a teenage girl in the village named Mariuccia but he knew they could never marry both because of her financial status and age. He tries to console his wife, saying “‘When I saw you I thought that by tying myself to you I would be freeing myself from her, maybe I would forget her because I didn’t want her…[I want a woman] who [i]s mature and responsible” (Ginzburg 58). Whenever she brings up Mariuccia’s name to him, he shuts her down, saying that “it’s all in the past” (Ginzburg 59) even though the wife is sure that the affair is so clearly being continued. She narrates “He had learned to lie to me, and it didn’t bother him any more… I had become dried up and lifeless. I wasn’t suffering, and I didn’t feel any pain. I too was lying to him: I was living by his side as if I loved him, when really I didn’t love him; I felt nothing for him” (Ginzburg 62). Eventually, Mariuccia becomes pregnant with his child. Already living a sad existence and mundane married life, her eyes are now open as to why her husband is out all day Self-aware, she knows that she should leave him, but still does not, and over time becomes more upset with herself for staying than with him for his infidelity. After Mariuccia dies in pregnancy and he kills himself out of grief, the wife, now widowed, feels no pain for the two that have just passed but only confusion: “There wasn’t a single place in the world where I wanted to go” (Ginzburg 66). Feeling out of place the entire marriage after tying herself to someone who didn’t “utte[r] a single word to me” (Ginzburg 66), she has been freed from the loveless relationship but is still trapped under the psychological stress and doubt that he has left upon her. Living her own hidden and self-conscious life beside the renowned cheater, a man whom she barely knows, his death has not liberated her from the unwantedness she feels. Even though the direct problem has been killed off, having been discarded so openly and publicly has left her lost and insecure with herself. Once his betrayal and obsession is revealed to her, she, whose sole purpose is to be someone’s wife, is still unable to change or adapt to the situation, as even the children cannot compensate for the lack of love in the marriage from which they came. In An Absence, the story is told from the perspective of the husband, Maurizio, while the wife, Anna, is away presumably out having an affair. Uniquely, all the reader knows of Anna is through Maurizio’s eyes. In addition, Anna is self-assertive, independent, and from a higher social class than Maurizio. In their arranged marriage, Anna does not need her husband’s approval to feed her self-esteem, but the opposite: Maurizio still finds himself “apologizing in his heart to Anna” (Ginzburg 25) when he missteps even when she is out. He is not emotionally open to Anna yet he is blind to the fact that she does not respect him. The behaviors they have developed due to the arranged marriage have eroded their relationship: “Anna was not in love with him, and neither was he with Anna. Both of them knew these things, and yet they were not unhappy, even if at the beginning there had been some disagreements” (Ginzburg 26). They are not in love, yet when she leaves the house to see another man, it “left him feeling miserable…. Then, she would return, her hair made lighter by the sea water and those beautiful red lips set against her dark skin” (Ginzburg 25-27). Maurizio seems to forget her assumed infidelity and returns to adoring her as soon as she reenters his house. His romanticized and reflective tone hints that he loves her, yet it is narrated that “He could not recall ever having been in love. He could not recall ever having fiercely lusted after a woman….. ‘God, why didn’t you make me a man, like all the other men? Why don’t you give me the strength to protect my child, to stand up for Anna?’” (Ginzburg 29) Their apathetic and forced feelings have placed Maurizio in a jealous yet guilty position – with his wife appearing as so much more powerful in comparison to him, he is unwilling to take the role of a husband and much less a father. In addition, there is an aspect of malice in Maurizio’s actions. He walks along the river, contemplating the different women that he could go cheat on his wife with, but inside he knows that she could not care less whether he is or is not faithful. Suffering from a lack of control, he stands at the bridge and “He felt vaguely proud of having briefly thought of suicide a moment before on the bridge” (Ginzburg 29), as a sort of last acting-out in an effort to get her attention. While both Anna and Maurizio are responsible for their passive marriage, his childishness and spinelessness have led him to wallow in his own inadequacy instead of caring for their children or his wife. This story is unique against Ginzburg’s catalogue due to both its point of view of the male and the lack of the female being an active character. Here, Maurizio is left alone, seeing his wife as manipulative and the reason that he has ended up so insufficient to the point that his only option is to take pity on himself. In He and I (1962), another unnamed couple is affected by the rift of twenty years of marriage but also of a feeling of inferiority on the part of the wife. She is a successful and talented writer but has lost hope in herself, seeing herself as less than her husband. She and her husband are seemingly opposites: “He loves travelling, unfamiliar foreign cities, restaurants. I would like to stay at home all the time and never move. All the same I follow him on his many journeys. I follow him to museums, to churches, to the Opera. I even follow him to concerts, where I fall asleep” (Ginzburg 35). Over the course of their relationship, she has become submissive, dependent, opinionless, and passive: constantly following him but never leading. Throughout the piece, Ginzburg highlights the dichotomy in what should be a happily married couple – naming what he likes and why she is the opposite. She says “I love and understand one thing in the world and that is poetry” (Ginzburg 35) and that “I don't even know how to make myself an education out of anything, even those things that I love best in life; they stay with me as scattered images, nourishing my life with memories and emotions but without filling the void, the desert of my education” (Ginzburg 38). The things she values above all, her solitude and her writing, have been ignored and diminished to the point that they no longer are part of her world. Instead, they are replaced by the judgements of her husband. Easily irritated, he cracks jokes towards her, such as that she forgot the actor’s name at a performance or is incompetent when it comes to grocery shopping. She, in turn, internalizes these comments, shifting herself into the projection of what he wants of a wife and dulling herself down so that her husband appears more established. His passive-aggressive questioning of her ability chips away at her self-esteem, but they continue through their lives together. She hints that she is emotionally abused by him: “he says that without him I am good for nothing. I don’t know how to manage my time; he does” (Ginzburg 39). Here, it is evident to the reader that her detachment from writing is due to how heavily her husband’s opinion affects her, to the point that she has become idle in her own life and follows his directions like a pet. Like the female narrator in The Dry Heart, she is inherently aware of her husband’s influences. The piece ends with a reflection of their early life: 

If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and sometimes I ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost 20 years ago on the Via Nazionale, two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk;  so young, so educated, so involved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street. (Ginzburg 46)

While they began as two young lovers with so much in common, over the two decades of life together, they have adjusted to the husband’s habits and wants and diminished the work and desires of the wife. With his careful coaxing, she sees herself as nothing outside of a wife – she is no longer a writer or creative but is instead just a wife that will never be good enough as long as she is inadequate in her husband’s eyes.

In the time of 1930’s Italian patriarchy and Fascism, the gaze of the public is all that matters: the public persona is much more important than being emotionally well. The inability to balance being a mother and wife along with personal desires eats away at the relationships she has with others and, ultimately, her relationship with herself. In Family Sayings, Ginzburg highlights the unique bond that she holds with her family, especially with her mother. Their mother-daughter relationship is not perfect, but as they grow older they began to accept the faults that may come between them. Her mother’s resilience in dealing with her father’s “dark moods” (Ginzburg 23) consisted of “[finding] a way to enjoy the places and things around her and to be happy” (Ginzburg 24). The hot and cold dichotomy between her mother and father’s distinctive moods created a unique atmosphere, where the children were to tiptoe around one parent but felt comfortable around the other. Of Ginzburg and her four siblings, she writes:

We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don’t write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood… 

and we fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. (Ginzburg 22-23).

Even though the siblings have grown apart and moved on from their youth, the notes of happiness in their childhood still move them, simply with a single word. Natalia Ginzburg’s adolescence, she says, has given her a bravery that has prepared her to move forward in the future as a female writer and strong woman, but also as a mother and wife.