Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo 9780823262298

Citation preview

Personal Effects

crit ical studies in italian am e ric a series editors: Nancy C. Carnevale and Laura E. Ruberto This series publishes works on the history and culture of Italian Americans by emerging as well as established scholars in fields such as anthropology, cultural studies, folklore, history, and media studies. While focusing on the United States, it will also include comparative studies with other areas of the Italian diaspora. The books in this series engage with broader questions of identity pertinent to the fields of ethnic studies, gender studies, and migration studies, among others.

Personal Effects E S S AYS O N M E M O I R , T E AC H I N G, AN D C U LT U R E I N T HE WO R K O F L OU I S E De S A LVO Edited by Nancy

Caronia and Edvige Giunta

fordham university press

n e w yor k

2 015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

for Louise DeSalvo and the students and writers she has inspired

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: “Habit of Mind” na n c y c aronia and e dv i g e g i u n ta

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Memoir Louise DeSalvo’s “Even in Death, La Bella Figura”: A Meditation on Honor, Respect, and the Silences That Bind margaux fragoso

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The Poetics of Trauma: Intertextuality, Rhythm, and Concision in Vertigo and Writing as a Way of Healing p eter c ov ino

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Fixing and Fictioning: Memory and Catholicism in Vertigo je a na d e l ro s s o

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Portrait of the Mother as a Writer and Researcher juli ja šu ky s

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Louise DeSalvo: Essaying Memoir jo sh ua fau s t y

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Teaching On Vulnerability and Risk: Learning to Write and Teach Memoir as a Student of Louise DeSalvo kym ragusa Fixing Things: What Louise DeSalvo Has Taught Me about Writing e m i ly be r nar d Dark Whiteness and Literacy without Assimilation: DeSalvo’s Unlikely Narrative k i m b er ly a. c o s t ino

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Contents

Mixing Bowl: On Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo in the Classroom, and the Day I Got into Hunter l i a o t tav iano Furthering the Voyage: Reconsidering DeSalvo in Contemporary Woolf Studies b en ja min d. h ag e n

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Culture The Context of Louise DeSalvo’s Impact: Incest in Virginia Woolf’s Biography m a r k h u s s ey “Thirty-seven Is the Unraveling Time” and Other Fictions of Fidelity in the Works of Louise DeSalvo jenn brandt

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Life Online: Skating and Breaking the Surface of the Self amy jo burns

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The Fruits of Her Labor: Louise DeSalvo’s Memoirs of Food and Family m a ry j o bona and j e n n i f e r- a n n d i g r e g o r i o k i ghtl i nge r

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Mapping the Female Ethnic Self in the Family Battleground: Vertigo and the Greek American Novel theodora patrona DeSalvo’s Rialto: On Moving as a Livable Bridge ilaria serra

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The Knife and the Bread, the Brutal and the Sacred: Louise DeSalvo at the Family Table jo h n g e nnar i

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Afterword. Crazy in the Study: Trying to Claim a Tradition in Louise DeSalvo’s Accented Writing anthony julian tamburri

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List of Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments We conceptualized this book in 2008 as a festschrift to mark Louise DeSalvo’s seventieth birthday in 2012. As we read initial essay proposals, however, we realized that while the book would still be a celebration of a writer, scholar, and teacher we both so greatly admired, the scope of Personal Effects was expanding. As the essays began to take shape, we recognized that each in its own way manifested the multiple and complex ties between DeSalvo’s work and key issues and contexts in US culture (and even British culture) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular, many of the contributions confirmed to us, again and again, the groundbreaking quality of the work of DeSalvo: her radical and influential Woolf scholarship, and her writing and teaching, which have played an instrumental role in defining and shaping the most significant and controversial literary genre of our times—the memoir. Our thanks go to our nineteen contributors for sharing our commitment to making this a book that would both recognize DeSalvo’s work and shed light on its origins, manifestations, and legacy. All the essays in Personal Effects were written for this book; with one exception, they are published here for the first time. We deeply appreciate our contributors’ enormous patience, integrity, and generosity as we labored, draft after draft, to make this collection a cohesive anthology that captured the generous spirit of DeSalvo’s work. Fredric W. Nachbaur, director of Fordham University Press, expressed early enthusiasm about our project. His faith in Personal Effects and his unwavering support spurred us on; we are profoundly grateful to him. We also thank the editors of the series Critical Studies in Italian America, Nancy C. Carnevale and Laura E. Ruberto, for envisioning our book’s place in it, for their important editorial input, and for the example they set as scholars. Our appreciation also goes to the two anonymous readers whose careful readings and invaluable comments have helped us make this a better book. We thank William Cerbone, Gregory McNamee, Eric Newman, and Katie Sweeney at Fordham University Press, who offered invaluable help through the many stages of the making of this book. Anthony J. Tamburri, a pioneer in Italian American studies and a longtime champion of this field, has written a beautiful Afterword to Personal Effects. We are indebted to him for his remarkable generosity and for being a stalwart supporter of our work, both now and in the past. We are grateful to the Italian American Studies Association (formerly the American Italian Historical Association). At its conferences, we hosted sessions on Louise DeSalvo’s work, where some of the essays included here were first presented. IASA has been a vital gathering point for scholars and writers who, over the decades, have forged a field whose visibility and recognition make the publication of a book such as Personal Effects possible. We thank current IASA president George Guida and past presidents Mary Jo Bona and Josephine Gattuso Hendin for their unerring support throughout the shepherding of this book. We extend our gratitude to Angel Eduardo for allowing us to use his photograph, “Early Bird,” for the book’s cover. We thank Rosangela Briscese for her assiduous work

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on the index and New Jersey City University and the University of Rhode Island’s Center for the Humanities for providing funds for the preparation of the book’s index. We thank Amy Jo Burns for her helpful and careful reading of the manuscript. Carmel Ferrer was generous with her time and promptly answered many technical and stylistic questions. Joshua Fausty offered insights and suggestions that helped us strengthen and focus our introductory essay. He was a much-appreciated interlocutor during the various stages of our work, at the desk and the dinner table. Nancy is grateful to Margaret Beatty, Jenn Brandt, Mary Saracino, and Anna Vaccaro for their friendship and support as she worked on this book while completing her dissertation and teaching. She offers gratitude to Michael Starkey and Harriet Elkington for being there and for offering important clarifications. She thanks the University of Rhode Island, where she has produced much of her work over the past several years. She offers especial thanks to Edvige Giunta, who serves as friend, mentor, co- editor, and sounding board. For the inspiration, joy, and love they provide, Nancy appreciates Eli Moses Rhodes Vaccaro and Sabrina Marie Iraggi, who, although young in years, remind her why work of this kind is essential. Edvige thanks New Jersey City University for granting course release time to work on this book and for being a supportive professional home for almost two decades. She extends her appreciation to her students, especially her memoir students—at NJCU and elsewhere—whose passion for studying Louise DeSalvo has inspired and convinced her that a book on this author was necessary. She is profoundly appreciative of the professionalism, collegiality, and friendship of Nancy Caronia, exemplary editor, scholar, writer, and friend. She is forever grateful to her husband, Josh Fausty, with whom she shares a longtime interest in Louise DeSalvo’s work; he has been her ideal life and intellectual companion. Her children, Emily Alice Cutts and Matteo Giunta Fausty, have, through the making of this book, exhibited the same love, patience, and grace they have invariably shown through each and every one of her projects. Finally, the extraordinary Louise DeSalvo has inspired this book and much of the work each of us has produced in other forms and venues. She met with us and answered countless questions over the years through email, by telephone, and during unforgettable, exquisite meals. Her example has been a guiding light for both of us. We dedicate the fruits of this laborious and joyful journey to her.

introduction

“Habit of Mind” Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta

What is simple is not easy. What is easy is not simple. — la o tz u

Memoirist No single memoir captures the essence of a life remembered. Memoir offers not a complete picture, but instead a fractal image of an experience or related experiences that shape a life. As Louise DeSalvo has taught us, memoir insists that the past be drawn anew each time one meets pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard. Memoir, unlike autobiography, does not offer an account of individual emergence, a narrative of the self retracing the steps that led to its present, socially and culturally recognized success; memoir is more than a coming-of-age narrative or a story of survival.1 Memoir, with its associative, spiral narrative, seeks to illuminate and understand the ties between the self and the world. In an interview, DeSalvo told us, “I think the major reason that you can . . . write memoir your whole life . . . and you can write about the same subject your whole life . . . is . . . that there is no single portrait. . . . [Portraits] . . . shift and change through time. That’s the reality. We’re at different stages of the life cycle each time we write.” 2 DeSalvo suggests that memoir does not outline a linear journey of the self-in-themaking, a self invested in its separateness and individuation from the community of its origins. Instead, the contemporary memoir, in its most original and literary manifestation, theorizes a notion of the self less individualistic and more fluid and inclusive than the self of autobiography. The self of memoir must be critically and ambivalently rooted in the stories of the communities the writer inhabits or has left behind if the writing is 1. See Giunta’s “Memoir and the Italian American Canon” (2010–2011). See also Judith Barrington’s Writing the Memoir (2002); Shari Benstock’s The Private Self: Theory and Practice in Women’s Autobiographical Writing (1988); Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again (2008); Jill Ker Conway’s When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998); Paul John Eakin’s edited collection The Ethics of Life Writing (2004); Thomas Larsen’s The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing the Personal Narrative (2007); and Sidonie Smith’s and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001). 2. Throughout, unless otherwise cited, quotations from Louise DeSalvo are taken from interviews and emails we conducted and exchanged in 2011 and 2012.

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to interrogate how relationships have formed, influenced, and changed the memoirist. Memoir thus reconfigures the relationship between the author and the self or selves on the page as well as the relationship between the writing and its readers.3 Readers are essential to this reconfiguration. DeSalvo embraces Virginia Woolf’s belief that the “meaning of a work” is “incomplete until it is shared with readers,” since that is when a writer “transcends the limits of the self” (Healing 209). DeSalvo, like Woolf, asks the reader of memoir to become an active participant in understanding and changing the political, social, and familial situations that memoir foregrounds.4 Writers write “to heal themselves,” according to DeSalvo, “but they also write to help heal a culture that, if it is to become moral, ethical, and spiritual, must recognize what these writers have observed, experienced, and witnessed” (Healing 216). This approach, which understands the self as related to a multitude of contexts, is integral to DeSalvo’s critique of the “recovery” narrative prevalent in popular memoirs that follow the narrative trajectory of autobiography (Breathless 150).5 The recovery narrative, DeSalvo explains, exonerates the reader of any responsibility for or complicity with the social and political contexts and institutions that may have determined or influenced the plight of the memoir’s narrator. This distinctly Anglo-American narrative of individual emergence attributes all responsibility for recovery (from trauma, poverty, loss, defeat, illness)— or the failure to recover—to the individual. In contrast, DeSalvo goes against what she describes in Breathless: An Asthma Journal (1997) as the “true American tradition of Benjamin Franklin” (151). Proclaiming herself “the imperfect asthmatic” (151), she refuses to

3. In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, “Cultures, or what are known as cultures, do not mix. They encounter each another, mingle, modify each other, reconfigure each other. They cultivate one another; they irrigate or drain each other: they work over and plough through each other, or graft one onto the other” (151). Nancy recognizes the change that occurs to individuals and communities with each meeting, intergroup or intragroup. The term “reconfigures” is especially apropos for contemporary memoirists and their readers since, while facts are stable, perceptions cannot be. Moreover, reconfiguration is a way to articulate how individuals and communities are active entities that can grow and change with each meeting. As a memoirist, DeSalvo makes this process of reconfiguration transparent. In Writing the Memoir, Judith Barrington examines the self-reflective function of memoir writing: “If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand the past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject, but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers” (29). 4. DeSalvo has researched, written about, and been influenced by Woolf over a period of four decades. DeSalvo’s overt engagement with and demand on the reader are reminiscent, most especially, of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). 5. DeSalvo states: “I see the perniciousness of the word recovery, for it suggests that the illness or the condition (asthma, whatever) is over, though it isn’t. It suggests, too, that people are personally responsible for curing their illnesses. I realize that I am against the neatness and the lie of what I suddenly recognize as the comforting arc of the recovery narrative. The narrative that says, in essence, I was sick, I suffered, I did this and that and the other thing, I figured it out, I made changes, I am now much better, don’t worry, there is nothing urgent we really need to do as people to help prevent asthma” (Breathless 150–151).

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take responsibility for her “imperfection” and holds accountable those who cause all forms of trauma— environmental, political, familial, and sexual (147). DeSalvo tells a story that unsettles readers and forces them to reflect on the ways in which they have surrendered—individually and collectively—political and social responsibility.6 The seed of DeSalvo’s commitment to the word as an instrument of change was planted early in her life. While her father served overseas in World War II, her mother taught the young Louise to read by reading to her daily. In Vertigo (1996), DeSalvo describes reading as the “greatest gift” that her mother gave her (64). She writes: “Then, as now, I am never so happy as when I am being read to, as when I am reading” (64). As DeSalvo grew up, her love of reading became the vehicle through which she came to understand the power of words to inspire change. Four years after her father returned from World War II, the family moved to a suburban enclave in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Her father, a machinist, worked for Stevens’ Towing Tank. Still a high school student, DeSalvo wrote a letter on his behalf, requesting that the company give him a pension when he retired. At that time, only “workers who were classified as ‘professionals’ [were deemed worthy of a pension]; as a laborer, her father had been denied that crucial benefit” (Giunta, “Introduction” xiv). The letter written by the teenage Louise made an impression; her father was reclassified as a professional and granted a pension. This experience gave DeSalvo a keen awareness of social injustice and of the power of words to serve as “weapons,” “the only ones in . . . [her] arsenal” (DeSalvo, Vertigo 77). In Vertigo, DeSalvo describes her father as a hard-working breadwinner thwarted by the hardships and contradictory feelings toward his working- class immigrant background and World War II. After his return from the war, he could be emotionally as well as physically abusive.7 DeSalvo’s mother, in turn, suffered severe bouts of depression throughout the author’s childhood. Rather than vilifying her family of origin or pathologizing violence and depression within the immigrant family, however, DeSalvo illustrates, through the story of her father, that the posttraumatic stress induced by the war was not simply the purview of the returning soldier, but of the entire family. She also focuses on the physical manifestations of depression as an illness with social and cultural roots. Avoiding sensationalism, DeSalvo depicts depression as a symptom that

6. In “Teaching Memoir at New Jersey City University” (2000), Giunta writes: “Nancy Mairs has written of the correlation between popular success and the ‘feel-good’ book—which she does not write (and neither does DeSalvo). Mairs calls her memoir, Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Non-Disabled (1997), ‘a feel-real book, and reality,’ she points out, ‘has never been high on any popular list’ (18). Writing as a woman with multiple sclerosis confined to a wheelchair, Mairs refuses, like DeSalvo, to subscribe to the recovery narrative and uses her life story to address the politics of disability. ‘I ask you to read this book,’ she writes in the first chapter, ‘not to be uplifted, but to be lowered and steadied into what may be unfamiliar, but is not inhospitable space. Sink down beside me, take my hand, and together we will watch the waists of the world drift past’ ” (81). 7. World War II was an especially trying time for Italian immigrants in the United States. Since Italy was an enemy country, the self-silencing of ethnic identity was most evident in the prohibition to speak Italian. Nancy C. Carnevale discusses the conditions that determined this loss of language and the consequences of such loss in the last chapter of her book, A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States 1890–1945 (2009) (158–178).

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reveals the ways in which body intelligence, the ability to be in tune—physically, mentally, and emotionally—is central to any intellectual pursuit.8 Growing up in a home with a depressed mother and an unpredictably violent father or, as DeSalvo calls it, “a really scary household,” taught her to be vigilant at all times. She learned to watch for her mother’s descent into depression and her father’s sudden anger. The household could devolve from “reason to rage” without warning. DeSalvo notes that an “intermittently violent father is different than an always violent father.” She explains: “This [situation] developed my habit of mind in a different way than being with someone who is abusive all the time.” Contradictory feelings of love and rage as well as longing and resentment toward her father permeated DeSalvo’s adolescence. Fear caused the young DeSalvo to become “self- contained” and a reluctant public figure. She became an observer of human behavior, which also led her to appreciate the control that one can achieve through the careful use of the written word. The family’s domestic life offered no safety for the young Louise, especially since she was often the target of her father’s rage. She relied on her ability to observe any signs of danger and made her way to the public library to find shelter from her father’s outbursts. Since her mother privileged education, DeSalvo could also avoid conflict with her by studying.9 Her habit of mind helped her to avoid the paralysis into which her mother and her sister fell; instead, DeSalvo developed a work ethic that sustained her intellect and curiosity, which in turn enabled her to survive her childhood and build an adult autonomous self. She found safe spaces within her home, within her school, and within herself. Words served as a healing balm. Her habit of mind led her to become a scholar, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and teacher who, as DeSalvo wrote of Woolf, “through writing . . . transformed the effects of harmful events into something meaningful” (Healing 42). For DeSalvo, the protagonist of a memoir may have been a victim, but through the act of writing, she becomes a survivor. This process involves facing a multitude of emotions— anger, joy, confusion, disappointment, sorrow, and grief—and places the writer in a vulnerable position. As DeSalvo tells us, “every act of writing is an act of mourning—

8. James F. T. Bugental suggests: “Inward searching is a process in which awareness is tuned into one’s own subjective experiencing in the moment and given free rein to move as it will, guided only by the sense of concern for one’s life and the expectancy-intention of discovery. It is not self- consciousness[,] self- examination or figuring things out. It is best when it is open, unforced, and almost playful” (51–52). Bugental is referring to the psychotherapy process between client and therapist, but this inward searching without expectation of an end goal is central to body experience; one cannot become aware of one’s needs without being physically attuned to what is occurring. If one is to embrace the pain or joy of living, an individual must become more aware—this awareness mitigates acting out; for example, DeSalvo’s father’s violent outbursts could have been a sign that he was not experiencing his pain, but attempting to push it away or, subconsciously, onto someone else. 9. DeSalvo’s mother’s attitude continues to be rare in working-class Italian American households. In “When the Story is Silence,” DeSalvo states that her “working- class Italian American students . . . find submitting their written work for class so difficult . . . [because] their families place many demands on them or . . . they don’t have a quiet place to work or . . . when they are writing, their parents often interrupt them because they don’t see writing as work” (158). In this regard, DeSalvo’s mother is a positive force who encouraged her daughter’s habits of reading and writing.

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mourning the past while living fully in the present. To do that you must have constant vigilance. At the same time, there is an obsessive quality. There needs to be.” Obsession here is not addiction, but a strategy that allows a writer to respond to past events without losing one’s self in the present to the mourning process. The memoir becomes the form that anchors the writer’s process.10 Obsession—with the work, with caring for oneself so one may complete the work—is a mode of reconfiguration. It serves as a tool to ground the writer while she mines the past yet avoids enmeshment with it. A writer who uses the tools and the form of memoir embraces a mode of working and thinking that eschews both victimization and heroism. DeSalvo suggests that a writer needs these tools and the form of the memoir in order to enter the process of writing about difficult subjects. Yet, this process does not necessarily make a writer courageous. She explains: “I think the man who jumps in the lake to save a drowning child does it not because he is courageous but because it is necessary.” While researching Woolf, DeSalvo discovered that writing was necessary for the author’s emotional and physical wellbeing; it was Woolf’s “way of constructing reality, of redefining herself. . . . This changed her view of the world from one of a chaotic place to one that was orderly though in need of change” (Healing 48).11 As a Woolf scholar, DeSalvo followed Woolf’s example and developed a meditative approach to writing. Cultivating a conscious connection between body, mind, and spirit is vital, she believes, if a writer wants to remain productive and emotionally and physically healthy. The writer begins by establishing a routine so the writing does not become the singular event in a life, but rather a part of one’s life. DeSalvo states: As a working class kid, I discovered Woolf’s process. I didn’t know about work, revision, a circumscribed period of time. She worked three hours a day; I could do that. She had thirteen revisions; I could do that. She didn’t know what she was doing. I could do that. A book took seven years. That was a revelation. I learned it was possible to become a writer. It was liberating and sobering. Woolf became my model for writing practice.

The habit of mind DeSalvo developed to cope with her own unpredictable home life prompted her to draw from Woolf’s process and apply it to her own writing practice. In Woolf, DeSalvo recognized discipline and commitment, and, most importantly, the reality that a writer had to place limits on time spent at writing as well as embrace the state of unknowing; she had to accept that there could be no sure knowledge of what that writing time might yield.12 In choosing Woolf as a role model, DeSalvo recognized that 10. DeSalvo states: “We cannot simply use writing as catharsis. Nor can we use it only as a record of what we’ve experienced. We must write in a way that links detailed descriptions of what happened with feelings—then and now—about what happened” (Healing 25). DeSalvo draws this conclusion after discussing James W. Pennebaker’s Opening Up: The Healing Power of Confiding in Others and his associate Sandra Beall’s studies regarding “the relationship between writing and wellness” (20). 11. DeSalvo argues that her mother’s depression might have been mitigated if her mother had written: “As a girl, my mother wanted to become a writer, but she never realized her desire. . . . Not writing [about her childhood traumas] negatively affected her, I’m sure, for she had no outlet for her emotions” (Healing 33–34). 12. DeSalvo suggests that when “Woolf led a balanced life,” the work went well (Healing 97); when she did not, the writing process could be difficult and slow. Woolf, according to DeSalvo, could

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writing, even as it was necessary to Woolf’s mental and physical wellbeing, was not a haphazard, anorexic, or bulimic endeavor. Writing was work that could be cultivated over time; in fact, a steady writing practice was crucial in order to remain creative— genius did not spring fully formed or without effort. She discovered that Woolf knew that the system of patriarchy placed her, a woman, in a subservient position, even though she was a member of the privileged class.13 This realization further fueled DeSalvo, a child of the working class, and pushed her to find a place within a scholarly community that, in the 1970s, included primarily privileged men and often remained hostile to women. As a scholar of Woolf in the 1970s and 1980s, DeSalvo diligently and systematically read, reread, and took notes on Woolf’s manuscripts and everything written about Woolf (this was before the age of digitization). She used the same method while researching the works and lives of Hawthorne, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and the many writers who appear in her writing. Over a decade later, researching her own life, her father’s life, her mother’s life and death, and her sister’s suicide for Vertigo, DeSalvo applied the same diligence—and she would again while researching the stories of her grandparents and the history of peasants in the Italian South for her later memoirs, Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004) and “Father Gone to War.”14 Indeed, DeSalvo’s work in the genres of the personal essay and memoir is shaped by the methods of the textual scholar, the biographer, and the literary critic in the earlier stages of her career. The necessary work of reading, rereading, taking notes, copying words—the words of those she wishes not to emulate or excoriate but to walk alongside—constitute the elements of a writing practice the fruits of which do not promulgate solitude, but embrace community.15 be either “emotionally intelligent (to paraphrase Daniel Golman’s term)” or “emotionally stupid” (99)—her emotional state depended on the way in which she approached each writing project. 13. In Writing as a Way of Healing, DeSalvo notes that in “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf remembers that when she was twenty, she had “the outsider’s feeling” that would haunt her throughout her life (52). “[She] felt as a gipsy or a child feels who stands at the flap of the tent and sees the circus going on inside. [She] stood in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate and saw society in full swing. [She] saw George [her half-brother] as an acrobat jumping through hoops. . . . The patriarchal society of the Victorian Age was in full swing in [the family’s] drawing room. . . . [She and Vanessa] were not called upon to take part in some of those acts. [They] were only asked to admire and applaud when [their] male relations went through the different figures of the intellectual game” (quoted in Healing 52–53). In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf recognizes that while culturally classed as privileged, as a female, she was still relegated to the sidelines and regarded as a fawning fan rather than a full participant. See Emily Bernard’s essay in this volume for an interesting take on male privilege in an Italian American household. 14. “Father Gone to War” is still in progress at the time of this writing. 15. In “ ‘But Is It Great?’: The Question of the Canon for Italian American Women Writers” (2006), Mary Jo Bona argues that established Italian American women writers, especially DeSalvo, support emerging Italian American women writers through various means, including, but not limited to, blurbs on book jackets. Bona first notes that “Louise DeSalvo’s front cover commendation of [Tina] De Rosa’s [Paper Fish] is no exaggeration: ‘The best Italian-American novel by a woman of this century.’ Such praise is a gesture of canonization, paralleling Willa Cather’s description of Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel as a ‘masterpiece!’ ” (99). Toward the end of the essay, Bona

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The memoirist and writing coach Natalie Goldberg recounts how during a Buddhist meditation retreat, she told her roshi, “ ‘The more I sit, the more Jewish I’m feeling.’ And he said, ‘That makes sense. The more you sit, the more you become who you are’ ” (2). DeSalvo uses reading, research, writing, and self- care—her habit of mind, the process of the necessary—to understand her class and ethnic origins—and to embrace her roots as a working class Italian American writer.16 She learned from her work on Woolf how to prepare the terrain for the journey toward becoming one of the most prolific and subversive memoirists writing today.17 DeSalvo’s memoir work forces readers and writers to question intellectual understanding without knowledge of the physical self. It also privileges a self- discovery that gives equal weight to the pleasures and pains of the body and the mind. In this way, DeSalvo stands at the forefront of a cultural renaissance of the body-mind-spirit connection. Her work embodies an intellectual commitment that understands the need for the care of the self in intellectual, emotional, and physical terms. DeSalvo has stated that, until she moved through her Woolf scholarship and towards her memoir work, she “was evading the narrative and emotional truth of [her] life” (Healing 19). In six books of memoir and essay published between 1996 and 2009 and in a writing blog begun in 2010, DeSalvo delves into that truth. She understands the importance of connecting—with writes, “DeSalvo’s back- cover blurb of Cappello’s debut memoir exclaims that she was ‘knocked out by [Cappello’s] original voice’. Similarly, Carole Maso’s back- cover commendation of Chris [sic] Mazza’s Your Name Here describes the book as a ‘complicated . . . unflinching portrait of violence’ and Rita Ciresi’s flap- cover blurb praises Louisa Ermelino’s The Black Madonna as worthy as a ‘ festa.’ Italian American women are reading and supporting their sisters, reinforcing their visible presence, and providing models for present and future writers” (103). As Bona notes in the case of Cather and Jewett, writers from other groups have employed this strategy; Alice Walker modeled this strategy as a spokesperson for Zora Neale Hurston, whose work Walker resurrected. 16. In the “Introduction” to Vertigo, Giunta writes that in the early 1980s, when DeSalvo drafted “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar,” her first foray into essayistic memoir, “DeSalvo became afraid of this new work and voice. Possibly, she realized that she was leaving the safe academic haven of textual scholarship to ‘come out,’ as she puts it, as an Italian American working- class woman who could not claim a legitimate place in the snobbish and hierarchal world of literary scholarship. . . . DeSalvo remembers thinking that there would be ‘no going back to that world’ once this essay was published. Not that she felt, she recalls, that the entire world would see it, but that it would be out there in the world for anyone to see; it would expose her working- class Italian origins, and she would have to relinquish whatever ‘insider position’ she thought she ‘had achieved by working on Woolf and doing textual scholarship.’ So she tore it in little pieces and threw it in the garbage. It was her husband, Ernie, who later rescued it and helped her piece it back together. Without his intervention, in the times before computer files, there would have been no ‘Puttana’ essay and, possibly, no Vertigo” (xx). 17. DeSalvo is one among a handful of contemporary memoirists—for example, Susanne Antonetta, Eavan Boland, Mary Cappello, Nick Flynn, Richard Hoffman, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lauren Slater, Rebecca Walker—who tackle the conventions and boundaries of the genre. These writers are acutely aware that the contemporary memoir is a brand new creature, diametrically opposed to what many have erroneously considered its precursor, autobiography. This awareness of the newness of the genre underscores, for DeSalvo, a sense of responsibility for influencing its direction and development not only through her writing but also, and crucially, through her pedagogical practice.

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the books one reads, with the way in which one makes a meal, with the walks one takes, and with the people with whom one chooses to have a relationship. Those connections reconfigure the self, the writing practice, and even the community. For DeSalvo, writing is a physical act of the self, but it is also physical work that connects us to one another. She understands that thinking alone does not provide emotional connections: one must be in tune with one’s own body as well as with the body of the community.

Introductions Introductions cannot be written at the beginning; they come at the end, when the process is almost complete. Introductions are made for the reader, to map out a route and provide the tools necessary for the journey. Our process began in Pittsburgh, when we barely knew each other. It was November 1996, and Italian American scholars had gathered for the annual conference of the Italian American Studies Association (then called the American Italian Historical Association). What distinguished that year’s gathering was the large attendance of writers: published, emerging, famous, and unknown writers filled the rooms. These writers were mostly women, and their presence was tangible, as was the impact of their words at the sessions where they read their work. In rooms crowded with women eager to hear them, these writers read works of poetry, fiction, and memoir, telling stories that had not been heard before, stories that challenged the myths of what it means to be an American, especially a woman, of Italian descent. Louise and Edvige sat in the first row, listening to Nancy’s first complete piece of writing—her memoir “Go to Hell.” 18 At other sessions, Louise read from her fi rst, newly published memoir, Vertigo, and Edvige presented the special issue of Voices in Italian Americana devoted to Italian American women authors, her first edited project.19 We were each emerging in different ways—writer, memoirist, scholar—amidst the Italian American women scholars, writers, and artists who were converging into a community that had been developing slowly since the mid-1980s, when Helen Barolini called a tradition into being in The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985), in which she proclaimed that Italian American women did write—and publish.20 That first meeting was not the auspicious occasion that led us to Personal Effects, but it was a catalyst for the work to come. Perhaps the deciding moment of this book—the one you hold in your hands—occurred in New Haven a dozen years later, in November 2008,

18. DeSalvo and Giunta published Caronia’s “Go to Hell” five years later in The Milk of Almonds (2002). Caronia’s memoir was originally published in Curaggia: Writing by Women of Italian Descent (1998). 19. See the “Special Issue on Italian / American Women Writers,” Voices in Italian Americana: A Literary and Cultural Review (1996), edited by Edvige Giunta. 20. Anthologies and other edited collections have been instrumental in cultivating a sense of belonging and literary tradition for Italian American writers. See Mueller and Labate’s “A Review of Anthologies for Teaching Italian American Studies” (297–306) in the MLA volume Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2010), edited by Giunta and McCormick.

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at another IASA conference, when Nancy casually turned to Edvige after a day of listening to scholarly papers about Italian American male authors and said, “Why don’t we do a panel on Louise? We need scholarship on one of the most prominent Italian American female authors of the twentieth century.” Edi said, “yes—and then we can do the book.” It was that simple. And so we made the leap—from that casual assertion to the work that led to Personal Effects. In part we were responding to the frustration we felt over the dearth of critical and scholarly work on Italian American women’s writing, even at these conferences where many women read their creative work, but the bulk of scholarship remained focused on male authors. At the time, Nancy had temporarily put aside her memoir and fiction writing to complete an MA in English in central New York and would soon move to Rhode Island to pursue a PhD in English literature. Edvige was coediting a volume for the MLA, Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2010), and teaching college students in New Jersey.21 In between other books, other essays, other writings, there were three years of researching, gathering, digging, thinking, talking, writing, drafting, interviewing Louise—until we arrived in Edi’s attic space—part office, part yoga studio, and all about the process of creation. There we reread and edited the essays that engage, ponder, struggle with the ideas, themes, tropes, problems of DeSalvo’s oeuvre— and we wrote. Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo is not simply a festschrift, though we are pleased to present it in celebration of Louise DeSalvo’s seventieth birthday. This collection recognizes that DeSalvo has made multiple contributions to numerous fields: she has expanded and enriched our understanding of Woolf, produced one of the largest and most provocative bodies of memoir writing in contemporary US literature, and transformed the lives of countless students, many of whom have become writers themselves. Her work—in literary criticism, textual scholarship, feminist biography, Woolf studies, pedagogy, narratives of memory and witness, the contemporary memoir, and creativity—remains relevant even as she continues to shift and deepen her connections to each field.

Scholar, Teacher, Writer Louise DeSalvo was born on September 27, 1942, at the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City, an urban center in Hudson County, New Jersey, across from New York City. She spent her childhood with her family in the Italian working- class neighborhood of nearby Hoboken, also in Hudson County, a town that in the last decade of the twentieth century underwent gentrification and today bears little resemblance to the community that DeSalvo once knew. Her parents, children of southern Italian immigrants, lived next door to DeSalvo’s maternal grandparents. In 1949, like other immigrant families, DeSalvo’s family migrated to Ridgefield, in nearby Bergen County. For many immigrant families, the move to the suburbs signaled the aspiration to upward 21. The MLA anthology gathers more than thirty scholars, including DeSalvo, who write on Italian American literature, film, and popular culture in the United States.

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social and economic mobility, pursued with tremendous effort and often at a great mental and cultural cost. Other writers of Italian ancestry, including Helen Barolini, Maria Laurino, Kym Ragusa, and Mary Saracino, have documented the painful effects of the move to suburbia on first- and second-generation Italian American families.22 The voiceover narrator of Ragusa’s autobiographical documentary fuori / outside (1997) speaks of this second migratory experience as one that replicates the loss experienced during the original migration—that mythical departure from Italy that so many Italian American authors—from Mario Puzo to Helen Barolini to Tina De Rosa to Maria Mazziotti Gillan to Sandra M. Gilbert—use as a narrative trope.23 Much like the original departure caused a trauma that would play out cross-generationally, the migration to suburbia forced many immigrants to reenact the drama of displacement, often masked by the fact that they considered the move a realization of the American dream of home ownership. Suburbia did not offer the tightly knit community and the cultural connections that the immigrant enclave provided. This experience was true especially for the women who did not work outside the home, like DeSalvo’s mother, whose isolation and disconnection were exacerbated by the new environs. After finishing high school in Ridgefield, DeSalvo attended Douglas College in New Brunswick, where she majored in English and graduated in 1963. The winter after her graduation, she married a young Italian American medical student, Ernest De Salvo, whom she had known since high school. After teaching at Wood-Ridge High School for four years (1963–1967), DeSalvo left that job.24 She gave birth to the eldest of her two children, Jason, in 1967. Justin, her second child, was born in 1971. In 1972, the family moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, and became homeowners. In 1977, she received a PhD in English from New York University. Her dissertation, “From Melymbrosia to The Voyage Out: A Novel in the Making,” would become her first book, Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 1980. DeSalvo taught as an adjunct assistant professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University from 1977 to 1982, resigning because the university could not offer her a full-time position. In the spring of 1982, she was interviewed for a tenure-track teaching position in the English Department at Hunter College. As DeSalvo told us in an interview, Jane Marcus was supposed to have this job. The space was open for two years, but then she couldn’t do it. She was a feminist and a contemporary woman—a good role model. She recommended me, and I showed up [for the interview] wearing a black dress with a black ribbon around my neck with Mary Janes and ankle socks. I liked clothes and I liked

22. See Barolini’s Umbertina (1979); Saracino’s No Matter What (1993) and Finding Grace (1999); and Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us (2006) and fuori / outside (1997). In the works of male writers such as Mangione (Mount Allegro [1943]) and Puzo (The Fortunate Pilgrim [1964]), the move to suburbia is often presented as the much- desired assimilation into the American middle class and the end of immigrant life, with its struggles and anxieties. 23. In her autobiographical documentary The Baggage (2001), Susan Caperna Lloyd explicitly describes emigration as the source of unspoken traumas that reverberate across generations, often with tragic outcomes, as in her family story. 24. Although DeSalvo “took” Ernest De Salvo’s last name when they were married, she eliminated the space between “De” and “Salvo” and uses his last name as one word.

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to dress. I saw the other candidate in a tweed suit with arm patches and I thought, “Oh god, what did I do?” I was always an outsider. Most of the hiring committee members were men. I gave them a puzzle; I think they hired me because I was working class.

In those first years at Hunter, DeSalvo taught Basic Composition, Introduction to Literature, and seminars on Virginia Woolf. She later started teaching memoir and pioneered Hunter’s MFA memoir program. Eventually, she became the Jenny Hunter Endowed Scholar for Creative Writing and Literature. She continues to teach at Hunter. Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, DeSalvo—who had published scholarly writing on Woolf, Lawrence, Hawthorne, adolescent literature, gender, disability, aging, and the writing process—turned to personal narrative. In December 1978 she accepted Sara Ruddick’s invitation to write an essay for Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about their Work on Women (1984), an anthology edited by Ruddick, Carol Ascher, and DeSalvo.25 DeSalvo thus began to write a personal essay that contains the seeds of the memoir work that would emerge almost fifteen years later. Provocatively titled “Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar,” the essay foregrounds the radical quality of DeSalvo’s scholarly work on Woolf, which led her to travel to Europe to conduct her research and to defy Italian American culture’s dictates of domestic containment. DeSalvo plays with notions of Italian American omertà and female domesticity by revealing how Italian American women who do not follow these Italian American cultural codes are equated with whores or prostitutes (“puttana”). Alluding to the title of a high modernist text, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), DeSalvo challenges Italian American conventions that name any woman with ambitions or dreams outside the domestic space a puttana. This move enables DeSalvo to embrace and also subvert the denigrating Italian slang, to stake her claim as a feminist literary critic and a woman of Italian descent— one who follows, though perhaps unconsciously, in an Italian radical feminist tradition while learning to write her story.26 Anthony Julian Tamburri argues,

25. This was to be the second volume of women’s writing that Ruddick edited. The first, Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk about Their Lives and Work, edited by Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, was published in 1977. Adrienne Rich wrote the foreword. Ruddick, a pioneer in feminist theory and philosophy, died on March 20, 2011. 26. While DeSalvo distances herself from her female ancestors in two important ways, she also finds a way to embrace them through the genre of memoir. She distances herself by writing her story and writing about other writers. More specifically, she writes about Woolf, a writer who is socially and culturally remote from her. Eventually, she writes about her family using the examples of Woolf and other writers such as Allende, Lawrence, and Miller. In her study of Italian American women’s radicalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jennifer Guglielmo has constructed a rich historical tradition of foremothers for writers like DeSalvo. In Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 (2010), Guglielmo argues that her “tracing of this history is thus intended not only as an act of recovery but as an attempt to unearth a valuable lesson: far from being backward in comparison to their more Americanized daughters, as the racializing (il)logic would argue, Italian immigrant women were in many ways more complete in their critique of power than later generations (7– 8). This tradition is most clearly seen in DeSalvo’s rendering of her step-grandmother in Crazy in the Kitchen.

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Within the intellectual discourse of Italian Americana, the various voices, no matter how different, must work toward the construction of a self-reflexive, critical discourse between and among ourselves that moves forward toward the eventual construction of an aesthetically and ideologically critical voice that will ultimately dialogue with those other ethnic / racial / sexual voices that exist beyond the confines of Italian America. (A Semiotic of Ethnicity 130)

Although at that point in her career DeSalvo was not conscious of an Italian American literary tradition, she was encouraged by Ruddick to write about her experience as a scholar, a child of immigrants, and a member of the working class. She enacts what Tamburri suggests Italian American scholars must do in order to make Italian American scholarship relevant within a larger discourse: she is both self-reflexive and critical of the familiar tropes of assimilation. She refuses to construct stories that play into nostalgic and sentimental tropes; instead, she reads and writes about her working-class roots, her Italian American ethnicity, and her scholarly identity through a feminist framework. DeSalvo’s memoir and essay work, beginning with the “Puttana” essay, connects feminist studies, a discipline that embraces a multiethnic, working- class ethos, and Italian American studies, a field that has become increasingly more committed to considering all stories and to moving away from the simplistic feel-good assimilation tale. Tamburri’s argument stresses the need for Italian American scholars to critically engage with a multiplicity of Italian American stories—for example, those like DeSalvo’s—in order to create a fruitful dialogue not only within Italian American studies, but also between Italian American studies and other ethnic and racial studies. As Tamburri points out, Italian American scholars must not ignore the intersections and connections— such as the way feminism bridges DeSalvo’s scholarship, creative work, and Italian American identity—that will offer a more layered picture of Italian immigrants and their descendants. DeSalvo’s creative work, when looked at through the lens of feminist scholarship or modernist studies, reveals a complex portrait of immigration and female empowerment that refuses simple notions of success or assimilation. Her writing process may have begun when her mother read to her as a small child, but was later informed by her work as a feminist and Woolf scholar. This academic research and institutionalized setting seemingly took her away from her Italian American roots, but also assisted her in seeing the threads between communities and traditions.

DeSalvo is one among a number of intellectuals who made their bones as literary critics and later became recognized as writers of the Italian American literary tradition. For example, Sandra M. Gilbert, coauthor with Susan Gubar of groundbreaking feminist literary texts exploring the British and American tradition—such as The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)—is one of the most important voices in Italian American poetry. Gilbert has also published an important memoir, Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (1995), and other works of creative nonfiction that explore Italian American identity. Literary scholar Josephine Gattuso Hendin is recognized as another important writer in the Italian American tradition through her novel The Right Thing to Do (1988). Other writers, including Cathy Davidson and Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, also fit the profile of the literary scholar / writer. See Linda Hutcheon’s essay “Cryptoethnicity” for a discussion of women critics whose Italian American identity has gone unrecognized by virtue of the non-Italian last name they took at marriage.

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In 1975, while writing her dissertation, DeSalvo began work on what would become her edition of Melymbrosia (1982), an earlier and more daring draft of The Voyage Out (1915), in which Woolf obliquely explored her experience of incest.27 In the early 1980s, while completing Melymbrosia and editing a collection of letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, friend and lover of Woolf, DeSalvo started thinking about a book on Woolf and incest.28 Initially, she wanted to focus on the children in Woolf’s novels, but Melymbrosia had taught her that being separated from one’s children (leaving them, sending them off to boarding school, having others raise them) is part of a cultural pattern for people of their class. . . . The most significant feature of childrearing among the privileged classes in England, Virginia Stephen shows the reader, is that children are often neglected and contact between parents and children is minimized. When it occurs, it is often unpleasant. (DeSalvo, Introduction: “A Wound” xiii)

27. DeSalvo’s methodology in unearthing the “self- censorship” (Taylor 132) in Woolf’s Melymbrosia continues to inform and challenge current scholarship on Woolf, modernist, and feminist studies. See especially Julie Taylor’s “Revising The Antiphon, Restaging Trauma; or, Where Sexual Politics Meet Textual History” (2011); Molly Hite’s “The Public Woman and the Modernist Turn: Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Elizabeth Robins’s My Little Sister” (2010); Meryl Altman’s “Posthumous Queer: Hemingway Among Others” (2010); and Rebecca Wisor’s “Versioning Virginia Woolf: Notes Toward a Post- eclectic Edition of Three Guineas” (2009). See also Hagen in this volume. As DeSalvo notes in her introduction to the 2002 reprint of Melymbrosia: The major problem, then, in establishing the text of Melymbrosia was that the manuscripts in the archive had not been sorted into earlier and later drafts of the novel as Virginia Woolf herself had written them. It was therefore necessary for me to reconstruct the drafts as they once existed before the earliest extant draft could be identified. I sorted the extant manuscripts into tentative drafts on the basis of internal evidence and physical characteristics (for example, paper type, paper size, watermark, ink color, typewriter ribbon color, pin holes in the manuscript—Woolf sometimes uses dressmaker pins to assemble the pages of her chapters). But the sorting, sequencing and dating of these drafts could not be accomplished with any degree of certainty without external evidence from letters, diaries, memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies describing the novel. Particularly important were letters stating that Woolf was about to begin a new draft, that she was not working, or working hard, or working only occasionally. Particularly important, too, were dated letters or datable manuscripts written on paper with the same watermark as sheets of the novel. What propelled my work was my conviction that if I could locate those pages, date them, put them in their original order, determine when Woolf made the changes that appeared on each page, then a very early version of The Voyage Out, which no one but Virginia Woolf herself had seen, might be discovered. The recovery and subsequent publication of the earliest attempt at fiction of one of the 20th century’s greatest literary stylists, I believed, would be of enormous interest to readers. (Introduction: “A Wound in My Heart” xxiv–xxv) 28. See Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, eds., The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (1985).

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Further research led her to the letters of Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell. She also studied the lives of Woolf’s two half-sisters, which in turn drew her to conclude that incest was pervasive in Woolf’s family, a privileged family with a high social and moral standing: I learn they put Laura— one of the sisters—away into an institution and I think Laura is having a normal response to being molested. Virginia behaves and writes in a way that is normal to being molested. I’m also reading Judith Herman’s Father-Daughter Incest. I apply Herman to what I was learning about Woolf and her family. I simply see what is in front of me. I’m not extrapolating; it was obvious. I just did my homework.

Reading the letters, DeSalvo learned that incest did not occur only in working class or poor families. The abuse of children, she realized, revolves around power and occurs in all social classes. She discovered that Woolf and her sisters had been caught in a trap of privilege and silence. Their behavior, including the positive attention they gave to those who had abused them, was not, for sexually abused children, abnormal or crazy. DeSalvo’s aim was not to sensationalize Woolf’s family life; she wished to show that Woolf was remarkable not only for her voice and her ability to sustain a working pattern that enabled her to produce nine novels as well as numerous nonfiction works, but also for her ability to do so in spite of what she had suffered as a child. DeSalvo recognized that Woolf was not an incest victim, but an incest survivor who had transcended trauma through her discipline as a writer. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989) sparked a heated debate among Woolf scholars.29 Calling it “an important contribution to Woolf studies as well as to the growing awareness of child abuse in its many forms,” Robert Spoo notes that, in her book DeSalvo rightly points out, Woolf’s biographers have unwittingly blamed the victim and contributed to the complicitous silence that protects abusers of children. In a bold move analogous to Woolf’s locating the origins of fascism in masculine aggression and hierarchy in Three Guineas, DeSalvo argues that incest in nineteenth- century England was a consequence of Victorian ideology. (311)30

By equating child abuse with other, more overt, systems of violence and abuse, DeSalvo’s book stands as a groundbreaking work of feminist scholarship. In Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women’s Lives (1996), Kennedy Fraser draws a comparison between DeSalvo and other Woolf biographers by suggesting that “previous biographers have dealt with her childhood sexual experience according to their limitations: tactfully, awkwardly, snidely, or with angry denial” (6). Fraser also argues that DeSalvo sifts through “the extensive testimony of Virginia Woolf herself, in letters and memoirs and juvenilia, and the obvious clues in her mature fiction, including early, unpublished drafts” (6) in order

29. See Hussey’s essay in this volume. 30. In his review essay “To the Light,” Richard Pearce writes: “DeSalvo shows us that the facts of Virginia Woolf’s life look very different when seen through the lens of incestuous child abuse—a term we have only recently begun to take seriously. . . . The experience has been at worst suppressed and at best marginalized, euphemized, even sublimated by a society unable to accept it as a relatively common occurrence in respectable middle- class families. And of course it has been repressed by the little girls who thought themselves to blame” (223).

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to reveal what is plainly and painfully obvious. Peggy Phelan finds DeSalvo’s book “extraordinarily valuable and brave” (16); she notes that it presents “the ineffable and elusive connection between the body and language” (16), that mind-body connection that DeSalvo insists upon in her writing and teaching. While DeSalvo was researching and writing the Woolf biography in the early- to mid-1980s, she began working on a novel about adultery, Casting Off. England’s Harvester Press published the novel in 1987, after US publishers rejected the manuscript.31 US publishers did not think that readers would find credible the story of Irish American suburban women who commit adultery but do not lose or even ruin their marriages.32 The novel centers on the multiple extramarital affairs of its female protagonists—Helen MacIntyre and Maive Macnamara. At the end of the novel, both women are still married to their respective spouses; they both feel no guilt and go unpunished for their transgressions. The more free-spirited Maive acts as the instigating character. She has a big appetite and makes no apologies for it. Married with four children, Maive has had two abortions and conducts numerous extramarital affairs at once. She harbors no guilt or remorse. Rather than being dissatisfied, her husband considers himself happily married. Maive believes that her adultery keeps her marriage vibrant. Helen, the more traditional of the two, has an affair with a much younger photographer, which forces her to confront her thwarted desire to write. When her lover becomes engaged to a younger woman, Helen recognizes that she had not been in love with him and returns to writing not to overcome her loss, but to acknowledge that she can no longer use his art (and the affair) as a substitute for her creativity. The construction of this novel is lush—long sentences are reminiscent of Woolf’s structure—and Helen’s fiction and poetry play an integral role in its narrative structure.33 31. No American publisher took Casting Off after Harvester published it, either. Bordighera Press will publish a revised edition of the novel with an introduction by Nancy Caronia in 2014. 32. See DeSalvo’s account of the publishers’ responses in Adultery (1999): “The book was based upon my interviews with a score of adulterous women who lived all over the United States, who were happy to share their stories so long as I disguised the details in my work. “Editors were almost universally outraged by the book. ‘This can’t happen!’ It happens all the time, I replied. ‘Can you kill one of them off?’ Well, no, I think it’s important that their lives aren’t destroyed, and that they survive, even flourish. ‘Totally unrealistic.’ Would you like to talk to the woman I talked to in Iowa? Maybe it was the same woman that Waller talked to in writing The Bridges of Madison County” (DeSalvo, Adultery 26–27). Although more than twenty years have passed, this attitude regarding women and their sexual lives continues to be pernicious. Whether watching twenty-first- century television shows such as Desperate Housewives, reality television shows such as The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, a cutting- edge series such as Breaking Bad, or the most recent state and federal representatives’ and senators’ battles over women’s reproductive rights on their respective Congressional floors, a double standard not only still exists, but women, most especially poor and working class women, are regularly punished for being female while men are rewarded for outrageous and often violent behaviors that are viewed—still—as evidence of positive male character. 33. Wondering what it might have been like for her if she had had a novel like Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish to read as a young writer, DeSalvo states that, even though Casting Off reveals “glimmers of the Italian-American woman [she is], . . . there are places where it is clear [that she is] trying to think of her literary mother as Virginia Woolf” (“Paper Fish by Tina De Rosa” 250).

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The epigraph—a poem written by Helen—bookends with Helen’s fictional prose, which not only ends the novel but is also interspersed throughout it. Casting Off exemplifies DeSalvo’s interest in reconfiguring present and past, literary and historical truths—as she would continue to do in her later memoirs and personal essays. In Casting Off, the narrative satirically examines the social and domestic mores embedded in US culture vis-à-vis the relationship between marriage and creativity. The novel, although not didactic, suggests that marriage, in and of itself, cannot be expected to fulfi ll all of a spouse’s needs, especially if both partners are not singularly expressive and creatively fulfilled. The affair compels Helen to come to terms with her artistic needs, which are separate from her life as a married woman. Casting Off can be viewed as the literary predecessor to DeSalvo’s later book-length essay Adultery: An Intimate Look at Why People Cheat (1999), which slyly includes an excerpt of the novel—the first time any of it appeared in print in the United States. In the early 1990s, Rosemary Ahearn, an editor at Dutton who had worked with DeSalvo on the publication of Conceived with Malice: Literature as Revenge in the Lives and Works of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller (1994), urged DeSalvo to consider writing a memoir.34 Ahearn, who was familiar with DeSalvo’s work on Woolf, had been “struck by DeSalvo’s writing and her approach to other writing” and found it inspiring that, as a working class woman, DeSalvo had “made a life for herself in a world in which she had no models” (quoted in Giunta, “Introduction to Vertigo” xxii). At this time, DeSalvo was drafting a novel titled “Bad Girl,” based on many of the stories that she would later develop in Vertigo, but without its reflective mode, its self-scrutiny, its relentless digging of the territory of memory, and its multiple, conflicting viewpoints and accounts. In September 1993, just as she completed “Bad Girl,” DeSalvo began writing a memoir for Sister to Sister: Women Write about the Unbreakable Bond (1995), an anthology edited by Patricia Foster. At the center of this piece was Jill, her only sister, who had killed herself a decade earlier, in 1984, the same year the “Puttana” essay was published in Between Women. In order to write about her sister, DeSalvo searched through the contents of the boxes that contained her sister’s belongings, a task that she had not dared to undertake before. Her experience as a textual scholar and biographer guided her to her sister’s letters, the few other objects her mother had saved, and to her own journals—those “personal effects” that fuel memory work. Within a few weeks, DeSalvo completed “My Sister’s Suicide” and was ready to think about a book-length memoir. That same year, DeSalvo sent the book proposal for Vertigo to Ahearn, who readily accepted it. “My Sister’s Suicide” would become the book’s second chapter while a recast and retitled version of the “Puttana” essay would become its penultimate chapter. Vertigo, published in 1996, examines and reflects upon the domestic life of DeSalvo’s Italian American family during and after World War II, but it also addresses global concerns such as war, class disparity, immigration, gender, education, and mental health. The 34. DeSalvo was “thinking of [writing] a memoir even [before] . . . Rosemary Ahern had asked [her]. . . . [She’d] planned it for 15 chapters, to total between 280 and 300 pages.” DeSalvo further told us, “After Conceived with Malice, I realize I don’t want to write about other people, I want to focus on my family. I want to tell my own story.”

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young Louise’s discovery of the power of reading provides the foundational experience through which her memoir explores and circles around each of these issues. In her introduction to The Dream Book, Barolini had written about how difficult it was for Italian American women to read, since it “was ridiculed [by the family] as too private, too unproductive, too exclusive an enjoyment. . . . Learning gave one ideas, made one different; all the family wanted was cohesion” (8).35 DeSalvo acknowledges that reading is central to her creative attempts to move beyond the constraints of immigrant identity. Yet, she also views reading as the means by which to articulate that identity. DeSalvo’s “self-imposed reading programs” begin in her childhood home with the “bookcase filled with a set of books, all with the same blue-gray binding” (Vertigo 54). Her mother is the revolutionary who “bought them, on time, from a traveling salesman, either for decoration or to establish the image of her household as literarily minded” (54). DeSalvo recalls: “neither she nor my father reads them. Yet ours is the only parlor I know with books in it” (54).36 While DeSalvo’s mother cannot establish reading as an intellectual pursuit for herself, her insistence that her daughter be able to read whenever and whatever she wants enables Louise to rebel against oppressive cultural traditions and eventually become a politically engaged feminist scholar and writer. At the same time, the act of reading conveys, tactically and perhaps unconsciously, a closeness to the dominant power structure. When DeSalvo transfers the language and spaciousness found in books into her daily domestic household, the situation becomes not only complicated, but also dangerous. DeSalvo’s relationship with her father suffers from her father’s confusion resulting from his daughter’s intellect and curiosity. His responses to her questions deteriorate to the point where he mocks her reading regime by calling her “big mouth” and accusing her of a penchant for “back talk” (77).37 DeSalvo recalls: “whenever we argued (which was often), I needed to have the last word” (77). In this context, the library, books, and reading itself represent freedom—from a family whose traditions suffocate intellectual ambition and from a head of household who 35. Other Italian American writers have written of this predicament. Rita Ciresi, for example, states: “reading—which subsequently lead to writing—always has been an act of rebellion for me, against Catholicism and other aspects of Italian American culture” (“Paradise” 21). 36. DeSalvo’s mother takes obvious pleasure in her daughter’s first attempts to read; when the young DeSalvo “hold[s] the book upside down,” her mother proudly “corrects [her] mistake” and declares, “don’t bother Louise, she’s reading” (Vertigo 55). DeSalvo’s love affair with books causes her to believe, somewhat facetiously, that heaven “must resemble a library. I think that if there is a god, surely she must be a librarian,” even if, at one point in her nascent intellectual pursuits, the librarian tells her, “I think you’re reading too much. Do you have any friends? Any hobbies? Anything else that you do besides reading?” (98). 37. In “Setting the Table,” the introduction to the girlSpeak journals (1997), Nancy Caronia writes, “My childhood was a time of silence and isolation. This silence continued well into adulthood. Now, thirty years later, I’m finally letting that girl’s voice out, strong and clear. The name ‘girlSpeak’ is meant to respect the long ago silenced voices within all of us” (vii). The question of counteracting the legacy of “silence and isolation” is central to the work of women writers. For women writers of Italian ancestry that question is further complicated by the cultural dictates of silence and secrecy that are at the center of what Barolini in her introduction to The Dream Book (1985) calls “the Historical and Social Context of Silence” (3–18). For a cross- cultural discussion of this issue, see Margaux Fragoso’s essay in this volume.

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needs to stifle his daughter’s defiance.38 Her mother’s pride in her daughter’s ability to read and her father’s fear, masked by anger, of the power young Louise draws from books, strengthen and complicate the young DeSalvo’s desire to read. In many ways, DeSalvo’s mother’s acceptance of her daughter’s reading habit is more dangerous than her father’s fear. The mother uses the daughter’s intellectual power to defy their culture, with its codes of silence and female submissiveness. In this way, the mother does not put herself at risk, even as she undermines (perhaps unwittingly) her daughter’s future place within a cultural community whose codes she will no longer be able to accept. Italian critic Caterina Romeo argues that Vertigo is “one of the most extraordinary Italian American memoirs” because it “exposes the positions of Italian American women in their own communities . . . [that] feel more comfortable with women who embrace domestic roles and in American society, where the notion of Italian American is not associated with intellectual accomplishments” (134). The marginalization of both female and male Italian American intellectuals has been well- documented and analyzed by Italian American literary and cultural scholars and writers such as Barolini, Tamburri, Mary Jo Bona, Fred Gardaphé, George Guida, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and Robert Viscusi.39 As Gardaphé points out, it is DeSalvo’s commitment to “academic excellence” (“Review of Vertigo” 279) that enables her to break free from these strictures in order to embrace what DeSalvo calls “the narrative and emotional truth of [her] life” (Healing 19). Bona asserts: “Breaking away from the familiar Italian American story of family continuity and cultural cohesion, DeSalvo pursues a deeper understanding of her mother’s life of constant housework, thwarted literary aspirations, and fear of the outside world” (“But Is It Great?” 102).40 In writing Vertigo, DeSalvo pieces together the fragments

38. On the predicament of the children of the working class and the dilemma that becoming middle class poses, see Janet Zandy’s Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (2004). See also Laura E. Ruberto’s Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S. (2007). 39. For examples of scholarship on Italian American writers and breaking through cultural codes of oppression and repression, in addition to The Dream Book, see Bona’s By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (2010); Bona’s Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (1999); Gardaphé’s Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (1996); Giunta’s Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (2002); Green’s The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures (1974); Serra’s The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States Between 1890 and 1924 (2009); Serra’s The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Biographies (2007); Tamburri’s A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian / American Writer (1998); Tamburri’s To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate—The Italian / American Writer: An Other American (1991); and Viscusi’s Buried Caesars and Other Italian American Writing (2006). Over the last two decades, several edited volumes that examine Italian American literature and culture have been published, for example, Carol Bonomo Albright’s and Christine Palamidessi Moore’s American Woman, Italian Style: Italian-Americana’s Best Writings on Women (2011); Barone and Covino’s Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture (2012); Pellegrino D’Acierno’s The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts (1999); and Tamburri, Giordano, and Gardaphé’s From the Margin: Writing in Italian Americana (1991). 40. Bona argues: “With the debatable exception of Diane di Prima’s 1969 Memoirs of a Beatnik, for the first time in Italian American autobiographical history, DeSalvo offers readers an inside

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of her immigrant life, including her father’s anger and confusion and her mother’s oppression and depression. She creates a space within the larger cultural community that might ultimately free immigrant narratives from sentimental and nostalgic views of life.41 The publication of Vertigo propelled the primarily private and domestic discourse of Italian American women into a public and politicized realm. Vertigo represents a radical departure from previous immigrant narratives, including Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964) and Jerre Mangione’s Mount Allegro (1943), which focus on assimilation, but never actually break codes of omertà, and, in some cases, even reinforce the trope of silence.42 By writing of incest, physical abuse, and mental illness, not only does DeSalvo violate the taboos surrounding these subjects, but she also illustrates the complicated ways in which these forms of violence are interwoven with class and ethnic oppression. Like Dorothy Allison’s semiautobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Michael Ryan’s memoir Secret Life (1995), Richard Hoffman’s memoir Half the House

look of an ‘unlikely narrative of how a working- class Italian girl became a critic and writer’ (Vertigo xxxvii), paving a path for subsequent writers who quickly followed her lead” (By the Breath 147). 41. In his review of Vertigo, Gardaphé states: “Reading Vertigo helps us to understand why there have been so few autobiographical works by Italian / American women. . . . This ‘unlikely narrative’ is a verbal montage of a life lived in pieces that comes together only through writing. A mother’s depression, a sister’s suicide, growing up in a home with a father at war and a mother in an enclave of women-managed households, form the basis for DeSalvo’s early traumas. She seeks salvation in the local library and fashions her identity through rebellion and pursuit of academic excellence” (“Review of Vertigo” 279). Gardaphé points out that the fracture inherent within DeSalvo’s familial structure is recurrent in the experience of the children of Italian immigrants in the US. 42. Vertigo was the first of many groundbreaking Italian American memoirs by women— including Mary Cappello’s Night Bloom (1998); Flavia Alaya’s Under the Rose: A Confession (1999); Carole Maso’s A Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth (2000); Maria Laurino’s Were You Always an Italian? Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America (2000); Beverly Donofrio’s Looking for Mary: Or, the Blessed Mother and Me (2000); Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001); Mary Saracino’s Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior (2001); Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (2001); Theresa Maggio’s The Stone Boudoir: Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily (2002); Cris Mazza’s Indigenous: Growing Up Californian (2003); Danielle Trussoni’s Falling Through the Earth (2006); Kym Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006); Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen: A True Story (2006); Jean Feraca’s I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio (2007); Cappello’s Awkward: A Detour (2007) and Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life (2009); Laurino’s Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom (2009); Leonilde Frieri Ruberto’s Such is Life: An Italian American Woman’s Memoir (2010); Joanna Clapps Herman’s The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America (2011); Annie Lanzillotto’s L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (2013); Christa Parravani’s Her (2013); Domenica Ruta’s With or Without You (2013); and Susanne Antonetta’s Make Me a Mother (2014). Leonilde Frieri Ruberto’s Such Is Life: An Italian American Woman’s Memoir (2010) was published in a bilingual edition since it was written in Italian by Ruberto, a first-generation Italian American woman. Her granddaughter, the Italian American scholar Laura E. Ruberto, translated the eighty-page text twenty years after it was written. The volume includes an introductory essay by Ilaria Serra, also a contributor to this volume.

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(1995), Linda Gray Sexton’s memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994), Kathryn Harrison’s memoir The Kiss (1997), and Susanna Sonnenberg’s memoir Her Last Death (2008), Vertigo makes it clear that the sexual oppression and exploitation of children are linked to the failure of the family to protect the children, even when family members are not directly implicated in the abuse. As in Woolf’s Melymbrosia, the family, we discover, is not an inviolate space, but rather one deeply implicated in the politics of gender and sexual oppression.43 DeSalvo’s anger pushes through silence. She rejects cultural norms while also acknowledging their power. In Vertigo and her other essays and memoirs, she unwinds the narrative of silent women as good women. In particular, she focuses on Italian American women whose frustration is transformed into a harangue that obfuscates the true nature of their discontent—their inability to do anything “except complain. To their children or anyone else who will listen to them. About their men and about their bad luck in having been born female” (Vertigo 220). She refutes any strict adherence to an Italian American cultural code, and in doing so, recognizes that complaint without action serves only as a reinscription of stultifying tradition. This refusal to enter cultural paralysis opens her narratives to an examination of issues that concern not only the Italian American immigrant community, but also the larger local and global communities. Breathless: An Asthma Journal, published in 1997, continues DeSalvo’s exploration of the genre of the memoir and its relationship to the essay. While some sections of the book are explicitly memoiristic in form, much like the later Adultery, On Moving, and even Writing as a Way of Healing, DeSalvo plays with the authorial voice by developing a persona crafted out of her experiences as a literary critic, biographer, and memoirist. In Breathless, DeSalvo casts herself in the position of the polemical social critic, reading her own asthma in connection with the asthma epidemic, which she views as yet another environmental crisis that victimizes especially children in poor urban neighborhoods. DeSalvo paints a frightening picture of a society that has given up the right to free and clean water and is progressively surrendering the right to free, clean air: “How long will it be,” she asks, “until those of us who can afford it will hook ourselves up to portable air purifiers to go outside?” (Breathless 148–149). This poignant question foregrounds the connection between class privilege and the ability to protect oneself from environmental abuse. Like Vertigo and all of DeSalvo’s memoir and essayistic writing, Breathless radically upsets the expectations of the recovery “arc.” DeSalvo joins authors such as Audre Lorde and Nancy Mairs, who have written eloquently on the politics of illness. Breathless is akin to The Cancer Journals (1980), in which Lorde refuses to contain her breast cancer within the confines of the private narrative. DeSalvo, like Lorde, roots her critique in the

43. Reprinted by the Feminist Press in 2002, Vertigo received the Gay Talese award in the United States. The Feminist Press had by then reprinted other classics of Italian American literature written by women, including Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish (1996), Dorothy Bryant’s Miss Giardino (1997) (as well as other novels by Bryant), Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1999), and Josephine Gattuso Hendin’s The Right Thing to Do (1999). Caterino Romeo translated Vertigo into Italian and wrote an afterword for this edition in 2006. Vertigo received the Giuseppe Acerbi Award in Italy.

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practices of feminism and its politicization of the private.44 And like Mairs’s memoir, Waist-High in the World (1997), Breathless takes on a prophetic tone as DeSalvo comes to view her illness as that which has opened her eyes to the frightful question of environmental abuse: I sometimes wonder who is the more highly evolved. The person who responds adversely to chemical fumes, exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, noxious odors, trauma, or the person who doesn’t. Maybe, I tell myself, I’m like the canary in the mine shaft. Maybe my gasping for air is information that other, less sensitive people should heed. Maybe the fate of the planet depends upon people like me whose responsive bodies are telling us all that there is something very wrong around here. (Breathless 149)

In refusing to identify herself as a victim of her illness, but insisting that responsibility for the environmental degradation must be collectively accepted, DeSalvo’s radical narrative asks readers to be accountable for their actions and communities to recognize and respond to the urgency of her words—and of the situation that they describe. Two years after Breathless, in Adultery, DeSalvo continues to push the boundaries of genre. Adultery begins with a caveat: if the reader does not want to commit adultery or think about adultery, he or she might not want to read the book since it will only cultivate the “fantasy of adultery” (47). This confrontation of the public and private illusions about adultery as it appears in literature and life lies at the center of this small, edgy book. Rather than passing moral judgment, DeSalvo delves into an inquiry into adultery that critiques society, popular culture, and the institution of marriage. What “drives people to commit adultery,” according to DeSalvo, is the promise of an escape from “real life” (47). Moving between public stories of adultery, including President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, and private stories such as her husband’s extramarital affair soon after the birth of their first son, DeSalvo calls herself, with irony and great seriousness, a survivor of adultery. As she examines adultery in literature and history, she interweaves her reflections on adultery as a cultural phenomenon with her personal adultery story and her view that her husband’s affair shaped—and reshaped—her life, her marriage, and, most of all, her literary career and philosophy of life. Like the protagonists of Casting Off, DeSalvo rejects the fantasy of adultery as well as its cannibalistic promise of the demise of marriage it brings to reflect instead on what a marriage might look like if intimacy permeated all aspects of a couple’s life rather than being confined to the bedroom. If Adultery is a polemic against anything, it is against marriage without renewal— without a commitment to change and to understand that two people must remain singular individuals if they are to become a strong and lasting couple.

44. Lorde was teaching at Hunter College when DeSalvo was hired. In the introduction to The Cancer Journals, Lorde states: “I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined. For other women of all ages, colors, and sexual identities who recognize that imposed silence in any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness, and for myself, I have tried to voice some of my feelings and thoughts about the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, my confrontations with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self- conscious living” (9–10).

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That same year, DeSalvo published Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, a book on the writing process that again brings together her work as a literary critic, biographer, novelist, and memoirist, but also her experiences as a teacher of writing. This book is not a simplistic “how-to” or “self-help” manual; rather, it is an essayistic meditation on the connection to emotional, mental, and physical awareness that is necessary to develop a writing practice. Drawing from the lives of canonical and emerging writers, DeSalvo weaves a portrait of the writer’s life that is complex and joyful, even when it involves writing about traumatic events. She examines the practices of writers as diverse as Woolf, Lawrence, Isabelle Allende, and her students at Hunter College. Distilling her writing experiences as well as those of the writers she has encountered, through books and through teaching, over several decades, she insists that writers must administer self- care. Like other authors, such as Anne Lamott and Stephen King, who write about the writing process, DeSalvo illuminates how the practice of the craft and the practice of self- care must be combined and reconfigured for each writing project.45 She believes that genius is crafted over years of practice, including the art of perfecting sentences. And, like King, DeSalvo uses herself as an example of a writer who reads other authors to show how integral the reading process is to learning to craft precise sentences and compelling stories. If Vertigo is a coming- of-age memoir, Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2005) broadens the archaeological work of memory, delving into the lives of DeSalvo’s peasant ancestors. Once again, DeSalvo turns to the tools of the researcher as she retraces the steps of her family, literally traveling to the places in southern Italy from which her ancestors had departed and ending with her granddaughter Julia as the singular plural of her family’s histories.46 The seeds of this book can be traced back to the essay “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar” (2003), in which she addresses the predicament of the working class intellectual, who must confront the gap between her privileged present and her immigrant ancestors’ past. In that essay she writes: It is my grandfather’s journey here to the United States that has made my work as a writer, as a thinker, possible. Without his emigrating, without his working on the railroad to support his family, without his devotion to a small girl who did not speak

45. Anne Lamott and Stephen King are two working contemporary authors who, like DeSalvo, insist that writers must be cognizant of their whole lives, not merely their writing lives. See King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), and Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1995). 46. Jean-Luc Nancy states: “Being cannot be anything but being-with- one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence. “If one can put it like this, there is no other meaning than the meaning of circulation. But this circulation goes in all directions at once, in all the directions of all the space times [les espacetemps] opened by presence to presence: all things, all beings, all entities, everything past and future, alive, dead, inanimate, stones, plants, nails, gods—and ‘humans,’ that is, those who expose sharing and circulation as such by saying ‘we,’ by saying we to themselves in all possible sense of that expression, and by saying we for the totality of all being” (3). The epilogue of Crazy in the Kitchen and DeSalvo’s characterization of Julia there suggests just this state of being.

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his language because her mother thought that speaking his language would impede her, I would surely not be here. (60)

DeSalvo acknowledges her grandfather’s position as an immigrant in the United States. She also recognizes his perseverance as a quality that she has inherited and continues to embrace. Far from denying her past, she probes its significance. DeSalvo undertakes the work of cultural recovery and reclamation, which sustains much of her work and is especially central to Crazy in the Kitchen, from her position as a working class writer and intellectual. Crazy in the Kitchen addresses the relationship between Italians, earth, and food by dissecting the trope of food as sustenance, which she and Giunta, as coeditors, previously explored with fifty-four contributors in The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (2002).47 Crazy in the Kitchen upends notions of abundance to focus on the deprivation that many Italian ancestors suffered and would have continued to suffer if they had remained in Italy. This narrative reveals why the simple assimilation tale has been accepted not only by Italian Americans, but also by other so-called white ethnics. In accepting the code of silence, those who immigrated forget the past in order to embrace the future, but, as DeSalvo points out, this means no one lives in the present. Crazy in the Kitchen refuses to sacrifice the present and reveals a past that can be cruel and violent. DeSalvo deconstructs the stultifying codes and traditions that she had started to explore in Vertigo and exposes the fear that plagued the lives of immigrants. By reconfiguring the past, she makes the present a vibrant site where tradition can be renewed rather than becoming ossified. In the epilogue, entitled “Playing the Bowl,” DeSalvo shifts the focus from the past to the present moment: she is attending a music class with her granddaughter, whom DeSalvo recognizes as the commingling of the histories about which she has been writing. While the other children are running around the room and making music with the “improvised instruments” that have been given to them, Julia commands “the center of the circle . . . [and] flips her bowl, takes her spoon, starts stirring . . . she’s stirring as quickly as the other children are drumming” (Crazy 254). 47. DeSalvo and Giunta chose to include known and emerging writers in The Milk of Almonds. Another press had expressed interest in the anthology, but the publisher only wanted to include a few well-known Italian American women writers. When the coeditors approached the Feminist Press, they were upfront about wanting to do an expansive anthology that could examine notions of food and sustenance without sentimentality and with voices that were rarely, if ever, heard. An anthology, too, can work as a community-building project that embraces many voices. After Between Women and before The Milk of Almonds, DeSalvo coedited an anthology of Irish American women writers, Territories of the Voice: Contemporary Stories of Irish Woman Writers (1989), which was updated and reissued as Green and Mortal Sound: Short Fiction by Irish Women Writers in 2002. Another Italian American woman writer, the celebrated poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan, has been indefatigable in supporting writers, including emerging writers and authors from diverse ethnic backgrounds, through her work as an editor of the Paterson Literary Review and the many anthologies she has edited, several with her daughter Jennifer Gillan. See especially Italian American Writers on New Jersey: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose (2003), edited by Jennifer Gillan, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and Edvige Giunta and Growing up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (1999), edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.

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DeSalvo recognizes that Julia is conjuring events from a global and multiethnic past by “calling out the names of what she’s making” (254). DeSalvo takes this recognition one step further to see in her granddaughter the history and the future of her maternal ancestry, which includes “the face of every woman in the world”: “Russia . . . AustriaHungary . . . Puglia . . . the Abruzzi . . . Campania, and . . . Sicily” (254). This acknowledgment reconfigures the meaning of DeSalvo’s work on Woolf, her close collaboration with women such as Sara Ruddick and Rosemary Ahearn, her editorial work for anthologies such as Green and Mortal Sound: Short Fiction by Irish Women Writers and The Milk of Almonds, and even her teaching. These areas of DeSalvo’s work cannot be viewed as self- contained, finite entities, but as part of a whole that lives on in the written word and through DeSalvo’s progeny.48 Stripping the Italian American experience of sentimentality and single-voiced narratives, DeSalvo writes Italian Americanness within a multiethnic context shaped by race and class. On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again (2009) was inspired by DeSalvo’s move from her home of more than three decades in Teaneck, New Jersey, to a home in Montclair, also in New Jersey. This extended essay explores the difficult process of moving and how the experience upended DeSalvo. She acknowledges that moving may be traumatic. Yet, she believes that not moving or not reflecting on its process may be more disastrous to one’s writing and emotional health. For Woolf, “ ‘home’ meant a place where you were controlled and abused, a place you had to flee” (15); yet imagining an “ideal home,” she could begin to search for “a safe space” (15). A search for safety can also become a pitfall, if one believes “moving to another place will fulfill our desires” (34). In many ways, On Moving is a meditation about sustaining oneself in the present moment. DeSalvo’s memoir-in-progress about her father’s experiences during World War II was at first intertwined with and part of the manuscript that became On Moving. The two books were “conjoined” because, as DeSalvo recalls, she thought her father’s narrative about the war was “necessary” to On Moving. She “had to pull it apart,” however, once she recognized that her father’s narrative deserved a more complicated telling than it would appear in On Moving. DeSalvo states that “Father Gone to War” is “about falling in love in wartime—when it’s impossible and difficult—[it’s] a big canvas and World War II is [only] the prelude.” Splitting apart On Moving and “Father Gone to War” led DeSalvo to recognize that “Louis [her father] is the great intruder” in her life and work. Once she separated the two narratives, she decided to put aside the father memoir until she completed On Moving. DeSalvo’s most recent book, The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity (2014), emerged from Writingalife’s Blog, which she began on January 4, 2010, with the auspicious entry “Thinking about Audience by Louise DeSalvo.” DeSalvo understands social media as a tool of twenty-first- century technology through which to make deeper connections to the writing process. She believes that the blog has allowed her to collect her thoughts differently and to engage with the discipline of writing in a new manner. For each blog entry, DeSalvo gives herself only half an hour, including 48. Her “progeny” includes her students, although they are not part of the narrative of Crazy in the Kitchen.

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time for one revision, before she hits the publish button. In the three years of the blog’s existence, she has explored issues pertaining to craft, practice, the memoir genre, and her personal experience of breast cancer. For DeSalvo, the blog is another tool to engage with the present moment and connect to a larger community. Louise DeSalvo has been writing for four decades. Throughout this time, she has been teaching, and she has no desire to stop. Her teaching at an institution like Hunter College, with its population of primarily working-class students, has informed her radical pedagogy, a pedagogy that recognizes and honors her students’ experiences—of gender, sexuality, class, race / ethnicity, disability, and trauma. Breaking “cultural silencing” lies at the center of DeSalvo’s practice as a teacher of memoir (DeSalvo, “When the Story Is Silence” 156). Advocating a “process-oriented pedagogy” (159), DeSalvo has taught generations of students how to “discuss openly issues of silencing and self-censorship” and to recover and shape their experiences into compelling, empowering narratives (155). She believes that teaching is simply another “connection to the process”: “I love to be with young minds excited about learning—watching them learn who they are. I have stayed by choice with working-class students.” She also believes that it is important, for a writer, to be around apprentices, helping them develop their talent, witnessing their process, and learning alongside as well as from her students. DeSalvo’s emphasis on the importance of a writing community— even as she values and has written extensively about the solitary and meditative quality of the writing practice—remains rooted in her determination to draw from her working class and immigrant origins, and to read them through feminist politics and radical pedagogy.

Structure This anthology gathers scholars and creative nonfiction writers who reflect on DeSalvo’s habit of mind as it actualizes in her work as a writer, teacher, and scholar. Contributors read DeSalvo’s work from a multiplicity of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives (women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, Italian American studies, and Woolf studies). Many of the contributors blend the personal and the scholarly. The book as a whole is mindful not to draw sharp lines of genre demarcation. We wanted to reproduce that creative approach to genre and hybridity that distinguishes DeSalvo’s opus. We treated her pedagogical praxis as an essential component of this opus. Thus, we sought essays that read DeSalvo as an author and a teacher of memoir for memoir is a pedagogical— not didactic—genre that has, starting in the latter part of the twentieth century, demystified the notion of the literary genius and elitist views on literature. Essays by Margaux Fragoso, Lia Ottaviano, and Kym Ragusa examine the influence of DeSalvo’s work as a teacher of memoir in working class institutional settings. Emily Bernard and Julija Šukys consider DeSalvo’s example more broadly and in connection with questions of creativity—specifically with regard to bridging the modes of scholarly and creative writing. Memoir, in the hands of a literary practitioner schooled in early and mid-twentieth- century American and British literature and second-wave feminism, becomes a rich and provocative example of literary experimentation that freely interacts with the genres of fiction—as argued by Jeana DelRosso in her essay on the Catholic elements in Vertigo. Joshua Fausty focuses on DeSalvo’s “essayistic memoir” as a type of

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writing that articulates “a literary process of subjective becoming that does not imply certainty about a final destination or even a starting point.” Peter Covino reads DeSalvo like a poet, distilling the significance of semantic and syntactic choices to identify what he coins as DeSalvo’s “poetics of trauma.” Many of the contributors— especially, Mary Jo Bona and Jennifer-Ann DiGregorio Kightlinger, Kimberly A. Costino, John Gennari, and Theodora Patrona— consider DeSalvo’s writing as a wide-ranging project of cultural recovery, reclamation, and transformation in the context of working class ethnic / Italian American female identity. Each of these contributors places DeSalvo’s work within a larger cultural framework. Patrona offers a comparative perspective by juxtaposing Vertigo to Greek American female immigrant novels. Costino reads DeSalvo’s writing through the lens of the literacy narrative. Bona and DiGregorio Kightlinger argue that DeSalvo’s antisentimental food narrative recasts the place of food in Italian American culture. Gennari’s manifesto forges new ways to look at Italian food both within and without Italian American culture. Expanding on the premises of immigrant female identity, Ilaria Serra addresses displacement and mobility as key components of contemporary migrant identity that DeSalvo, as the descendant of southern Italian immigrants, embodies in multiple and layered ways. Jenn Brandt analyzes DeSalvo’s only novel, Casting Off, through the critical lens of a third-wave feminist. Mark Hussey and Benjamin D. Hagen, as well as other contributors—including Brandt, Covino, Fausty, and Šukys—acknowledge DeSalvo’s influential critical and biographical work on Woolf. In particular, Hagen’s, Fausty’s, and Hussey’s essays can be read as a triptych that illuminates DeSalvo’s work on Woolf. Finally, Amy Jo Burns discusses DeSalvo’s most recent foray into blogging, especially as it is informed by and informs her writing and teaching. Personal Effects is divided into three sections: Memoir, Teaching, and Culture. We have grouped the essays around these three broad and interconnected topics not only because they best exemplify the nature of the work that DeSalvo has done over four decades, but also because these categories contextualize the literary production of DeSalvo for those familiar with it, while also making it accessible and readily usable for those unfamiliar with it. These categories help us understand that DeSalvo’s work is profoundly contemporary as well as rooted in the literary, philosophical, ethical, and pedagogical conversations prevalent in US culture in the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The first section, “Memoir,” begins with “Louise DeSalvo’s ‘Even in Death, La Bella Figura’: A Meditation on Honor, Respect, and the Silences that Bind” by memoirist Fragoso. This essay combines a close reading of DeSalvo’s work, an account of Fragoso’s first meeting with the author when Fragoso was still an undergraduate, and Fragoso’s personal / literary narrative. In “The Poetics of Trauma: Intertextuality, Rhythm, and Concision in Vertigo and Writing as a Way of Healing,” Covino uses Kristeva’s notions of intertextuality and poetic texts to read three chapters of Vertigo that center around trauma. DelRosso’s essay addresses the subversion of memory, fact, and history in DeSalvo’s work vis-à-vis the writings of contemporary Catholic women memoirists— exemplified here by Mary McCarthy and Martha Manning. Šukys, a writer of Lithuanian origins, dialogues with DeSalvo’s “Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf

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Scholar,” focusing on the struggle to balance research, writing, and motherhood—and of living and falling in love with feminine literary ghosts (Woolf for DeSalvo and Ona Šimaitė for Šukys). In the last essay of this section, Fausty argues that remembering and telling, undertaken in writing that performs “transformative nextness,” serve as vehicles for self and social transformation. The second section, “Teaching,” opens with an essay on “vulnerability and risk” in teaching / learning memoir by Ragusa—who was part of the inaugural group of MFA memoir students at Hunter College. In the next essay, Bernard explores the process of becoming a creative writer through a discussion of Adultery, Conceived with Malice, and Vertigo. She views these texts as examples of the way DeSalvo both fixes and unfixes: telling the truth, we learn, sometimes happens in the gaps between words, sentences, and paragraphs. Costino considers the ways in which representations of literacy interact with and resist cultural discourses and ideologies concerning race, whiteness, immigration, ethnicity, and gender. Ottaviano’s essay presents an intimate portrait of DeSalvo’s pedagogy of class and classroom. Hagen closes this section on “Teaching” with a thoughtful discussion of DeSalvo’s textual scholarship in her neglected book Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (1980) and considers the lasting value of her methodology for Woolf scholars today. He shows us how younger Woolf scholars, who have been trained after DeSalvo stopped working on Woolf, are looking back to her work and see it as offering vital and truly contemporary lessons for them to use today in their own research. The third section, “Culture,” opens with an essay by Woolf scholar Hussey who discusses the reception of DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse in Her Life and Work (1989) in Woolf studies and mainstream “intellectual media” at a historical moment in which US culture was undergoing a profound shift in attitudes toward incest and memory. Brandt rereads Casting Off in conversation with Adultery. She explores how the novel both delves into the relationship between sexuality and creativity and exposes the strictures to which women were still subjected in the late twentieth century. Burns’s “Life Online: Skating and Breaking the Surface of the Self” examines DeSalvo’s Writingalife’s Blog, which, she argues, succeeds in “genre-straddling” by bringing together the contemplative memoir and the hurried blog. Bona and Di Gregorio Kightlinger examine loss of language as a marker of Italian migration. The authors argue that DeSalvo uses food as the means by which to reconnect physically and spiritually with the past. Patrona examines Vertigo in conjunction with works by Greek American writers Ariadne Thompson and Helen Papanikolas to present a kaleidoscopic view of the female ethnic that underscores the hurdles of first- and second-generation women of white ethnic ancestry in the United States. Serra uses the livable bridge, which she borrows from Italian architecture, as a metaphor through which to read On Moving in juxtaposition to the earlier Crazy in the Kitchen, highlighting the ways in which DeSalvo treats the text as an architectural space. In “The Knife and the Bread, the Brutal and the Sacred: Louise DeSalvo at the Family Table,” Gennari probes DeSalvo’s effort to construct a familial narrative that is at once traumatic and redemptive, an effort that pivots on her hunger for a usable gastronomic past. The book ends with an afterword by Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, who calls attention to DeSalvo’s “militancy” and

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considers the collective work presented here as “a new articulation of the ItalianAmerican female writer.”

Conclusion It would be simple to say that DeSalvo is a Woolf scholar who wrote a groundbreaking and controversial book on sexual abuse and Woolf, a memoirist that turns timeworn tropes on their head, and a teacher who asks nothing of her students that she does not demand of herself as a writer. Still, it is not easy to pin her down. DeSalvo cultivates intimacy, whether she is remembering her childhood in Hoboken, writing about modernist authors, delving into ethical and pedagogical questions in the classroom and on the page— or baking bread. At the very end of Vertigo, we witness DeSalvo sorting through her mother’s belongings. Negotiating holding on and letting go, past and future, DeSalvo finds a way to incorporate and reconfigure “the most trivial, yet the most important personal effects of the women of [her] family” as they “come together at last, and mingle in [her] kitchen drawers and cupboards” (263). DeSalvo teaches us that perspectives change. In turn, the contributions in this anthology reflect the eclectic and generous quality of DeSalvo’s work. Our contributors understand the limitations and potentialities of genre boundaries. This anthology moves purposefully between the genres of the scholarly essay and personal essay. It includes emerging and known scholars and writers to create an intimate conversation that reveals the depth and resonance of DeSalvo’s work. Personal effects are “powerful totems” (263) and these essays remind us that, although the pen and the keyboard are important tools of the writing practice, the kitchen utensils, meditation, and the conversations over lunch are as integral to a life’s work.

Works Cited Alaya, Flavia. Under the Rose: A Confession. New York: Feminist Press, 1999. Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Dutton, 1992. Altman, Meryl. “Posthumous Queer: Hemingway Among Others.” The Hemingway Review 30, no. 1 (2010): 129–141. Antonetta, Susanne. Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001. ———. Make Me a Mother. New York: Norton, 2014. Ascher, Carol, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, eds. Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about their Work on Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Barolini, Helen. “Introduction.” In The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women, ed. Helen Barolini. New York: Schocken Books, 1987. ———. Umbertina. 1979. Afterword by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 1999. Barone, Dennis, and Peter Covino, eds. Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture. New York: Bordighera Press, 2012. Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir. Portland, Ore.: Eighth Mountain Press, 2002. Benstock, Shari. The Private Self: Theory and Practice in Women’s Autobiographical Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

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Birkerts, Sven. The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2008. Bona, Mary Jo. “ ‘But Is It Great?’ The Question of the Canon for Italian American Women Writers.” In Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, ed. Mary Jo Bona and Irma Maini, 85–110. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. ———. By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010. ———. Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Bonomo Albright, Carol, and Christine Palamidessi Moore, eds. American Woman, Italian Style: Italian-Americana’s Best Writings on Women. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Bryant, Dorothy. Miss Giardino. 1978. Afterword by Janet Zandy. New York: Feminist Press, 1997. Bugental, James F. T. Psychotherapy and Process: The Fundamentals of an Existential-Humanistic Approach. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978. Cappello, Mary. Awkward: A Detour. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2007. ———. Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life. New York: Alyson Books, 2009. ———. Night Bloom. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Carnevale, Nancy. A New Language, a New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States 1890–1945. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Caronia, Nancy. “Go to Hell.” In Curaggia: Writings by Women of Italian Descent, ed. Nzula Angelina Ciatu, Domenica Dileo, and Gabriella Micallef, 216–225. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1998. ———. “Go to Hell.” In The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, ed. Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta, 95–100. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. ———. “Setting the Table.” In the girlSpeak Journals, ed. Nancy Caronia, vii–x. New York: Women’s Words Press, 1997. Ciresi, Rita. “Paradise Below the Stairs.” Italian Americana 12, no. 1 (1993): 17–22. Conway, Jill Ker. When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York: Knopf, 1998. D’Acierno, Pellegrino, ed. The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. New York: Garland, 1999. De Rosa, Tina. Paper Fish. 1980. Afterword by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 1996. DeSalvo, Louise. Adultery: An Intimate Look at Why People Cheat. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. ———. The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014. ———. “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar.” In Reflections on Italian American Women Writers, ed. Mary Ann Mannino and Justin Vitiello, 59–71. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2003. ———. Breathless: An Asthma Journal. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ———. Casting Off. Hassocks, UK: Harvester Press, 1987. ———. Casting Off. 1987. Introduction by Nancy Caronia. New York: Bordighera Press, 2014. ———. Conceived with Malice: Literature as Revenge in the Lives and Works of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller. New York: Dutton, 1994. ———. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.

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———. “Father Gone to War.” Manuscript. ———. “My Sister’s Suicide.” In Sister to Sister: Women Write about the Unbreakable Bond, ed. Patricia Foster, 247–264. New York: Doubleday, 1995. ———. On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. ———. “Paper Fish by Tina De Rosa: An Appreciation.” Italian / American Women Authors. Special issue of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana 7, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 249–255. ———. “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” In Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, 35–53. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. ———. Vertigo: A Memoir. New York: Dutton, 1996. ———. Vertigo: A Memoir. 1996. Introduction by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. ———. Vertigo. Translated into Italian with an afterword by Caterina Romeo. Rome: Nutrimenti, 2006. ———. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. ———. Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980. ———. “When the Story Is Silence: Italian American Student Writers and the Challenges of Teaching—and Writing—Memoir.” In Giunta and McCormick, Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, 154–159. ———. “ ‘A Wound in My Heart’: Virginia Stephen and the Writing of Melymbrosia.” In Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia, ix–xxvii. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2002. ———. Writingalife’s Blog. http://writingalife.wordpress.com. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. DeSalvo, Louise, and Edvige Giunta, eds. The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. DeSalvo, Louise, and Mitchell A. Leaska, eds. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. New York: William Morrow, 1985. DeSalvo, Louise, Kathleen Walsh D’Arcy, and Kathleen Hogan, eds. Green and Mortal Sound: Short Fiction by Irish Women Writers. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. ———. Territories of the Voice: Contemporary Stories of Irish Woman Writers. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. di Prima, Diane. Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. New York: Viking, 2001. Donofrio, Beverly. Looking for Mary: Or, the Blessed Mother and Me. New York: Penguin, 2000. Eakin, Paul John, ed. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Feraca, Jean. I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio. 2007. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Fraser, Kennedy. Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women’s Lives. New York: Knopf, 1996. Gardaphé, Fred L. Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.

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———. “Review of Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo: A Memoir.” In Italian American Women Authors. Special issue of Voices in Italian Americana: A Literary and Cultural Review 7, no. 2 (1996): 279–281. Gilbert, Sandra M. Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy. New York: Norton, 1995. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Gillan, Jennifer, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and Edvige Giunta, eds. Italian American Writers on New Jersey: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Gillan, Maria Mazziotti, and Jennifer Gillan, eds. Growing up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American. New York: Penguin, 1999. Giunta, Edvige. “Introduction.” Louise DeSalvo, Vertigo, ix–xxiv. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. ———. “Memoir and the Italian American Canon.” Is There an Emerging Canon in Italian American Literature? Special issue of Rivista di Studi Americani 21–22 (2010–2011): 98–101. ———. “Teaching Memoir at New Jersey City University.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 11, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 80– 89. ———. Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Giunta, Edvige, ed. Italian / American Women Authors. Special issue of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana 7, no. 2 (Fall 1996). Giunta, Edvige, and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, eds. Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture. New York: MLA, 2010. Goldberg, Natalie. “The Sun Interview: Keep the Hand Moving.” Interview by Genie Zeiger. The Sun 335 (November 2003): 1–2. Green, Rose Basile. The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Guglielmo, Jennifer. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss. New York: Random House, 1997. Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. The Right Thing to Do. 1988. Afterword by Mary Jo Bona. New York: Feminist Press, 1999. Herman, Joanna Clapps. The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011. Hite, Molly. “The Public Woman and the Modernist Turn: Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Elizabeth Robins’s My Little Sister.” Modernism / modernity 17, no. 3 (2010): 523–548. Hoffman, Richard. Half the House: A Memoir. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Hutcheon, Linda. “Cryptoethnicity.” In Beyond the Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience, ed. A. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Parini, 247–257. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Ed. Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin, 2003. King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner, 2000. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor, 1995. Lanzillotto, Annie. L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013.

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Larsen, Thomas. The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing the Personal Narrative. Athens: Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 2007. Laurino, Maria. Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom. New York: Norton, 2009. ———. Were You Always an Italian? Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America. New York: Norton, 2000. Lloyd, Susan Caperna, dir. The Baggage. 2001. 32 min. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Spinster Ink, 1980. Maggio, Theresa. The Stone Boudoir: Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002. Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Non-Disabled. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Mangione, Jerre. Mount Allegro. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943. Marchetto, Marisa Acocella. Cancer Vixen: A True Story. New York: Knopf, 2006. Maso, Carole. The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth. Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000. Mazza, Cris. Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. San Francisco: City Lights, 2003. Mueller, RoseAnna, and Dora Labate. “A Review of Anthologies for Teaching Italian American Studies.” In Giunta adn McCormick, Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, 297–306. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. 1996. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Parravani, Christa. Her: A Memoir. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2013. Pearce, Richard. “To the Light.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 24, no. 2 (1991): 222–225. Phelan, Peggy. “Growing up Abused.” The Women’s Review of Books 7, no. 6 (1990): 16–17. Puzo, Mario. The Fortunate Pilgrim. New York: Athenaeum Books, 1964. Ragusa, Kym. The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging. New York: Norton, 2006. Ragusa, Kym, dir. fuori / outside. Ibla Productions. 1997. Romeo, Caterina. “Remembering, Misremembering, and Forgetting the Motherland.” In Giunta and McCormick, Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, 132–140. Ruberto, Laura E. Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the US. 2007. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010. Ruberto, Leonilde Frieri. Such Is Life: An Italian American Woman’s Memoir. Translated by Laura E. Ruberto. Introduction by Ilaria Serra. New York: Bordighera Press, 2010. Ruddick, Sara, and Pamela Daniels, eds. Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Ruta, Domenica. With or Without You: A Memoir. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013. Ryan, Michael. Secret Life: An Autobiography. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Saracino, Mary. Finding Grace. Duluth: Spinster Ink, 1999. ———. No Matter What. Minneapolis: Spinsters Ink, 1993. ———. Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior: A Memoir. Denver: Spinsters Ink, 2001. Serra, Ilaria. The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States Between 1890 and 1924. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. ———. The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Biographies. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.

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Sexton, Linda Gray. Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Boston: Little Brown, 1994. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Sonnenberg, Susanna. Her Last Death: A Memoir. New York: Scribner, 2008. Spoo, Robert. “Reviews of Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman, by Jane Marcus; Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, by Louise DeSalvo.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 2 (1991): 310–312. Tamburri, Anthony. A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian / American Writer. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. Tamburri, Anthony, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé, eds. From the Margin: Writing in Italian Americana. 1991. 2nd ed. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2000. Taylor, Julie. “Revising The Antiphon, Restaging Trauma; or, Where Sexual Politics Meet Textual History.” Modernism / modernity 18, no. 1 (2011): 125–147. Trussoni, Danielle. Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir. New York: Picador, 2006. Viscusi, Robert. Buried Caesars and Other Italian American Writing. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Wisor, Rebecca. “Versioning Virginia Woolf: Notes Toward a Post- eclectic Edition of Three Guineas.” Modernism / modernity 16, no. 3 (2009): 497–535. Woolf, Virginia. Melymbrosia by Virginia Woolf: An Early Version of The Voyage Out. Ed. Louise DeSalvo. New York: New York Public Library, 1982. ———. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Ed. Jenifer Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. “A Sketch of the Past.” 1939. In Moments of Being, 61–159. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Harvest, 1995. ———. The Voyage Out. 1915. Ed. Lorna Sage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Three Guineas. 1938. Ed. Jane Marcus. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2006. Zandy, Janet. Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

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Louise DeSalvo’s “Even in Death, La Bella Figura” A MEDITATION ON HONOR, RESPECT, AN D THE SILE NCES THAT BIND

Margaux Fragoso

Hidden in the Basement, Falling from the Ceiling In 2000, Louise DeSalvo visited my undergraduate college, New Jersey City University, to read from her memoir Vertigo. Only twenty- one at the time, I was amazed by her ability to write lyrically about her experiences with childhood sexual abuse. All those years, I had been taught to believe the cultural myth that talking openly about secrets such as sexual abuse was an immensely shameful act. But this simply wasn’t true, I realized, as I sat in the audience, galvanized by this gifted author and speaker, who was also, in Boris Cyrulnik’s words, “strong [enough] . . . to make a confession that destabilizes those around [her]” (253). Soon after attending DeSalvo’s reading, I finally wrote down my memory of a family friend bringing me to a dark basement when I was eight so he could sexually abuse me. Unfortunately, when I first started writing, I was very different from the powerful woman I had seen that day at the university. Filled with shame, I took those initial pages outside and sidled down the dark Union City block, past parked cars to the worn yellow curb, and there tore them into strips about four inches each in width. I then took each bookmark-sized wedge and carefully shredded it lengthwise. I completed the task by emptying my words into the gutter, which, at its mouth, housed a dented fast-food cup, rotted autumn leaves, and some smashed cigarette butts. In that first piece, I never named my abuser, but curiously, I did not rely on a pseudonym, either. I called him simply “the man” when I referred to the abuse and “a friend”

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if I wrote about him in other contexts. I was still seeing him (though now platonically) at twenty- one, when I first wrote about the abuse. Somehow my brain had created a schism between the child molester and the loving, supportive father figure Peter Curran could sometimes be. I was only beginning to admit that Curran was also undeniably my former abuser: he had, from roughly when I was eight to seventeen, coerced me into appeasing his wish for a young girl who could ser vice him sexually on a daily basis, performing his elaborate sexual fantasies down to every graphic detail. I had created an alter ego, “Nina,” and Curran had invented his own displaced self, “Mr. Nasty.” All the while, to the outside world we presented the facade that we were father and daughter, driving many miles every day to enjoy the solitude and tranquility of state parks and nature trails. I will never know if I am making a false connection when I tie my first writings about my childhood sexual abuse with the indignity of our home’s maggot infestation. When I was twenty- one, white wriggling worms descended from my family’s bathroom ceiling with the persistence of a biblical scourge. The maggots were smaller than eraser nubs and soundless as they fell in hushes from the cracks between the ceiling tiles. Stepping into the bathroom, I taught myself to bow my face so if one fell on me it would land on my shoulder rather than my cheek. I also learned to stomp on and then sweep the bodies into a dustpan, finally flushing them down the toilet. This is what my father had taught me to do to avoid the putrid stench they exuded while dying. It was a paradox that he would tolerate this infestation, while at the same time ensuring that his kitchen cabinets and his personal appearance were impeccable. Perhaps the situation panicked him: To gut that ceiling wasn’t something he could do himself, and to have it professionally done was pricey. Eventually, the maggots writhing on the tile became so numerous that my father hung up a green tarp to block them. It worked, but after a while, the stink of rot emitting from the ceiling was so powerful that even my father’s vigorously applied Giorgio Armani cologne couldn’t cover it. Years later, an unfortunate workman who was replacing the ceiling for the house’s next owners confronted—quite unexpectedly—the grinning skull-face of a picked- clean raccoon. This morbid discovery seems an apt metaphor for the damage done by my father’s attempts to maintain an unscathed appearance at any cost—what DeSalvo speaks of as la bella figura.

The Gift In DeSalvo’s memoir Vertigo, her sister Jill hangs herself with a belt that DeSalvo believes she had once given her as a gift. DeSalvo isn’t sure if this is actually true, but by identifying the belt as a present offered from one sister to another, she crystallizes the cyclical nature of unvoiced trauma. She addresses the fact that, in the name of familial and cultural honor, trauma, like a hand-me- down, is unthinkingly passed on through multiple generations. Belts have a dual function: to adorn and to cinch the waist of garments that would not otherwise fit. Thematically, Jill’s belt epitomizes the theme of honor and its relation to trauma and cultural repression; as Cyrulnik points out, “when words are silenced, objects become a language” (234). Indeed, silence and denial are deeply entrenched protective systems within this family. Upon viewing Jill’s corpse, DeSalvo’s mother’s character tries to console herself with

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these disconcerting remarks: “She came home to be with us, after all. She came home to be with us on her birthday” (Vertigo 32). It is clear to readers that DeSalvo’s mother’s thinking is distorted by grief; however, her comments are still useful in understanding how, within patriarchal families, the appearance of normalcy is often valued above all else, sometimes even over life itself. Moreover, as previously mentioned, Jill’s gift-belt represents the legacy of denial that is often handed down from one generation to another. By taking responsibility for the role that everyone plays in repressing the knowledge that a family member is in mortal danger, DeSalvo is standing in direct opposition to her mother’s repressive idealism. Without a doubt, her reference to the belt as a present brings out the horrific truth behind her sister’s life as “the good child” (Crazy 40), a selfsacrificing woman who literally martyrs herself to the family ideal of silent honor. By writing down her mother’s disturbing words, DeSalvo connects her family’s legacy of staunch-lipped pride to its most extreme form: Jill’s permanent silence. In Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004), DeSalvo reveals how Jill is, in her own way, following a tradition that their grandfather began when he did not want to be buried in a “damaged suit” because that “would have made a bad impression, would have brought disgrace to his family” (62). Here, DeSalvo elucidates her grandfather’s understandable—he had been taught to equate self-worth with physical presentation—but misdirected mindset that makes him deny rather than cherish who he is: “Even in death, la bella figura [was my grandfather’s way]” (62).1 With tragic pathos, DeSalvo helps her readers to see how her grandfather’s insistence on donning an immaculate suit at death represents an attempt to spare his future generations from the sense of shame he has experienced during his life. Unfortunately, by wearing a suit that, as DeSalvo points out, makes him look more like his bosses (61), he is erasing both his working- class identity in the United States and his past as a laborer who toiled for next-to-nothing pay in his native Puglia. DeSalvo questions her grandfather’s construction of la bella figura even as she empathizes with the needs of “poor people, foreign people, people without power” to garner respect through a new suit, like her grandfather, or a careful, precise signature, like her grandmother (90). DeSalvo recalls that her sister “dresses as if she’s fifteen,” and Jill remarks with her own tragic brand of la bella figura: “Who wants to be forty? Me, I’ll never be forty” (Vertigo 33). Maybe, in the distorted grip of severe despair, she sees merit in presenting her family with a coiffed dead body. It is not a coincidence that the childlike Jill sewed glamorous “evening gowns” and “cocktail dresses with matching headbands” for her dolls, “dressy” garments that “were suitable for a life [she would] never know” (37). Sadly, Jill seems terrified to create for herself the mature, fully realized life she envisions for her

1. La bella figura has a history that is well-worth noting for the purposes of this essay. In To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing, Steven Belluscio describes la bella figura as an Italian cultural concept that embodies a “complex [set] of behaviors through which one puts on—literally and metaphorically—a “good face” in order to mask immorality, incompetence, ulterior motives, ill will, discontent, or literally anything that could mar one’s public image. The opposite of la bella figura, la brutta figura (“ugly face”) is to be avoided at all costs— even at the risk of dishonesty” (200). In DeSalvo’s life and in the lives of her family members, the acceptance of la bella figura functions in both negative and positive capacities.

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dolls. DeSalvo references her sister’s meshing of eternal youth with la bella figura when she states that Jill is “proud when she’s thin enough to buy her clothes in the preteen shop” (33, emphasis mine). Like Sylvia Plath’s speaker in the poem “Edge,” Jill, perhaps, equates death with mannequin-like permanence and beauty as well as a passive form of artistic achievement. Plath’s verse is a fitting eulogy if read without irony: The woman is perfected Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment. (84)

Though everyone knows the effects of suicide are beyond devastating for a family, Jill may have felt that she was protecting those she loved from the potentially embarrassing symptoms of her mental illness. “It is a beautiful, sunny morning” (Vertigo 27), Jill writes in her journal on the day of her suicide—a seeming testament to the fact that the tension between her youthful demeanor and well-guarded inner turmoil has finally become too much to bear. DeSalvo explores the tension between pride and martyrdom in her haunting essay “Faceless.” The title alludes to DeSalvo’s character’s inability to focus on her own reflection due to her mother’s placement of a picture of Christ suffering on the cross in the corner of the family’s mirror. One cannot help but think of Jill gazing into the same looking glass and trying to replicate Christ’s sacrifice by becoming the paramount symbol of the obedient daughter. DeSalvo, however, refuses to gaze into this death-mirror; she vehemently rejects the “image of [her]self juxtaposed with that of Christ crucified” (“Faceless” 238). Throughout her young womanhood, DeSalvo resists this image of anguished surrender by any means: fighting with her father, staying out of the house as much as possible, and finally fleeing what she portrays as a severely dysfunctional household through marriage, which, as she points out in Vertigo, is the “only way for a woman of [her] class and background to move out of the family home” (Vertigo 235). DeSalvo demonstrates further resistance by defining herself as a writer: “a breaker of the silences, not a keeper of the [destructive] secrets” (Crazy 216). In addition to placing the ultimate image of dignified suffering on the family mirror, DeSalvo’s mother assumes an overwrought domestic life in order to cope with and mask her severe symptoms of clinical depression and anxiety. DeSalvo quotes her sister’s observation: “Before [our mother] decides to go crazy, she writes out her menu for Christmas, and makes a shopping list for food” (Vertigo 18). Certainly, the mother’s fanatical attention to household jobs serves as her means of indirectly expressing the hidden truth of the family’s dysfunction: She sets the breakfast table at night and turns our cereal bowls upside down so dust won’t get into them. She reverses the direction of every hanger in our closets so if thieves break into our house, they can’t grab all our stuff at once; they will have to take our clothes out item by item. (145)

This passage illustrates DeSalvo’s mother’s double reality: she assumes the role of a diligent housewife, all the while indirectly communicating that something isn’t right by topsy-turvying the bowls and the hangers. “Dirty, dirty, dirty,” she chants in Italian, as

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she ner vously cleans the areas under the dinner glasses and around the plates even though the disruption prevents her daughters from enjoying mealtimes (Crazy 29). From her anxious mother, DeSalvo receives little warmth: “My mother doesn’t know how to be a mother to me. No cookie baking in the kitchen. No lessons in how to make sauce. No cuddles. No intimate chats at bedtime. No very much of anything” (“Cutting” 323). DeSalvo’s grandmother often feeds the two sisters lunch because their mother’s preoccupation with house cleaning routinely causes her to forget about food. Undoubtedly, the characters of DeSalvo’s mother and her grandmother are polar opposites. The grandmother’s concept of la bella figura is rooted in her corporality and powers of intuition. She represents everything DeSalvo’s mother represses. To avoid getting flour on herself, her grandmother often bakes in her bra and underwear, defying DeSalvo’s mother’s idea of propriety and thumbing her nose at social status and decorum. Moreover, the very sight of the baking may unconsciously invoke class anxiety; having bread delivered to the home, as DeSalvo’s mother does, is a financial indulgence, whereas baking it for oneself, as the grandmother does, indicates poverty. DeSalvo’s grandmother, with her black dresses and her tradition of placing the bread in her bedclothes as though it were a living thing, also embodies the sense of Otherness that accompanies a “foreign” background (Crazy 27), an Otherness that the mother equates with indecency. Without a doubt, the opposing constructions of la bella figura clash constantly in the screaming battles of these two matriarchs. DeSalvo illustrates how the grandmother’s insistence on following the old Italian tradition of pulling “the knife through the bread towards the center of her chest where her heart was located” (30) enrages her Americanized mother: “Stop that, for Christ’s sake!” my mother would shout. She would pull the bread away from my grandmother and often she would cut herself in the process, not much, but just enough to bleed onto the bread. And my mother would throw the bread down onto the counter, where it would land upside down (a grave sin, my grandmother said, for bread should only be placed right side up; to do otherwise was to disrespect the bread; to do otherwise was to invite the forces of evil into your house). And she would say, “Why can’t you cut that goddamned bread like a normal human being?” (30)

“Normal human being,” in this case, means not superstitious, not working- class, and not immigrant. DeSalvo’s grandmother’s and mother’s forms of integrity differ irreconcilably: To her mother, pride implies conformity to the new; conversely, to her grandmother, dignity is rooted in the rituals of the past. For many years, DeSalvo’s mother cannot wait to be rid of the woman she regards as improper, foul-mouthed, and unkempt; however, the grandmother’s move into a state facility for the elderly proves to be more blight than relief for DeSalvo’s mother. Once the two women are physically separated, the rift between them becomes permanent; there is no longer any hope for the resolution and for the change DeSalvo’s mother has always secretly longed for (21). Their relationship will never be repaired. Instead of donning false cheer, as her mother does when she tapes a mawkish inspirational prayer to the refrigerator in the midst of a near- complete family breakdown (41), DeSalvo acknowledges that some things cannot be mended. She doesn’t even seek to resolve their conflicts in a reverie where she invites her now- deceased

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mother to an imaginary picnic: “I knew that you were not yet ready, that you might never be ready to join [my grandmother] in celebration” (251). Through acceptance, DeSalvo achieves an integrity that is based on authentic, not manufactured emotions. DeSalvo does not associate “pride” with a carefully cultivated presentation, like her sister and grandfather, or an overly pristine house, like her mother: rather, she makes a conscious decision to link self- esteem with creativity. Growing up, her knitting, breadbaking grandmother and fireman father are her role models; she sees that their sense of self is not wholly contingent on physical appearance. Modeling herself after them, DeSalvo states: “my hair [as a teenager] like everything else about my outward appearance is sensible, and [therefore] can’t be ruined” (50). In high school, her character takes pleasure in the fact that home economics hairnets ruin the “teased hair” of “fancy” and presumably arrogant, high-status girls whose vanity trumps their desire to get an education. She desires college so she can “study hard things, philosophy, literature” (50). In Vertigo, DeSalvo makes it known that she has chosen a life-affirming rather than fear-based existence by declaring the following: “I saw a movie once in which a character played by Humphrey Bogart said, ‘The world is inhabited by two classes of people. Those who are alive and those who are afraid.’ My father was alive. My mother was afraid” (Vertigo 43). Writing, cooking, reading, eating, traveling, and embracing her sexuality are all ways that DeSalvo’s character disengages with the specter of passivity the characters of her mother and sister embody. Her mother and sister are too mired in depression to save themselves, whereas the young DeSalvo intuits that she needs to find ways to escape the household before she, too, is engulfed by a fatal despair. DeSalvo’s character writes in her journal: “the distance I put between myself and my family [was] necessary, because it saved me” (26). Moreover, she offers this painful analysis of Jill’s short life: She tried to make everyone get along, or she sulked, or she tried to pretend everything that went on in our house was normal, that was what was happening wasn’t happening. But often she withdrew. Sat on the bed we shared and stared at the wall; sat in a chair on our back porch, silent, twirling her hair for hours. The cost to my sister being the good child was [her eventual] death. (Crazy 40)

Not so for DeSalvo’s character. Fortunately, she follows the example of her strong-willed grandmother who teaches the young girl a different kind of pride than what her sister internalizes: a self-respect one assigns to oneself, not something one expects to receive from the outside. DeSalvo’s mother’s character is fond of ranting that the grandmother’s sweaters are so hideous “that no one with any self-respect” will ever want to wear them (Crazy 82). Still, the dexterous old woman continues to create the garments “as if to crochet and to knit was what mattered” and “as if the admiration of others did not matter” (82). Without a doubt, watching her grandmother toil to make clothes influences DeSalvo’s decision to embrace the writer’s life—an existence that does not come with immediate rewards or the promise that external recognition is forthcoming anytime soon. What she knows is that she does not want to be like her mother, incessantly catering to cleanliness in order to prove that her house is beyond reproach. Her grandmother’s crocheting and knitting are independent of “anyone’s desire”; they defiantly affirm “her right to

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exist in a world that did not want her” (36). As DeSalvo discovers, art bestows true selfworth and embodies “what others do not, what others cannot give you, what the country you left, what the country you came to does not give you: a sense of worth” (82– 83). Like baking for her grandmother, writing for DeSalvo is inherently messy: it involves “bone, flesh, blood, sinew, soul, spirit” (253). It requires the breaking down and rebuilding of one’s pride as one watches oneself produce work that is often at first clumsy and imprecise. Art can never reach perfection—therein resides its transformative power.

Deadly Dignity and the Nuclear Family I have visceral memories of an elderly Chinese woman living alone in Weehawken, New Jersey. Her unmoving gaze and rigid pose seemed to suggest catatonia. People called her “crazy.” She always wore a white-buttoned blue cardigan, and her hair was severely pulled back, exposing a face that never acknowledged the judgments of onlookers. She had a rare mannequin-like ability to look directly into a pair of eyes without flinching, without fearing. Her stare discarded all assessments of her, flushed away any individual’s power over her. The opacity of her gaze transcended any violence that could be done to her. Yes, she was called the “crazy,” but never to her face. No boy who pitched a rock at that floating blue cardigan while her back was turned would ever dare face the stare of those black eyes. What an impression she made on me as a preteen. I will never forget her standing on her stoop in her tightly buttoned sweater and long narrow black skirt. I will always remember the passionless set of her jaw, her small, firm ears, and the wicker stiffness of her shoulders. Her incredible self- containment impressed me. At the same time, her alienation served as a warning to me. She had her own form of la bella figura, but at the terrible cost of being totally cut off from the world of human interaction. By the time I saw and admired that silently staring woman, I had already deeply internalized my father’s notions of honor at any cost. Pride, to him, existed as a public performance instead of a private, well- earned truth. It was always based on what an outside force understands to be virtue. My father, like DeSalvo’s grandparents, took immense pride in exemplary clothes and a perfectly composed signature. Poppa’s dress clothes were always dry- cleaned, his shoes buffed with slick black polish, and he was constantly combing his hair. He even kept a small black comb in the sun visor of our family car. In appearance, he was as slim as a cheetah and could be vicious regarding my mother’s Rubenesque build. I, too, was a disappointment, with my loud, hyperactive ways and my adamant refusal to wear dresses as a preschooler. Furthermore, though my father was a womanizer, he expected females, especially his daughter, to be paradigms of chastity. I think he sensed, but could not ever acknowledge, the sexual abuse I had endured at the hands of Peter Curran, and this further tainted me in his eyes. “Better to die than to be raped,” my father once said to me. “This way you still have your pride.” So when I was sixteen, I tried to turn, like Jill, to death as an answer to my entrenched feelings of shame and worthlessness. Fortunately, unlike DeSalvo’s sister, I was not successful in my suicide attempt. I had tried to recover my honor on my father’s terms and nearly lost my life as a consequence. Still, my involvement with Curran and my silence about what was happening to me continued unchecked. Back then my heart was tangled up in my father’s antiquated notions of a woman’s dignity—that old form

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of patriarchal control, which is the decree that your sexuality as a woman is never yours to begin with. It isn’t yours to give freely; neither is it yours to speak of as violated. Yet how can one truly maintain the illusion of pride when her life is falling apart? How does she protect her last possession and clench tight the only thing she can ever really own, which are her secret personal truths? Throughout my fourteen-year-long ordeal with Peter Curran, I desperately tried to maintain the pinched grace of an oyster. I refused to talk to anyone who questioned me about my relationship with him— whether it was a school counselor, psychiatrist, or social worker. I knew the internal pressure could be voided through speech. I learned instead to shove my fist through a bedroom window when my rage became too intense. Afterward, I disguised the damage by carefully scraping out the pieces of glass and placing them in plastic supermarket bags, which, like the first pages I wrote about the abuse, I quickly disposed of. I was always screaming and scratching myself in my sleep. When I woke up, I had bright red marks all over my arms and stomach. Sometimes my period would last for fourteen days or I would bleed for seven days straight between periods. These symptoms all appeared to me as manifestations of my particular brand of la bella figura—akin to that of an anorexic girl caressing the soft down of her newfound lanugo. My refusal to confide in anyone about Peter Curran caused my body to speak for me to the point where I thought I suffered from endometriosis, which causes heavy prolonged menstrual periods. Certain my bleeding was brought on by polyps and cysts, I even convinced my gynecologist to perform a laparoscopy. In this procedure, the doctor makes an incision in the belly button and inserts a laparoscope—a thin, lighted, telescope-like tube through which he can then observe the womb. General anesthesia is required, and you wake up in a great deal of pain. After the surgery, the gynecologist confirmed that I did not have the condition; internally, I looked “very clean,” as he put it. But, of course, my bleeding continued long after I tucked away my glossy medical slides. My father’s “death before dishonor” brand of dignity assumes that others have the power to decide what we are worth and whether or not we are deserving of respect and ethical treatment. It also suggests that we have the ability to assess and define people based on outward appearances alone. DeSalvo explains that the elite “hand of [justice and] authority” is always constructed as a white male hand, attached to someone who is “formally” dressed and American (Crazy 94). This respectable hand does more than deny the presence of women, the poor, the physically and mentally disabled, the elderly; it causes them to seek out a form of honor that can only be achieved in death. For those of us who do not perfectly fit these ideals of wealth, wellness, beauty, a high IQ, and fashionable dress, it is emotionally detrimental to create the illusion that we can, in fact, completely transcend who we actually are. For instance, returning to the example of DeSalvo’s grandfather’s “carefully purchased suit,” it must be noted that the garment was an unexpected source of discomfort to him: in that suit, he “feels like an imposter . . . like the [rich] bosses he despises, not like the laborer he is and the workers he respects” (61). The price for the regality that the hand of authority promises is almost always the suppression of a part of our current or past selves, or requires us to disown a family member who manifests abject behavior. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I witnessed several of my mother’s psychotic breaks from reality, although to say that I was a “witness” to these episodes is

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somewhat disingenuous, considering that I myself was often not fully mentally present; I would find refuge in disassociation. Whenever my mother acted out in public, I felt deeply ashamed of being seen as her daughter. She would sing or scream on the street; once, at the psychiatric ward, she stripped off all her clothes; sometimes she refused to bathe or comb her hair. I couldn’t accept that my mother was simply incapable of embodying the kind of dignity that most present- day cultures worldwide tend to laud as the ideal. I didn’t realize that in another kind of culture, one that by modern standards would certainly be coded as “primitive,” my mother might have been valued as a shaman, and thus be ascribed a sense of immense worth, nobility, as well as purpose in her community. When I think about her now, as I write, my mind goes back to my visit a few months ago to a traveling fair where I heard a boy with Down syndrome whoop several times with uninhibited rapture at the sight of an elegant roan mare. Not surprisingly, nobody reacted to his display of excitement and pleasure, as they would have had he been a “normal” child. My fear that his mother would become embarrassed or misunderstand my intention also prevented me from turning and smiling brightly at him, from letting him know that I shared in his joy at the sight of this beautiful horse. And I think back to my own self: the “abnormal” things (like randomly hopping) I did as a nine- and tenyear- old as a result of childhood motor tics. Wincingly, I recall the fact that my school friend’s mother would routinely hang up on me whenever I called their house. This woman could not tolerate my out- of-the- ordinary behaviors because she feared the consequent contamination and social exile of her own child. What DeSalvo identifies as “the hand of authority” (Crazy 94) is a racist, classist, ableist, misogynistic hand, one whose mission is to eradicate difference in every capacity; it often justifies its actions by referring to lofty ideals such as honor, dignity, and respect. DeSalvo offers this example of her husband’s grandfather: “His children were taught to respect him, no matter what. In the name of respect, he abused them. In the name of respect, they were supposed to allow him to beat them” (Crazy 153). All abusers operate under the phony assumptions of larger-than-life ideals; sexual predators mask their crimes under the pretenses of “love”; they ask that secrets be kept out of “loyalty.” Physical and emotional abusers demand the “respect” DeSalvo references while dictators preach about “patriotism” and cult leaders champion “solidarity.” DeSalvo’s character avoided the artificiality of these ideals by refusing these passive forms of loyalty and obedience. Interestingly, not capitulating to her father’s demands for a respectful daughter, was what ironically enabled the adolescent DeSalvo to survive long enough to develop a real bond with him in his later life, one that was based not on phony reverence for him, but on true forgiveness and mutual accord. As a grown daughter and an elderly father, they tell stories to each other; they realize how alike they actually are. This is a vastly different relationship from the distant one she imagined she saw when she spotted a father and son picking out produce together: And I wondered if the son had always treated the father in this way, with such respect. (Respect. What my father said I never gave him. Respect. What my father said I never gave my mother. All I ask of you is that you show us some respect.) Or if it was not respect that I was seeing, but stony silence, born of years of enmity, of the son’s learning that

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the less he said to this old man, the better. Had the strife of decades worn them into this placidity? Did the father tell the son, “You show me the respect that I deserve”? Had the son shouted back, “You earn respect; you don’t deserve it simply because you’re my father”? (Crazy 221)

DeSalvo, as she watches this pair, knows she has made the right choice by following her father’s example, not his advice. Though her father tried to ingrain in his daughter the importance of the dutiful kind of allegiance described above, he also, as a young man, rebelled against his own father who demanded that his son financially support his indolent, self- centered lifestyle. DeSalvo’s character decided which lessons to take from her father and which to discard; intriguingly, she is able to embody his life spirit all the while avoiding inflating him into a larger-than-life deity. Repressing the bad in someone to the point of idealization is a way of eluding the complexities of love; DeSalvo circumvents this fate by expressing the entire gamut of feelings she has felt for her parents, even her uncertainty about whether or not she loves her mother. She thus experiences what it means to move from the realm of abstract ideals into that of enduring emotion.

From Honor to the Truth Children are truth-seekers. One morning, while we waited for the school bus, my fiveyear- old daughter looked at me curiously and said, “Momma, the teacher’s wrong. For show and tell, she says we have to make a comment on what people bring. But what we really have to do is make a compliment, not a comment. A comment is when you can say something good or bad and a compliment is when you have to say something good.” Of course, this is the kind of laugh- out-loud remark that our children make and we repeat to friends and relatives. But why exactly do we laugh? Because the truth is always so fresh and novel when spoken aloud that to hear it as mature adults it is a shock to our systems? And is the pure truth so rarely uttered that, after a while, we lose our ability to know when it is being spoken? When I was a child, my father took showers with me; admittedly, our ritual was unconventional, but not in any way awkward or abusive. During one such shower, I asked if I could “play with his toy” and pointed to his penis. My father, in shame and confusion, tried to ignore this, but I persisted. “Poppa,” I said. “Is that a toy? Can I touch it? Can I play with it?” My father’s (dignified) response was to shut off the water and quickly dry off and dress—in no way acknowledging what had just happened. Through a child’s eyes, his silence was a terrible rejection of a gift that I thought I was offering him. More than that, I perceived his somber attitude as a condemnation. I felt like I was a bad, disgusting girl. In actuality, I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do: delivering to him a message about what was happening to me with Peter Curran. “You have no shame,” my father often said to me. Shame and pride were synonymous to him. He figured out how to show both humility and pride whenever needed, necessary for a solitary immigrant without much money who always felt himself burdened by a strong Puerto Rican accent. As with DeSalvo’s grandmother, silence was a skill passed through the generations to be used as “the most potent weapon” that the “poor,” “the despised,” and “the powerless” have to “wield against [an] adversary” (Crazy

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21). However, no adversary was physically present in the shower with Poppa and me that day. The specter that threatened our family was more slippery and ambiguous; it was a phantom that whispered that our blood was tainted, that he was cursed—words he often repeated in his tirades to my mother and me. Again and again he shouted that we were unworthy, that we were no good. Like most people, my father would repeat the errors of generations that had come before him. In a rare moment of vulnerability, he once confided to my mother that his father had singled him out of all his siblings to emotionally and physically abuse. Poppa was the scapegoat, the black sheep of his family. Unfortunately, the cycle of trauma silently became my inheritance, passed down from Poppa to me. This is not surprising in the least since the blunt force of trauma often severs one’s access to language. That is what happened to my father the day of the shower and it’s also what happened to me when I used words that weren’t the ones that would convey exactly what was happening to me. In her article “Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of Language,” Juliet Mitchell cites an example offered by psychologist Max Hernandez of a man who, after being raped in his boyhood, develops an adult fixation that people are staring at him. Mitchell expounds on this: “Common sense would urge us to say that the rape [itself] is the traumatic event [of most importance]. However, to the contrary, what in fact haunts is the memory of not being recognized or noticed together with a symptom which indicates that he suffers from unwelcome overattention” (122). Paradoxically, the sinister recognition offered by all abusers augments the horror of also being completely invisible and, at the same time, creates a split in the psyche between the need to constantly hammer away at this silence, this nonbeing (by making attempts to gain recognition) and the desire to hide from the possible scorn of an all- encompassing and omniscient audience. I myself struggle daily with opposing impulses; one is the urgency to write and to speak, the other (a sincerely formidable instinct) is to hide and to be silent like a rabbit crouching in its underground warren. But slowly, painstakingly, through the act of reading and writing memoir, through my bonds with other women and men who do the same, I am letting go of the illusion that silence and stoicism are synonymous with integrity. Ironically, it is DeSalvo’s mother— even though she tells her daughter little about her own past and destroyed hundreds of letters that she and DeSalvo’s father had exchanged during the war—who indirectly shows her, with the example of her own difficult life, how important it is to speak, and to keep one’s history alive. DeSalvo’s father would be the one who, as an elderly man, would provide his daughter with numerous invaluable details about their extended family. In the acknowledgements page of Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo states, “Without my father, I could not have written these people’s lives. Without him, there would be no book” (260). DeSalvo makes peace with her father and with the memory of her mother and sister as well; in essence, through the act of writing, she is doing her part to tear down the family cycles of violence, hate, and repression. To me, a pearl is a fitting metaphor for the solitary art of memoir writing. Oysters and clams always build the smooth white jewel in response to an irritant. Though the creature experiences pain, it is still able to work hard to build its gem. Whenever we

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speak of a person who will not talk, who perhaps cannot talk, we say that the individual has “clammed up.” For years, I had fiercely guarded my pearls, which were my memories, from anyone who would try to extract the truth from me. Then I saw women and men at various readings who weren’t afraid to wear their pearls, their stories: Louise DeSalvo was one of those writers. She has demonstrated to me the importance of narrative in resolving fractures within myself. As Cyrulnik writes, A story is a verbal representation that recounts a series of significant events. Telling our story creates a coherent feeling of selfhood. It reconciles the two parts of the divided ego. The socially acceptable ego can at last tolerate the secret ego that cannot [otherwise] be talked about. The subject can at last talk about himself and express himself as a totality. It is as though he was saying: “The blow I received made a painful part of my personality shrivel up. . . . [But now through language] I can at last express my [true] personality. As soon as I become whole, simply by describing what happened to me, I can face other people. I am no longer divided into a transparent part and a ghost-like part.” (44)

By following the example of Louise DeSalvo and others like her, by becoming active readers, writers, and speakers, we can all work to transform supercilious and damaging notions of honor into personally empowering truths. Through art, we validate and strengthen our own hidden capacities for developing transformative perceptions. During an imaginary picnic with her deceased mother, DeSalvo inverts the Christian tradition of breaking bread to delineate a meaning that is vastly different from the ritual’s connotation in religious ceremonies, in which a wafer represents the vow to stay tethered to the ideas that dominated the past. In Crazy in the Kitchen, the “tearing of the bread” (“Cutting” 330) evokes DeSalvo’s own reworking of her family’s interpretation of la bella figura to include a symbolic “tearing” that her mother, in life, might have viewed as a barbaric gesture. Here, the idea of la bella figura is envisioned not as a masking of the real, but as a way of getting to the wellsprings of covert emotional truth: Today we do not cut the bread for we have forgotten to bring our knives. Today we tear the bread with our hands. It is hard, this tearing of the bread, this partaking of it. It is hard because the loaves have a thick, nearly impenetrable crust. Yes, it is hard, we both agree, to break the bread, to get at the tenderness inside. It is hard to break the bread. But it is not impossible. (330)

This simple picnic represents the true essence of la bella figura, which at its heart denotes pure beauty. It is perhaps best represented by the uncomplicated art of a mother and daughter gathering to share a meal. DeSalvo’s closing line—“it is not impossible” (252)2 —suggests that destructive cycles can be broken, old meanings rewritten, divided selves integrated. This acknowledgment is DeSalvo’s final tearing away from years of unvoiced sorrow that her mother and sister suffered due to misguided ideals of honor and integrity. 2. Gloria Nardini suggests that la bella figura in its most noble form is really about “gentility, grace, thinking about others” (11), suggesting that while the concept is not without complication, the application of it in the aforementioned way can lead to the enrichment of one’s life and the lives of those around us.

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Works Cited Belluscio, Steven. To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Cyrulnik, Boris. Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past. New York: Penguin, 2009. DeSalvo, Louise. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. “Cutting the Bread.” In The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, ed. Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta, 322–331. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. ———. “Faceless.” In About Face, ed. Anne Burt and Christina Baker Kline, 235–244. Los Angeles: Seal Press, 2008. ———. Vertigo: A Memoir. 1996. Introduction by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. Mitchell, Juliet. “Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of Language.” Diacritics 28, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 121–133. Nardini, Gloria. Che Bella Figura! The Power of Perfor mance in an Italian Ladies’ Club in Chicago. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

The Poetics of Trauma I N TERTE XTUA LITY, RHYTHM, AND CONCISION I N VE RTIGO A ND WRITING A S A WAY OF HEALING

Peter Covino

For more than thirty years, Louise DeSalvo’s work has consistently engaged issues of subjectivity by insisting that women and men alike, ethnic and nonethnic, have a right to their stories of trauma. As DeSalvo asserts throughout Writing as a Way of Healing (1999), shaping these stories into coherent narratives may be physically and emotionally healing as well as socially and politically useful: “Through writing, we revisit our past and review and revise it. What we thought happened, what we believe happened to us shifts and changes as we discover deeper and more complex truths” (11). The challenges of crafting experiences of trauma into compelling narratives requires committed reading and research and a developing recognition of one’s own emerging voice—what DeSalvo describes as nonjudgmental patience, “study and reflection” (99), and “relaxed awareness” (85). DeSalvo’s claims are at once simple and elusive. While some readers may dismiss them as trendy pop psychology, writers who follow the writing and healing regimen DeSalvo prescribes inevitably value her arduous intertextual invitation to “discover strength, power, wisdom, depth, energy, creativity, soulfulness and wholeness” (9).1 The unfaltering rhythms of this charged aphoristic mantra are noteworthy and ubiquitous in DeSalvo’s best work, work that is characterized by an amplified associative range— and that regularly integrates various levels of discourses, including literary critique, creative nonfiction, and psychoanalytic history—as she leaps freely across prose and 1. By intertexuality, I mean a deliberate and ongoing reference by a writer to his / her previous work in an effort to reevaluate and reintegrate the work’s shifting significance.

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poetic genres from one text to the next.2 An intertextual reading of Vertigo and Writing as a Way of Healing reveals a heightened sense of concision and a keen poetic rhythm as key components of DeSalvo’s aesthetic techniques. In both texts, poetic rhythm is created through clear, short headings, brief but nuanced chapter sections with resonant titles, diarylike entries, repetition, and suggestive jump cuts or edits that conflate complex, varied emotional registers. DeSalvo’s wide-ranging work brings a prose writer’s and researcher’s clarity and objectivity to bear on devastating issues of family dysfunction and incest as well as the role writing has in conceptualizing and understanding these issues. Her poetic nonfiction work likewise benefits from documentary techniques— particularly the juxtaposition of research, examples of work from students or emerging writers, and historical anecdotes. Such juxtaposition, a common feature of twenty-firstcentury poetry, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s epic Paterson (1958), which famously includes snippets of letters sent to Williams from the young, aspiring poets Allen Ginsberg and Gilbert Sorrentino, among several others (172, 210, 212). DeSalvo’s nonfiction work often meditates on specific texts, most often by Virginia Woolf, but also many other writers from diverse fields, such as D. H. Lawrence, Isabel Allende, Henry Miller, James W. Pennebaker, Dorothy Allison, Junot Díaz, and Janet Frame, to name some. One instructive example that contributes documentary authenticity is the excerpt of a student’s (Alice’s) “process journal,” which details a strategic way of writing about rape in a productive, respectful manner that sees writing about trauma as a valuable, transformative “gift” (Healing 87, 88). An intertextual reading of three chapters of Vertigo that similarly foreground trauma—”Fixing Things,” “My Sister’s Suicide,” and “Safe Houses”— documents the poetic qualities central to DeSalvo’s writing. Julia Kristeva’s ideas about intertextuality— and her view of literary, and especially poetic texts as continually en process—are crucial to my reading of DeSalvo’s poetic aesthetics (Oliver 23), as are poetic theories that value indeterminacy and the multidimensionality of common language and everyday objects. Everyday objects, such as DeSalvo’s mother’s bowls, spoons, and cooking utensils, among many other things, become “powerful totems” (Vertigo 263) that DeSalvo finally unpacks and uses, at the very end of her memoir, in a pivotal and culminating act of psychic integration. Throughout, Vertigo is filled with lists, offered with typical comic deflation, that range from the seemingly mundane ways the author was expected to behave as a child (Vertigo 59) to favorite wartime memories (64) to types of foods her mother cooked—in a chapter ironically entitled “Anorexia” (201)—to several crises the writer has survived, including “1) [Her] mother’s hospitalization for an acute psychotic depression and shock treatments. 2) [Her] sister’s breakdown and her suicide” (3). DeSalvo’s succinct, declarative sentences, offered in the present tense, value immediacy and directness and help her memoir be free of sentimentality and facile complaint. Kristeva, like other poststructuralist theorists, values an awareness of aesthetic inclusiveness, subjectivity and, above all, the unconscious drives of language, especially poetic language, to challenge ideas of traditional power relations, logical coherence, and textual stability. 2. This range is most evident in DeSalvo’s publication history during the time she wrote Writing as a Way of Healing, when she also published the memoir Vertigo (1996) and the hybrid essay / memoir Breathless: An Asthma Journal (1997).

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Kristeva theorizes further about the “dialectical tensions” that exist in poetic texts, which through their rhythms and skillful word choice, “reactivate the contradiction between the semiotic and symbolic” elements of language (Oliver 24). Critic Graham Allen offers an apt overview of Kristeva’s key ideas (which she expanded upon from Lacan) when he reminds us that the “semiotic involves the language of drives, erotic impulses, bodily rhythms and movements retained from the infant stage” (49). The ways in which Writing as a Way of Healing harks back to textual moments of conflict in Vertigo, both conscious and unconscious, eschews ideas of closure and invites an intertextual reading that values discontinuity, fluidity, and rupture. Vertigo and Writing as a Way of Healing are both texts, to adapt Kristeva’s terms, that resist easy consumption; instead, they require active engagement and a conscious awareness of writerly process and effect. Additionally, Writing as a Way of Healing functions as a theoretical and creative treatise that positions and interrogates the sociopolitical dimensions of much of DeSalvo’s earlier work. Throughout Vertigo, at strategic moments, DeSalvo pressures language by mining individual word histories rather than using more descriptive linear and narrative structures; she engages more associative poetic impressions that follow short nonsyntactical, stanzaic structures such as brief or even two- or one-word sentences: verse, noun, verb. 1. one of the lines of a poem. 2. to versify, that is, to turn a phrase. Nothing new here. But what about the word’s derivation? . . . Vertigo; verse. The one, then the other. The one or the other. . . . To turn a phrase in the midst of my instability. . . . my vertigo into something that is worthwhile. (8– 9)

Through this technique, DeSalvo thwarts attempts at making fixed meaning, and welcomes instead a jazzy, improvisational, and even somewhat sardonic style, not unlike the later, psychoanalytically probing work of Anne Sexton that DeSalvo also claims as an influence (Healing 71). I am reminded here, specifically, of the diarylike, confessional poems of Sexton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Live or Die (1966), which includes an elegy for her beloved friend Sylvia Plath along with many poems about controversial feminist subject matters, such as menstruation, childbirth, and Sexton’s stay at a mental institution and the subsequent mistreatment at the hands of its staff members. In Writing as a Way of Healing, DeSalvo theorizes the unresolved relationship between her understanding and integration of her sister’s suicide and her experience of sexual abuse as a child. In doing so, she highlights the intellectual and creative mysteries inherent to the pleasures and potentialities of poetic meaning. For DeSalvo, “poetic spaces” are spaces to be read intertextually; these spaces are less restrictive and more productive, a consequence of “implied” or more subtle poetic rhythms and repetitions; they result from the conscious weighting of absences and poetic slippages that are more pronounced in conventionally poetic texts. The act of “turning toward” literature to understand her pain provides DeSalvo with important examples of “vitality” (Vertigo 7). The sonic-mnemonic and etymological linkages among words such as “vitality,” “verse,” and “vertigo” (also the eponymous title of the famous Hitchcock movie that is the antecedent to the memoir’s title) become central challenges that DeSalvo’s writing explores.

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DeSalvo charts a path toward “see”-ing and toward the recognition of commonalities between her life and that of Woolf’s. In Vertigo, she acknowledges the influence of Virginia Woolf on her own writing: “When I started my work on Woolf, I did not realize how similar her family was to mine—did not know my sister would kill herself as Woolf had . . . did not see that we were both abuse survivors” (11). This vision of personal healing achieved through reading and learning from other writers becomes part of a larger schematic in which DeSalvo articulates the steps she takes toward the possibility of healing. Her writing becomes the evidence of this psychic mapping—a well- contoured map that invites visual play, frequent time shifts, and movement across many types of writing, from list-making to journal writing, and even more broad-based manual and self-help writing, which also characterizes Writing as a Way of Healing. Just a few lines after DeSalvo makes the connections between her life and Woolf’s, she almost gleefully exclaims to a friend: “ ‘Incest’ I say. ‘I’m going to write about Virginia Woolf and incest’ ” (Vertigo 11). Later in the same paragraph, she also announces: “But someday . . . I also want to write about my sister’s suicide” (11). DeSalvo links incest and its underlying effects as a possible cause of her sister’s suicide through the explosiveness of her initial utterance about “Incest” (capital “I”) and the quick shift to her desire to pursue her own personal narrative. DeSalvo’s signature poetic techniques are apparent in this exchange. She writes in concise and straightforward (often one-line) sentences, mostly in the present tense, and frequently uses distinctive one-sentence paragraphs. She also conflates the sentence about Woolf’s abuse through the powerful and personally revealing declaration of her sister’s suicide. The details of Woolf’s abuse and DeSalvo’s sister’s suicide are suspended; the paragraph, with its quoted opening of “ ‘Incest’ ” and its ending word “suicide,” reads as a carefully balanced stanza in a prose poem. The paragraph exists, friezelike, highlighted in a space of psychic relief—and it has the effect of communicating narrative intrigue and engaging anticipation. Who is speaking of the “Incest”? Whose voice is being quoted, even as DeSalvo quotes herself? Whose experiences will be unearthed? Certainly not Woolf’s, since DeSalvo had already published in 1989 a well-known critical book that explores the effects of Woolf’s abuse on her own work (Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work). DeSalvo intertextually and poetically channels her knowledge from the experience of her earlier scholarly writing in an effort to establish crucial ties to current crises in her own life. From the examples of Woolf’s work, DeSalvo has gained the fortitude to confront the challenges of her own writing life—she has embarked on an exploration of the tensions of her life lived in the shadows of incest, suggesting that such tensions may be related to her sister’s suicide.3 In later chapters of Vertigo, DeSalvo’s earlier intuition about the interrelationship of incest and suicide proves more plausible but no less easy to pin down or to fix as a “badge,” an emblematic word in the text that typically functions as a symbol of 3. In Writing the Memoir, Judith Barrington comes to a similar conclusion, several years after DeSalvo, about a pivotal moment in the development of memoir writing. Barrington recounts Woolf’s first meeting of the Memoir Club of 1920, in which Woolf read a revealing memoir about her half-brother George Duckworth’s incestuous relationship with her and Vanessa Bell (Barrington 11).

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authorial and scholarly legitimacy. DeSalvo’s writing throughout both Vertigo and Writing as a Way of Healing is more akin to the later unrhymed poetry of D. H. Lawrence in its need for the “immediate present, instant poetry” (Lawrence quoted in de Sola Pinto 5)4 or, as suggested earlier, to the poetry of William Carlos Williams, a fellow New Jerseyan, than to Woolf’s more rhetorically elaborate work. DeSalvo’s idiom is decidedly American and powerful in its integration of contemporary cultural issues of class and ethnicity. D. H. Lawrence, the working-class son of a miner, who lived and traveled throughout Italy and America and wrote eloquently about both countries, is an obvious model. After years of rhymed, formal poems, Lawrence wrote Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923), which integrates themes about his life in New Mexico but begins with sensual, prose-driven poems set in San Gervasio, Florence, and Taormina, Italy. This collection includes poems with such emblematic titles of fruits and fauna commonly found in Italy as “Pomegranate,” “Figs,” “Grapes,” and “Sicilian Cyclamens” (278–289, 310–313). The first few plainspoken, insistent, and enigmatic lines of Lawrence’s historically incisive “Pomegranate”—or similar texts by Lawrence, such as Sea and Sardinia (1921) and Etruscan Places (1932)—must certainly have made an impact on DeSalvo: You tell me I am wrong Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong? I am not wrong. *** In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women, No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in flower, Oh so red, and such a lot of them. (Lawrence 278)

DeSalvo is not alone among writers of Italian descent who, separated from their homelands, are susceptible to the evocative power of lines such as these. These writers had never seen basic, mundane objects of their ancestral lands become such vibrant literature. DeSalvo always writes with an awareness of her cultural and ethnic roots and she does not shy away from ethnically or class-inflected slang or nonconventionally grammatical expressions. In the year 1994, on a “beautiful autumn day,” DeSalvo was conceiving, writing, and polishing various chapters of Vertigo, as she tells us in the book’s first chapter, “Fixing Things” (10). Before her, on her writing desk, is a small cardboard sign that reads “yes you can,” a “talisman” she stole from the National Arts Club in 1974, when she first began her scholarly writing (10). The symbolic importance of stealing this trinket from the fancy club is not lost on DeSalvo and she speaks movingly about her twenty years of insecurities as a working class Italian American woman who wanted to become a writer: yes you can. An antidote to the toxicity of the words the world flings at aspiring working- class girls: you cannot, you cannot, you cannot. (10)

4. D. H. Lawrence is writing about “the Blake of Song of Experience and the Wordsworth of ‘Resolution and Independence’ [as] the prophets” of this kind of poetry, but the description can be used to describe both Lawrence’s and DeSalvo’s writing (de Sola Pinto 5).

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In 1994, when computers were still in their infancy, worldwide traumatic events and the Western ideal of media capitalizing upon reality seemed to blur almost beyond recognition and credulity. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela became the country’s president, after generations of suffering under the brutality of apartheid. In that same year, civil war in Rwanda between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis claimed half a million lives. This was also the year that Serbia attacked Bosnia; famous grunge-rocker Kurt Cobain killed himself; O. J. Simpson fled in his white Ford Bronco; and Tonya Harding was stripped of her figure skating title following an attack she allegedly orchestrated to injure her rival Nancy Kerrigan. This troubling time was further reflected in the “recovered memory” debate that raged on television talk shows, news programs, and in related media, where some were accused of fabricating stories of trauma in order to gain sympathy and much coveted media time. Writing in the early 1990s, the classically trained, stylistically spare poet Louise Glück, bemoans that memoir narratives of “dark truth [have] become unnervingly popular, a literary convention” that strive for “biographical accuracy” instead of “authentic examples of transmuted suffering” (Glück 53, 54). Glück’s feelings of impatience and battle fatigue in light of this proliferation of trauma narratives can hardly be surprising as she sounds the alarm against poetry that seems limited to her by a static point of view, and a language not artful enough to reinhabit the anguish. Glück has little patience for the “harrowingly real” (56) or the details of personal trauma—as if poetry in these cases should definitively not be confused with some basic tenets of nonfiction. Her unwillingness to consider difficult realistic details, or the books she cites as complex intertextual realities, results in a dismissive tone that minimizes the individual issues of ethnic and class-based differences. Glück, for example, diminishes the achievement of Linda McCarriston’s highly regarded Eva-Mary (1991), a collection that foregrounds working class portrayals of violence and the moral and financial challenges of an Irish Catholic family. Glück is also especially critical of Sharon Olds’s The Father (1992)—which Glück considers “pinned to a pre-adolescent and faintly coy obsession” (57)—without mentioning or reconsidering any of Olds’s pioneering work on the subject of incest as early as the groundbreaking Satan Says (1980). Glück’s is ultimately an opinion leveled from a point of view of privilege; a more orthodox aesthetic renders her unwilling to engage divergent creative goals. In contrast, DeSalvo has integrated some of the best lessons of scholarly and memoir writing about trauma and “extreme experiences” (Healing 162). The intellectual context for her creative experiments is more welcoming and broadly defined; she has worked diligently to understand why and how she and others need to incorporate personal traumatic events into compelling and sustained narratives. In Writing as a Way of Healing, DeSalvo further theorizes the ethics of exploring trauma, by insisting that successful literary forms help writers look at “causes and consequences” of trauma, thus enabling them to transform themselves from victims into survivors (164, 168). DeSalvo offers powerful caveats about not “retraumatiz[ing]” (160) oneself when writing about difficult situations; and by insisting that writing, if one has proper supports, can lead to creative work that “reteaches us empathy” (167). Vertigo and Writing as a Way of Healing could easily serve as artful primers for reading and more fully accessing the machinations of memory work in light of the dire challenges of confronting trauma.

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As a writer of nonfiction, DeSalvo adheres to a truth-telling model even as she realizes the shifting nature of memory and the distinction between the truth of memory and the truth of fact. Vertigo interrogates the linearity of memory and works imaginatively to understand the “spiraling trajectory of memory” (Giunta xxiv) and the impact of the writing process on memory. DeSalvo’s associative leaps in time, from her diaries and from memories dated many years before the writing of Vertigo, add to the poetic. In “Fixing Things,” the lists— of the crises she has lived through (Vertigo 3) and the books she loves (“The Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room, Ryder, The Antiphon, Women in Love, Crazy Cock, Tropic of Cancer, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Learned Optimism, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Legacy of the Heart” [6–7])—the short paragraphs, and the etymological forays into the meanings of the words announce the playful, lyrical, and experimental nature of the work, even as the larger, more painful, traumatic excavations of the text related to incest and suicide begin to emerge. “Fixing Things,” as the first chapter in Vertigo, sets the groundwork for DeSalvo’s self- conscious explorations. The chapter functions as a stay against too much bewilderment, even as it is full of evocative compression, and is wonderfully calibrated both tonally and with regard to innovative writing strategies. While enumerating influences and highlighting writing methods, DeSalvo’s lists also revel in an incantatory energy that activates a powerful subtext. When a reader considers the literalness of the list of books more carefully, we recognize that the memoir promises to confront issues of sexual impropriety and taboo (“Crazy Cock, Tropic of Cancer” [7]), even as DeSalvo tries to muster the courage (“Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Learned Optimism” [7]) to extend a feminist critique of important literary forerunners. In the second chapter of Vertigo, “My Sister’s Suicide,” the reader is promised, from the moment the title is proffered, a full-throttled exploration of difficult revelations about Jill, DeSalvo’s sister, and her tragic suicide. The painful details of the suicide, to which in the “Prologue” and in “Fixing Things” have been skillfully alluded but not explained, become foregrounded and, in counterpoint to the title, carefully parsed. In the “Prologue” DeSalvo offhandedly mentions that “it is spring 1986, some two years, after my sister Jill kills herself. My sister’s suicide in 1984 surely has been the most important and traumatic event I have experienced in my adult life. But I have tried hard to put it behind me, to keep it out of my mind” (xxv). In the next paragraph, DeSalvo obliquely connects her chaotic life to the greater challenges of world news when she says: “it is just after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, just after the United States bombs Libya” (xxv). Then she playfully cuts to the “insomniac ducks” that have been keeping her awake nights since “tak[ing] up residence in a huge puddle of water in [the] neighbor’s backyard” (xxxv). As I write this essay, in June 2012, I notice the eerie resonances with the recent tsunami in Japan and the leaks in the nuclear reactors there, along with the recent civil war and NATO-led bombing of Libya, not to mention the current war in Syria. DeSalvo consistently urges us to pay attention and look outwards, indeed to connect the form of our writing to larger events and political realities, even as we confront what is inwardly painful. DeSalvo’s writing becomes more compelling as a consequence of her casual and artful tethering of personal tragedy with larger traumatic world events. She asserts that this sort of identification with larger realities enables writing to gain amplification and

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is a benchmark of work that is transformed and not mired in overwrought ideas of victimization: Sharing our work removes us from the solitary brooding on our personal hurts as we listen to other people’s struggle, learn of other people’s triumphs. . . . The most significant stage, then, of grieving is public recognition that we have sustained a loss and public recognition that we ought to be deeply feeling our loss. Making our work public can become a kind of ceremonial sharing, this kind of public recognition of our private experience. (Healing 208–209)

Some of the dictums DeSalvo proposes in “Caring for Ourselves as We Write” include: “Patiently strive for artistic authenticity” and “Remain politically aware and involved so that you and your work stay connected to something beyond your own self-interest” (99). In both examples, DeSalvo is careful not to belabor the point of political engagement; in the earlier example from the “Prologue” of Vertigo, she utilizes clever deflation with the humorous episode of the ducks (at which she eventually throws stones) to undercut the seriousness of her explorations. Even more strategically, she drops the subject of her sister’s suicide entirely until the very first line of “Fixing Things,” and then proceeds, associatively, to change or suppress the traumatic subject: It is a little more than a month after my sister’s suicide in January 1984. I think I am doing well. I am going through the motions of living a normal life, pretending that her death hasn’t made much of an impact on how I am feeling. My diary entries are filled with prosaic happenings. (Vertigo 1)

DeSalvo’s capacity to face the trauma of the suicide has been incremental. In the first mention of the suicide in the “Prologue,” it is two years after the suicide, in springtime; in the passage cited above she is writing “little more than a month after” her sister’s suicide. In the space of a few pages, DeSalvo has circled around the trauma and now imagines herself within the greater shock of the immediate aftermath of the incident, but she is still reluctant to engage the events directly; instead, she takes stock and muses on the need to fortify herself with lists and through the examples of other writers. These preparation rituals are intellectually responsible and psychoanalytically consistent with the situation of survivors of trauma; they help ready DeSalvo for the sublimated and measured writing of the tour de force chapter “My Sister’s Suicide.” “My Sister’s Suicide” begins with a literal journey into DeSalvo’s basement and her difficult past. She negotiates the metaphor of clearing away the past and of allowing these complex secreted realms to occupy a living space. The basement is filled with family mementos of DeSalvo’s sister and mother. Both women, we learn, have recently died: DeSalvo’s sister Jill hanged herself after a failed marriage while living across the country in Portland, Oregon. Within a few years, her mother dies—a woman who was severely depressed after a debilitating and non-specified illness. The basement includes three boxes labeled with Jill’s name that end up in DeSalvo’s basement after her father threatens to throw them out. The three boxes emblematize the Freudian triangulation and family dynamics, even as DeSalvo’s temporal shifts and concise poetic prose enact the troubled dynamics of family dysfunction. DeSalvo is not a distant bystander in this heart-wrenching family drama, but she is a complicit and fully engaged actor whose

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understanding of personal catharsis adds to the memoir’s tremendous tensions without overburdening them. DeSalvo’s father, in this chapter, is the classical psychoanalytic trigger of DeSalvo’s recollections of these disturbing memories, which are made more unsettling since none is detailed entirely or in a purely linear fashion. The father’s strong desire to erase his difficult past and to dispose of the family’s mementoes hints at the larger history of family violence and lack of restraint that DeSalvo will explore further through temporal shifts and in calibrated additional recollections. We learn that Jill and her father had an enmeshed relationship and that Jill confided intimate sexual details to her father. Yet outright suggestion of paternal incest is vigilantly resisted here as it is elsewhere in the memoir. Even DeSalvo’s mother, in her advanced depressive state, finally recognizes how unbearable Jill’s relationship with her husband, Jill’s father, has been for the family dynamics and her own mental health—and she refuses to return from the mental hospital if Jill continues to live in her house. DeSalvo also pieces together other memories of family dysfunction and violence, including one enraged argument when her father runs after her with a knife. Perhaps most disturbingly, she suspects one of the reasons that she and Jill as children were often sent off to Long Island to spend summer with relatives had to do with her mother’s severe depression. DeSalvo presents these events and painful insights non- chronologically. In a terrifying assertion—“Craziness is a ball that is being passed back and forth” (19)—DeSalvo relies on her signature comic deflation, a common poetic technique most particularly used in Beat and New York School poetry.5 The seeming randomness of recollections emerges as a vital and conscious writerly and poetic strategy that invites an intertextual reading and presages other revelations, especially related to incest and the “forbidden.” By referring incidentally here to childhood trips to Long Island, this chapter is doing the added work of foreshadowing the devastating revelations of DeSalvo’s and, likely, Jill’s incest at the hands of “Auntie Vinnie” (103), which are explored in more detail later in the memoir, mainly in the “Safe Houses” chapter. We should not underestimate DeSalvo’s decision “to gender” Aunt Vinnie—whose real name we may imagine being Vincenza—as male. In the hotly debated Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler asks, “is the construction of the category of women as a coherent, stable, subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?” (8). Similarly, DeSalvo seems to be questioning the compulsory order of sex, gender, and desire by fully imagining the horror of her aunt’s reality as a perpetrator. She offers several potential explanations—not dismissals or denials—that make the writing full of agonizing pathos. We learn later, and casually, for example, that “Auntie Vinnie’s mother used to be a prostitute . . . and that her mother’s johns had already done God knows what all to Auntie Vinnie” (Vertigo 103). This initial matter-of-fact detailing of a “crazy” and boundary-less household becomes further problematized and expanded in “Safe Houses.” The conversational tone and re5. Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch are considered pioneers in the use of humor in poetry. See especially O’Hara’s The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1974) and Koch’s On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950–1988 (1994). Diane di Prima has been especially influential to other Italian American writers; humor is foregrounded in such poems as “Thirteen Nightmares” and many others from Pieces of Song: Selected Poems (2001).

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straint in describing Aunt Vinnie as not merely a perpetrator but also as a victim of abuse, adds to the complexity of the narrative. This suggestive use of “empathy” (Healing 167), even in the face of trauma, is an instructive example of what DeSalvo advocates as one of the touchstones of successful multidimensional writing in Writing as a Way of Healing. At the height of DeSalvo’s integration of these feelings and realities, she also includes a self- conscious commentary, one of those signature one-sentence paragraphs, about the healing powers of writing: “Language, I have learned, by writing about this, gives birth to feeling, not the other way around” (Vertigo 105). After we gain, later in the memoir, a fuller picture of the incest, we can once again turn back to “My Sister’s Suicide” and appreciate DeSalvo’s achievements. By reading intertextually across related texts and across other chapters, one understands the boldness of the possessive pronouns of DeSalvo’s chapter title even more clearly. Subliminally, DeSalvo seems to be linking her sister’s suicide to her own difficult journey and maturation as a writer and as a scholar and biographer of Virginia Woolf, whose own relationship to her sister Vanessa was also a serious point of interest for DeSalvo. In “My Sister’s Suicide,” DeSalvo further reveals her emerging recognition of her sister’s dangerous lack of boundaries, while simultaneously claiming her life. When DeSalvo discovers that Jill is flirting with DeSalvo’s husband in the married couple’s house, she writes: “A door slams against [Jill] in my heart” (17). The painful irony should not be lost here, since the metaphorical door to DeSalvo’s writing continues to open and becomes enriched by the cross-fertilization of ideas across the varying texts that she was writing. These snippets of poetic prose help us to visualize the psychic, temporal, geographic, and class-based movement that make DeSalvo’s work so compelling. Among other journeys, she chronicles movements away from the Italian American enclave of the urban center of Hoboken to the more Americanized suburbs of Ridgefield, New Jersey. These details are also explored in the “Safe Houses” chapter of Vertigo, where ideas about class, the effects of World War II, and the emerging Cold War lead DeSalvo to recognize that traditional middle- class American values can also be unsafe and unsettling. In early chapters of her memoir, DeSalvo chronicles her father’s move to Florida and her sister’s relocation to Portland. These locales contrast effectively what we may expect to be the more idyllic Long Island landscape of summer vacations. Tragically, and without flinching, the idyllic is often rendered in its full postlapsarian horror. When, at the end of “My Sister’s Suicide,” DeSalvo describes crying after finally sorting through her sister’s personal effects, it is difficult for us as readers not to cry along with DeSalvo as she discovers her sister’s doll clothes sewn by Jill herself. The doll’s clothes, mostly cocktail dresses and evening gowns, are symbolic of what Jill will never again wear; they also represent the struggle of the working class to become middle class. The disembodied doll clothes of “My Sister’s Suicide” are poetic amplifications of Jill herself; they evoke Jill’s unheard, disembodied phone message left on DeSalvo’s answering machine just before her suicide, as detailed earlier in the chapter. The groundwork toward dramatically exposing the fantasy of middle class intactness has already been laid, and will be given more resonance and layering in “Safe Houses.” In that chapter, DeSalvo links her sexual abuse and her overly sexualized behavior to a complex chain of events, including the larger socioeconomic realities of the working class and the lack of access to proper mental health services. Once again, there is empathy

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here, but no wistful sentimental self-mythologizing. DeSalvo focuses on the clearhearted recognition of the effects of the differences in class and ethnicity as well as the resources afforded one based on socioeconomic background. The section in “Safe Houses” that details the differences between the working class speech of Hoboken and the middle class language of suburban Ridgefield serves as a poignant and humorous counterpoint to the observations DeSalvo began in “My Sister’s Suicide.” The wit, rawness, and depth of psychological insight contrast the more tempered but no less devastating descriptions of Jill’s suicide and the family’s reaction: Despite my graduate degrees, my diction stays resolutely and defiantly Hudson County, New Jersey. It says “street” not “avenue”; it says “tough,” not refined. . . . It talks about sex as they did, and it uses the word “cock” or “prick” or “dick” and certainly not the word “penis”. . . . It says “Fuck that” not “Oh dear me.” (93– 94)

There is no empty bravado here, even when she uses humor. The language is saturated with the effects of promiscuous experience. The working- class rhythms of DeSalvo’s phrasing have harnessed the power to articulate, re- create, and reinhabit the intuited connections to deeper personal tragedy. The “rougher”—I would argue more poetic— language in this case serves as a buffer or temporary stay and / or a poetic spell that temporarily wards off and skillfully paces more painful revelations about family dysfunction and sexual abuse. The earlier scholarly and theoretical work on Woolf helped DeSalvo establish the polyvalent, authorial voice she utilizes in Vertigo, while the more instructional work of Writing as a Way of Healing enabled DeSalvo to empathize and share her insights more broadly, and perhaps more politically, too. Throughout Vertigo, we witness fi rsthand DeSalvo’s own sense of heightened interiority in a work that unfolds in bold, surprising, and endlessly instructive and poetic ways. Kristeva’s theories of intertextuality, once again, help us more fully appreciate DeSalvo’s noteworthy achievements. DeSalvo’s texts remain sites of struggle, that encourage readers, the author, and critics alike to join in a process of continual production and reshaping or reassessing of the texts. The “I” in both texts is not static or univocal, but instead, in good poststructuralist fashion, passes through and uncovers varied forms of knowledge in a multidimensional and varied writing process (Allen 67). Toward the end of Writing as a Way of Healing, DeSalvo suggests that finishing Vertigo “was a complex experience— exhilarating yet wrenching” (Healing 147). While we might expect to hear the details of this intense process, DeSalvo instead crafts several sociohistorically coded experiences that make clear that she wants to stave off her feelings of loss by making biscotti. She faithfully reproduces her version of this updated Americanized recipe for the classic Italian snack, “The Writer’s Blues Chocolate Hazelnut Orange Biscotti Pick Me-Up,” in minute and engaging lyrical detail (148). Yet the real poetry of this section occurs on the previous page, in a typically deflated, deadpan, prose stretch: Standing in my messy kitchen, trying out one new recipe after another, deluging the family with tins of cranberry pistachio biscotti, chocolate orange hazelnut biscotti, visiting coffee houses in New York to sample their wares—all eased the transition of life beyond the memoir. (147)

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How’s that for a culminating, billboard-loud piece of poetic insight offered so casually? It’s all here: Kristeva’s sense of the doubling of poetic language, and the split subject position between the conscious and unconscious, and the social and pre-social effects of poetic language as well. Just two years after publishing Vertigo, DeSalvo’s understated sense of accomplishment leads her to still more wonderful poetic figurations. In an attempt to control her repetition compulsions, she is flooded by her Italian American, working- class family dysfunction but somehow turns it into something positive—not just a prizewinning memoir, but also enough biscotti to feed an avenging army. DeSalvo makes so many different types of biscotti because she can. She can afford the cost of the biscotti ingredients, and making them becomes an active symbol of her own growing confidence as a writer. Louise DeSalvo—scholar, working class intellectual, cultural worker, and psychoanalytically astute writer—has shaped texts full of poetic resonances. The musical and emotional notes resound in the rich body of words and texts that exemplify DeSalvo’s poetics of trauma.

Works Cited Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir. 1997. Portland: Eighth Mountain Press, 2002. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. DeSalvo, Louise. Vertigo. 1996. Introduction by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. ———. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. New York: Ballantine, 1989. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. de Sola Pinto, Vivian. Introduction: “D. H. Lawrence: Poet, without a Mask.” In Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1–22. di Prima, Diane. Pieces of Song: Selected Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001. Giunta, Edvige. “Introduction.” Vertigo. Louise DeSalvo. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1994. Koch, Kenneth. On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950–1988. New York: Knopf, 1994. Lawrence, D. H. Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren F. Roberts and Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Penguin Classics, 1994. O’Hara, Frank. The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. New York: Knopf, 1974. Oliver, Kelly, ed. The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. 1981. New York: Mariner Books, 1999. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. 1958. New York: New Directions, 1992.

Fixing and Fictioning MEMORY AND CATHOLICISM IN VERTIGO

Jeana DelRosso

There are several dubious points in this memoir. — m a ry m c carthy, mem orie s of a c at hol ic g irl hood

The subversion of memory and history in memoirs by contemporary Catholic women writers such as Mary McCarthy, Martha Manning, and Louise DeSalvo calls into question the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. These authors highlight those moments in their memoirs when they turn to the strategies of fiction, making it impossible for the reader to ignore the fictional tropes in their writings. Many writers of memoir and creative nonfiction, while employing the techniques of fiction, eschew the blurring of the boundary between fiction and nonfiction.1 DeSalvo constantly undermines the veracity of her memory and of the “historical” stories she relates in Vertigo. She writes: “This is how I remember . . . though I know that it is not altogether true” (50). This attitude toward truth and accuracy prompts a critical interrogation of the fictional side of memoir. Vertigo’s metadiscourse recognizes that writing itself is not just an act of agency, but also one of change; the Catholicism inherent to DeSalvo’s text functions as the hinge upon which such change is suspended. DeSalvo calls her journal, which she often mentions in Vertigo, a “fixer”: “I use my journal, my writing, as a way of making things better, of fixing things, of healing myself, 1. Walt Harrington asserts that “being clear about the place and purpose of literary device versus the place and purpose of documentary reality in our work needs serious conversation” (501). Memoirist D. J. Waldie writes that “admissions of fictionalizing rightly cause general suspicion of the kind of writing for which I’m best known” (59).

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and as a way of taking a ‘fix’ on my life” (4–5). This statement, which appears early on in the memoir, when juxtaposed against the first official words of the book—the title of the first chapter, “Fixing Things”—suggests that DeSalvo uses writing not only as a therapeutic process but also as an adjustment process, a way of reframing the past, of translating it into a language that she, as an adult, can understand. Writing, then, functions as a way of “making things better,” of fixing. As Caterina Romeo suggests, DeSalvo might be trying to fix her status as a cultural outsider, to link “her sense of displacement and marginalization to her ethnicity, her class, and her gender, analyzing the problematic relationship between American society and the Italian American community, while at the same time also examining the ambivalent position of Italian American intellectual women in a traditionally patriarchal culture” (562). DeSalvo is also trying to “fix” her Catholic girlhood and its effects on her life. In Vertigo, the balance between fiction and nonfiction rests precipitously on the very Catholic elements—masses and May pageants, religious sisters and saints, holy days and holidays—that DeSalvo reframes through her writing. In The Catholic Imagination, Andrew Greeley claims that “Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures” (1). He calls these objects and persons “factual descriptions of Catholics, both practicing and supposedly lapsed, and the Catholic religious imagination that shapes their lives” (1). This kind of imagination permeates the works of Catholic authors, whether practicing or lapsed, retired or recovering. As I have argued elsewhere, a text need not claim Catholicism as its sole locus of experience to be considered Catholic.2 Rather than limit our definition of Catholic literature to that which takes religion as its focus, we need to think broadly about what constitutes such literature, especially Catholic literature by women writers, who frequently reenvision traditional Catholic elements. Such literature may range widely in terms of the race or ethnicity of the author or protagonist, the class issues that the text raises, and the ways in which the text addresses sexuality—whether from a doctrinal perspective or otherwise. Catholic literature itself may be placed on a continuum: on one end, conservative, doctrine- espousing texts that emphasize the sacraments, original sin, penance, ritual, and salvation through suffering; on the other, progressive Catholic texts that revise and reclaim such Catholic precepts as grace, saintly intercession, and the possibility of redemption on earth. What many texts under this broad definition of Catholic literature have in common remains their engagement with Catholicism as both religion and culture, and the tension that often ensues from the intersection of Catholicism and gender, particularly in Catholic girl school narratives such as DeSalvo’s. Nan Metzger and Wendy A. Weaver argue that the genre of memoir is “inextricably entwined with the Catholic Church,” noting that both historical hagiography and contemporary memoirs by women writers often manifest as spiritual journeys (103). Yet many contemporary writers fail to acknowledge the presence and, perhaps more important, the significance of a Catholic imagination in their work. In her essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl tells us the story of her first piano lesson, of the nun who taught that lesson, and of how Sister Olive sneezed in the sun—which is what she 2. For a detailed analysis of how Catholicism functions in contemporary literature, see Chapter 1 of my book Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives.

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remembers most clearly about this par ticular moment. Recalling this event, Hampl writes: “I was baffled about why I remembered that sneezing nun” (264); she ultimately decides that Sister Olive “is meant to be a moment, not a character” (267) in the larger story she is telling about her father. While this relegation of Catholic presence to “a moment,” or a side note, may be true for Hampl—at least in this instance—it does not hold true for DeSalvo.3 Instead, DeSalvo’s Vertigo contains many of the elements of Greeley’s “enchanted world.” The narrative of Vertigo is based on a history that DeSalvo attempts to “fix,” in all the multiple meanings of the term—first, as in photography (making a story permanent); second, as in ameliorating (correcting and reshaping); third, as in stacking the odds (like fixing a card game, a sporting event, a horse race). This third meaning of “fixing” as manipulation challenges the veracity of the stories a memoirist tells—and this is the meaning that most directly applies to DeSalvo’s memoir. DeSalvo’s complicated relationship with the concept of truth resonates within current discussions of creative nonfiction, particularly memoir. In her introduction to Vertigo, Edvige Giunta acknowledges that “DeSalvo . . . is not concerned with the singular truth of verifiable facts—a truth that cannot be ascertained. Rather, she is concerned with the multiple, provisional accounts that memory generates: these accounts contain a different kind of truth, the elusive, not always reassuring truth of memory” (xxiv). Giunta’s emphasis on the multiplicity of truths elucidates how the story a memoir tells is built around the emotional truth of a particular moment; this emotional truth may be different from and give birth to an entirely different story by another witness of the same event—indeed, even the same witness may offer multiple accounts of a singular event. Giunta’s reading of DeSalvo gains support from the critical recognition of creative nonfiction as the fourth genre. In the preface to their anthology The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of / on Creative Nonfiction, Robert L. Root Jr. and Michael Steinberg argue that such writing explodes genre boundaries “because its writers often braid narrative telling with fiction and poetic techniques” (xv). DeSalvo’s memoir fits this description, as it employs all the elements of good storytelling: narrative, plot, structure, and literary stylistic devices. Yet Vertigo goes a step further, complicating the story DeSalvo tells us by constantly calling attention to it: “This is my story,” she insists, “and, as I have said, I’m sure it can’t be all true” (53). Mimi Schwartz proposes an uneasy truce between truth and story by relying on the notion of an authentic rather than factual truth; for her, “the emotional truth [is] what matters” (339). While Schwartz’s essay, “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” problematizes the differences between fact and fiction in memoir, she ultimately determines that “if the main plot, characters, and setting are true, if the intent is to make honest sense of ‘how it felt to me’ and tell the true story well (with disclaimers as needed), it’s memoir to me” (343). Vertigo embodies such a definition of truth, disclaimers and all. DeSalvo questions the veracity of the story that she is telling, just as she questions her memory, as when she states: “This is how I remember the war years, though I know that it is not altogether true, and, maybe that it is not true at all. Maybe this is the story that I tell myself about that time in my life because it is too dif3. Hampl is otherwise often intentional in her representation of Catholicism in her autobiographical writings.

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ficult to remember what I really lived through” (50). DeSalvo’s truth attempts to balance emotional experience and verifiable fact. This notion of the elasticity of truth is noticeably present in a number of memoirs by Catholic authors, originating perhaps in the ur-text of the genre, Mary McCarthy’s renowned Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.4 First published in 1946, McCarthy’s memoir establishes some of the groundwork for what later becomes recognized as an emphasis on authenticity of voice over detail of fact in contemporary memoir writing. McCarthy begins her book with a concern with memory and its flaws, with the problem of story versus fact. Her preface, “To the Reader,” offers the kind of disclaimers favored by Schwartz: “there are cases where I am not sure myself whether I am making something up” (4). Such assertions seem to release McCarthy from accountability for her story in a way that feels like an attempt to avoid blame. McCarthy readily acknowledges that the conversations she relates have been fictionalized: “My memory is good, but obviously I cannot recall whole passages of dialogue that took place years ago. . . . The conversations, as given, are mostly fictional” (4). Most contemporary creative nonfiction writers consider this strategy wholly in keeping with the truth of their story, but McCarthy uses it to dissociate from what she relates. She also recognizes, as most memoirists, including DeSalvo, do, that other people’s versions of the same set of circumstances may differ considerably from hers, pointing out that it is often parents “who set us straight on our own childhood recollections, telling us that this cannot have happened the way we think it did” (5). This observation, however, reads like a relinquishing of responsibility, as if McCarthy is letting herself off the hook for what her memoir reveals about her family and herself. While she continually undercuts her storytelling and the reader’s investment in that story, McCarthy also insists that everything is true. For example, she relates the stories her Uncle Harry tells about her father, Roy, and his drunkenness and profligacy, but then proclaims, “Uncle Harry’s derelict brother, Roy, is not the same person as my father. I simply do not recognize him” (15). In insisting that her father—who, with her mother, died when the four McCarthy children were still young, leaving them orphaned and in the hands of abusive distant relatives—was a good father, McCarthy rejects other versions. Instead, she focuses on her belief in her father’s goodness, relieving him of any responsibility for her and her siblings’ situation. There seems to be something distinctly Catholic about McCarthy’s need to see the good in her father; it enables her to forgive his sins—that is, his death—against her and her siblings. Fixing her story thus results in maintaining her version of the truth, even as she constantly questions it or even reveals alternative accounts. Like McCarthy’s memoir, DeSalvo precariously balances fact and fiction, walking a tightrope between self- examination and self-indulgence. Indeed, if one does not take into consideration the underlying Catholicism embedded in this narrative, DeSalvo’s memoir can read, occasionally, as narcissistic. When telling friends of her younger sister’s suicide, DeSalvo reports to them that she had given Jill the belt she used to hang herself. “I had given her a belt,” she insists (29), though she has no idea if this is the belt 4. Several sections in McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood are italicized, likely because they act as a kind of metadiscourse. Accordingly, all quoted materials from these sections are italicized in this essay.

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Jill used. She suggests that this desire to insert herself into the narrative of her sister’s death is her “way of taking responsibility for what happened to her [sister],” as well as something that “links” and “binds” them, “even in death” (29). Yet, to the reader, this claim may suggest self-absorption, since it indirectly places DeSalvo at the center of her sister’s death. DeSalvo’s feelings of culpability regarding her sister’s death, though, could reflect her ingrained Catholic guilt. Memoirist Martha Manning claims that “Catholic children are used to guilt by association” and that “according to the tenets of our faith, we were all born with original sin” (61). McCarthy addresses such guilt, admitting to having agonized as a child over having drunk water on the morning of her First Holy Communion (19). DeSalvo may well have had such feelings drilled into her by her teachers in Catholic school as well as by her Italian Catholic parents at home—although she says that her mother “is no devout believer in the faith into which both she and [her] father have been baptized, into which they baptize” their daughters (67). What complicates this self-projection into the story of Jill’s death is DeSalvo’s honesty in telling us that she has no idea whether or not it is true, particularly since those same friends to whom she provided her original story may well read her memoir. In a similar manner that at first does not seem laden with Catholic overtones, DeSalvo’s metadiscourse around the story of the school fire that nearly killed her father reveals multiple levels of self-awareness regarding her storytelling. When telling this story to friends, DeSalvo declares: “I was so angry with him in those days that I wanted him to die” (111). However, she immediately admits to us, her readers, that she tells this story about her father the firefighter “to get attention . . . to disguise the paralyzing fear [she] felt, to get some control over it” (111). Her memoir becomes a means to fixing the past—not just what she has said about what happened, but also how she interprets those events—in order to gain some control over the fear of her father’s death. Her manipulation of the telling and reframing of these events—her sister’s suicide and her father’s near- death—creates an emotional truth that earns her sympathy from her readers, but also assuages her own unacknowledged, though ingrained, Catholic guilt. If DeSalvo fi xes the past by adhering to emotional truth, she also chooses to complicate this truth by remembering her childhood and telling her story through photographs of her younger self. Throughout Vertigo, she describes pictures of herself and her family, and uses her descriptions of those photos to reflect not only on what she remembers, but also on the veracity of that memory. DeSalvo uses photography, especially in her descriptions of the World War II years, when her mother regularly photographed the young Louise so that the pictures could be sent overseas to wherever her father was stationed at the time. Interestingly, the adult DeSalvo thinks of this time as the happiest of her childhood. Her father, with whom she argues throughout her life, is absent, and she does not yet have a burdensome younger sister. But the differences between her life during and after the war are even greater, as they transcend her immediate family. DeSalvo describes how, before the war, “families went to church on Sundays when everyone dressed up in their best to show how affluent they wished they were, and parents trundled their children in perambulators or strollers up and down sidewalks” (51). This memory presents prewar family life and religious practice as patriarchal and structured, focused on the nuclear family, upward mobility, and institutional religion. During the war, everything changes: with women and children left to fend for themselves, the nu-

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clear family ensconced behind closed doors dissolves, and communities of women emerge and flourish. Even church-going habits change, since “mothers ducked into churches for prayers for the safe return of their husbands on their way to and from markets or playgrounds and they generally avoided the place on Sundays” (52). The neighborhood transforms into a female- centered, communal family that privileges spirituality over religion. Priests or formal rituals no longer mediate women’s connection to God. Catholic expression now occurs within private moments rather than the familiar public spectacle that characterizes Catholic girl school narratives. This allegedly idyllic time in DeSalvo’s childhood is memorialized in the many photos taken during these years. DeSalvo describes a photograph of herself “all bundled up, sitting on [her] new sled, [her] Christmas present” (53); this image is just one of the many pictures taken of children to be “sent off to their darling daddies away at war” (53). And while these photos are mailed regularly throughout the war, most of the pictures are taken on major Roman Catholic holidays. When DeSalvo discusses another Christmas photo mailed overseas, she describes herself “as clean and neat as if . . . going to church, or to a party” (54). It is certainly not the former, because we know that DeSalvo’s mother has by now abandoned institutional religion.5 If there is any question in the reader’s mind about DeSalvo’s attendance at Sunday mass, her phrase “as if I am going” (154) should alleviate any doubt. DeSalvo refers to several other photographs taken on Christian holidays, including several at Easter (55, 70, 100). While holidays are traditional times to take pictures, DeSalvo and her mother spend these religious holidays without religion, at least in any institutional form. The photographs may well serve as a way, for DeSalvo’s mother and the other women, to perform Christian holidays, which they do not in fact observe, for their husbands at war—to let them think that the old ways are being upheld, even though they are not. These women thus fix reality, cutting and reframing it. The photographs likely alleviate the men’s minds that all, at least on the home front, is fine; their wives’ fixing, therefore, becomes an early lesson for the very young Louise in the importance of emotional truth over verifiable facts. DeSalvo mentions other photographs taken during the rites of passage that most Catholic children undergo, such as first communion and confirmation. She writes: “I know I did these things, not because I remember them, but because there are photos that testify that the body that I inhabited participated in these events” (100). DeSalvo uses photographs to jog her memory about events that she cannot recall, to give evidence of those events to herself and her readers, and to look for cues that can tell her whether she and her mother were happy during her childhood. In her book Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, Annette Kuhn points out that “family photographs may affect to show us our past, but what we do with them—how we use them—is really about today, not yesterday. These traces of our former lives are pressed into ser vice in a never- ending process of making, re-making, making sense of, our selves—now” (19). Through photographs, DeSalvo similarly works to remake both her past and her present self. Kuhn joins a tradition of memoirists who interrogate the significance of photography in recreating memories. Root and Steinberg, who use photography primarily as a 5. This is, perhaps, one factor in her mother’s apparent happiness during this time, as demonstrated by her smiling face in photos (53).

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metaphor for memory, argue: “Finding the language to describe experience sometimes alters it, and your description of the experience becomes the memory, the way a photograph does” (xxvii). They suggest that the writing itself thus becomes more real, truer, than what actually happened. In “The Landscape of Creative Nonfiction,” Jocelyn Bartkevicus uses photography more concretely, as a tool for recovering memory. She discusses the discovery of a photo that jogs her memory of what she originally recalled as an idyllic childhood. Writing about the disturbing photograph, Bartkevicus realizes that it “awakened darker memories” (227). As a memoirist attempting to find the truth, she “focus[es] on the unremembered photograph and dig[s] for more” (227). For Bartkevicus, photographs invite the truth by triggering memory. Kuhn refers to such photographs as “memory texts,” one of many kinds of “cultural productions across a range of media, which . . . are in effect secondary revisions of the source materials of memory” (5). Annie Dillard takes Kuhn’s idea of photographs as memory texts or “prompts” (Kuhn 7) a step further by suggesting that photographs can actually serve to create, not just trigger, memories: “Your batch of snapshots will both fix and ruin your memory of your travels, or your childhood, or your children’s childhood. You can’t remember anything from your trip except this wretched collection of snapshots” (Dillard 243). For Dillard, the photographs themselves replace memories, serving as a substitute for what a writer might otherwise remember. Like those photographs, memoir writing “battens on your memories. And it replaces them” (242). The photographs in Vertigo also create memories, memories that DeSalvo cannot access and stabilize, memories that she cannot confirm. They ultimately become a metaphor for DeSalvo’s writing, each helping her understand her past, which in turn aids a discovery of her present self. DeSalvo lays this strategy out early in Vertigo: I think, as I write, that my journal acts as a kind of “fixer,” as in photography. Like the chemical that you use to stabilize an image, to make it permanent. But I begin to see, too, that the other meanings of “fixer” also apply to why I write. I use my journal, my writing, as a way of making things better, of fixing things, of healing myself, and as a way of taking a “fix” on my life. Of seeing where I am, and plotting a course for the future. (4–5)

DeSalvo’s writing, like the photographs she describes, acts as a means to remembering; even if what she writes is not exactly true, her words on the page make it true— or, at least, true to her story. “I know my stories aren’t all true,” she writes (50). In writing these stories, she not only fixes them in time and space, but she also fictionalizes them.6 The third meaning of fix comes into play here, as she stacks the deck for her reader, by “making things better” than they actually were (4). DeSalvo’s attention to her Catholic upbringing mainly occurs, not surprisingly, in the early sections of her memoir, in which she discusses her childhood, particularly her education in a Catholic institution. Young Louise starts first grade at the Sacred Heart Academy at the age of four, largely because she already knows how to read (66). This early emphasis on language, on words on the page, serves the young Louise well, although it continues to create dissonance for the adult DeSalvo who tells us this story. 6. Curiously, in photographs, the young Louise looks more joyful after her father returns from the war (60).

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She writes at great length about her first grade teacher: “The nun who taught us (whose name I have forgotten by now but whom I will refer to by the name Sister Mary)” (75). Such assertions may cause the reader to question again the veracity of DeSalvo’s claims; couldn’t she have asked an old classmate about the nun’s name? Found it in some of the papers she keeps from school? Perhaps that is not necessary. Contemporary theorists of memoir might well argue that the name is less important than the essence of the person. Regardless, DeSalvo’s first grade teacher, “Sister Mary,” figures heavily in this section of the memoir. The first lesson she teaches the young Louise is that school might not be as exciting as she had hoped it would be. DeSalvo suggests that she had been disappointed early on because “Sister Mary had told [her] that [she] was going to learn wonderful and important and interesting things in first grade” (78), but the nun seems mostly interested in another student’s arcane ability to recite the alphabet backward. And although the young Louise has been “instructed in the niceties of addressing nuns by [her] mother” (79), she demonstrates early signs of her argumentative nature when, in her determination to outshine this other student, she asks questions that make the nun look foolish. Other Catholic memoirists notice this competition among the students manufactured by the nuns. For example, McCarthy comments on “the parochial-school methods of education, which were based on the competitive principle” (18). DeSalvo does not exhibit the same intense attachment to the nuns’ teachings that McCarthy does, thus suggesting that Vertigo leans more to the progressive side of a continuum of Catholic literature. Like McCarthy, the young DeSalvo, though, learns at least to play by the rules, and by the end of the first year at Sacred Heart Academy, she is “selected to crown the Blessed Virgin Mary during the school’s May pageant” (81)—a victory indeed, as this honor is only bestowed upon a model student. Other Catholic memorists, including McCarthy and Manning, focus on the privilege girls receive in leading such processions. Apparently, in such protocols, it also helps that the leader is short. DeSalvo explains: “it would look very nice if I led the procession” (81). In her memoir, Chasing Grace: Reflections of a Catholic Girl, Grown Up, Manning illustrates this particular brand of Catholic hierarchy as she experienced it in her parochial education, humorously pointing out that “Catholic processions somehow depended on exact size order. God forbid someone should have a growth spurt in the midst of the preparation period. The whole ceremony would have to be called off” (80). Such emphasis on display and performance reveals the superficiality of a church that values demonstration over education. Catholic school does provide opportunities that DeSalvo would likely not have had if she had attended a public school. For example, she was able to complete the work of first and second grade simultaneously. The school also provides another, perhaps more surprising opportunity for the young Louise: escape from her family. She writes: “What I like about school is being away from my mother and grandmother’s battles, the vicious shouting matches between them that now erupt frequently when my father and grandfather are not there” (DeSalvo 74). The community of women that thrives during the war dissolves into the postwar nuclear household. The family becomes a battleground for primacy between the two female heads of house—Louise’s mother and grandmother— creating an uncertain and often hostile environment for Louise and her younger sister. Here the Catholic school becomes the default choice, the space preferred over a beleaguered

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household, the “safe, quiet place” in opposition to the “maelstrom” of the young Louise’s home life (74). Yet, despite the academic success and safe space that Catholic school affords DeSalvo, life in parochial schooling is neither safe nor sweet for this young Italian American girl growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the early 1950s: “I had already been laughed at for my long, unpronounceable Italian last name (which contained twelve letters in all, seven consonants and five vowels) both in the school yard when kids asked who I was, and in the classroom when Sister Mary called the roll” (76). Curiously, there is no mention here of Sister Mary’s reprimanding the other children for making fun of DeSalvo’s Italian heritage. Instead, Sister Mary herself contributes to DeSalvo’s sense of inadequacy: “I remember that Sister Mary . . . after lunch, took a giant piece of Scotch tape and taped my mouth shut when she caught me asking the boy seated next to me to tell me what had been written on the blackboard” (80). While the young Louise demonstrates her abilities to achieve academically, gender discrimination still affects this female-led institution. Although girls like DeSalvo and her friend Miranda Panda seem to be the academic stars, it is these same girls who must do domestic work, like decorating the classroom for the May crowning. Through the evocation of her past, DeSalvo unpacks the contradictions of Catholic education, which values female education, but also persistently enacts patriarchal ideologies. In Vertigo, DeSalvo’s mother acts as the unwitting emissary of this Catholicism. She promotes Catholic education for her daughter, praising the Catholic school for its equal treatment of students. Yet she recognizes only a single-faceted class-based equality, manifested in the school uniforms: my mother says she thinks that wearing uniforms is a very good idea because it makes everyone seem the same so that, during school hours, the rich kids and the poor kids will all look similar, and that means no one will get preferential treatment. This is what’s so good about Catholic schools, she maintains. (67)

The tone is clear: DeSalvo’s mother “says she thinks” and “maintains” that everyone will “seem the same” (my emphasis). Her disclaimers appear to be protesting too much. This use of qualifiers suggests that DeSalvo is not in agreement with her mother on this point. Furthermore, DeSalvo’s mother overlooks the oppressiveness of the free labor she herself must provide, as woman and mother, in order to make the school uniforms, which is a time- consuming and tedious task: “sewing them is hard work (especially the blouses with their darts and puffy, set-in sleeves)” (67). DeSalvo’s mother and the other women in Hoboken defy tradition and convention while using public markers of conformity such as school uniforms and photos taken on holidays to signal that the patriarchal traditions and domestic sphere remain in place. Commenting upon the class issues in her convent school, McCarthy points out that the French nuns were to be called by the appellation “Madame” followed by their surname in order to make it clear that they, like the students, came from the best families (103). Her position on equality in Catholic education differs dramatically from that of DeSalvo’s mother, as McCarthy sees the competitive nature of the schools as a smart and deliberate method for allowing poor children to better themselves: “There was no idea of equality in

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the parochial school, and such an idea would have been abhorrent to me. . . . Equality was a species of unfairness which the good sisters of St. Joseph would not have tolerated” (19). Like DeSalvo, McCarthy rejects the idea of Catholic education as a class leveler. In Chasing Grace, Manning also portrays the flaws of Catholic education. Published in 1996—the same year as Vertigo—this memoir reaffirms what pervades earlier Catholic girlhood narratives: the burdens placed upon young girls and the limitations of the nuns’ teaching. Manning remembers that the Sunday school nuns were more interested in rote recitation of the rules of Catholicism than in the explication of the thinking behind those rules, as she learns in her preparation for first penance: It didn’t take long to figure out that you didn’t really have to understand the sins; you just had to remember them and, above all, spell them correctly. After the Judeo- Christian sins came the Catholic sins, which were considerably more complicated and, given the attention they received in our preparation, considerably more important. (34)

To these Manning adds a third category, the “nun sin,” which involves such injunctions as “moving your desk one millimeter off the taped edges on the floor” (36). Treated as being more important than “Thou shalt not kill,” these Catholic commandments also involve fasting before communion, attending mass regularly, and, most significantly for the young Martha, never touching oneself sexually. The young Manning struggles with the idea that touching herself, as she has been doing, is sinful, particularly as it hurts no one. Her solution is nothing short of ingenious: when the priest asks her about impure thoughts (which he does regularly), she lies, and then adds one to the number of lies she has already told—“In that way, I converted masturbation to lying and was absolved of all my sins” (43). Despite this resolution to her childhood concerns, sexuality and religion remain deeply intertwined throughout Manning’s young adulthood. Sex and sexuality also emerge as forces in the young DeSalvo’s understanding of religion. Of particular note is the way in which she overlays her parents’ sexual intercourse with her vision of Catholicism. She describes in detail lying awake at night and staring at the Sacred Heart picture in the bedroom where all four members of the family sleep: “Jesus is holding his bleeding heart out in front of him on an outstretched gold plate. The sounds and smells and movements of my parents’ sex, and the sight of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, bleeding on a plate, commingle” (DeSalvo 72). Deeply uncomfortable, the young Louise focuses on the holy picture on her mother’s mirror, which she can see by the dim light of the nightlight. But the picture of Jesus offers her no solace. One night she has an accident in bed and finds “delight” in interrupting her parents (73). The disjunction between the teachings of the church and the needs of her body erupts in a way that echoes Manning’s childhood understanding of autoeroticism as something at once shameful and delightful. These delicate negotiations become essential to the characters’ growing self-awareness, to their relationships with other people, and to their responses to social and cultural entities and ideas, including family, school, and church. Catholic doctrine confounds the young Louise religiously, educationally, and domestically. When the adult DeSalvo later waxes poetic about her Catholic education, she focuses on its influence on her writing life:

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In the years that I attend Catholic grammar school . . . the lessons that I learn from the nuns are prodigious. They go beyond book learning. They will stay with me for a lifetime, long after I renounce my faith. They will inform my intellectual work. I learn to see life as a titanic moral struggle between good and evil; I learn that we are all God’s children; I learn the importance of neatness, order, discipline, rigor, practice, and routine in learning. The virtue of work. The spiritual, soulful nature of work. That work is another form of prayer. That you must teach others what you have learned. That you teach, too, by example. That there is beauty in the structure of a well-balanced sentence. That language must be used carefully, correctly, and precisely. (82)

The list goes on, paying tribute to “austerity,” “renunciation,” “generosity,” “intuition,” “pageantry and ceremony,” and “flowers” (82). McCarthy also writes at length about what she has learned from the nuns, but with a distinctly different approach and focus: What I liked in the church, what I recall with gratitude, was the sense of mystery and wonder, ashes put on one’s forehead on Ash Wednesday, the blessing of the throat with candles on St. Blaise’s Day, the purple palls put on the statues after Passion Sunday, which meant they were hiding their faces in mourning because Christ was going to be crucified, the ringing of the bell at the Sanctus, the burst of lilies at Easter—all this ritual, seeming slightly strange and having no purpose . . . beyond commemoration of a Person Who had died a long time ago. In these exalted moments of altruism the soul was fired with reverence. (26–27)

DeSalvo’s tribute to the nuns and their teachings lacks the minute detail that characterizes McCarthy’s homage. McCarthy offers concrete details of what she appreciates about her Catholic school education, echoing Greeley’s notion of a Catholic imagination. In contrast, DeSalvo lists exactly the kinds of virtues to which a Catholic school instructor might pay lip ser vice, but which rarely manifest in any kind of reality. “Everything you do is judged and ranked and marked,” DeSalvo states. “And you never get a star for making an effort” (83). Vertigo certainly demonstrates that DeSalvo ultimately organizes her life around many of the principles learned from the nuns. From an adult perspective, she tells us: “Even now, I like to plan my day in blocks of time devoted to different subjects and tasks” (74). She is unequivocal in recognizing the impact of Catholic schooling. But this glorification of rules and regulations prevents the young Louise from seeing the chalkboard in the first grade, as she is senselessly seated at the back of the room, unable to see over the heads of the older children (thus prompting the taping of her mouth when she asks her classmate for help). Much like Hampl, DeSalvo attempts to change, through writing, unpleasant childhood experiences. Hampl explains that in her first draft of the piano lesson story she had written about a music book that she used to have, only to realize later that the book never belonged to her: “I’m sure of that,” she writes, “because I remember envying children who did have this wonderful book with its pictures of children and animals printed on the pages of music” (262). Hampl discovers what she has been doing, consciously or otherwise, with the original draft: she has been giving herself what she wanted all those years ago. DeSalvo also gives herself what she wanted all those years ago: a happy educational experience that provided a reprieve from her family and an escape into a world

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of academic morality. She thus rigs her Catholic educational experience, arranging it into a more pleasant memory. This kind of fi xing remains at odds with much of what DeSalvo tells us about her experiences in Catholic school. What rings most “true”—at least, in the sense of true to the story of DeSalvo’s life as she tells it—is DeSalvo’s appreciation of how the nuns read real literature to their classes throughout their grammar school years: I remember that they were grown-up books, gargantuan books, that these nuns read, filled with action, with the pulse of history, or with love and passion (though never with any sex as I recall). I learn to see reading as a privilege and pleasure, and to glean the lessons to be learned from those who had taken the time to write beautifully, powerfully, and well. (83)

Less interested in the mystery of Catholicism, DeSalvo focuses on the pragmatic side of her parochial schooling. Here is the real benefit that the nuns provide to the young student Louise and to the adult writer DeSalvo, the ser vice for which they should be extolled. Their emphasis on reading—and not just reading anything, but reading real literature—has a lasting impact on DeSalvo. McCarthy also writes of having learned a love of great literature in her convent school, although her nuns publicly denunciate the sins and non- Catholicism of the authors whose works the students are reading. DeSalvo also learns her love of writing from the nuns; indeed, her early writings, encouraged by the nuns, begin in epistolary form: she has “a pen pal in Peru, and another in Ecuador. Both Catholics. Both, she has gotten through her school’s participation in a global effort to put Catholic children in touch with one another” (98). This emphasis on reading and writing informs DeSalvo’s life as her readers experience it in Vertigo. She becomes the scholar, the English professor, the teacher, the researcher, the reader, and, most certainly, the writer who the nuns, with their love of and pleasure in literature, set her up to be. Even DeSalvo’s reflection on “vertigo”—the title of her book—is rooted in her Catholic training. She knows that her interest in the etymology of the word is grounded in her Catholic background, since she has “been trained well in dictionary skills by the nuns” (8). The phrase “dictionary skills” does not adequately describe the real skills that DeSalvo acquires—the reading and writing that, she believes, save her from the depression that claims her mother and sister. Those root skills—using a dictionary, applying a detective-like approach to language—are, indeed, the basics of advanced reading and writing. These principles enable DeSalvo to recognize the connection in not just the roots, but also the meanings of the words “vertigo” and “verse,” both of which come to hold significance in her life and in her memoir. She writes: “To turn a phrase in the midst of instability. By versifying, to transmute my instability, my vertigo into something that is worthwhile” (9). Thus, she sees verse as a means of repairing her vertigo, writing as a way to unwind and resolve the emotional imbalance that plagues her family and her self. “Vertigo; verse. The tug between these two poles remains, is very real,” she writes (12). She could easily replace those terms with “fiction; nonfiction” to describe the ways in which she seeks stability throughout her narrative yet remains uneasy with that balance. Her versifying constitutes fixing, in all three senses of the term: situating, correcting, and manipulating. She must perform all three in order to cope with her vertigo and explore it in writing. And she fixes her relationship with Catholicism as well, molding it to fit her needs as both Catholic schoolgirl and adult writer.

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Romeo argues that DeSalvo’s connection of vertigo and verse provides the writer with a way “to gain stability through claiming her voice as a working- class person, as an Italian American, and as a woman” (562–563). DeSalvo also attempts to claim her voice as a Catholic writer and as a Catholic woman, even as her memoir remains deeply ambivalent about her Catholic roots. She recognizes both the educational values and the dangers inherent in a system ultimately steeped in patriarchy and power. Playing with notions of truth and memory, DeSalvo addresses the incongruities of her story—her history—as a Catholic girl and woman writer. According to Root and Steinberg, “the truth . . . need only be veracious enough to satisfy the writer’s purpose and the art of writing” (xxvii). DeSalvo’s purpose seems to be self-reflection, but also self re-formation, as she transfixes her life on the page, arranging her memories of family and religion, education, and upbringing, to serve her own end. “I need to write my way out of pain” (DeSalvo xxxvi), she tells us in the introduction. Writing, for DeSalvo, then, becomes not just her antidote, but also her salvation. Her memoir recovers and reclaims her Catholic story, even as it fixes it, for the readers as well as for the author.

Works Cited Bartkevicus, Jocelyn. “The Landscape of Creative Nonfiction.” In Root and Steinberg, The Fourth Genre, 225–231. DelRosso, Jeana. Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. DeSalvo, Louise. Vertigo. 1996. Introduction by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. Dillard, Annie. “To Fashion a Text.” In Root and Steinberg, The Fourth Genre, 236–245. Greeley, Andrew. The Catholic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hampl, Patricia. “Memory and Imagination.” In Root and Steinberg, The Fourth Genre, 259–268. Harrington, Walt. “The Writer’s Choice.” River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 10, nos. 1–2 (2008–2009): 495–507. Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 1995. Manning, Martha. Chasing Grace: Reflections of a Catholic Girl, Grown Up. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1957. Metzger, Nan, and Wendy A. Weaver. “Some Context for Current Catholic Women’s Memoir: Patricia Hampl and Her Contemporaries.” In Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature, ed. Mary R. Reichardt, 103–118. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Romeo, Caterina. “The Power of Memory: Louise DeSalvo.” In Voces de América / American Voices: Entrevistas a escritores americanos / Interviews with American Writers, ed. Laura P. Gallo, 561–580. Cadiz, Spain: Aduana Vieja, 2004. Root, Robert L., Jr. and Michael Steinberg, eds. The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of / on Creative Nonfiction. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Education, 2002. Schwartz, Mimi. “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” In Root and Steinberg, The Fourth Genre, 338–343. Waldie, D. J. “Ordinary Time: The Making of Catholic Imagination.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 7, no. 1 (2007): 58– 67.

Portrait of the Mother as a Writer and Researcher Julija Šukys

It is early 2009. Soon, at the end of February, my son will turn two. This winter has been easier than last—that long 2008 season of sleep deprivation, when my baby and I found ourselves housebound by over four meters of snow. I remember tearfully phoning my mother at her nursing home located a six-hour drive away. She listened sympathetically. “Phone your doctor,” she said. I hadn’t written since the end of my pregnancy, and it was killing me. And even though I’d known I would have to take time away from my work, I never thought having a baby would change my relationship to writing as much as it had. I hadn’t counted on how unhappy not writing would make me, and how alone my son Sebastian and I would find ourselves. “I didn’t know that if you want to write and don’t . . . not writing will eventually begin to erase who you are,” writes Louise DeSalvo (Healing 31). I came across this sentence long after Sebastian had grown out of baby- and toddlerhood. Underlining it, I recalled how over those first couple years I’d felt myself fading away. More than anything, I wanted my mother to come and stay with me, but her wheelchair, the MS, and everything else that comes with it, made this impossible. Still, she was right when she told me that something had to change. “You don’t have children to put them in daycare!” exclaimed a childless friend a few weeks after that weepy conversation with my mother, hearing of my plans for my son. Trying to keep my voice even (probably unsuccessfully), I replied that I needed to write,

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and that this necessity bore no reflection of my love for my little boy. If I didn’t write, I explained, I would, quite simply, die. And that would be bad for both of us. That shut the conversation down. “Write, write, or die,” reads an epigraph to DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing (H.D. quoted in Healing 4). There, she examines in detail the ways in which writing allows human beings in general, and women in particular, to survive. Part memoir, part study, and part how-to, DeSalvo’s book takes seriously the notion that writing is essential to a writer’s physical and mental health: The act of linking feelings with troubling events, then, makes our bodies display responses associated with yoga and meditation. This explains why writers who stop work soon feel out of sorts—why they become edgy, irritable, anxious, even depressed. This explains, too, why people who begin writing report feeling a greater sense of well-being—why they become calmer, more capable of coping with stress, more serene, even when facing life’s challenges, than they’d been before. (23)

The bibliographical path that DeSalvo and others lay out will lead me from one writer to another. All repeat the simple yet powerful mantra that writing is essential for their hearts to keep beating. No metaphor: they appear to mean it literally. These authors confirm how inextricably intertwined writing and life are. It seems hard to believe that I ever felt alone in this notion. And so it is that in this winter of 2009, Sebastian attends daycare and finally sleeps through the night. For my part, I have begun to claw back my writing time, though not without fallout, and not without feeling judged, if sometimes only by myself. Nevertheless, for the first time in two years, I have the luxury of time for reflection. I am struggling to balance my new role as a mother with the thing that makes up my very essence and identity: writing. And I want to know if it’s just me. Do I simply have a bad attitude, I wonder, or have others lived something comparable? So, one day, after dropping Sebastian at daycare, I tromp through the snow and slush to the library in search of companionship, comfort, and wisdom. The excursion has been inspired by Virginia Woolf, whose work I’ve been reading lately. Somehow, I’ve managed to reach my mid-thirties without much contact with this author. As a student, I was preoccupied by the French, Russian, and German writers of my modern languages curriculum, so I suppose that’s why Woolf somehow didn’t make it firmly on to my horizon. But reading A Room of One’s Own, I can’t believe how modern and relevant she remains. Embarrassed by my ignorance, I want to learn more. From Woolf, I follow a trail of Anglo-American writing on mothering. In addition to Woolf (the only non-mother on my mother-reading list), I read Alice Walker, Tillie Olsen, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Sara Ruddick. All have come a generation or more before me. It is on this journey and inside a book called Between Women that I meet Louise DeSalvo for the first time. DeSalvo’s essay, “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar” (sometimes simply called, in a kind of shorthand, “Puttana”), weaves together stories about life as a researcher, writer, mother, and ethnic other. The essay is about loving a child, while at the same time loving reading, writing, and scholarship. It’s about the pleasure of archival work, and about how literature can change us in fundamental ways. Its opening

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paragraph describes a 1975 airplane scene: bound for England, DeSalvo is a young Italian American mother traveling alone for the first time. And this, according to the laws and logic of her cultural heritage, makes her a puttana. “Oh yes,” she writes, “I now remember what women who do anything without their husbands are called. Puttana. Whores. I remember hearing stories in my childhood about how women like that were stoned to death in the old country” (36). DeSalvo writes that she secretly feared that she had damaged her child by going to graduate school. This comforts me. Yes, mothers who write are selfish. Mothers who research are neglectful. Women who choose ambition and art “over” their children are puttane. This is what we are told in those conversations we try to shut down as quietly and deftly as possible. “Woolf has unleashed our anger,” writes Louise DeSalvo (51). Yes—but now what to do with it? Use it constructively, answers DeSalvo. Reading “Puttana” for the first time, I feel a deep kinship with DeSalvo’s work, with her story, and with her prose style that has moved over decades from a formal, academic tone “that involves an erasure of self rather than its expression,” and toward “an arch, smart-assed, reflective, deeply personal voice” (“Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar” 61). Since finishing graduate school, I too have deliberately shed my academic drag in favor of something simpler, more direct and honest. And if writing “Puttana” was a turning point in DeSalvo’s life,1 then reading it is a turning point in mine. She had no models before writing her essay, but this is not the case for me. “Puttana” is proof that my literary instincts might be right, and that I can write (am allowed to write; may allow myself to write) differently, personally, in my own skin, and from my experience. Like my Italian American model, I too have a feeling of writing from the margins. But unlike DeSalvo’s family, where poverty and starvation in its native southern Italy were rarely spoken of, my family has never been silent about its origins. My maternal grandmother told stories about growing up “atop a bag of flour” (her father was a maker of millstones), and about seeking refuge in Ukraine with her family during World War I. My parents sent me to Saturday heritage language school and required me to speak Lithuanian at home from earliest childhood. It was the Cold War, and the country of my parents’ birth appeared on no map. Schoolmates told me the language I spoke didn’t exist. They accused me of making Lithuania up, curtly correcting me: “No, that’s Russia.” Still, this surname that those around me so often deemed and deem unpronounceable, was a point of pride in our family. When I married, my in-laws asked if I would take their name. I shook my head, unsure how to elaborate. My reasons seemed both too banal and too complex. Winter 2006. I am thirty-five years old, six-months pregnant, and about to board the last leg of a flight to Vilnius, Lithuania, the country where both my parents were born. In Prague, security screenings take forever, because rules for transporting liquids and gels in carry- ons have changed. Beside the X-ray machine, a pile of shampoos, creams, and toothpastes grows with each inspected passenger. I feel uncharacteristically calm

1. DeSalvo attests to this in “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar.”

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and patient, because I am not really traveling alone. The baby kicks, and I put my hand on my belly, as if to answer his salutation. For the past four years, I have been working on a book about a Lithuanian university librarian and Holocaust rescuer. This is my last research trip before the birth of my son. We are formidable, he and I. We walk with the spirits of foremothers. Though I don’t know her yet, Louise DeSalvo walks with me, too. I come from a family, from a cultural heritage, where women survive. When their men are taken from them, our mothers and daughters rally around one another, and get on with life. On my father’s side, there is the story of my grandmother, who was deported alone from Lithuania to Siberia. On the night of June 13, 1941, Red Army soldiers arrived in the night. They gave her twenty minutes to pack. Among the items she took was my grandfather’s suit, made of fine English fabric. He would join her at the station, the soldiers said. After all, he, a known anti-Bolshevik, was the one they wanted. His was the name on the list of enemies of the people. But in the end, they only got her, and it was she who wore the English suit for seventeen years in the mud and snow of central Russia. Next there is my mother. Now paralyzed by multiple sclerosis, she has lived without my father for twenty years. Though a fit and active man, a heart attack felled him at age fifty-six. No one could have predicted that my mother, who smoked for about thirty years, never exercised, who was diagnosed with a degenerative disease in her early forties and then breast cancer in her fifties, would outlive her husband. When she turned seventy, it was a major victory for us, and each day beyond, a gift. Even my mother’s mother, who lived with her husband for almost fifty years, survived him by well over two decades. Over coffee one morning a few years before her death, she told me how she had thrown her body over my eight-year- old mother as they ran west from Lithuania in 1944, willing any bomb that hit to kill them both. God forbid one live without the other. All this is to say that traveling alone in my seventh month of pregnancy does not worry me. I know that we, too, will survive, though my husband isn’t so sure. He asks me to find a doctor as soon as I arrive, just in case. So, when I pass a gynecological clinic on my first day in Vilnius’s old town, I note its address and phone number. I go everywhere on foot, and once even run up the city’s main boulevard to get to the theater on time. I walk so much that I don’t gain a pound in those three weeks, despite the cabbage rolls, potato pancakes, and dumplings I eat, and despite the growing baby. To fight off loneliness, for lunch at the same café every day, I order the foods of my childhood, dishes both my grandmothers used to make. These are not the subtle delights DeSalvo describes in Crazy in the Kitchen: no Brussels sprouts browned in butter and served with caraway seeds or sautéed scallops with fresh oregano. “You can tell how enslaved the women of any country are by the kind of preparation their traditional foods require,” she writes in “Puttana” (36). Just as the ritual of handmaking pasta for their families oppressed the women of DeSalvo’s ancestral homeland, hand-fluting koldūnai (boiled dumplings) and grating dozens of potatoes by hand for kugelis (potato cake) oppressed the women of mine. But potato pancakes sustained my paternal grandmother in Siberia, and she loved feeding us this life-saving food when she arrived in Canada. My maternal grandmother,

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on the other hand, hated cooking. “If I could hire anyone,” she used to say, “it would be a cook.” Because of this knowledge, her blueberry-filled dumplings tasted of pure love. An aging woman with a limp and accent, the librarian whose footsteps I trace through cold and wet Vilnius, was invisible to most during her lifetime. Ona Šimaitė’s face was not obviously that of a warrior or revolutionary, and perhaps this is why she succeeded in a situation that demanded secrecy, courage, and disguise. We know that from 1941 to 1944, she slipped into the Jewish ghetto and work camps of German- occupied Vilnius to bring its prisoners food, clothes, medicine, money, and forged documents. She carried letters and messages, and in one case, brought a vial of strychnine for a friend to use if suicide became his only escape. She came out of the ghetto with manuscripts to hide, once stole away with a Jewish girl, and on several occasions carried out sedated children in sacks. She supported the most desperate by listening to their fears and responding to their letters—in most cases, the last letters they ever wrote. In 1944, the Gestapo detected the librarian’s activities. They arrested and tortured her for twelve days, then deported her to the prison camp at Dachau. From there, the Germans moved her west to a POW camp in occupied Lorraine. She never learned what happened to the ghetto memoir that she had hidden under a floorboard in the university library’s attic during the German occupation,2 or to the hundreds of ghetto prisoners’ letters she had secreted in its stairwell. After the war ended, and she was living in the southern French city of Toulouse, free for the first time since her 1944 arrest, Šimaitė penned a series of letters to the family members of Vilna Ghetto prisoners who had died in camps and German Aktionen. These promise-keeping letters outlined how she had come to know the deceased, and described their lives and deaths in the ghetto or elsewhere. Finally, she passed on messages of love and farewell from the dead. Šimaitė moved to Paris in 1947, and worked sporadically as a librarian, a vocation she called “the beloved profession” (“Lost and Found” 313). (“If there is a heaven, surely it must resemble a library,” writes DeSalvo. “If there is a god, surely she must be a librarian” [“Puttana” 46].) Though Šimaitė never finished a long-promised memoir, she nevertheless wrote every day, in both her diaries and the many letters she composed. These, in addition to the lives she saved, are her legacy. In 2003 and 2004, I traveled for many months to collect Šimaitė’s letters from five archives in three countries.3 My box of photocopied letters grew heavier with each library I visited, until I could no longer carry it onto the plane and was forced to check it as baggage. At home, I organized the material by date, assigning each archive a different- colored star (the kind that primary school teachers used to hand out) to keep track of every letter’s provenance. Šimaitė wrote between sixty and eighty letters per month throughout her adult life, which comes out to between thirty thousand and fifty thousand letters in 2. Written in Russian, Grigory Shur’s (Grigorijus Šuras’s) memoir was published in Lithuanian in 1991. 3. The archives are located at Vilnius University, Mažvydas Lithuanian National Library (both in Lithuania), YIVO and the Hoover Institution Archives (USA), and Yad Vashem Archives (Israel).

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total. A significant number of these survived, and I managed to get copies of a good proportion. By the time I had finished gathering my research materials, I had a mountain of paper to contend with. So, I established a chronology, then began reading the archive systematically. In her first scholarly project, DeSalvo pieced together the life of a text; I assemble the life of a woman. The latter too is like detective work—meticulous and requiring stamina (“Puttana” 37). We both seek our subjects, our writers, at their least guarded. We want these women to teach us their secrets. We hope to learn from their lives, from their writing, and from their pain. But it was Woolf herself who showed DeSalvo the connection between a writer’s life and her work: Woolf was interested in the writer behind the work, in what she or he was like—what kind of house she lived in, what her writing schedule was like, what she ate for breakfast, how she dressed for dinner. She was concerned with what literature and memoirs revealed about the history of the times, its morals and mores. The pages of her essays and notebooks are filled with questions and answers about the human beings behind the works of art, about the implications of art for humanity. Woolf taught us that writers are human beings, that writing is a human act, that the act of writing is filled with consequences for a society and for its readers. (“Puttana” 52)

Having been trained as a literary scholar at a time when the author was dead, when a writer’s intention didn’t matter, and when the makings of a literary life were beside the point, I had a hard time shaking the belief (or rather the belief that others would believe) that writing a life was somehow retrograde. I had difficulty not apologizing for or minimizing my project. But together, Šimaitė and DeSalvo taught me that writing a life is important literary work, even today. Šimaitė ensured the survival of her life’s writing. Near the end of her life, she destroyed letters deemed unworthy of safekeeping, but organized and bequeathed others. Indeed, the contents of her personal archive impressed even her: “What letters!! I have many treasures like this in my archives. Yesterday I devoted six hours to them. But I don’t feel hungry when I work with my archives” (Diary 29, July 26, 1969). She kept these letters not for herself, but for the future. Perhaps even for an unborn researcher and writer. In her final diary, and in the last weeks of her life, Šimaitė asked in despair: “Who will tell all those good people that I don’t have the strength to write?” (Diary 29, January 1, 1970). I will tell them. I, the archival researcher and biographer, will write her story. Like DeSalvo, I find myself utterly seduced by archival work when I start the work of sifting through, reading, and taking notes on Šimaitė’s letters and diaries in the spring of 2005. I am not yet a mother. Not yet pregnant. I have nothing but time and optimism. I believe the project will be easy to complete. I am wrong. I try to write as I read, planning to lay out her story as it comes through the letters and diaries. But soon I realize that these epistles and entries hide as much as they tell about the life of their author. After 1946, Šimaitė barely mentioned the war. She never wrote about saving people. Instead, she produced mounds of writing about everyday financial and health woes. She wrote about books sent back and forth to and from Lithuania. About movies, cats, and sewing. Occasionally, there is an exciting nugget, like a

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meeting with Max Brod in a Tel Aviv café to talk about a Kafka translation, but such instances are rare and often vague. I don’t know what to do with this corpus. I am stuck. My book progresses slowly. I’ve begun the project too cavalierly, too determined to tell Šimaitė’s story “straight,” and too resolved to keep myself out of it. No theatrics, no first-person voice, I have told myself. This book, unlike portions of my first, will not be about me. Silence Is Death (2007) tells of my attempt to piece together the life story of Tahar Djaout, an Algerian writer gunned down in 1993, during the Algerian civil war of that decade. In it, I experiment with dialogues with the dead and with imaginary journeys to think about how readers invent the authors they read. And even though one critic lauded the book for its boldness, I can’t forget the sting of reading the words of a senior scholar, who summarily dismissed my use of the first-person voice. But by the time I read DeSalvo’s “Puttana” at the university library that winter’s day in 2009, I will have learned a hard lesson. I will have understood how important it is to listen carefully as an archival researcher: an archive will tell you what to do with it if you are quiet enough. I will have discovered that the necessity of deepening my relationship with Šimaitė, and that I must take seriously the conversations I have with her in my head, in my dreams, and on my travels (no matter what my phantom senior scholarreviewer might say). When I read of the “enormous difficulty” that DeSalvo had keeping the problems she was having in her life “separate from the issues that Woolf was discussing” (“Puttana” 37–38), I feel a sense of recognition so keen that I laugh out loud. For I too have learned that, by keeping myself out of the story, I do serious harm to my text and handicap myself as a writer. To tell Šimaitė’s story in a way that matters to a reader, I must show why she matters to me. I need to act as a guide and interpreter, and demonstrate why her story is important still today. On two Sundays in a row during that pregnant winter in Vilnius, I walked every street of the ghetto that Šimaitė visited regularly over the course of two years. I photographed its entrances and exits, the places where buildings once stood, but where a boulevard now runs. I imagined the walls erected along peripheral streets and the blacked-out windows of flats. I visited the addresses found in her letters, and poked around in courtyards and stairwells. At the library, I drank tea in a hallway while gazing out across the university’s lawn and wondered in which rooms Šimaitė used to hide people. I touched the librarians’ desks and opened the card catalogues looking for her handwriting. I read the letters she had received, the diaries she had written, and the books she had loved. One afternoon, before darkness fell, I ventured down the street where she had lived, and examined her apartment building from all angles. Just as DeSalvo once followed Woolf’s footsteps across Sussex, Cornwall, Kent, Cumbria, and Yorkshire, I tracked Šimaitė in Vilnius. A few months after my son’s birth, my husband, the baby, and I traced Šimaitė’s journey from camp to camp across Western Europe, to Toulouse, and finally to her beloved Paris. But unlike Woolf, Šimaitė never wrote the tomes she had inside her, insisting in her letters to writer friends that she herself was not a writer. She hadn’t been able to produce the memoirs her friends implored her to put to paper, so I started writing them in her stead.

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At first, the responsibility of writing the book she hadn’t been able to compose herself weighed heavily on me. Only after years of the slow work of getting to know her archive and life did I begin to find a way of telling her story that was something other than hagiography. “You mustn’t turn her into a saint,” her nephew had told me one evening in Vilnius. “She would have hated that.” Unconventional from the start, Šimaitė was born in the Lithuanian countryside, raised by her grandparents in early childhood, and educated in Polish-language and Latvian schools as a young girl. Later, she traveled to Moscow to attend university, and there she witnessed the Russian Revolution. It was then that she acquired her austere political convictions (believing in neither land ownership nor citizenship), and established ties and sympathies with the Leftist Socialist Revolutionaries, a party that, despite early cooperation, soon fell afoul of the Bolsheviks. Most of its ideologues and leaders (like Isaac Nachman Steinberg) fled the Soviet Union after its 1917 coalition government fell. Those who stayed suffered Stalin’s show trials and executions. According to her nephew, Šimaitė was never an SR party member, and in her letters after the war, she declared that if forced to choose an affiliation, she would be an anarchist. In 1919, Šimaitė returned to newly independent Lithuania, where she cultivated friendships with some of the country’s most important writers of the left (Kazys Boruta is one example). She visited them in prison, provided them with books, and supported their families materially and emotionally as they waited for their men’s release. Šimaitė herself never married or had children. Reading and writing stood firmly at the center of her existence for as long as she was alive. More than anything, she desired a life of the mind, and to have time to “converse with herself,” as she referred to her diary keeping. After years of work, “I have come to share a great deal with this woman. I have come to be a great deal like her in her attitudes toward the male establishment and art and feminism . . . have learned from living for . . . years with her to take the very best from her while managing, through the example of her life and her honesty about it, to avoid the depths of her pain” (“Puttana” 50). These are DeSalvo’s words about Woolf, but I could have written the same about Šimaitė. They have been good to us, these women. I now know that the painful transition I began in 2009 is one that many motherwriters go through. Perhaps father-writers do too, but I haven’t been able to trace a similar recurring narrative or literary lineage. The crux of the matter seems to lie in the conception of writing as real work. Before children, a woman’s writing may seem an exotic, artistic, or intriguing facet of her personality. After children, it may be dismissed as a frivolous hobby. “Often, we must assert our right to take this uninterrupted time for ourselves. We must continually fight for it, even with people we love,” writes DeSalvo (Healing 75). Remember: Write, write, or die. DeSalvo has many modes: she is a scholar, an essayist, a blogger, and a novelist. But it is through her role as a mentor and through her articulation of the importance of mentorship among writers that she has touched my work most profoundly: We see ourselves as belonging to a nurturing writing (and artistic) tradition. We respect and learn about the work of our literary and artistic forbears. We know that we are not alone in our work, that others who have come before us have much to teach us about this

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practice. We find ourselves good companions and mentors and guides to help us along the way. (Healing 81)

DeSalvo’s gifts to both readers and fellow writers include not only her primary, literary texts, but the craft- and process- oriented discussions that she offers in Writing as a Way of Healing and more informally on her blog. There she addresses the most universal and seemingly insurmountable writing challenges: How do I start a book? Sit at your desk every day, answers DeSalvo. How do I keep motivated? Find a writing partner and honor your commitment to her. How can I find time to write? Stop watching TV. Stop answering the phone. Stop reading the paper. Be industrious. Be consistent. Believe in your work. Plan. Do. Come, DeSalvo said to me on that 2009 winter’s day in the library. Be a motherwriter together with us. We understand what it is you need. For we are “a self- chosen community . . . shar[ing] struggles, challenges, and triumphs in life and in our work” (Healing 125). Spring 2011. My son is now four. Often in the morning, on the way to daycare, Sebastian tells me about his dreams. Or rather, he tells me stories that he invents as we drive, and calls them dreams, perhaps because he isn’t sure how else to name what it is that he’s doing. They involve fantastical journeys down sewer pipes that, in his dream world, are called “dreanies.” He flies, floats, drives, grows huge, and shrinks small. One morning, on the way to daycare, he says to me, “I’ve run out of dreams, Mummy. Today I need to play a lot, so I can make more dreams and get good ideas.” So, even though he cannot yet read, it occurs to me that Sebastian too is a writer in his own way. My favorite dream is something he calls “World of Game.” It’s so complicated he can’t explain or even understand it. “No one can,” he adds. Yes, writing can be like dreaming. When we create texts or tell stories, we go deep into ourselves to examine the things we can’t explain or understand until we find or write our way through our own puzzles and riddles. Each in our own World of Game. Each trying to understand the incomprehensible, and to explain the inexplicable. “Art for the sake of life,” as Virginia Woolf once wrote. “I still have many bad dreams,” says Sebastian in a quirky English that comes from being bilingual. “It’s just my living.” Telling his dreams is a way for my son to make sense of his existence. I write to do the same. “My entire writing life (indeed my entire adult life) has been a series of breakings and mending, a shattering of the writing self that was a repairing through writing of something in my life that needed fixing,” writes DeSalvo (“Breaking” 70). Writing and research saved DeSalvo as a young mother: “Without books, without talking about books, where would I be now?” asks DeSalvo in her memoir, Vertigo (6), published several years after “Puttana.” It was Virginia Woolf who showed her the way to a different life: “She . . . taught us to express ourselves as women—in our lives, in our work, in our art” (“Puttana” 52). No hobby or profession, writing, for DeSalvo and for so many of us, is our vocation, and our life-blood.

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Becoming a mother shattered me too. But with Šimaitė, DeSalvo, and Woolf as my guides, I managed to reconstitute myself in a new way. In some respects, I think I’m harder now: not as scared, unsure or self- deprecating as I was before I had my son. But in other ways, I’m softer: more generous when reading the work of others, for one thing, now that I’ve learned how much more heroic the effort of completing a book becomes as a writer’s life fills with responsibility. I’m trying to be more generous with my loved ones too. To be less angry and unforgiving. Sometimes I fail. But this is undeniable: my soul and my life are bigger now. Shortly after the ill-fated conversation with my friend who disapproved of daycare, I applied for a grant to pay for it. Then (taking a piece of DeSalvo’s advice), I wrote out a schedule on my calendar, and stuck to it. I poured my love, anguish, and anger into my manuscript, and ultimately wrote my way to clarity and to calm. Even if my friend couldn’t understand that choosing between my son and my work was an impossibility, I was heartened to find that DeSalvo could: “We use our writing in the interests of our stability, which often means balancing our responsibilities to ourselves and to others. It sometimes also means making compromises. It never means giving up our writing or the people we love” (Healing 100). The copy edited manuscript of my book, now called Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė, will be arriving any day now. At last, what can explain the fact of this essay written in honor of a woman with whom I have almost nothing in common? Louise DeSalvo is more Italian than American, rough, tough, a street kid, out of the slums of Hoboken, New Jersey. I am more Canadian than Lithuanian, solitary, middle- class, from the suburbs of Toronto. We have absolutely nothing in common, except that we are mothers who research and write. And that, I realize, is quite enough.

Works Cited DeSalvo, Louise. “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar.” In Breaking Open: Reflections on Italian American Women’s Writing, ed. Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino and Justin Vitiello, 59–71. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2003. ———. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” In Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write About Their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, 35–53. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Vertigo: A Memoir. New York: Dutton, 1996. ———. Writingalife’s Blog. http://writingalife.wordpress.com. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Šimaitė, Ona. Diary 29. F286–17. MSS. and TSS. Vilnius University Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Department. ———. “Lost and Found in Vilna: Letters from a Librarian.” Trans. Julija Šukys. PMLA 118.2 (2003): 302–17. Print. Šukys, Julija, ed. “And I burned with shame”: The Testimony of Ona Šimaitė, Righteous Among the Nations. A Letter to Isaac Nachman Steinberg. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2007.

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———. Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. ———. Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Šuras, Grigorijus (Hiršas). Užrašai: Vilniaus kronika 1941–1944. Trans. Nijole Kvaraciejūtė and Algimantas Antanavičius. Vilnius: ERA, 1997. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

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Louise DeSalvo ESSAYING ME MOIR

Joshua Fausty

In the closing scene of Vertigo (1996), Louise DeSalvo recalls finding, in the days soon after her mother’s death, “recipe cards,” “measuring cups and spoons,” “powerful totems” with which the writer cannot bear to part: I decide that I will cook with them. Make room for them in my drawers and cupboards where they can join my spoons and bowls, my sister’s spoons and bowls. The most trivial, yet the most important personal effects of the women of my family, come together at last, and mingle in my kitchen drawers and cupboards. (263)

This passage exemplifies DeSalvo’s relational ethics, her effort to present the past, to understand and respond to its significance in her life in healthy and constructive ways that support her vitality and creativity.1 The kitchen utensils all mingled together, her own with those of her dead sister and mother, suggest her attempt, dramatized through the entire memoir, to establish and maintain a connection with the past that does not require adopting old or habitual ways of thinking and seeing, to forge a new type of connection that prevents past losses from cutting off the possibility of hope for the future. This effort is inseparable, in Vertigo, from the process of becoming a writer.

1. The term “relational ethics” is adapted from Patricia J. Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights: “Cradled in this community whose currency was a relational ethic, my stock in myself soared. My value depended on the glorious intangibility, the eloquent invisibility, of my just being part of the collective—and in direct response I grew spacious and happy and gentle” (230).

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Vertigo chronicles DeSalvo’s coming of age as a reader and writer who writes about, and out of, familial, social, and cultural circumstances that might have impeded the development of the reader-writer herself, that might even have killed her. It is a book of origins: of the writer, of her writing, and of the essayistic exploration that constitutes that writing. It is also the book that best explains how and why DeSalvo made the transition from Woolf scholar and biographer to memoirist / essayist, and how she reconciled the apparent paradox of her connection, as a working-class Italian American growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, to the British upper-class woman to whose life and work she devoted so much of her life and work.2 Vertigo is also the book in which DeSalvo makes the writing process most transparent. It is the most essayistic of her memoirs.3 Essaying is a strategy akin to what Adrienne Rich calls “writing as re-vision” and, as such, it has the power to transform one’s perspective on one’s life and oneself.4 DeSalvo’s writing exemplifies essayistic memoir as a literary process of subjective becoming that does not imply certainty about a final destination or even a starting point. It is hopeful by virtue of its active and open attitude toward both the past and the future and, in constituting versions of both, it has the potential to produce, not a fully completed product of the conscious will, not the Truth as revelation, but rather a truthful present-inmotion, a literary-subjective self-in-the-making, that performs transformative nextness.5 DeSalvo’s memoir is about writing as a process and about the relationship of that process to the writer’s life. Because Virginia Woolf was a major influence on DeSalvo, an examination of DeSalvo’s work on Woolf helps contextualize DeSalvo’s own essayistic memoir writing. DeSalvo’s work on Woolf constitutes the prehistory to her own memoir project. Reading such a prehistory provides a frame for reading DeSalvo reading Woolf. It is a

2. In addition to writing Woolf’s biography, writing literary criticism about her, and editing her letters, DeSalvo is responsible for the archival reconstruction of an early draft of The Voyage Out (1915), which was published posthumously as Melymbrosia (1982) and recently reissued in England. See Benjamin Hagen’s essay in this volume. 3. For more on the theory of essaying, see my “Trinh T. Minh-ha Essaying Ethics.” 4. “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self- destructiveness of male- dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see—and therefore live—afresh” (Rich 35). 5. “Transformative nextness” is Stanley Cavell’s term. In his philosophical study of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Cavell reads Emerson as representing “the urgency of the need for transformative social change and the resistance to internal change, to transformative nextness” (16). Of these, Cavell asserts, we must have both. His reading of Emerson points out that Emerson’s writing is offered as a kind of provocation to the reader that at once explains the necessity to open up to or recognize an other and, at the same time, that that writing makes itself available as “an other” that could manifest alterity for the reader in such a way as to allow such a becoming to take place in its very reading (31–32).

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joint reading that sheds light on DeSalvo’s trajectory as a critical intellectual and on the writing she produces to trace and understand that trajectory. Like Woolf, DeSalvo uses memoir to witness—to remember and tell, sometimes for the first time—acts of personal, cultural, and social violence and trauma. She also links the act of writing with the recognition and infusion of class identity and a vision of social justice into communal cultural spaces. Such remembering and telling, undertaken in writing that performs transformative nextness as essayistic becoming, serve in DeSalvo’s memoir as vehicles for self and social transformation.

Becoming: Safe Spaces Essaying implies adopting certain attitudes to one’s work, to the future, and to the reader. As such, it is a partial act in a double sense. The self of essayistic writing is a self-inprocess—in the process of becoming, of thinking and writing itself into being—and thus incomplete; though it becomes, this self is aware of the impossibility of full selfcompletion and self-presentation. Essayistic writing is also partial in its perspectival nature, as it presents positions, arguments, ideas, experiences, and memories. Such partial accounts also contribute to its ethical enactment of becoming. Key occasions of reading—casual as well as formal, even professional, scholarly work— come to signify for DeSalvo a determination to make meaning through a literary life. The meaning of that life is created through a writing that opens up meanings and makes healing and hope possible.6 The account of an episode from early childhood figures DeSalvo’s essayistic approach to memoir: It is 1956, and I am thirteen years old. I have begun my adolescence with a vengeance. I am not shaping up to be the young woman I am supposed to be. I am not docile. I am not sweet. I am certainly not quiet. And, as my father tells me dozens of times, I am not agreeable. . . . In the middle of one of our fights, the tears hot on my cheeks, I run out of the house, feeling that I am choking, feeling that if I don’t escape, I will pass out. It is nighttime. It is winter. I have no place to go. But I keep running. There are welcoming lights a few blocks away. It is the local library. I run up the stairs. I run up to the reading room, sink into one of its comforting, engulfing brown leather chairs, pull an encyclopedia down from the shelf, hold it in front of my face so that no one can see me, so that no one will bother me, and pretend to read so that I won’t be kicked out. It is warm and it is quiet. My shuddering cries stop. My rage subsides. (Vertigo xiii) 6. DeSalvo is not the only essayistic memoir writer to find in writing a process connected to healing, hope, and possibility. In Plaintext, Nancy Mairs writes: “A few years ago I almost died by my own hand, and when I woke from that disagreeable event, I recognized for the first time that I was fully and solely responsible for my existence. . . . These essays enact that responsibility, however belatedly discovered, in the terms in which I can understand it: as a writer of my life” (xi). Mairs’s emphasis on the empowerment that comes from recognizing one’s “responsibility” for one’s own life suggests the importance of making one’s own way, and the vital role that essayistic writing can play in that process.

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Hiding out at the library offers an escape to safety for DeSalvo, who decides to stay “until closing time because,” she writes, “here, I know, no one will bother me,” and describes herself becoming “restless” and thinking, “I might as well read something, might as well not waste my time” (xiv). Browsing the shelves, she picks a book and reads “a few pages here and there so I know it will interest me, know that I’m not wasting my time. . . . It’s about a family; it’s about the war,” she writes, “two subjects about which I want to know more” (xiv). From this scene of occasional reading, not planned but spontaneous and happenstance—a matter of the chance coming together of the circumstances of a life too complicated fully to account for—DeSalvo weaves threads of meaning so delicate that they are liable to be missed. For DeSalvo, not only reading but also writing about unsafe stories becomes a necessity, and essaying becomes the strategy through which to realize it. The threads of “family” and “war” are stretched and woven from the Prologue through the memoir’s narrative, as similarly chance reverberations of themes and significance emerge through the interplay between scenes and stories from the past and the present: September 1994. I am in my basement, looking for an old contract. And, instead, I find a manila envelope with my name, “Louise,” penned in the lower right corner of the envelope in my mother’s shaky handwriting. I sit on the floor and open the envelope. I’m ready, I think, for seeing what it contains. It is an odd agglomeration of memorabilia. But each piece bears a message, I feel sure. Something my mother wanted me to know. (260)

Describing the various contents of the envelope from her mother, DeSalvo comes to a “newspaper clipping from 1988, ‘Hope lives amid grief and loss,’ by Joyce Maynard, about a woman named Hope, whose daughter had died” (261). This clipping contains perhaps the most important message of the entire memoir: “It concludes: ‘If I lost one of my children I would miss that child forever. But if I stopped living I’d be denying the very thing that having children is about—hope for the future’ ” (261). DeSalvo’s essaying memoir is about the search for—and the creation of—“hope for the future.” I include these two moments of discovery to cite a key element at the heart of the process of the becoming of the self of memoir as DeSalvo practices it: chance occurrences of reading become occasions for the piecing together of meaning that not only sustains the narrative of memory but also nourishes the desire for, and possibility of, courage.7 In the first case, DeSalvo finds herself running from home in the cold dark night with “no place to go” to the eventual destination—unplanned—of the local public library reading room where she finds comfort and solace in the pages of books chosen randomly off the shelves. In the second, some 264 pages and thirty- eight years later, she finds herself— again by chance—leafing through the contents of an envelope left to her by her mother and feeling sure she will find, in the “odd agglomeration of memorabilia,” some “message,” though she knows not what. These scenes of memory are pervaded by an almost physical, heightened awareness, drenched in the feelings of an unexpected and expectant openness

7. Courage is defined by the existential psychologist Rollo May in The Courage to Create as “the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair” (12).

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to discovery. Finding herself in the library reading room and happening upon the articles in the basement both occasion acts of reading. Reading invariably leads to writing, which in turn reflects back on living, and on the meanings of that living for its subject. In the Prologue to Vertigo, DeSalvo foreshadows a moment she develops more fully in the second chapter, entitled “My Sister’s Suicide”: “My basement is a complete mess,” I write, “and has been, for years.” And it is through the contents of these boxes in my basement that I piece together my family’s history. In the two years it takes me to write this book, each day, as I go to my desk between the hours of one and five in the afternoon, I feel revitalized, as I take up the work, as I reclaim my past, as I learn who I am. (xix)

Piecing together is a strategy of essayistic memoir, a way of writing that defies chronology and linearity to embrace an associative and fragmentary narrative. It is a way to “learn who I am” for DeSalvo that does not imply learning once and for all. Toward the end of Vertigo she writes: “It has been five years since my mother’s death. By writing about her, I have begun to know her, and to love her, as I could not when she was alive. What I have learned alters my memories of her, transforms them, transforms her . . . it changes my past, and it changes me, as well” (262). Learning who she is signifies an active process of discovery through both reading and writing, remembering and reflecting on the memories and moments that in any given present may constitute a particular picture of identity. Yet, if one remains open to the meanings hidden among the diverse materials of one’s history, that picture is subject to revision. This insight—and practice— is another source of hope and courage in DeSalvo’s essayistic memoir.

The Truth of Memoir In Thinking Class, published in 1996, the same year that Vertigo appeared, Joanna Kadi writes: “I take speech seriously. This revolutionary action often comes with severe consequences. Speaking out carries danger and not in abstract, theoretical ways. Telling the truth can’t be taken lightly, or engaged in glibly” (12). An Arab American intellectual and, like DeSalvo, a member of an ethnic group with a complicated racial history in the United States, Kadi also turns to essayistic memoir as a vehicle for “telling the truth.” This telling, which is oblique and partial, articulate and stifled, takes seriously complications of identity and difference in the context of a society that often punishes those who speak out against the accepted view of things. As Kadi emphasizes, “telling the truth” can be highly problematic. Not only does the writer of essayistic memoir know that fact and push ahead anyway: she actively embraces the complexity of telling—and rendering that complexity through the telling—as an ethical necessity.8 Telling involves remembering and “memory is not,” as Patricia Hampl puts it, “fundamentally, a repository. If it were, no question would arise about its accuracy, no argument would be fought over its notorious imprecision” (Hampl 127). 8. This argument is also made by Audre Lorde in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” a speech included in Sister Outsider.

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One of the persistent messages of Vertigo is that we can never simply leave the past, or the people and the pains of the past, behind: rather, we need to take them with us and find ways of integrating them in our lives in order to heal. This message is a component of DeSalvo’s relational ethics, which works on different levels throughout her writing, both “critical” and “creative”—and her memoir must be counted as both. Georg Lukács’s idea of ethics as “a sphere where a certain kind of communion exists, a sphere where the eternal loneliness stops” (57) is useful in reading DeSalvo’s work as a literary critic and biographer. Her work is informed by a political awareness that the lives of the writers she writes about are real, that the literature they produce is rooted in those lives, and that those lives are often marked by unspeakable suffering. Words can only approximate, never speak the event: this is especially true of traumatic events such as incest, abuse, war, mental illness, and suicide in Vertigo—all events that have an impact on the writer, the family, and the community. DeSalvo’s recognition of the uncertainty of memory makes it necessary for her to shift perspectives and present multiple accounts of possible truths, rather than any one definitive account of a supposedly singular historical truth. Her truth emerges out of the conditions she finds herself in, conditions that require the “telling” of partiality as a basic quality of subjective experience. In the “Combat Zones” chapter of Vertigo, for example, DeSalvo offers multiple accounts of her father’s return from World War II; she examines the relationship between personal story and public history, and the necessity to rely on possibilities and hypotheses, as opposed to facts, in reading and writing about that past: This is how I remember the war years, though I know that it is not altogether true, and, maybe that it is not true at all. Maybe this is the story that I tell myself about that time in my life because it is too difficult to remember what I really lived through. (50) This is my story about the war, and, as I have said, I am sure it can’t be all true. (53) This is how I remember I felt when my father came home, but the photos taken of my father and me after the war tell a different story. (60)

Each of the above examples establishes a possible and partial truth, a truth not undermined by its partiality or approximation. Essayistic writing is energized by this partiality and recognizes it as a necessary, politically and philosophically valuable, way of telling. Such partial telling is apparent in the work of other memoirists. For example, in Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (2001), Lauren Slater writes not so much about epilepsy, the illness that may or may not afflict the narrator, but rather about the act of telling, simultaneously revealing and invalidating the veracity of the narrative over and over again: “I am just confusing fact with fiction, and there is epilepsy, just a clenched metaphor, a way of telling you what I have to tell you: my tale” (6). The “telling” Slater refers to is an ethical imperative the writer must follow, for the truth lies not in the tale, but in its telling. (The implications of Slater’s book in particular are that the truth does lie, and that lies can reveal certain kinds of truth.) A chapter of Slater’s book that closes with the final, centered inscription “The End” (59) is followed by a page that reads:

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Not quite. This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is supposed to be true. . . . Therefore, I confess. To the establishment. I didn’t really fall into the grave. I was just using a metaphor to explain my mental state. (60)

In a later chapter entitled “How to Market This Book,” the narrator herself declares that the book itself “ponder[s] the blurry line between novels and memoirs” (160), and refuses to “tease apart the fabrications from the facts” (161); truth in Lying occupies an unstable, shifting place; it is “slippery” (160) like the narrator of Lying. The seemingly paradoxical subtitle, “A Metaphorical Memoir,” captures the essayistic quality of literary memoirs such as Slater’s and DeSalvo’s. These memoirs are characterized by an acceptance, indeed an embracing, of narrative tentativeness, of the imaginative filling in of blanks, of possibilities that are as important as, or more important than, verifiable facts. This quality is absent in memoirs that do not follow the essayistic route, that stay closer to the epistemology of traditional autobiography. In contrast, essayistic memoirs are founded upon the necessity to allow for narrative gaps, for multiple accounts that may often seem to undermine each other. As DeSalvo puts it in Vertigo, “my stories aren’t all true” (9)—and her essayistic memoir writing reveals that such an acknowledgment of partiality makes possible a more expansive and possibly truer version of “truth.”

Reading Woolf DeSalvo’s account of her own efforts to remember, to uncover, the repressed memories that surface in Vertigo are instructive—almost uncannily so—in light of the relationship between her critical work on Woolf and her memoir work in Vertigo. The echoes are not lost on DeSalvo. Woolf provides her with a model, even sets the trajectory, for her own reconstruction of the past and, more crucially, the creation of a writing that allows her to reinterpret and rewrite her own life and family history. In her biography of Woolf, in a chapter entitled “A Daughter Remembers,” DeSalvo argues that Woolf’s most significant efforts in “A Sketch of the Past” were her “attempts to recapture the memories of her feelings from infancy and early childhood, those elusive moments that explain so much, if we can remember them” (Impact 100). Through this exploration of childhood memories, DeSalvo argues, Woolf “uncovered” one memory that she had likely repressed, “the fact that her half brother Gerald Duckworth had abused her when she was very young” (100). DeSalvo notes that writing “A Sketch of the Past” was the bravest writing task that [Woolf] had ever set out to accomplish, because she knew that for her introspection was a dangerous and difficult enterprise, and that if she probed too deeply into the past, she could pay dearly for it by becoming agitated, depressed, and even suicidal; she was, moreover, “afraid of autobiography in public”; and she feared that if she wrote about her youth, she would stop writing altogether. . . . Nonetheless, she began . . . late in her life . . . a project that she came to describe as autoanalysis. (99)

As DeSalvo’s explanation suggests, fear is the necessary counterpart to bravery, and Woolf’s “writing task” brought with it particular fears that went to the core of her ability

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to continue writing at all. According to DeSalvo, for Woolf, writing about and remembering her childhood—her “autoanalysis”—meant taking risks that had the potential to devastate her both psychologically and professionally; indeed, such a project, Woolf feared, could even lead to suicidal thoughts and actions. The fact that Woolf endeavored to take on the project testifies not only to her courage but also to what, for her, must have been the importance of making such an attempt, even in the face of such potentially overwhelming consequences. DeSalvo quotes from Woolf’s diary of April 15, 1939: “I’m interested in depression . . . & make myself play a game of assembling the fractured pieces” (99); she explains that although Woolf “had written other accounts of her life, other memoirs of the past,” this one was different because “in writing this one, she had a different aim. She would not only tell what had happened to her, she would try to recall her feelings” (99). The “game” Woolf describes suggests that this type of memory writing involves playing with the “pieces”—the emotions and feelings around “depression”—in a writing the object of which is the “assembling” of them into some shape or form yet to be discovered. In Vertigo, DeSalvo makes a similar attempt to recall and revisit the events of childhood, including the trauma of sexual abuse. As she would come to realize while working on Vertigo, writing about such events—weaving the pieces of childhood into the meaningful shape and form of a narrative, however fractured or provisional—became a necessary process in the ser vice of life, a strategy of memoir writing “for survival,” the precursor of which had been reading books that others had written, including many by Woolf. In the Prologue to Vertigo, DeSalvo establishes her own tentative beginnings as a memoir writer—beginnings characteristic of the essayistic attitude she adopts throughout her memoir writing. Through a series of micronarrative “memoir moments” that span the period from her childhood in 1956 to the year she finally decided to “start writing,” in 1986—the year of “My Sister’s Suicide”—DeSalvo’s continuous present-tense dramatically draws one into the prehistory of the book in hand. As her prologue recounts, that prehistory is the story of an attempt—and repeated attempts—finally to begin. Yet there is nothing final about what becomes the book’s beginning, for it is in the prologue that DeSalvo establishes the radically provisional attitude of the early attempts that would eventually become Vertigo; it is an attitude strikingly similar to Woolf’s in “A Sketch of the Past.” As DeSalvo puts it, “I write for an hour; I am beginning to write a novel that is not really a novel because it is the story of my life and yet I don’t know what form it should take. I write about how I have to write about my life to give it some shape, some order” (Vertigo xvii). Memoir writing often emerges out of real suffering. In Pillar of Salt, Janice Haaken indicates that DeSalvo uses trauma theory and theories of dissociation to read Woolf’s life. DeSalvo, Haaken argues, believes that in the case of Woolf, “recovered, repressed memories are more revelatory of the trauma they signify than are more continuous memories. . . . DeSalvo points out that traumatic memories often emerge in disconnected fragments, lacking a coherent meaningful story” (170–171). Haaken’s comments here are relevant to a reading of DeSalvo’s own autobiographical reconstruction. Much like her biography of Woolf, each of her memoirs has an ethical-political intention, one actualized through essayistic writing that is characterized by—to borrow Haaken’s phrase—“disconnected fragments, lacking a coherent meaningful story” (170–171).

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Haaken’s agreement with DeSalvo’s claim that “the notion of ‘artistic temperament’ conceals the suffering born of real lived experience” is helpful in identifying the political and ethical efficacy of memoirs that, whether intentionally or not, reveal through storytelling the often hidden trauma of lived experience. As Haaken puts it, “debunking this idea of an inherent female fragility means demonstrating the magnitude of what women often endure” (170). Such a revelation—in order to serve as a healing act rather than as a further trauma—must be given form, whether that form is preexisting or newly created. Woolf finds a form for her own memoir by creating an approach to memory that allows her to revisit her past in writing that includes the process of writing and remembering as layers of its material. The process and its recording, as well as the consideration of its genesis, become part of the product: The text includes an account of its experimental creation, a metanarrative that constitutes a study of its own approach. DeSalvo adopts the same strategy in her memoir, but with different—and more hopeful—results. Drawing upon Shari Benstock’s work, Helen M. Buss suggests that as an autobiographer, Woolf “had trouble looking into the ‘abyss’ of a divided self,” and that this difficulty may have been partly “because the age she lived in lacked a fully articulated sense of what memoir can be for women” (Buss xx–xxi). Indeed, as both Benstock and Buss point out, Woolf was an early pioneer in this work and seems not to have been psychologically prepared for its consequences. DeSalvo’s understanding of the psychological significance of Woolf’s attempt to write about her childhood can, following Buss’s reading of Benstock, be understood in light of the historical infancy of the genre of the memoir, which had recently registered the subjective split characteristic of much writing today. For DeSalvo, writing in a different place and time, and with the benefit of having come to understand Woolf’s life through a decades-long process of studying her writing and its relationship to her history, the attempt has been a saving grace.

Occasional Attempts Like DeSalvo’s Vertigo, which contains multiple accounts of its own prehistory, one of the most salient aspects of Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” is its self- consciously occasional nature. Woolf begins the memoir by explaining that she will do so because she is “sick of writing Roger [Fry]’s life” and because her sister Vanessa has told her that “if I did not start writing my memoirs I should soon be too old. I should be eighty-five, and should have forgotten” (Woolf 64). Having decided to begin, she goes on to note “several difficulties,” including “the enormous number of things I can remember,” and the number of ways in which memoirs can be written. As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways. But if I begin to go through them and to analyse them and their merits and faults, the mornings—I cannot take more than two or three at most—will be gone. So without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself— or if not it will not matter—I begin: the first memory. (64)

What is notable about this beginning is not Woolf’s claim that she will not “choose” her way but that she, a writer so thoroughly taken up with questions of style and structure,

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chooses to “begin” without analyzing the “merits and faults” of the alternative ways she might begin. Woolf distances the ultimate form the process will take from her will; she decides that the act of writing, in this particular case, presumably in contrast to other instances, will somehow allow “the form”—the memories, the order, her “way”—to “find itself.” 9 As Jeanne Schulkind puts it in her introduction to Moments of Being, the book that includes “A Sketch of the Past,” “[Woolf’s] memoir . . . presents a consciousness which follows its own peculiar byways rather than a pre-ordained route as it ponders the meaning of reality and the mystery of identity” (16). A few pages into her “Sketch,” however, Woolf seems to have settled on a sort of plan for the form of her memoir—although it is a plan, to be sure, based on an idea that will deepen the occasional and essayistic quality of the piece rather than reduce it to a predetermined structure. The method Woolf’s tentative “plan” describes prefigures DeSalvo’s way of including the writing “present” in the narrative of her own memoir. The following passage from Woolf captures her discovery of “a possible form” that would come to be exemplified by essayistic memoir: 2nd May . . . I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes. That is, to make them include the present—at least enough of the present to serve as a platform to stand upon. It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment. What I write today I should not write in a year’s time. But I cannot work this out; it had better be left to chance, as I write by fits and starts by way of a holiday from Roger. I have no energy at the moment to spend upon the horrid labour that it needs to make an orderly and expressed work of art; where one thing follows another and all are swept into a whole. (Woolf 75)

The questions Woolf leaves unanswered about form in “A Sketch of the Past,” and her sense at the beginning of a certain casual, noncommittal approach to this writing, are an attempt to protect herself from the seriousness— even danger— of the task she has chosen to undertake. Woolf has said she cannot take the time or energy to “make an orderly and expressed work of art” (75). The “plan” Woolf describes not only reverberates with DeSalvo’s method in Vertigo but shares elements of the writing process DeSalvo 9. Woolf discusses the process of “shaping” her childhood in “A Sketch of the Past”: “Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space—that is a rough visual description of childhood. This is how I shape it; and how I see myself as a child, roaming about, in that space of time which lasted from 1882 to 1895. A great hall I could liken it to; with windows letting in strange lights; and murmurs and spaces of deep silence. But somehow into that picture must be brought, too, the sense of movement and change. Nothing remained stable long. One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed past the little creature; one must get the feeling that made her press on, the little creature driven on as she was by growth of her legs and arms, driven without her being able to stop it, or to change it, driven as a plant is driven up out of the earth, up until the stalk grows, the leaf grows, buds swell. That is what is indescribable, that is what makes all images too static, for no sooner has one said this was so, than it was past and altered” (79).

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discusses in Writing as a Way of Healing, a process geared toward producing “art” that enables the author to work through trauma toward healing.10 Woolf never intended to publish “A Sketch of the Past”; she wrote it for herself, not for an audience. Yet, DeSalvo reminds us, Throughout her life, Virginia Woolf maintained that her work—any work—was incomplete until it was shared with readers. Readers completed the meaning of a work and echoed it back to the writer, so the writer could fully understand, perhaps for the first time, the significance of the words she or he had penned to her own life and to others. . . . Only with an audience, Woolf believed, can we transcend the limits of the self, can we understand our life’s true meaning. (Healing 209)

DeSalvo writes with the intention of publishing: she believes in revealing secrets, in taking it public. In Writing as a Way of Healing, publishing becomes one of the most important aspects of recovery: “Writing our story and keeping it locked away where no one can read it repeats the lethal pattern of silencing and tyranny and shame that so often accompanies trauma” (209). For DeSalvo, trauma theory and theories of witness are crucial to understanding the ethical quality of the relationship between writing and reading, writer and reader: “Listening involves an ethical responsibility to the writer” (210). Conversely, as a writer she believes that her “primary loyalty is to other survivors and not the person who harmed . . . [her]. And that telling . . . [her] story is an ethical act” (214). If DeSalvo feels a kinship with her contemporaries who embrace the notion of writing as witness, her reading of Woolf’s work and life propels her to develop an understanding that writing can help “heal” and that “making writing public . . . is the most important emotional, psychological, artistic, and political project of our time” (216). Woolf endeavored to make her writing self—the “ego,” as she puts it—an active participant in the essayistic exploration of that self’s past. That exploration led her to previously unconscious or preconscious elements of personal and family history. Woolf also examined the relation of the past to the writing present, as well as to possible futures. An understanding of the self- consciously high stakes of the experiment Woolf had chosen to undertake makes it difficult to read her prose in “A Sketch of the Past” as “easy,” “unaffected,” or “impersonal”; yet one can see how Woolf’s deceptive narrative distance from the material might invite Schulkind’s claim that Woolf’s writing in this piece takes on an “easy, unaffected manner revealing an ego so unaware of itself that it appears almost impersonal” (Schulkind 16). 10. In a section of Writing as a Way of Healing entitled “What Kind of Writing Helps Us Heal?” DeSalvo draws on clinical research done by James Pennebaker and others that shows the health benefits of certain kinds of writing: “We can’t improve our health by free-writing . . . or by writing objective descriptions of our traumas or by venting our emotions. We cannot simply use writing as catharsis. Nor can we use it only as a record of what we’ve experienced. We must write in a way that links detailed descriptions of what happened with feelings—then and now—about what happened. . . . In controlled clinical experiments . . . only writing that describes traumatic events and our deepest thoughts and feelings about them, past and present, is linked with improved immune function, improved emotional and physical health, and behavioral changes indicating that we feel able to act on our own behalf. And this was accomplished in the experiments by only one hour of writing—fifteen minutes a day— over a four- day period!” (25).

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DeSalvo’s memoir, which, in contrast to Woolf’s, includes copious passages of humor, might similarly be misread as “easy” and “unaffected,” although it is harder to imagine reading DeSalvo’s persona as “an ego . . . unaware of itself.” She does at times seem confident in Vertigo, but this perception is belied by passages like that in the Prologue, where she recounts an early attempt at memoir writing inspired by a friend’s suggestion and encouragement: “ ‘Why don’t I write that memoir we’ve talked about?’ she asks me. She makes it sound so simple. . . . Sure, I tell her, I’ll give it a try. And soon I’m at my desk, and though the words I am putting down aren’t yet making very much sense, I am writing, blessedly, writing” (DeSalvo, Vertigo xviii). Schulkind’s suggestion that Woolf is “so confident now, so much a master of her material” that she “need not even be bothered to decide on a form before beginning” (Schulkind 16) overlooks the fact that the mode of essaying that Woolf actually did choose demonstrates not “mastery” of her “material,” but, like for DeSalvo after her, a profound sense of insecurity, even fear, about the uncertain—but certainly complicated—relationship between herself and her past. It also overlooks the possible psychological consequences of such an investigation— of struggling, as Woolf did, to remember significant details of her life and to understand their deepest meaning for her present and future. This meaning, Woolf discovered, would have to be grounded in the present, as she acknowledged when she began to approach the materials of memory: “this past is much affected by the present moment” (Woolf 75). The relationship between past and present—their intermingling and interdependence—would have to be recorded as an element of the narrative. For DeSalvo, Woolf’s memoir suggests a multiplicity of reasons for her having written any particular phrase or sentence. As Woolf knew, and DeSalvo knows, the unconscious determinations behind or beneath a work are many and powerful. Woolf herself acknowledges the difficulty of writing memoir, with the pressure a writer feels to choose a way to write it—there are so “many different” ways. Deciding what to include from among the “enormous number of things she can remember” (64)—her choice not to make a choice, but rather to proceed and let the way and form take care of themselves— reveals her awareness of the contingency of what is, ultimately, included in the piece. It also reveals the possibility that what turns out to have been included was, in fact, somehow chosen (by her) according to the unconscious necessity of what happens when one just leaves it to chance. When one begins to essay—which is always a sort of beginning— one cannot know exactly where one will go, where one will end up. The essayistic attitude Woolf and DeSalvo adopt rests upon the ethical openness to possibility characteristic of transformative nextness: To know in advance the results of essayistic explorations would shut them down, render them unessayistic. Woolf could not have predicted what would happen to her during the writing of “A Sketch of the Past”; her attitude in this piece—the source of its essayistic quality and its power—is to adopt a mode of inquiry, to make an attempt, to discover. Just as “this past is,” paradoxically, “much affected by the present moment” (75), the future, too, is contingent on the present moment and all that has, in the past, made this present possible. Just to describe oneself in a given moment in time can seem impossibly difficult. Woolf captures this difficulty in one of her characteristic “detours” from remembering that are part and parcel of the essayistic mode of memoir writing—“detours” that serve

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to explain, through reflection and performance, some of the challenges of self-writing and their implications for our understanding of the selves about which we write: Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and again how futile life-writing becomes. I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream. (80)

As Woolf clearly knew, and as DeSalvo reveals throughout her memoirs as well, the individual subject of memoir is subject to a multiplicity of social forces about which it can be hard to write. One way of getting at an analysis of the social forces that shape us, she suggests, is to tell our stories. The problem is that to know “the subject” of memoir requires understanding the “forces” that shape her. It is a problem of text and context, of the mutual interdependence between an understanding of the subject and of the social forces that subject the writer. Woolf’s caution here acknowledges the necessity to think of the subject in the larger contexts of family, society, and the world: while the story of the “fish” may be our best window into the flow of “the stream,” Woolf-as-fish complains that, in order to explain her own place in the flow, she needs to describe what it is impossible to see: “the stream” itself. The subject is, at least in part, given shape by these “immense forces” that “society brings to play upon each of us,” so the “subject of this memoir” must be described in the context of “these invisible presences” that Woolf claims she “cannot describe.” The subject of memoir therefore simultaneously exists and does not exist, is both potential and impossible, a product of the past and of the present, and especially dependent on the hope for a future that may or may not come to pass. It exists in relation to “these invisible presences”—social forces—which give it a context, a historical significance, a “stream” in which to “swim,” but it is a “stream” of “immense” and mysterious power the effects of which are largely unpredictable. Woolf suggests that the subject is unknowable without recourse to these “presences,” and yet, in her writing, she draws upon their significance as an unknowable otherness with the power not only to shape the self, but also to call the self into question. That self becomes, but is not fully knowable; self-writing for Woolf is revealed to be a momentary—and partial— stay against the “current,” an impossible attempt to “describe” both the “fish” and “the stream” in which it swims.

The Self as Other That memoir writing sustains DeSalvo’s life does not mean that the writing self in DeSalvo’s essayistic memoirs is an essential one. Indeed, DeSalvo’s memoirs constantly call into question the essential self. While other kinds of nonfiction remain content with the given or assumed self—traditional autobiography, for instance—the essaying self always moves, never finally settles, never fully completes. DeSalvo’s essaying in Vertigo gives voice to the Italian American working- class adolescent she once was through a critical yet imaginative interplay of voices that modulate various points of view. Her multifaceted exploration of individual and family history reveals ambivalence about identity and meaning that enriches her memoir and lends it a powerfully ethical charge.

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In the “Safe Houses” chapter, DeSalvo finds words for the “story” she “never told . . . my parents, couldn’t tell . . . my parents, because . . . I didn’t remember what happened, or didn’t have the language to describe what happened, or because there isn’t a language to describe what happened, or because . . . I was too angry or stunned or blunted to describe what happened” (Vertigo 101). This “story” surfaces in the author’s memory “in bits and pieces, in scraps and fragments. . . . A moment here, a moment there, disconnected in time, removed from place. Jump cuts of memory without cause and effect, event and consequence, incident and emotion. A place that language can’t describe, but a place that . . . my body remember[s]” (101). Telling this story requires a different kind of skill, delicate and dangerous, where language works like a “scalpel” (101). But this skilled writer, this acclaimed critic and biographer who has reconstructed the traumas in the lives of others, discovers that her “powers of expression fail” her, that she “cannot organize the experience the way . . . I organize . . . my arguments, foregrounding certain details, glossing others” (101): Whenever I try, the sentences run together, and the language I use is not what I recognize as my own. . . . The closest I can come, the language I manage to find, is like some lunatic version of those papers we write at the beginning of each school year. “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Do you remember? (101–102)

In his study of illness and ethics, The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank writes that in testimonial narratives, “the more that is told, the more we are made conscious of remaining on the edge of silence” (138). Frank draws on Shoshana Felman’s definition of testimony, one that applies to DeSalvo’s incest narrative and helps explain her reflection on the process leading to that narrative: testimony is “composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance . . . events in excess of our frames of reference” (quoted in Frank 138). At once the most personal and cultural kind of work, DeSalvo’s writing in Vertigo deals with the violence and disconnection so often devastating to adolescent girls. It does so without a trace of self-pity. Through essaying, DeSalvo transforms the trials and tribulations of this early life into a more mature appreciation of the critical awareness of difference and disconnection. As the occasional other of herself, she strives to realize the responsibility for otherness implied by her relational ethic of connection and mutuality. As in Woolf, there is a tension in DeSalvo between a desire to create and maintain— but also to question and challenge—“shape” and “order,” and an alternative desire to respect the necessity—but also the danger, the potential destructiveness— of overstepping traditional boundaries. In her writing, that tension reveals the complexity of DeSalvo’s own effort not only to survive, but also to thrive. DeSalvo’s persistent questioning, a quality of Woolf’s writing emphasized by Schulkind, belies DeSalvo’s seeming certainty at any given moment. Such questioning, although it may be put on hold long enough to allow the confident articulation of seemingly one-sided views and interpretations— even memories—always manages to resurface at another point in the writing, providing alternative considerations and even radically different versions of the past. This desire to seek and find other ways of seeing and conceiving the significance of her life and its relationship to the world has its counterpart in the attitude of DeSalvo’s girlhood: “I am

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restless, questing, trying to find something that I want that I don’t have, but I don’t yet know what that something is. I am certain, though, that I will find it, and that when I find it, it will make me happy. . . . Somewhere, I tell myself, I will find this something that will make me happy” (Vertigo xiv–xv). In DeSalvo’s persistent struggle to find that “something,” in her dogged determination to be a writer, to live according to the knowledge that “writing is a human act, that the act of writing is filled with consequences for a society and for its readers” (“Puttana” 52), DeSalvo lives a life rooted in a belief not in “art for art’s sake,” but rather in “art for the sake of life” (52). That the line between “art” and other “work,” including literary scholarship, is not a clear one for DeSalvo is the result of her knowledge that both art and other “intellectual work” not only grow out of but can also have a profound impact on the life of the artist-intellectual: My intellectual work, I now know, is an outgrowth of the life I’ve led. It has transformed whatever traumas I’ve survived into something useful for myself, and, I hope, for others. My work has changed my life. My work has saved my life. My life has changed my work. (Vertigo 12)

From the time she was a young girl, even before she found herself on that winter night in the reading room of the public library, DeSalvo had known that books would provide shelter and comfort in dark times: “ ‘Louise is always hiding her face in a book,’ my family’s words. True words. But hiding was necessary. A strategy for survival” (Vertigo 7). Breathless (1997) and Adultery (1999), written after Vertigo, also enact the author’s “strategy for survival.” In Breathless, the author links the personal narrative of asthma to a social narrative that targets environmental ruin and the inadequacy of the public health system to reveal how health and environmental policies are tied to issues of class and race. Breathless treats asthma as an individual and social symptom. DeSalvo moves seamlessly from personal narrative to literary and cultural analysis to political indictment, questioning the commonsense view that the victims of pollution are the ones with “the problem”—a view that does not identify those responsible for the environmental degradation that leads to the symptoms of its victims. DeSalvo’s reflections on her own struggle to breathe lead her to consider the possibility that the bodies-in-pain of such victims—the crying- out of their physical symptoms—may be important warning signals to the rest of us, if only we could learn to listen: I sometimes wonder who is the more highly evolved. The person who responds adversely to chemical fumes, exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, noxious odors, trauma, or the person who doesn’t. Maybe, I tell myself, I’m like the canary in the mine shaft. Maybe my gasping for air is information that other, less sensitive people should heed. Maybe the fate of the planet depends upon people like me whose responsive bodies are telling us all that there is something very wrong around here. (Breathless 149)

The author’s reference to herself as “the canary in the mineshaft” positions her—the writer—as the one whose body and writing carry the signs for others to read—and the signs are not just signs of a personal story of illness but of political, social, and environmental destruction. The reality of such destruction often goes unnoticed because those who suffer it most are overwhelmingly members of historically disempowered groups:

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the disenfranchised, the underprivileged, people of color, and children—those without the social and economic power to keep corporate polluters, public waste management facilities, and large city bus depots, to name a few, out of their “backyards.” More meditative than Breathless, Adultery was almost complete when the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal exploded. Adultery transforms the personal meditation on infidelity—and “the lessons it can teach” (123)—into a cultural commentary (the author revised the book to insert the Clinton material) on how her writing about this personal issue can be used to understand what was happening in American politics in the late 1990s. Adultery questions the importance given to the affair, however sordid, of the President of the most powerful country in the world, and considers the implications of the American obsession with a politician’s adulterous affair vis-à-vis the neglect of social and economic, national and international, issues that plague the country and the world. Adultery is an essayistic meditation on the intersections of the personal and the political understood through the lens of domestic disruption. In Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004), DeSalvo turns back to the story that she had begun telling in Vertigo, a personal story of origins in which she explores how being working- class, immigrant, ethnic, and belonging to a family in which depression, violence, and incest had wounded her as a child, would become the material of her writing. In this memoir, that story becomes an exploration of the history—the “wild” (1) stories, forgotten and remembered, and “true, all true” (5)— of southern Italian immigrants in the United States and the southern Italy they left—a bloody history of class oppression, racism, and silence. DeSalvo inhabits a world that, partly by virtue of her class, ethnicity, and gender, often feels unsafe, foreign. An other in this world, she writes to change it for the better—to make it safe. Her desire to find alternatives to the dangerous spaces she inhabits as a child and adolescent leads her to develop a strategy for survival that includes constructing safe spaces in the writing itself. In her memoir work, she writes through various threats— personal, political, and historical. In her essaying memoir, language itself becomes a critical social venue where differences collide and coexist—and “come together” and “mingle”—to create new spaces of self-discovery, new forms of connection and meaning. DeSalvo’s memoir not only makes thriving in this difficult world seem possible, despite the odds, but it also reveals the power of unflinching memory work to transform what can seem impossibly difficult history into a wellspring of healing and hope.

Works Cited Buss, Helen M. Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002. Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. DeSalvo, Louise. Adultery. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. ———. Breathless: An Asthma Journal. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ———. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.

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———. “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” In Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers, and Artists Write About Their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, 35–53. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. ———. Vertigo. New York: Dutton, 1996. ———. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. New York: Ballantine, 1989. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. New York: Harper San Francisco, 1999. Fausty, Joshua. “Trinh T. Minh-ha Essaying Ethics.” Afterall 23 (2010): 99–106. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Haaken, Janice. Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Hampl, Patricia. “Other People’s Secrets.” In The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting, ed. Charles Baxter, 116–131. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 1999. Kadi, Joanna. Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker. Boston: South End Press, 1996. Lukács, Georg. Soul and Form. 1910. London: Merlin Press, 1974. Mairs, Nancy. Plaintext. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986. May, Rollo. The Courage to Create. New York: Norton, 1994. Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York: Norton, 1995. Schulkind, Jeanne. “Introduction.” Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 11–24. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. New York: Random House, 2000. Williams, Patricia. J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

On Vulnerability and Risk L EARNING TO WRITE AND TEACH MEMOIR AS A STUDE NT OF LOUISE DeSALVO

Kym Ragusa

When you came in, you greeted us warmly and sat down at the head of the table. This was the first class of the new concentration in memoir in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College. Unlike the other students, I already knew you. Still, I was disarmed as you paused before beginning class to take off your jewelry. Slowly and methodically, you took off your rings, finger by finger. You removed your bracelets and watch, pulled off your chunky clip-on earrings. Then you ran your hand through your short, dark hair and introduced yourself, your downturned mouth only occasionally rising into a smile. The seven of us, all women, all there with a story to tell, looked around at each other and knew that nothing was more important than this moment. We were there, in the words of Audre Lorde, who had taught at Hunter many years ago, “to do our work.” As we introduced ourselves and spoke about our projects, you told us how critical our work was, how our stories spoke to personal experience, but also to something larger. Yes, we were writing about illness, addiction, abuse, incest, but we were simultaneously writing about homelessness, migration, the Holocaust, contemporary Iran, the Vietnam War. You spoke to us about memoir as a tradition that has had some of its fullest expression when told by those writing from the margins: women, LGBTQ people, working- class people, people of color. Writers outside the established pa rameters of the literary canon, and writers who could not separate personal experience from community and history, from the larger world in which they lived. You spoke

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to us, unadorned, your sleeves rolled up, and invited us, each of us, to enter into this tradition. On that first night, the seven of us sat around the large rectangular table in the classroom. I looked out the window at the darkening sky, the light of the late summer evening already beginning to fade. The thick tangle of Upper East Side apartment buildings outside somehow shocking—this was Hunter College, after all, a school populated by working- class and immigrant students, many of them, myself included, first-generation college students. This classroom, in this building on the Hunter campus, was in, but not of, the neighborhood. After class, some of us would walk together to the subway, to trains taking us to Brooklyn and Queens. Others drove or took a bus back to New Jersey. This geographical and metaphorical journey became an integral part of the experience of the program, the rushing to class after work, the long exhausted rides home after class, our heads full of writing. I first became interested in memoir through my work in documentary film. I studied filmmaking and anthropology as an undergraduate and in graduate school, and felt especially drawn to autoethnography and the work of memory: the personal, subjective experience of group belonging or exclusion, and the ways in which we remember experience and memorialize our individual and collective pasts. In the early to mid-1990s, I made a number of short films exploring these ideas within my own complex family narratives, and found that my way of working in film—making meaning through association, shifting time frames, and the unreliability of memory itself—resonated with the literary genre of memoir. When Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta invited me to submit an essay based on my film work for their anthology The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (2002), I wrote a piece that attempted to bridge writing and the visual experience of film. It was out of this experiment that the seeds of my own book-length memoir developed. By 2005, I had become fully immersed in memoir as a genre and had shifted away from the expense and time-boundedness of filmmaking. My first year at Hunter, 2005, was also the first year of the memoir concentration of Hunter’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Louise had encouraged me to apply. And I wanted to see where I could go with memoir after I finished my first book, The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006). I wanted to see how far I could push the genre and how much I could learn from it about writing and about my own life. In his assessment of contemporary memoir in the New York Times Book Review, Neil Genzlinger laments the overabundance of narratives by unknown writers who write about experiences that are becoming more and more “unexceptional”: “Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight.” As a memoirist, I bristled when I first read his article, even though I agreed with his concern about the genre having become a kind of clearinghouse for stories of personal disaster. Genzlinger admonishes would-be memoirists: “No one wants to relive your misery . . . you merely want to make readers suffer as you suffered, not entertain or enlighten them.” And as the reader suffers through the work, he or she is also compelled to feel sympathy for the writer, for having gone through so much and

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having lived to tell the tale. These narratives of personal disaster have a wide readership, and although we hear periodically about the “backlash against memoir,” agents, editors, and publishing houses continue to promote the genre. There is always a new memoir about cancer, abuse, mental illness, the loss of a loved one, or eating disorders. Who is reading these books, and why? If our experience of personal disaster is commonplace now, it stands to reason that there would be some collective urge to articulate that experience, a desire to learn that one is not alone with it. And perhaps, in this time of war, financial crisis, compulsive consumerism, and increasing social isolation, when we are feeling physically as well as financially vulnerable, alternately stressed and numbed, we need stories of other people’s suffering to remind us that we are alive. The problem is not that many contemporary memoirists are exploring the personal, or indeed the most devastating elements of the personal, but that they are not connecting private experience to something larger. Many memoir writers who have become subjects of therapy or medical care do not choose to also become historical witnesses, cultural critics, or makers of larger meaning. These writers do not ask why, do not look to the larger cultural or historical moment for the causes of illness and trauma. The loss and pain remain a solely personal, emotional experience. A book about cancer focuses on the experience of grief over losing a loved one or the slow process of recovery and the triumph of survival. Few cancer memoirs, however, question why so many people are getting the disease, or call for collective action to combat it. Or the narrative will focus primarily on the details of illness and close off other aspects of the writer’s life that do not represent pain or loss. While this privatization of experience may prove comforting and even transformative to readers, it also limits us as readers and circumscribes the larger experience of being human in this time and place. This is something I have learned from Louise DeSalvo—life is big, and though memoir is an examination of a particular experience or moment in a writer’s life, that specificity is always connected to a larger whole. Her book Writing as a Way of Healing is a guide to how to use personal narrative as a tool for overcoming the effects of trauma, illness, and other forms of loss. In this book and in her classroom, she emphasizes the making of meaning from difficult experiences. For her, the possibility of personal transformation is deeply connected to one’s development as a writer (and as a reader), to learning how to make sense of and shape life events instead of reliving them, to connecting them to something larger than personal experience. DeSalvo sees personal writing as potentially therapeutic in that it is a process of reimagining and thus reframing a difficult life experience, through description and reflection. Yet, memoir as a genre, and specifically the work one writes for publication, is not synonymous with therapy. On the first day of her memoir classes, DeSalvo hands out a list of elements she believes make a good memoir; among them is the idea that “the author acts as witness to the events narrated. The narrative is then told from the point of view, not of the person who lived through the events, but from the vantage point of the ‘I’ who understands what these events mean.” This meaning is made through the rigorous process of learning to tell that particular story, through description, detail, character, scene, dialogue, temporal and spatial context, some sense of “cause and effect” and pattern within the narrative, and a clear understanding of the “relationship between form and content.” Indeed, these are elements of good writing in general, and it is this

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interplay that tends to be missing from many contemporary memoirs that focus on pain and loss. Vertigo is an instructive example of a memoir that deals with the personal in a way that is both an artful reimagining, as opposed to a reliving, and a work that contextualizes a painful past into a larger historical moment, where it becomes legible from a number of different angles: the personal and emotional, the social and the political. Vertigo tells the story of DeSalvo’s childhood during World War II and her coming of age in the 1950s. The narrative moves from the events of her youth to her experience of finding her voice and vocation as an adult writer and scholar. There is personal pain in this story: her mother’s mental illness, her sister’s suicide, her father’s abuse. Yet these traumas do not constitute the story. Her experiences are both part of an individual life and part of a moment in the history of the United States. Women and children had enjoyed a period of relative freedom and autonomy during wartime that was sometimes violently repressed when the men, traumatized by their own experiences of combat, returned home. The personal events unfold from this moment, as well as from the losses, sacrifices, and dreams of DeSalvo’s Italian immigrant family, who joined the exodus of newly prosperous postwar Americans out of the cities and into the suburbs. To read this memoir is not an exercise in sympathy or voyeuristic fascination with the hard times the author survived; instead, it is a vivid illustration of the idea that “the personal is political,” that we need to see our lives in all their fullness and complexity, that we need to look outside of our immediate experience to the world around us if we are to make sense of that experience and communicate it to others. Indeed, DeSalvo’s writing and teaching stem from an earlier moment in memoir, rooted in feminism and the emerging movements for inclusion and recognition of other previously marginalized groups: lesbians and gay men, people of color, and workingclass people. As DeSalvo and other writers / scholars of memoir have described, memoir as a genre (as opposed to the autobiographies and reminiscences of famous people), developed as these groups were claiming a voice and a place in American political and literary culture, through their use of personal experience, to say something about a larger collectivity and about the time in which they lived.1 From the late 1960s through the early 1990s, memoir evolved into a capacious, expansive, and elastic genre, one that could incorporate history, political commentary, myth, fantasy, poetry, and essay in addition to difficult personal contexts such as illness, poverty, abuse, and grief. In works such as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (1987), Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (1991), and Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines (1993), writers took risks within their craft that are much less common in today’s more conventionally written memoir; they tested the relationship between form and content, fact and fantasy, private and public. In addition, these writers, and others of the period, wrote from a state of vulnerability that is different from the vulnerability of physical or psychic illness depicted in current 1. See Barrington (1997), Buss (2002), Giunta (“Teaching Memoir” [2000] and “Forging Public Voices” [2002]), Morrison (1995), and Smith and Watson (2001).

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memoirs. These writers were socially vulnerable, due to their status as economically disenfranchised, as immigrants or the children of immigrants, as writers whose first or home language was not English, as women who were still in the process of fighting for the economic and political rights that we take for granted now. In that state of heightened vulnerability, they dared to see themselves as more than their bodies or emotions; they dared to see themselves as actors in and witnesses to their place and time. As Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May note, “Every writer consciously (or even unconsciously) reaching from the margins to the center for political and social power instinctively presents the personal story—the memoir, in effect—as a radical document, to be read as personal and public” (5). DeSalvo’s Vertigo continues this reach. Published in 1996, just before memoir began to morph into the more limited genre it has become today, Vertigo can be read, again as Hampl and Tyler May put it, as “an act of history” (5). In it, DeSalvo combines reflection on difficult personal circumstances with a critical rethinking of sentimental narratives of the “home front” during World War II and the subsequent white ethnic class mobility of the postwar era. DeSalvo enacts the process of coming to voice from the margin through play with form and content. Like Kingston, Alexander, and Lorde, DeSalvo uses multiple shifts in time to signal various states of consciousness: as a perceiving child, as an enraged teenager, and as an adult woman sifting through the shards of her memory to make sense of the events she is presenting. It has taken me a number of years to assimilate the lessons Louise DeSalvo taught me when I was her student. I came into her class having just completed the manuscript for my first memoir. The Skin Between Us was inspired by the work of DeSalvo, Lorde, Kingston, and other writers of that era; it was the story of the two sides of my family, African American and Italian American, and of my experience growing up between these often antagonistic communities. For my MFA thesis, and what I imagined would be my next book, I attempted to connect the stories of my father’s years as a soldier in the Vietnam War, my experience of living in Berlin during the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and my infertility. It was a stretch to connect these disparate events, and though I wanted this work to be grounded in history, a public story as much as a private one, I got stuck in the pain, in the physical and emotional vulnerability of my experience. I did not yet have the skill, or the distance, to enlarge the story from one of personal disaster to one of witness. The Skin Between Us was published; I took time off from the MFA project and began to teach memoir. And it was in the act of teaching that I began to fully make sense of all that I had learned from DeSalvo’s instruction and writing, in the act of sharing the memoirs that moved me with my students, working from writing exercises that I based on exercises we did in class at Hunter, and emphasizing the writing process as both an opportunity for private healing and for coming to public voice. In my later teaching of MFA students at Queens University of Charlotte and in my current teaching of undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I have attempted to articulate a practice of autobiographical writing that focuses on the development of craft, on a process of personal transformation, however subtle and gradual, and on collective or public accountability. I want my students to witness their writing develop over time and through effort, to understand their work as a coming to greater self-knowledge and a way of making sense of difficult experiences. I want them to see their own lives in relation to larger

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forces, in connection to history, place, and cultural background, to bigger stories that might frame their own. My students have written about infertility and Korean history, queer Muslim identities, cancer and political repression in Madagascar; they have written about body image and class migration, about rape and the process of reclaiming desire, about the neuroscience of depression. They have written essays, memoirs in verse, fragments, and full-length memoirs. I am moved again and again by their ability to make disparate, unexpected connections in their work between elements of their own life experience and the forces that shape the larger world around them; I am equally moved and inspired by their willingness to play with form, by their irreverence toward the conventions of genre, and by the way they so gracefully balance that irreverence with a deep seriousness about the work itself. At the beginning of each semester, I look around my classroom, and for a moment I see myself in my new students’ faces. I see myself in Louise DeSalvo’s classroom on that first day in 2005, when she took off her jewelry and presented herself to our small group, unadorned and ready to work. I have thought about that image of her many times over the last few years. Louise’s naked face and hands, reflected back by seven sets of waiting eyes. I believe it says a great deal about memoir itself, and about DeSalvo’s work as a memoir writer and a teacher. Memoir is “about” the self, but only partially. Ultimately, memoir is about the self peeled back to reveal the world. This is what I have taken away from her classes and books, and what I have tried to pass on.

Works Cited Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. Portland, Ore.: Eighth Mountain Press, 1997. Buss, Helen M. Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women. Toronto: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002. DeSalvo, Louise. “Criteria for a Good Memoir.” Classroom handout, Hunter College, New York. 2005. ———. Vertigo. 1996. Introduction by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Genzlinger, Neil. “The Center of Attention.” New York Times Book Review, January 30, 2011. Giunta, Edvige. “Forging Public Voices: Memory, Writing, Power.” In Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors, 117–137. New York: Palgrave, 2002. ———. “Teaching Memoir at New Jersey City University.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 11, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 80– 89. Hampl, Patricia, and Elaine Tyler May. “Introduction.” In Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life, ed. Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May, 3– 8. St. Paul, Minn.: Borealis Books, 2008. Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser, 83–102. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Fixing Things WHAT LOUISE DeSALVO HAS TAUGHT ME ABOUT WRITING

Emily Bernard

It started with Adultery. My friend Nina was stuck. She was writing a memoir, and she had come to a part in the story that was difficult for her to tell. The difficult part concerned the years when her three children were small and her husband was working around the clock, trying to finish his book in time for tenure. He got tenure, and she left. Not for good, just for a week she spent at a writer’s colony, where she met a man who liked her writing. There was flirtation, and there were questions. There was a long period of doubt. Her marriage became stronger for it, but now it was time to write about this hard, confusing episode. She didn’t want to—the things she had to say are not the kinds of things women are supposed to say out loud. Who says this out loud? I helped her search for titles. “There’s a book called Adultery by this writer, Louise DeSalvo,” Nina reported to me in an email. “You would like it.” She sent me a copy. She was right. That was seven years ago. I feel the same about Louise DeSalvo’s 1999 book, Adultery, now as I did then. Like all of DeSalvo’s books, Adultery transcends its thesis. It is less a book about adultery than it is a book about marriage, less about marriage than writing, less about writing than living. Seven years ago, I had just gotten married. My husband, John, and I were starting our life together with new jobs in a new state. We moved everything to Vermont, including several boxes in storage I had forgotten about; they had been tucked away during This essay was originally published in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 40, no. 5 (2011): 680– 688. Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis.

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the years John and I spent on fellowships and in temporary jobs, traveling back and forth, trying to spend as much time together as possible. The boxes were bursting with books. We stacked them all the way up to the ceiling in our Burlington apartment in the summer of 2001. They were still there, behind the television, the day the twin towers fell. Disoriented—that’s not exactly the right word, but it comes close. Perhaps for someone else, it would not be a good idea to read a book called Adultery after having just gotten married, and when going through such a seismic shift in identity in general. DeSalvo begins her introduction to the book with a cautionary note: “Unless you consciously (or unconsciously) want to jet-propel yourself into committing adultery, reading about it isn’t such a good idea” (Adultery 3). For someone else, perhaps. For me, it was a very good idea, indeed. Why? Because Adultery is ultimately about being a woman, and the choices we make. “I looked into the bathroom mirror. I saw my ravaged face. My swollen eyes. It was a face I didn’t recognize. It was the face of a wounded woman. I didn’t want this face. I didn’t want to be this woman” (109). Here, DeSalvo regards herself some time after learning of her husband’s affair. She wonders if she can kill herself by taking a year’s supply of birth control pills. She figures that, with her luck, she would probably just wind up with hair on her chest. Instead of suicide, she opts for a PhD. These lines. I see DeSalvo closing the medicine cabinet, looking at herself in the mirror, and deciding that it is time not for death but for work. The choice—the will— not to be the woman who would destroy herself but another woman, the one who would create. One who would face change— embrace it, even—instead of hide from it. One who would live and not die. It is a choice whether to sit mutely or summon the courage to stand up and say “I.” It is not an easy choice, and it is a choice women have to make every time they choose the page over silence. My mother chose silence. I had married a man very different from my father, but I had married, all the same. Would my fate be the same? In the fall of 2001, nothing was certain. It will be interesting to see what happens. The night she found out about her husband’s betrayal, Louise DeSalvo took the keys to the car and went barreling into the night. She drove very far and very fast with no destination in mind. She had questions, fears, and insights. Then she remembered a line from a book, “It will be interesting to see what happens” (133). The line appears in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson, a novel DeSalvo had read in high school. It became a mantra of sorts, as she headed home, and then on into the rest of her life. It served as a reminder to approach the world, with all of its glories and horrors and absurdities, with curiosity. It was the beginning of orientation for me, too, in my new life in a very different country than the one in which I had gotten married. Interesting times, indeed. But like Louise DeSalvo, I had married a man strong, smart, and funny enough to help navigate us through the wilderness of the new country of marriage, at least. Like DeSalvo, too, I had married a man strong, smart, and funny enough to tolerate me while I wrote about my life in this new country. Forget the library. After I finished Adultery, I went online and ordered every book by Louise DeSalvo. I put down Adultery and picked up Conceived with Malice, a 1994 study

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that explores revenge as a motive in the creative lives of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller. In the introduction to Conceived with Malice, DeSalvo describes the scene from her own life that inspired the book. In the 1980s, she attended a pre-publication reading given by a famous American male novelist (whom she does not identify). He read a passage from a novel he was writing in which a female character was sexually degraded. After reading the passage, he looked up at his audience and said, “I really got her back with that one.” DeSalvo remembers: As I was driving home after the reading, I realized how stunned I was by the novelist’s blatant admission of revenge as a motive for that scene. In part, it was because he challenged my idealized vision of writers. It was also because he was so satisfied with himself. I wondered whether “she” would find out what he had done to her in his work, and whether he would get away with it— or, whether, when she found out about it, she would fight back. I hoped she would fight back. (Malice 5)

It was the I in these sentences that dazzled and inspired me. At the time, I was struggling hard with the alienating and alienated language of conventional academic writing. I belonged to an English department that included a vibrant creative writing program, and I regularly collared its faculty in the hallways to discuss books. “I hope you won’t take offense at this, but you talk like a writer, not an academic,” said Greg, a memoirist. His words filled me with happiness, but talk was all I was willing to do at that point. When I wound up in the hospital for emergency surgery, David, a fiction writer and a poet, said, “I think there’s a story in this.” “I’ll leave that for you all,” I said. “I don’t understand,” he replied. “It’s just a little too scary,” I told him. I had learned to live in a foreign country and mastered its language, and I was afraid to go back home. Reading Conceived with Malice while standing at my kitchen counter and walking around the apartment, savoring the precision of the words, the strong, clear sentences—that was the beginning of my journey back. Louise DeSalvo’s prose was my transportation; her I was my beacon. I remembered that I had chosen academia out of passion, not fear. I remembered that I had gotten a PhD because of my ambition to make bridges across barriers. I recalled that my desire as a writer had always been intimately connected to a need for communion, with the living and the dead. DeSalvo’s I was an invitation. It brought her into the story, and made room for me there, too. Her I was a confession of desire to be known, just as she would invite her readers to know Woolf, Lawrence, Barnes, and Miller. Somehow, DeSalvo had balanced incisive literary analysis with fierce personal passion. Maybe there was a way for me to do this, too. Conceived with Malice was, for me, a step away from fear, and a step in the direction of becoming a woman who would create, and say I without apology. “You should write so that others can live,” my husband said once. We repeat this line to each other often. It is a maxim for living as much as writing; as a mandate, it is both

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large and small. We repeat it to remind each other that we are here to contribute—that’s all. No more, no less. I love the fact—and so repeat it often and emphatically—that it was I who introduced my Italian American husband to Louise DeSalvo, and not the other way around. “John is the most intellectually curious person I know,” I say to people. In Adultery, DeSalvo writes that, even as a teenager, she saw the ideal marriage “as a working partnership with a person whom you respected” (Adultery 135). Mutual respect helps get you through the hard times, I have learned. At any rate, when John became acquainted with DeSalvo’s work, her books migrated from my desk to his, and then back. Hard times came when I began to want more from my writing life. During our first year of marriage, I began to find the constraints of academic writing unbearable. I was drowning in constipated prose that I didn’t want to read and found painful to produce. I was looking for a way out but I had no map. I felt I couldn’t make a creative transition without making a physical transition of some kind. I didn’t want to leave my job. I didn’t want to give up citizenship, but I felt the tug of a different terrain, and that I would die, somehow, if I did not find a way to live according to what felt like my true, native tongue. I did not yet have the language to explain to John what I needed, and why. Louise DeSalvo provided the language: I come from a family, from a cultural heritage, where women don’t go away to do things separately from men. That is not to say that men don’t go away to do things separately from women. They do. And often. But in the land of my forbears, women sit around and wait for their men. Or they make a sumptuous meal and they work very hard and watch their children and wait for their men. But they don’t go anywhere without their men. Or do anything for themselves alone without their men. Except complain. To their children or to anyone else who will listen to them. About their men and about their bad luck in having been born female. (Vertigo 220)

John came upon these words in Vertigo, DeSalvo’s 1996 memoir. I had just told him that I wanted to go away for a weeklong writer’s workshop. Initially, he hadn’t understood why I wanted to go. He had always supported my writing, all of my writing. Why did I want to leave our home? Why did I seem so desperate to leave him behind? Sometimes, when we go to visit John’s parents for the holidays, his family sits in a circle while John reads aloud. Whether he’s reading a passage from his own writing or an article in the newspaper, it doesn’t matter. When John, the oldest son, reads, it is an occasion. “Be quiet! Johnny’s reading!” announces his mother. The rest of us comply, and shut up. Recently, on a trip to visit my parents for the holidays, John pressed my father for some details about his life that he likes to keep secret—like his age, for example. “Seventytwo, seventy-three,” my father finally surrendered. We were in the car. John sat next to my father in the front while I sat in the back, as usual. My father began to tell John a story about his childhood, one I had never heard before. I leaned in close. My father looked up in the rearview mirror and said, “Now, Emily, don’t write any of this down.”

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For many years, I have not shared any of my writing with my parents, not even the essay that was chosen for Best American Essays. The idea of reading aloud to them from my work is nearly inconceivable. I am an African American woman born into a middle-class family. My husband is an Italian American man born into a working-class family. But more than race, class, or even gender, the relationship between our families and our writing is the difference between John and me. When John found the above passage in Vertigo, he came into my office and read it to me. DeSalvo’s words helped him understand that it wasn’t our home I was eager to leave; it wasn’t him I seemed so desperate to leave behind. In Vertigo, DeSalvo describes other challenges in the life of a woman writer. She remembers an exchange she had with her son in 1976. “Recently Jason has come into my study after school. I continue working. He looks at me and says, ‘Mom, do you realize that at this moment, mothers all over he world are making their children snacks?’ before trudging off to his room to play his music loud” (230). DeSalvo writes of the unending conflict between motherhood and writerhood: I don’t want to be just a mother, just a wife. I want the time to do my work. And to find the time I need requires that I work when my children are home. How else can I manage the hundred and one things that need to be done each day, and write, too? The cooking and cleaning and homework- checking and shopping and all the rest of it. Learning to enjoy my work, learning to find a balance between my work and the rest of my life, and learning to play will take me many years. (230)

I have repeated the anecdote about Jason and the snacks to many women writer friends over the years. Some of them, like me, have young children. They listen and shiver while I repeat DeSalvo’s story, looking ahead, perhaps, and anticipating similar words of recrimination from their own children. I, too, imagine my children lobbing words like these my way. The possibility is not remote. My twin daughters are not yet three, but my writing life is something they are already trying to understand. On a recent morning, Isabella kissed me goodbye and said, “You going to work on your book, mommy? And then you coming home? To me?!?” But even now, as I read over these lines in Vertigo, it is not guilt, or the anticipation of guilt, that I feel. Instead, I read them and remember a scene from my own past, one that took place more than fifteen years ago. I was traveling home for the holidays, and I fell into a conversation with a woman outside of the Nashville airport. We talked on a bench while we waited for our families to pick us up and take us home. She told me that she had recently gone back to work now that her children were in high school. She went radiant with pleasure as she talked about her work, but then she seemed embarrassed when she described how her children resented her job, resented the fact that she was no longer home as often as she had been. I myself had not traveled to Nashville to visit my parents in over six months, even though my mother was gravely depressed, as she had been for years. As the woman spoke, a feeling of relief poured through me. “You’ve given your children such a gift,” I told her.

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“What do you mean?” she asked. “Your happiness,” I said. Writing is a way to manage, interpret, and live in the world. It can be both destructive and constructive. It is a way to end wrongs and make things right. Louise DeSalvo describes her approach to writing in her 1998 book, Writing as a Way of Healing: The metaphor I use most frequently is of writing as a “fixer.” As in photography, writing acts for me as a kind of fixer, like the chemical—the fixer—you use to stabilize the image. “Fixing things,” I sometimes call it. And it acts as another kind of “fi xer,” with all its healing implications. I use my writing as a way of fixing things, of making them better, of healing myself. As a compasslike way of taking a “fix” on my life—to see where I am, where I’ve been, and where I’m going. (7)

To enter the world of the work of Louise DeSalvo is to enter into a conversation with a writer who is already in conversation with other books and other writers. It is an expansive and raucous conversation in which there are stretches of silence, as well. The silence is necessary; it is there to enable listeners and readers to honor our uncertainty and fear before gathering the tools to face them down. The silence allows for difficult, important questions: How do we balance our commitment to art with other commitments? When is truth-telling an act of betrayal? What does it take to stand up and say I, to keep saying I, even when— especially when—we wonder if anyone is listening? The fixer is in the questions as much as the answers. In the epilogue to Writing as a Way of Healing, DeSalvo describes watching one of her students read her work aloud at the end of a semester: I see how absorbed her listeners are. This is, I think, a privileged moment. When an audience is utterly captivated by someone’s experience because a writer has communicated her meaning in a way that makes it directly apprehensible. A moment when there is no “I,” no “you,” only “we.” One of connection and communion, of “conspiracy”—a breathing together. I teach toward making this possible. I write to make this possible. (207)

To enter into the world of Louise DeSalvo’s work is to reach the intersection between I and we. It is not the end of conflict, but it is the end of loneliness. It is a place of brilliant conversation, unflinching reflection, and deliberate observation. It is to watch a writer at work, hard, glorious work. It is to observe a woman as she closes the medicine cabinet and chooses work over fear. It is to close the medicine cabinet yourself, and realize that woman is you.

Works Cited DeSalvo, Louise. Adultery. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. ———. Conceived With Malice: Literature as Revenge. New York: Plume, 1995. ———. Vertigo: A Memoir. New York: Dutton, 1996. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Dark Whiteness and Literacy without Assimilation DeSALVO’S UNLIKELY NARRATIVE

Kimberly A. Costino

Acts of literacy make Louise DeSalvo whole. They pull and hold the fragments of her identity together, if only momentarily. As we learn from autobiographical essays such as “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar” (1984), “Digging Deep” (1998), “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar” (2003), and “Color: White / Complexion: Dark” (2003), reading, writing, and intellectual work help DeSalvo to make peace with her mother, to explore the lives of her forebears, and to reconnect with and rewrite her past. Acts of literacy have figuratively, if not literally, saved her life time and again. In different pieces of DeSalvo’s autobiographical work—visibly rewritten and reconstructed—the message is the same: literacy has brought me pleasure; literacy has made my life better; literacy has liberated me from race, class, and gender oppression; literacy, in essence, has saved me. This liberatory representation of literacy is at the heart of the “American Dream” and at the root of classic immigration narratives like Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912). These narratives tell the “unlikely” story of an exceptional subject achieving liberation (and upward socioeconomic mobility) by way of assimilation through education, by becoming literate (DeSalvo, Vertigo xxxvii).1 Few cultural discourses are more powerful or more prevalent in the US cultural imagination. As Victor Villanueva argues in Bootstraps: 1. According to critic Betty Bergland, The Promised Land was published, anthologized, and used in “citizenship schools” so often that “the work came to represent for much of the twentieth

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From an American Academic of Color, however, this representation of literacy that assimilates individuals through upward socioeconomic mobility into racelessness is a dangerous myth. It erases the role that inequitable social structures (such as racism, classism, and sexism) play in a person’s ability to become or to be identified as literate in this culture. As a result, literacy, as Elspeth Stuckey points out in The Violence of Literacy, can be violent and oppressive; it can push toward the kind of class and cultural annihilation that much, if not all, of DeSalvo’s autobiographical writing actively challenges. This essay explores the way that DeSalvo claims an empowering, liberatory notion of literacy for herself at the same time that she claims a raced, classed, and gendered identity. In writing the “unlikely narrative of how a working- class Italian girl became a critic and a writer” (DeSalvo, Vertigo xxxvii), DeSalvo tells the story of how a raced and classed individual leaves the oppressive, patriarchal world of her Italian American home by entering the world of literacy and academia, thus assimilating into racelessness. She employs what I refer to as the “separate worlds trope,” a dominant cultural narrative in the United States that shapes the way individuals understand and construct their experiences with literacy.2 In so doing, she, like many contemporary writers who write about their experiences with literacy (such as Linda Brodkey, bell hooks, Richard Rodriguez, and Marianna De Marco Torgovnick), writes a version of the classic immigration narrative that reinforces the ideological articulation between literacy and assimilation into raceless US citizenship. DeSalvo breaks away from this trope in later autobiographical essays such as “Digging Deep,” “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar,” and “Color: White / Complexion: Dark.” Unlike many of her contemporaries, she makes a deconstructive move to represent literacy as being liberatory without requiring assimilation, by making visible what feminist philosopher and historian Joan W. Scott refers to as “the constructed nature of experience” and “the inner workings or logics” (59) of the ideological systems that create and maintain racial difference. DeSalvo historicizes her forebears’ illiteracy and the seemingly natural and inevitable separation between the world of her working- class Italian American home and the privileged world of literacy and academia in which she now lives. She rewrites her experiences with literacy and the multiple and provisional identities that the discursive representations of these experiences construct. In so doing, DeSalvo deconstructs the classic immigration narrative that perpetuates the ideological articulation between literacy and assimilation into a raceless middle- class identity and illiteracy with anything “Other.” She constructs (literally writes into being) the subject position of an empowered, literate, working- class Italian American woman. While in her later personal essays DeSalvo embraces a racialized dark white southern Italian working- class subject position, she rejects such an identity in her original “Puttana” essay by employing the separate worlds trope and representing literacy as assimilation. Throughout this essay, DeSalvo suggests that literacy is the primary means by which she can leave behind her raced and classed identity. She opens the essay by juxtaposing the image of herself as a scholar—“I am thirty-two years old, married, the century not just the story of a Russian Jewish immigrant girl but the experience of Americanization itself” (8). 2. See Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

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mother of two small children, a Ph.D. candidate,” on her way to do “real research” on Virginia Woolf—with the patriarchal nature of her “cultural heritage,” a heritage that she is unable to claim after her work as a doctoral student and Woolf scholar: A few years ago, I decided, like everyone else, to explore my ethnic roots. It lasted a very short time. I bought a pasta machine. Learned how to combine the ingredients for pasta, to roll out the dough, and cut it. Word got out that I was a terrific pasta maker. Then I began to realize that you can tell how enslaved the women of any country are by the kind of preparation their traditional foods require. Any recipe that begins “Take a mortar and pestle . . .” now drives me into a feminist frenzy. Well, pasta making is something like that. (“Puttana” 35–36)

In this passage, DeSalvo constructs herself as a raceless (read white), assimilated, highly literate woman with an unnamed “cultural” identity who has left her oppressive “ethnic roots” behind. The reference to pasta works as a signifier for the “cultural” identity she has left behind, but the words “Italian” or “Italian American” do not appear in this passage. As Edvige Giunta notes in Writing with an Accent, in the “Puttana” essay, “DeSalvo expresses ambivalence about identifying herself as an Italian American” (125). This conflict between Italian American identity and intellectual growth is supported by image after image of DeSalvo poring over manuscripts (“Puttana” 44), wrestling with “esoteric and highly cultivated prose” (43), and “always running away, running away” (48) from her “tyrannical father” (48) and the oppressive, patriarchal world of home, of “the old country” (36) and into the world of books and literacy. When her home becomes emotionally toxic and her father has one of his “fairly frequent outbursts,” the young Louise runs to the “welcoming lights a few blocks away. It is the local library” (46). When she describes the ways her intellectual work on Virginia Woolf has made her more like Woolf, a white, upper- class British woman, DeSalvo reaffirms the confl ict between Italian American identity and literate, intellectual work: Before I worked on Virginia Woolf, I whined a lot, like my Italian foremothers. . . . I didn’t really understand that there was a social structure that was organized to keep men dominant and women subservient . . . Before I worked on Virginia Woolf, I would ask the young doctors who came to our house for dinner if I could get them another cup of coffee. . . . Now my husband, Ernie, and our children—Jason and Justin—get up to cook me breakfast. . . . But sometimes, when I’m feeling really good and have the time, I make them a bread pudding. (51)

This passage suggests that one need not be genderless in order to be literate, but one does need to be raceless, which in contemporary US culture is code for “white.” Indeed, by the end of this section, DeSalvo reconciles her identity as a woman and as a scholar; she can do both intellectual and domestic, gendered work, but the domestic, gendered work is signified by bread pudding, not pasta. Despite ending the “Puttana” essay by asserting that she is “more Italian than American,” this identification rings a bit hollow. DeSalvo presents herself as a raceless woman scholar, not as the dark white, working-class, southern Italian American woman writer of her later autobiographical work. DeSalvo’s characterization of conflicts between intellectual growth through acts of literacy and a racialized identity (like Italian American) results from the ways in which

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literacy has been articulated with the notion of assimilation into raceless, US citizenship. It also results from the ways illiteracy has been articulated with racialized immigrants, including Italian Americans, throughout US culture.3 The root of this articulation can be traced to the way literacy and immigration have been imbricated throughout US history. As historians such as John Higham, Bill Hing, and Ronald Takaki have pointed out, whenever “native-born” Americans have felt threatened by heavy immigration, these culturally dominant groups have raised questions about language and employed the notion of literacy as a means of regulating, controlling, and assimilating the masses of newcomers crossing US borders. In other words, those in power have deployed the notion of literacy to maintain an exclusionary notion of “whiteness.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, Congress tried to control access to the country with a literacy test and to regulate naturalization and citizenship by requiring all candidates to read and write English. Literacy is deployed in similar ways in contemporary discussions about immigration, bilingual education, English-only, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and “standards” for education. Throughout these debates, discourses about and representations of literacy and immigration work together to construct a literate / illiterate binary. The image of a white, middle- class, native-born citizen represents the full articulation of this ideal; the immigrant, the non-“white,” the working class, and the poor embody the aberration of this ideal. This binary has been created and maintained, at least in part, by the “separate worlds” trope that structures classic immigration narratives like Antin’s Promised Land as well as more contemporary literacy narratives like DeSalvo’s

3. When I use the phrase “articulation between,” I am drawing on Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation. In a 1986 interview with Lawrence Gossberg, Hall likens the concept of discursive articulation to a truck whose two separate pieces—the front / cab and the back / trailer— can be linked and perceived as one entity or unity, but do not necessarily have to be. The connection is possible, but not necessary or essential, which means that the distinct or different elements can be re- connected or rearticulated in different ways because “they have no necessary belongingness” (53). For Hall, the connection or articulation, like the one I am arguing exists between literacy and racelessness, does exist “historically in a particular formation, anchored very directly in relation to a number of different forces,” but it has no “necessary, intrinsic, transhistorical belongingness. Its meaning—political and ideological— comes precisely from its position within a formation. It comes with what else it is articulated to. Since those articulations are not inevitable, not necessary, they can potentially be transformed, so that [literacy, for example,] can be articulated in more than one way” (53–54). One example of this articulation between illiteracy and the Italian American woman is the fact that it has become commonplace for Italian American women writers, as it has for African American women writers, to discuss the absence of a visible tradition of Italian American women writers and the lack of models. These writers have argued that the subject position of an empowered, literate, Italian American woman was simply not culturally available (see Barolini; DeSalvo’s “Breaking”; and Giunta’s Writing with an Accent). One reason for this is the fact that Italian immigrants were racialized during the second great wave of immigration and defined as always already undesirable, illiterate, criminal, and, at best only useful for manual, not intellectual, labor. For a history of Italian immigrants in the United States, the formation of their racialized identities, and the role language has played in their ethnic identity construction, see Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno’s Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America and Nancy C. Carnevale’s A New Language, a New World.

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“Puttana” essay. The trope, I argue, emerged out of the discourses and ideologies of both literacy and race dominant during the second great wave of immigration. Antin’s narrative, then, as well as the discourses and ideologies about literacy, race, and immigration structuring the context of its production, can help us appreciate the significance of DeSalvo’s unlikely revision. Antin’s The Promised Land tells the story of how a Jewish immigrant from Polotzk, Russia, pulled herself up and out of the slums of Boston’s Dover Street to become a nationally recognized and acclaimed writer, lecturer, and activist. As critics such as Michael Kramer have noted, the overall structure of Antin’s autobiography mirrors this journey: the first half of the book takes place in Russia, the second half takes place in America, and the two chapters in the middle recount Antin’s journey across the sea and her “initiation” into US culture through education and, specifically, through her abilities to read and write in English. Within this narrative, Polotzk (like DeSalvo’s workingclass, patriarchal Italian American home) is represented as oppressive and serves as the “other” from which Antin is liberated. Literacy, as it is for DeSalvo, is the primary force by which liberation—and assimilation— occurs. This liberatory representation of literacy is evident when Antin describes the way that her ability to read English enabled her to read about US history, “chapter for chapter” (164), which in turn stirred patriotic feelings for her adopted country: “America . . . the country I love so dearly” (164). She cannot imagine that “happiness” “in any other language” could be “so sweet” or “logic . . . so clear” (146). She does not think she “could believe in my neighbors as I do if I thought about them in un-English words” (164). The assimilating force of literacy is also evident in Antin’s description of composing a poem about George Washington, an experience she characterizes as being “very discomposing” (180). In both of these descriptions, Antin points to the ways that being educated in English brings about assimilation by stirring love for America. Reading and writing in English are represented as a means of achieving and expressing patriotism and loyalty to America. Moreover, Antin’s reference to the process of putting such patriotic sentiments down on paper as a process of “discomposing” suggests that the act of writing in English unmakes her old identity at the same time that it creates a new one. This unmaking of identity through acts of literacy had—and continues to have every time the structure of the classic immigration narrative is unwittingly deployed—racial implications. Antin wrote and revised her autobiography between 1910 and 1912, a time when the new “sciences” of eugenics and evolution and the biologistic ideologies of race that they supported were prominent in the cultural consciousness. During that time, racial tensions were also running high because of the large numbers of non–English speaking, racially different immigrants entering the United States. According to historian Silvia Pedraza, because immigrants came in greater numbers than ever before (between 1901 and 1910 alone, 8,795,386 arrived), and settled in large clusters in major cities, they stirred racial anxiety among those who considered themselves “white” (6– 8). The biologistic ideologies that the discourse of eugenics supported bred fear among the nativeborn citizens about the ability to assimilate the growing numbers of racially different immigrants landing at Ellis Island each day and about the impending “race suicide,” if these immigrants proved to be “unmeltable” (“Immigrant Type Low”). Such fears led to a discourse that attempted to restrict immigration and to distinguish between racially

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“desirable” and “undesirable” immigrants. This discourse included discussions about literacy, about its possible racial and / or biological characteristics, and about its subsequent role in assimilating immigrants (“Undesirable Immigrants”; Elkus). According to the Congressional Record for June 25, 1906, a literacy test requiring all males over sixteen to demonstrate their ability to read English or some other language was proposed in order to “separate the ignorant, vicious, and the lazy from the intelligent and industrious” (quoted in Hutchinson 466).4 Those arguing for the implementation of this test primarily did so by relying on a biologistic ideology of race, usually a eugenicist one that asserted that all human traits, including “literary composition,” were inheritable (Quigley). A literacy test, in this context, was a “logical” way to bar members of “inferior” races from entering the country. To counter these seemingly natural or biological links between “undesirability,” noncitizens, “inferior race,” and illiteracy, many opponents of the literacy provision (that is, proponents of immigration access) relied on what Michael Omi and Howard Winant refer to as the emergent “ethnicity-based paradigm of race” (15) to argue against the test. They insist instead that education is “the solution to the immigrant problem” (“Helen Gould”). Education was believed to have the power to “save” native-born Americans from “race suicide” (“Education Will Save Us”) by assimilating the racialized immigrants enough to live and work in the United States.5 This debate undoubtedly helped to shape the narrative structure of Antin’s text and the separate worlds trope that structures more contemporary literacy narratives like DeSalvo’s original “Puttana” essay. Antin needed to emphasize her ability to assimilate through literacy in order to argue against immigration restriction. She accomplished this goal by constructing two separate worlds—an oppressive, racialized one and a raceless, liberatory one—and she represented literacy as the vehicle for assimilating racialized individuals into racelessness. When, seventy-two years after Antin, DeSalvo employs this separate worlds trope to construct her experiences in her original “Puttana” essay, she engages in a project that Scott would describe as using “the evidence of experience” (59) to make minority voices and experiences visible in dominant cultural and historical narratives. Scott argues that one way historians have challenged grand narratives of history has been to construct alternative histories that document the lives and histories of those individuals and groups who continually have been left out, marginalized, or ignored by drawing on what she refers to as the evidence of personal experience. A primary purpose of DeSalvo’s “Puttana” was to make visible her experiences as a female Woolf scholar, experiences that the introduction to Between Women suggests had heretofore been invisible (Ascher, DeSalvo, and Ruddick xix–xxv). In this essay, DeSalvo does not make visible the constructed nature of experience. She also does not expose the

4. According to Hutchinson, some version of a literacy test was consistently presented before Congress from 1891 until 1917, when a test was finally adopted. Before the 1905–1907 session, which was the first to occur during the second great wave of immigration, the test received little public attention. 5. According to Omi and Winant, the ethnicity-based paradigm of race, which in contemporary times conflates immigrants and minorities and has racelessness as its unattainable goal, is rooted at least in part in social Darwinism and the notion that changes in environment bring about changes in the human race.

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ideological operations that create and enable difference and oppression. Instead, she interprets and narrativizes her experiences in ways that are consistent with existing cultural and personal narratives about literacy (like Antin’s), and that employ the separate worlds trope and its ideological articulations of literacy. Thus, DeSalvo is unable to embrace literacy and an Italian American identity, an identity that has and continues to be linked to illiteracy in the US cultural imagination. In later writings, beginning with Vertigo and continuing through “Digging Deep,” “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar,” and “Color: White / Complexion: Dark,” DeSalvo constructs her experiences differently; she revises moments from the original “Puttana” essay and, in so doing, discloses the ways in which discursive representations of experience are ideologically constructed. As Giunta points out in her introduction to Vertigo, DeSalvo, in this later work, “is not concerned with the singular truth of verifiable facts—a truth that cannot be ascertained. Rather, she is concerned with the multiple, provisional accounts that memory generates” (xxiv). DeSalvo revises the experiences depicted in the “Puttana” essay, historicizes her forebears’ illiteracy, writes about the process of discursively constructing her experiences in her earlier works, exposes the ideological nature of race, and does most, if not all, of this work in the present tense. DeSalvo does not just narrate her experiences as verifiable facts. Instead, she consistently and relentlessly calls attention to the construction and reconstruction of her experiences. She exposes how the articulation between literacy and raceless US citizenship has affected immigrants and immigration practices. More specifically, she highlights how the articulation between illiteracy and the Italian American woman has become pervasively accepted. These articulations are not natural, not inevitable, not necessary, and not an individual choice; they are, instead, products of historical, ideological, and discursive operations of power. In the “Puttana” essay, DeSalvo does not represent herself as being an intellectual and a racialized working-class Italian American. But in “Digging Deep,” DeSalvo begins to construct this subject position as she makes visible and draws connections between her work as an intellectual and the manual labor of her working-class Italian and Italian American forebears. She more fully articulates this subject position as she rewrites and makes visible the process of writing and rewriting the experiences that structure the original “Puttana” essay in “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar” and in “Color / White: Complexion / Dark.” “Digging Deep” exhibits the separate-worlds trope that structures the classic immigration narrative, and it reinforces the notion of literacy as liberation that has been created and maintained through this trope. Early on, DeSalvo states: I work with students, with books, with words because I believe that education can make one’s life qualitatively better. My grandfather worked with steel, with pickax and shovel, because he was illiterate, because he had no other way to earn his living. I work, standing in front of a (somewhat comfortable) classroom, talking, or sitting at a desk writing, or reclining on a sofa reading or thinking. My grandfather worked, hunched over, always in pain, always uncomfortable, scraping his way through and across the land, his labor exploited. (“Digging Deep” 14)

DeSalvo juxtaposes the world of her illiterate grandfather with her own comfortable world of literacy, of intellectual work, of the decidedly not working class. Literacy here, as it was in the “Puttana” essay and as it was for Antin, is liberatory. However, in “Digging

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Deep,” DeSalvo historicizes these separate worlds. Rather than present the articulation between illiteracy and the working- class Italian American world of home and literacy and middle- class life as natural and inevitable, she points to the racism that Italian immigrants like her grandfather faced. This racism forced Italian immigrants to do manual labor and barred them from attaining an education. Drawing on a 1916 essay called “The ‘Wop’ in the Track Gang,” she notes that when these men complained about their living conditions, “the padrone [would] remark, ‘These dagoes are never satisfied. . . . They should be starved to death. . . . They don’t belong here’ ” (15). DeSalvo thus locates her grandfather’s illiteracy in oppressive social structures, rather than in his individual failure to become a literate, raceless US citizen. Of her father, she writes: “he didn’t have sufficient schooling; as the only son in a large family, he stopped school in the seventh or eighth grade. He had started working when he was seven years old, helping his mother with the piecework she did at home” (15). She notes that her mother’s dreams were thwarted early on when she was forced to take a job “as a ‘salesgirl’ selling shoes and couldn’t use the scholarship she was awarded to go to college [since] her family was in desperate financial shape” (16). Such historicizing challenges the seemingly natural differences between the oppressive world of home that the DeSalvo of “Puttana” was so happy to leave behind and the more comfortable life of the raceless intellectual. DeSalvo further questions the strict separation between the Italian American working- class world and the more liberated world her literacy and education have enabled her to inhabit. “Digging Deep” opens with the image of herself as Virginia Woolf scholar travelling to “give a series of talks” (13). Her airplane hovers over railroad tracks that her illiterate Italian immigrant grandfather helped build. The image joins the separate worlds of DeSalvo’s illiterate Italian forebears and her raceless, literate world of academia. She challenges the separate worlds trope again when she states, “Everything I have done as a teacher, as a writer—who I teach, and why, and what, and how—I now read against the context of my grandfather’s work, and against that of my working- class mother and my father” (21). In the same way her grandfather used “a pickax and a shovel to dig deep,” DeSalvo asks herself and her students “to dig deep” (21). She states, “it isn’t until I write this essay that, I understand that in the language I use as I go about my intellectual work. . . . I am trying to retain the connection with my grandfather, and with his hard, manual labor” (21). Here, DeSalvo embraces her literacy as she does in “Puttana”; she continues to recognize it as the thing that makes her life less hard (“digging into meaning is something like digging into hard earth, which it is and which it isn’t” [21]). In this essay, however, her working- class origins (which taught her “about the kind of worker [she] would one day want to be” [14]), enable, rather than exist in tension with, her identity as a literate scholar, teacher, writer, and intellectual. She states that writing “Digging Deep”—this particular act of literacy—has prompted, indeed created, this connection, this reconstruction of her identity as a “working- class intellectual” (18) and of the experiences upon which this identity is built. While the process of writing “Digging Deep” enabled DeSalvo to construct an identity as a working- class intellectual, the subject position as formulated in “Digging Deep” is still somewhat raceless. DeSalvo describes the importance of making the writing process visible—she refers to it as her “primary purpose as a working- class intellectual” (18). This process of discursively constructing and reconstructing her own experiences

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and her own identity is made explicit only in the last line of the essay, when she recognizes “in the language I use as I go about my intellectual work—in consistently asking my students and myself to dig deep—that I am trying to retain my connection with my grandfather, and with his hard, manual labor” (21). In “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar,” DeSalvo makes this process more explicit, thus writing the subject position of the southern Italian American woman writer into being. In her conclusion, referring to the “Jar” in the title, DeSalvo states her “entire writing life . . . has been a series of breakings and mendings” (70). She ties the work that she does as a writer, literate work that makes and remakes her identity, to the work of her working- class Italian American family—her father’s work as a “handyman” (70), her mother’s work as a “mender” (70), her sister’s work as a “potter” (70), her grandfather’s work fixing railroad lines, and her grandmother’s work as a “super” (70) —in ways that ultimately create her identity as a literate, working- class, Italian American woman: At first I was a textual scholar, devoted to discovering how works of art came into being, using extant manuscripts, journals, letters, diaries. Then I became a feminist literary historian, then a biographer, increasingly aware of issues of class, ethnicity, sexual violence, and the creative process. Then I began writing memoir, and I began to identify myself as a writer who was Italian American. Finally, here I am, a Southern Italian American writer. But not finally, I hope, for I am sure that there will be new breakings, new mendings, before this writing life is over. (70–71)

This memoiristic piece does more than simply announce DeSalvo as “a Southern Italian American writer”; it announces that DeSalvo’s old, assimilated self has been shattered. The narrative enacts this shattering by breaking away from the separate worlds trope that structured “Puttana.” In “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar,” DeSalvo exposes the process of writing the “Puttana” essay (of constructing that narrative and that self). She also rewrites scenes from her other memoiristic pieces in the present tense. Through these revisions, DeSalvo continues to historicize the articulation between illiteracy and Italian American identity that the separate worlds trope maintains in ways that call attention to the role that racist and classist social structures (in both Italy and the United States) play in barring access to literacy and education. We see an example of this sort of revision in the opening of “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar,” when DeSalvo rewrites the image of herself on an airplane from “Digging Deep” to include her “maternal grandfather, Salvatore Calabrese” (“Breaking the Jar” 60). After the pilot announces that they are flying over “the tracks of the Main Central Railroad” (60), she acknowledges her grandfather’s arrival in “the United States, that has made my work as a writer, as a thinker, possible” (60). His work on the railroad has made it possible for her to fly below the clouds, above the rails, on my way to giving a lecture about the life of this famous and privileged woman writer—a writer, I realize years later, who would never take tea with the likes of me, who would have been horrified that someone Italian American, someone formerly of the working class, would be writing her life. (60)

This scene presents the same image that opens “Digging Deep”: the image of DeSalvo hovering above land, above the worlds that have shaped her, pulling them together in

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some sort of whole identity, even if such wholeness is only provisional. This version, however, explicitly foregrounds DeSalvo’s raced as well as classed identity. This same attention to her raced identity and to revision, to remaking experiences constructed in earlier work, is evident again when she writes (in present tense) about how writing the original “Puttana” essay made her into a hyphenated American, one who is only vaguely aware of what being an Italian American really means. I believe, for example, that we are assimilated Americans. I do not yet know what being a Southern Italian American means, although I am one. I am completely unaware of the hidden history of persecution, racism, and exile that has shaped my people and my personal history. (“Breaking the Jar” 62)

She goes on to write (again in present tense) how the process of writing Vertigo (which is a rewriting / revision of the original “Puttana” narrative) enables her to see the ways in which southern Italian American identity is “unassimilated”: “Until the time that I write Vertigo, I have lived under the guise of being an assimilated American. In writing Vertigo, I learn just how unassimilated I am, just how unassimilated my people are” (65). DeSalvo thus reverses the thrust of the separate worlds trope and the classic immigration narrative that cultivated it. Creating connections between these two worlds, she tells the stories that explain why her grandfather, her mother, and father did not have access to education. In “Color: White / Complexion: Dark,” DeSalvo explores the racialized identities upon which racist structures are built. Such identities constitute acts of social and discursive construction. DeSalvo historicizes racialized notions of Italian American identity, noting, for example, “the horrific mistreatment, exploitation, and enforced starvation of contadini (peasants) and farm laborers in Mezzogiorno that appears, now, to have been a form of ‘ethnic cleansing’ ” (“Color White” 18). She also emphasizes that the mistreatment of Italian Americans was based on the fact that “they were Italian”: “how policemen invaded the Italian neighborhood in Hoboken, NJ; that Sacco and Vanzetti were assumed to be guilty despite evidence to the contrary; that Italian Americans were lynched in the South; that they were incarcerated during World War II” (19). She attributes this treatment to the fact that they were “not quite white” (27). She also describes how this “not quite white” subject position was created and maintained in part through the naturalization process. Analyzing her grandmother’s naturalization papers, DeSalvo considers the ways Italians and Italian Americans have been and continue to be racialized—to be dark whites. Her grandmother enjoyed “neither the privilege of being completely accepted nor absorbed into the mainstream of North America” (22). In her deconstruction of the myth of naturalization for Italian Americans, she wonders if any Italian Americans actively feel assimilated or, if, like her, they have been told they “were ‘an embarrassment,’ ‘irrational,’ ‘too emotional,’ ‘too noisy,’ or ‘too shiny’ ” (23–24). This refusal to allow Italian Americans to fully assimilate into racelessness or whiteness is even more fully historicized in DeSalvo’s discussion of the discursive construction of her grandmother as a dark white subject. Although her grandmother was fair-skinned, her complexion is identified as “dark” on her naturalization papers because she “was not only Italian, she was from the South of Italy, a peasant, a terrone—a

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creature of the earth, and so the color of the earth, and because of this, she had to be dark, not fair” (27). DeSalvo writes that her grandmother “had to attest that though she was White, she was not completely White, for she was also Dark” (27). This darkness meant that she was also thought to be not quite (or not very) smart, not quite (or not very) reliable, not quite capable of self-government, not quite (or not very) capable of self- control, not quite capable of manifesting the traits of duty and obligation, not quite adaptable to organized and civilized society, not quite clean enough, not quite (or not at all) law-abiding (remember the Mafia). . . . Dark made its implied meaning clear: my grandmother had become “racialized.” (27–28)

In this passage, DeSalvo deconstructs the articulation between literacy, assimilation into racelessness, and US citizenship. That DeSalvo’s grandmother had to sign her name to this document (an act of literacy) in order to become a US citizen implies a certain kind of literacy (though not necessarily the kind that carries cultural capital; DeSalvo asserts as much throughout the essay). That she has naturalization papers implies a certain kind of citizenship, albeit one that does not confer full privileges. As this passage points out, the “Othering” impact of racialization is a condition of becoming “Italian American.” She concludes the essay by asserting: “My grandmother, then, became a ‘Dark White’ citizen of the United States of America. A ‘white nigger.’ Someone not truly white. Someone Italian American” (28). Through this connection to DeSalvo’s grandmother’s story, the original “Puttana” narrative becomes fully historicized. In her series of revised and increasingly historicized memoirs, DeSalvo “break[s] the jar” of the classic immigration / assimilation narrative and the literacy myth that it supports. She writes into being a subject position which disrupts the notion that one is either literate or raced / classed / gendered; writing in the present tense but referencing the rich layers of her previous self-narratives, she creates an inhabitable and potentially transformative space, a space for other dark white writers to come home to—until the next time we break the jar.

Works Cited Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 1912. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Penguin, 1997. Ascher, Carol, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick. “Introduction.” In Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, xix–xxv. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Barolini, Helen. “Becoming a Literary Person out of Context.” Massachusetts Review 27, no. 2 (1986): 262–274. Bergland, Betty. “Mary Antin.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Women Prose Writers, 1870–1920, ed. Heidi L.M. Jacobs, Shaun M. Harris, and Jennifer Putzi, 8–18. Detroit: Gale Group, 1992. Brodkey, Linda. “Writing on the Bias.” College English 56 (1994): 527–547. Carnevale, Nancy C. A New Language, a New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890–1945. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

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DeSalvo, Louise. “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar.” In Reflections on Italian American Women Writers, ed. Mary Ann Mannino and Justin Vitiello, 59–71. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2003. ———. “Color: White / Complexion: Dark.” In Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, 17–28. New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. “Digging Deep.” In Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers, ed. Alan Shepard, John Macmillan, and Gary Tate, 13–22. New York: Boynton / Cook, 1998. ———. “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” In Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, 35–53. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. ———. Vertigo. 1996. Introduction by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. “Education Will Save Us: Andrew D. White Says Improved Learning Will Preserve Republic.” New York Times, May 12, 1906. Elkus, Abram I. “Unread Immigrants.” Letter to the Editor. New York Times, January 9, 1912. Giunta, Edvige. Introduction. In DeSalvo’s Vertigo. ix–xxix. ———. Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Gossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Theory 10, no. 2 (1986): 45– 60. Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. “Helen Gould Speaks: Education the Solution of the Immigration Problem.” New York Times, December 8, 1905. Higham, John. “Cultural Responses to Immigration.” In Diversity and Its Discontents: Cultural Conflict and Common Ground in Contemporary American Society, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Jeffrey C. Alexander, 39– 61. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Hing, Bill. To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation. New York: New York University Press, 1997. hooks, bell. “Keeping Close to Home.” In The Presence of Others: Voices and Images That Call for Response, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz, 124–135. New York: Bedford / St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Hutchinson, E. P. Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. “Illiteracy and Its Significance.” Letter to the Editor. New York Times, January 12, 1912. “Immigrant Type Low, but 1,100,735 Get In.” New York Times, January 7, 1907. Kramer, Michael P. “Assimilation in The Promised Land: Mary Antin and the Jewish Origins of the American Self.” Prooftexts 18 (1998): 121–47. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennigan and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1994. Pedraza, Silvia. “Introduction: Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in American History.” In Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America, ed. Silvia Pedraza and Ruben Rumbault, 1–20. Belmont, Mass.: Wadsworth, 1996.

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Quigley, Margaret. “The Roots of the IQ Debate: Eugenics and Social Control.” The Public Eye, 1995. www.publiceye.org /magazine/v09n1/eugenics.html Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Scott, Joan W. “Experience.” In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 57–71. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Stuckey, J. Elspeth. The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton / Cook, 1991. Takaki, Ronald. “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery.” Discovering America: A Special Issue. Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 892– 912. Torgovnik, Marianna De Marco. Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. “Undesirable Immigrants.” New York Times, July 24, 1907. Villanueva, Victor, Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1993.

Mixing Bowl ON CRAZ Y IN THE KITCH EN, DeSALVO IN THE C LASSROOM, A ND THE DAY I GOT INTO HUNTER

Lia Ottaviano

In Crazy in the Kitchen: Foods, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004), Louise DeSalvo integrates her family’s past into the story of her own life—and into the broad histories of the Italian South and immigration to the United States. Implicit in her work is an understanding of how the past informs—even forms—the present. Like Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s “témoin fidèle,” necessary to “mediating between narrative and history” (101), DeSalvo is deft at showing her readers exactly how her predecessors have shaped her identity.1 She accesses this meaning, first, by watching. A scene: Two people in a kitchen. One is a man, the other, a woman. The kitchen is in Ridgefield, New Jersey. The man and the woman are old—old enough to be grandparents. They have both lost their spouses, and their grandchildren—the man’s grandson, the woman’s step-granddaughter—have arranged for them to meet. The grandchildren, two generations removed from the country, the experiences, the history of their grand1. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, History, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman write, “Joining events to language, the narrator-as- eyewitness is the testimonial bridge which, mediating between narrative and history, guarantees their correspondence and adherence to each other. This bridging between narrative and history is possible since the narrator is both an informed and honest witness [témoin fidèle]. Once endowed with language through the medium of the witness, history speaks for itself. All the witness has to do is efface himself, and let the literality of events voice its own self evidence” (101).

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parents, are hoping for their grandparents to fall in love, as they have with each other. They are hoping, at least, for their grandparents to get along. The grandparents in the kitchen are worlds apart. The girl’s grandmother is from Puglia, the boy’s grandfather, from Sicily. They only seem to have in common their nationality. The girl’s grandmother is a farm worker, a peasant woman, poorly read—a woman of superstition, who fears the malocchio, the evil eye. She is a woman as hardened as the hands with which she holds knives. The boy’s grandfather is a craftsman, a stone carver who came over from Italy to work on St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He is a learned man, well-read and respected. He is a man with opinions on rock-and-roll and politics. The woman is wearing the same tattered, unremarkable house clothes she always wears. Her apron is stained with traces of meals past. Her hair is unwashed. The man is neat. His suit is made up of three matching pieces. He wears a cravat around his starched collar. He has brought the woman flowers. The woman cooks. The man hovers. The woman stirs. The man advances. The woman stirs more vigorously. Scalding liquid splatters. The kitchen is tense, hot, and unforgiving. The man withdraws. This withdrawal is what the woman wanted. Soon, he will leave. This departure is what the woman wanted. Another scene. A boy stands on a stool and peers into a pot. He, too, is in a kitchen—his paternal grandparents’ kitchen in Johnston, Rhode Island. The boy is eight years old. He is cooking for his family for the first time. He has decided to make them seafood stew, and his grandfather has taken him to the fish market, where he has picked out blackshelled mussels, scallops, cod. The boy has been learning to cook from his mother. She is a waitress, and the years she has spent working restaurants have served her well—she has stolen secrets from the chefs whose paths she crossed and concocted a cache of her own tricks and methods. The boy watches his mother make roasts and soups. He watches the way she slices carrots, celery, garlic, tomatoes. He watches the way she adjusts the heat on a stove. He commits these lessons to his memory. Tonight is a special occasion. The boy’s parents and grandparents surround him as he stirs. His grandmother is a farm girl from Prince Edward Island—the mussels are for her—and his grandfather is a first-generation Sicilian whose father owned a bread truck in Providence. The boy’s grandfather has provided the bread for this meal; he has placed it on the cutting board beside the stove. He will be the one to cut into it. The boy’s grandfather advises him what herbs to add: cloves, thyme, sage, a bay leaf. The boy’s grandmother sets the table with silverware. The boy’s mother praises him for watching the flame. The boy’s father sings. Both of these scenes are recollections, but only the first is from DeSalvo’s Crazy in the Kitchen. The writer is present in the scene—she is one-half of the pair responsible for the setup (the other half is her future husband)—but as the scene unfolds on the page, she is hardly there at all. She is lurking in the doorway, inconspicuous, watching; she is popping into the kitchen to fetch a thing she does not need. We do not know exactly where the narrator stands, but we find that it does not matter. We trust she is leading us where we need to be led. We trust she is telling us what we need to know.

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The second recollection is mine. It is a scene I observed from my grandparents’ hallway, and the eight-year- old boy is my brother. That I remember the place I had been standing dictates how I remember the scene—it, too, an event watched—but my observations are constructed from my place in the background; I am secondary to the action unfolding. The meat of the story is in the kitchen. And so, I pay attention. In these two scenes, different in both time and location but similar in setting and form, the narrator’s place serves only as a point from which she can write. She does not figure as her characters do. She does not interfere. She does not interrupt with a demand or a question. Instead, she beholds. She witnesses. DeSalvo’s narrator is a “narrator-as-eyewitness” (Felman and Laub 101), a narrator who delivers an engaging snapshot of her past, but also offers insights into the larger history of which she and her family are but a small part. In Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo is largely reflective. She is skilled at writing on writing, and her meditations on how the piece has come into being reflect her position as witness rather than subject. But bearing witness, as DeSalvo points out, is not easy: “Art can be hard, goddamned hard. To make; to witness” (Crazy 253). Following a scene in which DeSalvo reveals her grandfather working on the Lackawanna Railroad in 1908, when he first arrives in the United States from Italy, she writes: “Here, the unexpected happens: my grandfather becomes a cook on the railroad” (71). This musing communicates to the reader multiple pieces of information: DeSalvo underscores her investment in considering her grandfather’s past. She demonstrates to the reader that history is not fixed, but in process, and that our thinking about our own history can be, and perhaps should be, an ongoing, continuous engagement. Finally, she illustrates the ability of memoir, as a genre, to jump back and forth in time, bridging, to use Felman and Laub’s term, the gap between the then and the now (101). Not only does DeSalvo address the importance of bearing witness, but she also uses it to inform her work. She uncovers the difficulty of her grandmother’s life in southern Italy through the lens of World War I: “It was 1919. Because of the war, life was harder and more dangerous in Puglia than it had ever been. The poor were poorer; the rich, richer. And it was more difficult to leave” (Crazy 77). She uses her father’s experience fighting in the Pacific during World War II to illustrate the ways in which the private vicissitudes of a single soldier reveal the brutality of war: “No way to tell what burning bodies jumped from torpedoed ships look like; no way to speak of the men who killed themselves in gruesome ways rather than face battle” (98). Her mother’s childhood battle with illness hints at a terrifying ancestral lineage: “My grandfather had heard stories of how people afflicted like my mother lost all reason. They stopped eating, and died. Or they threw themselves into rivers or off precipices. Some believed that the only cure was to dance and gyrate until you lost consciousness” (117). DeSalvo’s resolve to give her family members their voices is a driving force of her work. Through writing, through witnessing, she attends to the pain of their silence. She serves as witness to her family’s past. Felman and Laub consider the reader crucial to establishing the narrator-as-witness. The reader is, to use Felman and Laub’s term, “the belated witness” (108). The act of transmission, put into play by the writer—from event to scene to belated witness—demonstrates that even the oldest, most veiled cultural and historical anxieties can be shaped, transformed, and given purpose. Felman and Laub suggest that this type of testimony must “open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imagi-

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native capability of perceiving history” (108). What this testimony enables in the reader is the sense that “what is happening to others [is now happening] in one’s own body, with the power of sight (of insight) usually afforded only by one’s own immediate physical involvement” (108). DeSalvo, witness and vessel, invites the pain of her ancestors into her own body—her mind, the hand with which she holds her pen—in order to then externalize it, to make it real. DeSalvo, first reader of her ancestors’ past, invites her readers into a similar—simulated—relationship, pushing her ancestors’ silenced pain closer to the realm of realization. DeSalvo bears witness to traditions and to their translations—from the Italian South to Hoboken, New Jersey—as well as their generational trajectory—from her grandparents to her granddaughter. She observes her grandmother enacting the history and the traditions of her ancestors and brings these traditions into the present moment through the crafting of her narrative. “As she worked,” DeSalvo writes, “my grandmother sang Pugliese songs that sounded Greek or North African. She sang to herself, beating the insistent rhythms with her foot” (Crazy 48). Her grandfather engages in playful ritual, one flavored by the conservation of food and goods, one that DeSalvo has crafted to reveal its connection with the hardships he has experienced: “I watch my grandfather’s work with the pigeon. He dangles the head before me, teasing me. This, he won’t discard, for in this household, nothing is wasted” (67). But as often as DeSalvo looks back, she also turns her attention ahead, away from the parents of her parents, toward the children of her children, toward her granddaughter: So here is this little girl, this little child with a wise face, who seems to have seen all things, to remember all things, this child with her mother’s face, and my face, and her mother’s mother’s face, and her grandmother’s face, and the face of every woman in the world. And this child is stirring and cooking and singing through the celebrations, through the pogroms, invasions, bombings, evacuations, emigrations. (254)

The traditions of DeSalvo’s ancestors—the good as well as the unsavory—seem to be concentrated within the stirring motion of her granddaughter’s hand. In translation, these traditions, memories, circumstances, and occurrences retain their original meaning, their essence, but also take on—become mixed with— elements of the new. DeSalvo also makes anew when she bears witness to documents—factual information marked by a special brand of silence. She writes about her grandmother’s naturalization certificate to call into question the process by which immigrants are granted US citizenship. She writes of her maternal grandfather’s wedding photographs—the first, of him and DeSalvo’s biological grandmother, who died while DeSalvo’s mother was still a child; the second, of him and DeSalvo’s step-grandmother, whom her grandfather married to help care for his daughter. DeSalvo rescues the photographs from her father. She lingers with them. She knows that within them lurk things to be discovered. “When I get them,” she writes, “I clutch at them, as if, in having them, I have resurrected my grandparents. As if, in having them, I have known my grandmother. I think that if I gaze at them long enough, they will yield secrets that will help me become more myself” (59). Through her willingness to witness, DeSalvo revises the narrative of her ancestors’ longing to return to their home country and simultaneous need to stay in the United States. She returns on their behalf, but arrives elsewhere.

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This arrival is a turn and return, to herself. When she shifts the focus to herself, DeSalvo does not shy away from revealing herself at her worst. She stays in the room with her fuming self. She witnesses herself—and invites us to witness her—disrespecting her father, rebuffing her mother, lashing out at her sons. Crazy in the Kitchen is a book of bequeathings, and with the good, DeSalvo accepts the ugly. She berates her husband over unwashed spinach. She obsesses over the perfect pizza. She broods while on vacation. She writes: “When you think these things, and you cannot stop yourself from thinking these things, you hate yourself. You realize that beneath all that superficial niceness the people in your public life see—your students, the people who read your books—a truly evil person lies inside” (160). A thorough historian, DeSalvo traces patterns down to their points of origin. Down through her lineage; down to the dinner plates; down to caverns of her soul. DeSalvo reveals herself at her worst only after writing her grandparents’ stories. She historicizes a setting larger than their home to focus on the conditions that decimated the poor of the Italian South: There were swarms of mosquitoes that could engulf you, give you a hundred mosquito bites, and malaria, which could kill you. Dangerous vipers that fell out of trees and wound themselves around your neck and choked you to death. Vipers that slithered out from under rocks and struck you and poisoned you. There were tarantulas that could bite you and drive you crazy. And the only cure, my grandfather said, was to dance and dance and dance until you fell to the ground, exhausted, and then you would be cured, because the dancing had used up all the poison. (2)

This story is from another place. The words translate, but the gist is different—mystical in a way the other stories that DeSalvo relays are not. This story, in terms of the history DeSalvo shapes as a belated witness, contains rhythm, momentum, and elements of the supernatural. The story indicates the possibility of suffering harm or injury, but also gives shape to a dynamism, an energy, a vitality therein. In spite of the physical and psychological challenges they faced, DeSalvo and her ancestors are capable of great resiliency and strength. The combination of peril and celebration that DeSalvo’s grandfather speaks of, that DeSalvo herself bestows upon her readers, dates as far back as the fourteenth century. Tarantism, a mania characterized by an uncontrollable urge to dance, was a prevalent affliction that figured in ceremonies in old southern Italy. In Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy (2009), Karen Lüdtke explains the symptoms the tarantata, or tarantula victim, suffered. Lüdtke describes how the tarantata’s performance of her symptoms in a public sphere—with an audience, with witnesses—sublimates her suffering. She argues that this actualization, through the tarantata’s representation of her crisis, is critical to the alleviation of her pain and her eventual recovery. “Her crisis,” Lüdtke suggests, “[becomes] an integral part of her cure” (8).2 DeSalvo’s grandfather is the 2. According to Lüdtke, “the crisis of the tarantate involved symptoms associated with a range of physiological rhythms, ranging from the lethargic (listlessness, drowsiness, paralysis) to the hyperactive (convulsions, trembling, shaking), all of which may be seen to be out of sync with ‘healthy’ bodily rhythms of the heart, pulse, metabolism or respiration. In the ritual context, the effects of the tarantula’s poison were summoned up through audio, visual, kinaesthetic and olfac-

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keeper of this folklore, which he received, most likely, from his predecessors and then passed down to his descendants. There is danger in the stories DeSalvo’s grandfather carries. The sky is threatening; the air is thick with bugs; the ground is covered with rocks under which vipers hide, then strike. There are crevices out of which tarantulas crawl, and holes that house tiny creatures with venom potent enough to kill. There is no avoiding danger. It is omnipresent; it is ubiquitous. It is the lay of the land. It is the animals’ kingdom. It is safest to stay inside And yet, there is something about the place. As much as it wards off, it also tempts. There is risk. There is seduction. It is a hot place, a place with a pulse. Perhaps it is the way things move, with sound, with purpose. Nothing apologizes; nothing equivocates. Perhaps the way to survive is to surrender. There is no fighting the danger. The stories have been saved. Stowed. Stashed. These stories originated elsewhere. Someone tucked them away in haste. The stories themselves have traveled. They have crossed over. They have made journeys on ships with DeSalvo’s people and survived. They have been protected like relics, safeguarded like gold. The heirlooms have been passed down, though they have a particular, individual magic—the retelling of one accomplishes something the retelling of another cannot. These stories speak of another way of life. Italy against America, ancient against modern. DeSalvo draws the stories forth into the contemporary moment and sets them against her own life story. Balancing her ancestors’ pasts with her present, she encourages her reader to recognize the breadth of personal history. DeSalvo provides her readers with insights into the social and cultural climate in which her predecessors were born and lived. “There were men wild with rage at their wives or sisters,” DeSalvo writes, “who disgraced them, who dragged their women into the piazzas of the villages to beat them so that all would see they were men who could keep them in line, my grandmother said” (Crazy 3). This story rings like a timeworn tale of horror. DeSalvo graces us with happier moments, but these, too, are dense, layered—thick with the implication of time passed, places changed: My father tells me about how my grandmother always made do. How whatever she cooked—heart, tripe, lung—was good, nutritious, tasty. How she spent fifty cents a day on food, how he went to that market with her every day before she went to work and he went to school. (107)

She resuscitates the past by bringing it into the consciousness of the reader. She makes the past alive in the present moment. A scene: DeSalvo is cooking Brussels sprouts. She is, as she reports, “in her Anglomaniac period, which lasts five years” (164). She is cooking things that Virginia Woolf ate. tory stimuli, such as incessant rhythms, rapid movements, colourful ribbons or wild flowers. The afflicted was stimulated to express and accentuate her crisis, to become and enact all that which the tarantula, as an indigenous element of the Salentine fauna, was seen to embody. Her crisis became an integral part of her cure. It was made tangible, audible, visible and accessible to the senses, providing the scope for the transformation of experiences and self-perceptions, in individual, social and political terms” (8).

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Trifles. Bangers and mash. And, of course, the sprouts. She knows how she will dress them: “Simply, with a little brown butter, caraway seeds, salt and pepper” (165). And she knows what she will serve them with: “The pork chops I’m sautéing and finishing in the oven” (165). DeSalvo has calculated this meal to the letter. But then something goes wrong: “While they’re boiling, my husband and I start fighting. We fought a lot in those days, though I can’t remember what this fight was about” (165). And suddenly: “On this night, I get so angry that I pick up the pot of Brussels sprouts, and fling the Brussels sprouts (boiling water and all) at him. I don’t hit him, thank goodness. But one waterlogged sprout lands on my thigh and burns me” (165). DeSalvo cools down. The burn heals. The scar, inevitably, stays. It is more than a wound suffered during the course of one overheated evening. It is the mark of her grandmother, in Ridgefield, New Jersey, slamming pots filled with searing tripe. It is the mark of her mother, in the first house in Hoboken, serving her family misbegotten desserts. She sees the scar, and it reminds her of the women that came before her, of their anger, their hardships, their triumphs. The then and the now collide in the image of that single scar. One of the remarkable things about Crazy in the Kitchen—and there is a whole host of remarkable things—is the multiplicity of its narrative strengths and their implications. DeSalvo does not limit herself to writing in the vein of the traditions belonging exclusively to the familial, the practices that characterize her culture. She is involved in other contexts. Reading passages from Crazy in the Kitchen that describe DeSalvo’s interior life, and knowing her, too, as my teacher, I find it difficult to consider her a writer belonging to a single sphere. She is a poet, but also a biographer. She is a memoirist, but also a critic. Where she winds up seems, in many ways, antithetical to where she began. The workingclass girl from Hoboken, New Jersey; the epicurean; the Woolf scholar. In some places within the narrative, she chooses to separate these roles one from the other in order to place herself within a certain historical context. Of her childhood, DeSalvo writes, Whenever my grandfather takes care of me, he gives me wine mixed with water. He drinks his wine; I drink mine. (In high school, I will be the girl who drinks too much at parties. The girl who drinks so much that I can’t remember who took me home. The girl who drinks so much that I often pass out on the way home— once, in the middle of a four-lane highway.) (64)

Once she is no longer a child sipping her grandfather’s wine or an adolescent testing the limits of her tolerance, but an academic, an intellectual, a textual scholar, DeSalvo reveals how, rather than rejecting her family’s ethos, she will chose to become their historiographer: When my father became ill, and I feared he would soon die, I wanted to learn whatever I could about what he remembered so that I could make a record. So my family’s story would not vanish. I’d spent years writing about other people’s lives, famous writers’ lives. Why not about those of my family? (139)

“Each word in a work,” Louise teaches, “resonates against its unwritten alternative” (“Class Notes”). It is an apothegm she received from her own graduate instructor, one she is passing on to her students. It is 5:30 on a Wednesday evening, and she is getting

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us to start thinking about contrast. She is getting us to start thinking about specifics. She is getting us to start thinking. Twelve stories up, in Hunter College’s West Building, DeSalvo—Louise, to her students—sits at the head of a rectangular table, her back to the Manhattan skyline. Before class starts, she asks a student for a mint, and she flips it delicately around in her mouth before taking a small sip of water. The sun is setting. She is wearing something she has knitted. She has not yet said the word “fuck.” “Each word in a written work,” she continues, surveying each rapt face in the room and bending the kinks from a paper clip, “is there by choice, not by chance.” Twelve heads nod; faces go thoughtful; pens scratch across pages of notebooks. Louise need not work to command our attention—this is an MFA program, and we are all here by choice—but her commitment to her students is uncommon. This is a tie that borders on blind devotion, and a deal that works both ways. She gives us her all; she expects it back. There is no room, in this classroom, for bullshit. She pushes. Her job, as she states it, is to get us to writing the best work possible in the two short years that we will be here. She knows that what we are doing is difficult. That some scenes will not come easily. She knows that she will have to wrest, and pry. She knows that some will resist her, and she knows that, sometimes, some students will not like her at all. She knows that she might even have to make someone cry. But there is something larger at stake. “My job,” she says, “is to take you from little baby writers to the place where you know your work.” She thinks. “To the place where you know your working self.” Twelve heads nod; pens scribble. “My job,” she says, “is to make you grow.” 2009, a weekday afternoon. I am twenty-three years old. I am ringing a register on the checkout line of the retail store I have worked at for the past five years. I am bagging items for a customer; the store is busy; the phone rings. My co-worker interrupts me. “It’s for you.” I am annoyed. Only my family phones me at work, and rarely for anything important. Could it be my mother, calling to tell me to buy a loaf of bread on my way home? Could it be my brother, calling with a fi lthy joke I am in no mood to fi nd humorous? I roll my eyes, sigh, and accept the receiver. “Yeah?” I can’t stay on for long. My customer already looks impatient, and I don’t want to keep her waiting. “Lia?” It’s a woman’s voice, one I don’t quickly recognize. “Yeah?” I hold up my finger to my sighing customer and mouth, “I’ll be with you in one second.” “It’s Mary.” My mouth dries; my eyes widen. I know this is something big. Mary Cappello is my writing professor at the University of Rhode Island, and she has helped me apply to graduate programs. My graduate applications have been mailed; now we are waiting to hear back. I’m surprised she’s calling me—calling me at work—but it’s a point I don’t belabor. One that I can’t belabor, because she’s excited, talking before I decide what to say. “Louise has been trying to get in touch with you. You’d better check your phone. Now.”

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I hang up the phone with sweating hands. I turn back to my customer. Her eyebrows are raised. I think she looks expectant. I feel like I owe her an explanation. “I think,” I say, “I just got into grad school.” I take my break early without asking permission. I retrieve my purse and walk out to my car. I don’t check my phone until I’m sitting. There are several missed calls from the same unknown number, and a voicemail message is waiting. I start thinking I might throw up. It’s a cold day in February, but I roll down my window in hopes the fresh air will sooth me. I scroll to the number. I select “redial.” It doesn’t ring for long. A woman answers. She has a slightly raspy voice. She sounds like a woman to whom one speaks properly. I remember her saying, “It’s Louise DeSalvo.” I remember her saying, “You’ve been accepted to Hunter.” I remember her saying, “Come to New York.” I remember her saying, “I’ll give you a tour.” And I remember her saying, in a tone more serious, “I’ll take you out to lunch.” Two weeks later. Late morning in Manhattan. The sun is high over Lexington Avenue. The air smells like garbage and roasted peanuts. I hitch up my black tights, adjust the straps on my flats, and kiss my mother goodbye. “I’ll be waiting here,” my mother says. “Come meet me when you’re done.” She disappears into Neil’s Coffee Shop, a greasy spoon on the corner of East Seventieth and Lex. I’m meeting Louise half a block north, at an Italian restaurant called Bella Blu. She has asked me to arrive at twelve. I walk up slowly. I arrive too soon. I take my time on the sidewalk, beneath the blue awning, and pull invisible hairs from my coat. I had finished Vertigo the week before, and spent time studying the photo on the inside flap. I had wanted to know who to look for. But the book was published over ten years ago, and in ten years, looks can change. I have no idea how I am going to find her. I take one timid step in. With only one foot over the threshold, I can tell that this restaurant is nice. High ceilings; good lighting; starched white tablecloths on every table. From the vestibule, I spot a straight-backed woman seated at a two-top on the left. The sun glints off her silver hair. She is serious, consulting a leather planner. I think I recognize her nose. I step in. We make eye contact. She stands. I move toward her. “You must be Lia,” she says, and smiles. I nod and extend my still-gloved hand. She clasps it. “They make beautiful pizza here,” she says. Then her eyes narrow. She releases my hand. “Are you traveling alone?” I shake my head. “My mom came with me. She’s getting a burger at some place down the street.” Louise returns to her cushioned seat. She doesn’t invite me to take one of my own. She unfolds a crisp napkin, covers her lap, and sets her mouth in a line. I have not yet read Crazy in the Kitchen. I have not yet fully realized the gravity with which Louise approaches a meal; the importance with which she considers the cuisine of her ancestors, in all of its traditions and translations; the value, the immutable worth she places on family. “Honey,” she says, clasping her hands, looking at me over the rim of her glasses, “go back and get your mother.”

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Works Cited DeSalvo, Louise. “Class Notes.” Lecture, Hunter College, New York. 2009. ———. Crazy in the Kitchen: Foods, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Lüdtke, Karen. Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.

Furthering the Voyage R EC ONSIDE RING DeSALVO IN CONTEMPORARY WOOLF STUDIE S

Benjamin D. Hagen

There is something to be said for the critic who starts the reader on a journey and fires him with a phrase to shoot off on adventures of his own. — v irginia woolf

The concluding essay of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader: Second Series (1932) poses the question, “How Should One Read a Book?” In it, Woolf figures the public library as a sanctuary free from the sway of “heavily furred and gowned” academics who might try to “tell us how to read, what to read, [and] what value to place upon what we read” (Essays 5:573). Yet, near the end of this same essay, after sketching a reading program that includes forays into fiction, biography, history, poetry, and even the guilty pleasures of the “rubbish-heap” (577), Woolf returns to the matter of the literary critic, suggesting that “it may be well to turn” at last “to the very rare writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature as an art” (581). Furthermore, she qualifies this return with a surprising caveat: “They [the critics] can do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep in the shade of a hedge. We can only understand their ruling when it comes in conflict with our own and vanquishes it” (581). The relation that Woolf suggests here between the common reader and the literary critic differs only slightly from what exists, she theorizes, between reader and author (novelist, biographer, and poet) earlier in the essay. There, she famously enjoins common readers with a double imperative: “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow worker and accomplice” (573). She goes on to argue that in a time to

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come, “we [will] no longer [be] the friends of the writer; but his judges”; yet this judgment, she explains provocatively, will not come by way of a superior intellect or method but, rather, “through [a] feeling” won by way of the prior effort to approach the author on his or her own terms (580–581). While Woolf employs a more combative and even juridical vocabulary in order to figure the encounter with the literary critic (“their ruling,” “conflict,” “vanquishes”), she nevertheless retains a model of approach that struggles to hold back one’s “preconceptions” and that trains in their stead a capacity to give up preconceptions (at least provisionally)—a capacity, that is, to risk leaving oneself vulnerable to the sway and to the movement of another’s argument. What I take Woolf to mean at the end of her essay is that a reader should neither take her judgments or pleasures from other critics nor value her judgments or pleasures over those of critics, but, rather, she should take her judgments and pleasures to the work of critics as a means to see what she might still learn from them. Woolf, I should point out, does not have academic scholars in mind here (as she does at the beginning of her essay). The critics she refers to in her closing pages are “poets and novelists” such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry James, both of whom have much to offer, she thinks, “in their unconsidered” and nonsystematic “sayings” on art (581). Despite this qualification, I think it is worthwhile to risk Woolf’s advice in a reconsideration of Louise DeSalvo’s research (she is, after all, like Coleridge, James, and Woolf, also an artist). In the following pages, I return to DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (1980) and the archival labor that made this text as well as her editions of Melymbrosia (1982, 2002) possible. The purpose of this return is twofold: (1) to give a new, more precise account of the critical and theoretical implications of DeSalvo’s methodology as well as her analyses, which I claim are not only relevant but also beneficial to contemporary Woolf studies, and (2) to give an account of how this somewhat Woolfian approach to DeSalvo’s scholarship, that is, on its own terms and with my own preconceptions checked, helped me learn to read Woolf’s first novel again, as if for the first time. It is this honest engagement with DeSalvo’s readings, in short, that taught me to further her voyage: to read Woolf not so much as DeSalvo herself reads her but, rather, to read her with and against DeSalvo’s hard-won sensitivity to the overlapping contours of the style and the sadness of Woolf’s first voyage.

Between Drafts I am concerned about the formalist element in most European-born theories, which does not consider the text to be a text until it is published and pays little or no attention to drafts or revision, or contextualizes, as in some Marxist theory, only the moment of production of the text. Derrida holds that the text constantly interacts with culture and so is changed with each reading, by translation, in new contextualizations and revisions of literary history. Why aren’t the changes made in the author’s conception and gestation equally important? (Marcus xvi)

The enigmatic word “Melymbrosia” is the title that Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) began using around 1909 to refer to her first novel, which she would eventually retitle The Voyage Out in 1911 and finally publish in 1915. This initial naming inspires DeSalvo to resurrect

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this title for her two editions of an early extant draft of Woolf’s novel, the recovery and recomposition of which required a great deal of archival labor. DeSalvo’s introduction to Melymbrosia: An Early Version of The Voyage Out (1982) details the difficulties she faced and the strategies she employed in order to meet this task during the many years she spent among sheets and fragments not just of a single draft but of multiple drafts that had long been “dismantled, mutilated, cut in pieces, cancelled or overwritten” and ultimately “scattered” among the many pages that Leonard Woolf presented to the Berg Collection in 1962 (xiii). Indeed, individual tasks took months to complete. As she explains in one of her many contributions to Virginia Woolf Miscellany, “it took about three months” alone to inventory, by text collation, the differences between “the first English and First American edition” and to locate letters and diary entries from two different archives “which described the revision” process (“Two More Notes” 3). The larger and lengthier task of sorting through the Berg’s “792 typescript pages” and “216 holograph leaves” (“Introduction” xiv) meant that DeSalvo had to compose an even larger inventory that accounted for “the location of each page,” all of which had been imprecisely and chaotically arranged, as well as the physical characteristics of each sheet: type of paper, watermark, size of sheet, whether the text was typed or handwritten, perforations if any, creases indicating that the sheet had been folded, color of ink or pencil used for corrections, chapter headings, or page numbers in Woolf’s hand—in short, any information that might help sort out the drafts and indicate what sheets had been grouped together. (xv)

There were numerous obstacles to this adventure in inventory: for example, the sheer number of sheets through which to sift (some of which were bound together; many of which were loose, separate, and solitary); the fact that Woolf sometimes assigned several page numbers to a single page and also the little variety of paper types (which made it difficult to regroup the sheets sensibly). “Only thirteen types of paper,” DeSalvo explains, “are represented in the more than one thousand pages of extant material, and [only] four types account for most of the sheets” (xv). Additionally, as I mention above, DeSalvo studied and sifted through both published and unpublished diary entries, memoirs, and letters for explicit references to when Woolf might have begun or revised certain drafts but also, because this was not always clearly stated, for “indirect evidence” too (xvi). During this supplemental research, DeSalvo discovered a few occasional irregularities in the stationary Woolf used for her letter writing, irregularities that corresponded to alterations in the manuscripts themselves. Moreover, these very same letters “were written on the same type of paper” Woolf used for later drafts, prompting DeSalvo to propose that one draft “was revised at the end of 1910” and another begun “at the beginning of 1911” (xvii). Overall, this archival labor enabled DeSalvo to recompose, in addition to the extant draft she would eventually edit and publish, a full sequence of eight lost and partial drafts and revisions (though there is certainly evidence pointing to many more lost revisions).1 She ends her introduction with a detailed overview of the evidence that sup1. DeSalvo names the stages of this sequence as follows: “Lost Draft A: Winter and Spring 1908”; “Extant Draft A: Winter and Spring 1908”; “Lost Draft B: November 1908 through Early February 1909”; “Extant Draft B: ca. March 1910, Revised in 1912”; “Revision of Extant Draft B:

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ports her sequencing as well as a summary of significant shifts in plot and characterization as Woolf repeatedly revised her project between 1908 and 1915 (and even beyond, since she revised the novel again in 1920). The clean text of Melymbrosia that follows DeSalvo’s introduction does not attempt to reproduce Woolf’s handwritten corrections, additions, or strikethroughs but, rather, tries to present a complete reading copy of the novel as Woolf might have published it in 1910. Melymbrosia thus constitutes a transcription of what DeSalvo terms “Extant Draft B” and dates “ca. March 1910, Revised 1912” (“Introduction” xix). Though this is the period in the midst of which Woolf changes her title to The Voyage Out, DeSalvo uses her initial, enigmatic title “Melymbrosia” in order to maintain distinction between the published version(s) and this particular draft. Despite a resurgence of interest in the status of manuscripts in contemporary Woolf studies, which extends from James Haule and J. H. Stape’s collection Editing Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist Text (2002) to Cambridge University Press’s new and forthcoming editions of The Works of Virginia Woolf,2 this account of DeSalvo’s archival labor has itself become submerged. This is not to say that DeSalvo herself has been forgotten. Though Haule and Stape’s collection, which gathers descriptive and theoretical accounts from several Woolf editors,3 does not include a chapter on The Voyage Out, Edward Bishop’s contribution nevertheless includes a charming anecdote of a conversation with DeSalvo. Bishop relates a memory of a road trip with DeSalvo (speeding in her “black Alfa Romeo” from Harlem, New York, to New Jersey) during which he lost a private debate with DeSalvo on how best to prepare “manuscript transcriptions” (139). “Louise,” he narrates, cuts him off repeatedly as she swerves and speeds, insisting vehemently that “The Duty of the Editor Is to Edit” and that “Readers want a clean text” clear of “squiggles” or “flying brackets” or “symbols” (139). The chapter that follows this anecdote purportedly offers the argument that Bishop felt he could not express at that time: namely, that DeSalvo’s insistence that the transcription of an early draft present a clean reading copy—rather than one that attempts to reproduce the strikethroughs, alternate passages, and marginal notes of the writer—assumes “that the author’s intentions [are] paramount,” resulting in a “clear text [which] militates against an awareness of alternatives” (144). Bishop concludes that “a sense of textual life and activity that conventional printed documents” like DeSalvo’s Melymbrosia “deny” is at stake here (151) and enjoins his readers to agree that in order “to engage with Woolf’s pre-publication texts we need transcriptions that preserve their wildness” and their “sense of becoming” (154). Late October to December 1910 and After”; “Extant Draft C: 1911 and Thereafter”; “Extant Draft D: Early 1913”; and “The Proofs: Spring and Summer 1913” (xviii–xxii). She transcribes and publishes a few of these fragments as appendices to the scholarly edition of Melymbrosia (1982). 2. Rebecca Wisor writes: “A surge in interest among modernist scholars in the area of textual editing has made itself evident. . . . Hailed as a ‘new direction’ in modernist studies at the most recent meeting of the Modern Language Association, editing was also the theme of the 2008 International Conference on Virginia Woolf” (“Versioning Virginia Woolf” 497). It should be noted, however, that editing texts has been a consistent preoccupation of modernist scholars (even if that preoccupation has intensified over the past decade). George Bornstein’s edited collection Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation (1991) is evidence of this preoccupation. 3. Included in Editing Woolf are essays by Anne Olivier Bell (one of the editors of Woolf’s diaries) and Joanne Trautmann Banks (one of the editors of Woolf’s letters).

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Explicit in Bishop’s argument in Editing Woolf—as well as in other more recent engagements with DeSalvo’s research by other scholars—is that in composing and publishing a readable copy of a single draft of The Voyage Out DeSalvo implicitly encourages a reductive and impoverished sense of Woolf’s creative process.4 This critical chorus calls for transcriptions that would privilege “textual fluidity” and display “extensive prepublication fragments” in a single volume (Wisor 499). Yet rigorous attention to the “status of manuscript drafts” (Hite 46 n. 13) and “changes made in the author’s conception and gestation” between them (Marcus xvi) is precisely what DeSalvo’s work—her editions of Melymbrosia, her notes and articles in Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and her

4. Responses and references to DeSalvo’s work tend to shuttle back and forth between textual and sexual concerns (political and psychological). Bishop’s textualist approach sees a recent revisioning in Wisor’s work, which implicitly includes DeSalvo’s edition of Melymbrosia as an example of “a modernist, essentialist view of textuality that emphasizes the importance of final authorial intention” (498) and that “favor[s] a clear reading text” (500). Against this version of DeSalvo and other Woolf editors, Wisor sketches out some possibilities of a “posteclectic, postmodernist approach to textual editing,” which aims to showcase “instability and plurality” and prefers “open- endedness to closure and the display of variants to their concealment” (500). While I certainly have no objection to the desire to edit such an edition, there is a great deal of concealment in the account of Wisor and the theorists she cites insofar as they bracket the edited book from all accounts (both critical and otherwise) that may help contextualize the production of the edition. In the case of DeSalvo, these accounts (found in her articles and other books) clarify that her “clear reading text” does not at all signify a clean, linear account of Woolf’s literary production. After all, the “expanded view of textuality” that Wisor champions is itself almost half a century old, a view that DeSalvo could be said to have adopted in the very creation of her edition of Melymbrosia (532). This realization also helps point out the inadequacy of Molly Hite’s related critique of DeSalvo, though her concern is less textual and more stylistically and politically minded. She argues that Woolf’s “drafts cannot be used to put political and ethical positions ‘back into’ the published novel without a dubious theory that the drafts constituted a somehow truer, purer, or uncensored form of the novel” (525). She continues, echoing (though with crucial difference) Bishop’s and Wisor’s mutual desire for posteclectic texts: “To treat Melymbrosia as an archive of governing intention, a means of ‘clarifying’ recommended attitudes in The Voyage Out, is to disrespect Woolf’s choices in the process of revision” (525). As my essay attempts to show, DeSalvo’s work neither enjoins a reductive view of Woolf’s creative process by distilling it down into a single draft (or into two easily distinguishable drafts) nor does it adopt a crude sense of her stylistic shifts and revisions. More convincing critiques include those of Julie Taylor and Meryl Altman. The first, in her reconsideration of Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon, expresses concerns about the “models of victimhood” that DeSalvo generates in her readings not only of Barnes but also of Woolf (139). While I am not altogether convinced that such models can be directly (that is, more than thematically or figuratively) associated with “a fantasy of original textual purity” (142), this seems a more productive and more relevant route concerning the substance and the totality of DeSalvo’s work. Likewise, Altman, who does not wish “in any way to denigrate DeSalvo’s indispensable and painstaking work of recovery” (136), points out how at times her aesthetic judgments of Woolf’s earlier draft, which DeSalvo considers a finer work of art (First Voyage 154–155), tend to make “some assumptions about connections between mental health and honesty, and between honesty and ‘quality,’ which might be questionable and might also lead her to some over-readings of the Melymbrosia text” (136).

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meticulous study Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage—itself accomplishes and what it prompts scholars to do in response. “What must be stressed,” DeSalvo argues clearly in her introduction to the scholarly edition of Melymbrosia, “is that the term ‘draft’ is a convenience for the purposes of discussion. There is abundant evidence that Virginia Woolf wrote and rewrote some pages many times over; so one must not assume that each draft was an entity written at one time. Nor can one assume that the drafts were written in page number or chapter order” (“Introduction” xvi). In short, DeSalvo offers a clean reading copy neither to present the official Ur-text submerged beneath The Voyage Out nor to promote “a fantasy of textual purity” (Taylor 142); instead, she proffers a plausible snapshot or, to use a Woolfian term, a sketch of a fragment of Woolf’s long, arduous, and complex process of creation.5 The very passage that DeSalvo uses as her epigraph to Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage, drawn from A Room of One’s Own (1929), explicitly argues that the “shape” of a novel is not static but radically open. If, as Woolf suggests, a novel’s shape “starts in [its reader] the kind of emotion appropriate to it,” then “that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the ‘shape’ is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being” (quoted in First Voyage xiv). DeSalvo’s implicit purpose for placing this epigraph at the beginning of her book is to signal, I think, that she is not after some sort of origin or Ur-text that explains the whole of the published novel. Rather, she aims to trace the radically open shape of the novel’s emotional center as it shifts from draft to draft, blending and combining itself with other affects along the way. To this end, in her critical account of Woolf’s creative process, DeSalvo neither applies a borrowed conceptual apparatus (psychoanalytic or otherwise) nor reductively matches up fictional details with biographical ones in simple, analogous one-to- one relationships. Each chapter works with and between specific passages from her meticulously reorganized and reordered inventory of Woolf’s manuscript pages, which evinces Woolf’s struggle to work and rework her novel. In this sense, DeSalvo approaches The Voyage Out—in both editions of Melymbrosia as in Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage—as a shape-shifting text in concert with and sensitive to the equally shifting lives of Woolf and her intimates as well as a whole (again, equally shifting) assemblage of literary contexts and allusions. In other words, DeSalvo approaches Woolf’s first novel as a fundamentally dialogic text, one that converses—explicitly and immanently—with and among other texts (both literary and lived) and with itself, modifying itself over and over again in a variety of striking ways. One misses the nuance of this approach, won in predigitized archives, in the work of Christine Froula, a premier Woolf scholar. Her highly and deservedly praised Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant- Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (2006) offers one of the richest recent accounts of Woolf’s published and unpublished work. Yet, in her analyses of Woolf’s life and work she does not account for explicit differences in style, tone, characterization, and critique that Woolf made (whether intentionally or not) during her 5. It is interesting to me that critics of DeSalvo’s editing technique read her decision to produce a clean transcription of Woolf’s manuscript pages as a gesture of archival suppression. I find it interesting because such a reading itself is a gesture of suppression insofar as it brackets its critique solely to DeSalvo’s edited volume and ignores her archival accounts and critical texts.

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creative process. As Molly Hite points out, Froula quotes The Voyage Out and DeSalvo’s edited Melymbrosia in parallel, as if they constituted the intentional whole of one unified, uniform text.6 To represent DeSalvo’s research as privileging a notion of a primary, uniform text, however, misses that the totality of her research—the years of archival, editorial, and critical labor—expresses nothing if not an insistent and sensitive awareness of the movement and perpetual unfolding of Woolf’s stylistic subtleties and complexities. DeSalvo’s critical work, moreover, explicitly offers a theory of fiction that requires one to account for a novel not as a finished, intended whole but as a process of modification. In her conclusion to Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage, she writes: Virginia Woolf once described The Voyage Out as a harlequinade and at another time spoke of her fiction as if it were a masquerade for autobiography. One can conceptualize her creation of The Voyage Out in the terms with which she herself described it. In the earliest stages, Woolf established the emotional center of the story—the necessity of a young woman’s death before her marriage because she has been both unfaithful and overardently attached to a man identified with her father. Then Woolf rewrote Melymbrosia by reattiring it: it became The Voyage Out. She kept the novel’s core but it became less visible, less accessible, not because it had been obliterated, but because she had dressed it differently, with so many other and distracting accessories, that it became very difficult to see. More importantly, its emotional strength and artistic integrity became disguised. The result was a draft which now was a modification of that early design, but a modification which amounted to a masquerade. (156)

One need not concur with DeSalvo’s argument here in order to see that she in no way adheres to a theory of mere subtractive repression. The changes that The Voyage Out undergoes from ideation in 1908 to completion in 1915 (and further revision in 1920) do not obliterate its shape—recall the epigraph from A Room of One’s Own—but modify, adjust, and reattire the perspective from which one approaches this shape, opening it to dimensions that, for DeSalvo, dilute the intensity of earlier drafts. What is important to note here is that The Voyage Out is not a masquerade of Melymbrosia; rather, DeSalvo makes it plain that each draft is itself a masquerade of “writing biography” (First Voyage 157). In this sense, the finished draft is far from a reduction for DeSalvo; it is a complex and “curious amalgam of two stages of the novel’s earlier phases (themselves disguises), feverishly but imperfectly fused, rather than a newly- created stage” (158). The model of authorship that DeSalvo builds here emerges component-by- component through a trained and scholarly sensitivity to Woolf’s developing and self- differentiating technique as well as to the upheavals, changes, traumas, successes, and violences in the artist’s life. The correspondence between life and art may—in isolated passages of this text—display an unconvincing one-to- one relation, but such moments come after pages 6. In a much earlier essay, published some twenty years before Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant- Garde, Froula explains that she accepts DeSalvo’s “view that much valuable material was submerged in the transformation of Melymbrosia into The Voyage Out” and thus will “treat the two versions as a single composite text” (89). This justification, however, actually misses the impetus behind DeSalvo’s project and misreads DeSalvo’s theory of “masquerade.” Moreover, it assigns to DeSalvo a reductively linear narrative of Woolf’s creative process.

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that detail the phasings, fusings, and transfigurations of Woolf’s allusive structure, characterization, and affective center. While certain pages of this text may seem unwarrantedly certain of their claims, I cannot think of a book on Woolf that seems on the whole so aware of itself as a speculative analysis. The rhetoric of DeSalvo’s arguments—which are themselves riddled with the words “perhaps,” “appears,” and “seems” as well as the phrase “can be read” (as in “this passage” or “this connection” or “this biographical fact can be read”)—carefully emplaces its more provocative claims at the conclusions not only of each chapter but also each analytical section, making these provocations both a passage to and a prompt for further analysis. The closing pages of her chapter “ ‘The Voyage Out’: 1911–1915,” for instance, meticulously follow characterological shifts among drafts, leading up to her claim that Rachel Vinrace’s death at the end of the novel “is the logical extension of her response to Richard Dalloway’s kiss” in its early chapters (First Voyage 102). This succinct conclusion prompts a brief summary of the preceding sections that ends with an explicit critique: “Woolf’s reclothing of Rachel Vinrace as an innocent victim rather than as a woman both fascinated with and repelled by her own sexuality . . . robbed [Rachel] of her vitality as a character and . . . seriously undermined the fundamental structure of [Woolf’s] novel” (102). This critique prompts yet another section that turns from the novel to its author’s life. Here, DeSalvo succinctly composes—as Woolf often does in her own essays—fragments of a life: diary entries, readings of “slight” (104) revisions of manuscript pages, and a swift narrative of Woolf’s failing health, all leading to Woolf’s relapse “the day before the publication” of The Voyage Out on “26 March 1915,” which put the author in a “nursing home” for the third time since she began the project years earlier (109). I note these elements of DeSalvo’s argument not because the use of Woolf’s diaries and letters is rare in Woolf studies but because the way in which DeSalvo arranges these texts and materials is itself programmatic of her book as a whole. Her claims may remain unsettling and, even, ultimately unverifiable, but the specificity with which DeSalvo tethers her claims to interesting and even surprising revisions suggest that they are nevertheless plausible and that Woolf’s recurring bouts of illness as she worked on her first novel are themselves tied to a past that continues to be present in ever-new arrangements throughout her life. It is in this sense that DeSalvo’s method prefigures contemporary genetic and textual theories and methods. More than this, I think, she prefigures the “comparative” methodology that modernist studies is now eagerly taking up.7 Though the term “comparative” tends to connote cross- cultural or transnational research, the totality of DeSalvo’s work helps us revise (and thus supplement) the important question that Susan Stanford Friedman and Rita Felski pose in an issue of New Literary History: “Why are contemporary discussions of comparison oriented toward questions of space rather than time?” (vii). A DeSalvoesque revision of this question might read, “Might contemporary discussions of comparison attend to the ‘intra’ in addition to the ‘trans,’ ‘cross,’ ‘inter,’ and ‘multi’?” DeSalvo’s potential contribution to comparative logic also helps extend Meryl 7. Though many articles and books could be cited to evidence this trend in modernist studies, the recent publication of Mark Wollaeger’s 750-page edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, a sourcebook of comparative research, should suffice here.

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Altman’s recent point that “texts from the same ‘hand’ ” differ dramatically from each other (133), for Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage shows that even a single work differs radically from itself. What DeSalvo’s critics so often miss, then, is that the totality of her work exemplifies an active, comparative paradigm that might serve them as a concrete model of a sensitive approach to the movements of creative processes. Again, revising the words of Friedman and Felski, DeSalvo “offer[s] [a] sustained [even if implicit] reflection on the vicissitudes and complexities of comparison, as a mode of thought central to everyday experience, literary expression [and creation], and disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary knowledge” (ix).

Final Matters: Reading Sadness and Style With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age. (Woolf Essays 4:50–51)

The insights of DeSalvo’s methodology and analysis bring me to two matters with which I wish to end: namely, sadness and style. These are not untouched subjects in Woolf studies, of course. And yet, while plenty of studies offer detailed analyses of Woolf’s style and meditations on a kind of sadness in her work (whether in the guise of grief, mourning, depression, trauma, elegy, or the like), it is Virginia’s Woolf First Voyage that best weaves them as inseparable components insofar as it teaches me to sense an affect of sadness woven into Woolf’s style as well as a charm in her sometimes overpowering sadness. The sadness to which I refer here is not just the affective dimension of a particular traumatic event but something more radical, more immanent, more fundamental to Woolf’s life and work. I want to linger now with the relation between sadness and style, and to that end I focus primarily on DeSalvo’s readings of Helen Ambrose’s grief at the beginning of The Voyage Out as well as the death of Rachel Vinrace at its end. DeSalvo is at her most persuasive, I think, when analyzing Woolf’s shifting characterization, especially in regard to the character Helen Ambrose. Of note are the alterations that the novel’s early pages undergo from draft to draft, pages in which Helen sobs, “leaning her elbows on the balustrade” and “shield[ing] her face from the curious” eyes of passersby (Voyage Out 10). In the published version, DeSalvo explains, “one learns nothing about [the] causes” of this grief, for Helen’s “present sadness is not connected” explicitly “with any experiences” (First Voyage 81). This early episode, then, remains cryptic and mysterious. In Melymbrosia, however, Woolf details at length the cause of Helen’s despair: “Tears dropped when the consciousness came over her, like a gust of pain, that her arms no longer closed upon the bodies of two small children” (Melymbrosia 3). These pages describe, again as DeSalvo puts it, “an irresponsible and infantile parent” who “is more comfortable thinking that she cannot return to her children than she is in realizing she will not because she does not want to” (First Voyage 37). This sadness, it would seem, is not altogether sad; it is an affected, stylized sadness.

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The greatness of DeSalvo’s argument, however, lies not just in this diagnosis but in the way she lays out the thematic, symbolic, and intercharacterological effects of the shift in Helen from a mother suffering a convenient grief to a woman caught in a cryptic one. The most immediate and longest ranging effect of this change in Helen from Melymbrosia to The Voyage Out is the framing of her niece Rachel, the purported heroine of the novel. In the early drafts, Helen is immediately “envious of Rachel’s high spirits” and reacts to this envy with a move of redefinition (First Voyage 38). “In the space of one day,” DeSalvo writes, “Helen has redefined Rachel as an unfeeling innocent” in need of protection and “is willing (and able) to protect Rachel” from the world of men “only insofar as it makes Rachel dependent” upon her (39). But in the later drafts Rachel is always already presented as a victim, not merely a falsely diagnosed one. Thus Helen moves from being an “active predator” (41) who compels and coerces Rachel to exist under her false influence to a “self- denying mother” whose “repressed hostility” prompts her to compete with the men of the novel “for Rachel’s attentions” (82, 84). Again, one need not accept the conclusions that DeSalvo comes to here. Yet the strength of her critical account of Woolf’s revisions and allusive structure prompts one to have to do something with DeSalvo’s claims, to work, that is, with the complex shifts from Melymbrosia to The Voyage Out, and not to turn dismissively from them. I admit that I always found the early pages of Melymbrosia taxing and far less compelling than the corresponding pages (trimmed down a great deal) in The Voyage Out. Consider the following: Tears dropped when the consciousness came over her, like a gust of pain, that her arms no longer closed upon the bodies of two children. Then the physical desire would be replaced by the memory of the words. “We saw a dog with a bandage on its leg, mummy.” Those were the words, which her son had suddenly spoken after good bye had been said, as she left the room. She being gone, the nurse would answer him. He expected her to come back. He might feel lonely. To leave them for four months was intolerable pain. The wild animal in her determined to go back. Nevertheless though feeling a rush all through her, she stood still weighted down as if her feet were cast in lead, by the knowledge that to go back was impossible. She did not remember why, but she knew that it was. There was no reason, life being a compromise. (Melymbrosia 3)

For years, this passage from Melymbrosia seemed far too melodramatic and monodramatic for a writer who would later learn to express the manifold source of depressions and excitations. Yet, DeSalvo’s reading shows me something else, something that my own limitations had missed: The introductory sequence begins with loneliness and ends with a philosophical statement. The focus lies not so much in the presentation of Helen’s feelings or thoughts, but in seeing how one feeling leads to another: how a drive becomes rationalized; how an impulse is controlled—in short, in demonstrating how thought and feeling interact, how complicated and contradictory even a few moments of one’s internal life can be. This, the hallmark of the mature Woolf method, was evident very early. (First Voyage 37)

This reading discloses a mature “Woolfian” style and sensibility at work long before Woolf’s fiction of the 1920s (Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse). Moreover, it persuasively readjusts my own perspective—sensitive as it has become to modernist

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techniques of obfuscation, redirection, obscurity, allusiveness, and so on—which completely missed the powerful compositional movements of the earlier version of Helen’s grief. Indeed, these are the stirrings of a characterization that will come to have, as I have already suggested, a great effect on how DeSalvo reads Rachel Vinrace as well as the difference between Woolf’s many versions of Rachel Vinrace. Yet it is this learned appreciation that prompts me to ask how else one might read Woolf’s choice to excise an explicit account of Helen’s grief in her later drafts. It is not necessarily the case, I think, that Woolf was “disguising important elements of [her] meaning” (First Voyage 63). Rather, I suggest that by obscuring Helen’s sadness in The Voyage Out, Woolf establishes an unnerving yet irreducible and inescapable sadness— “a sadness at the back of life.” She composes, in other words, an affect that lingers as a kind of residue throughout the novel, precisely because it cannot be located in any one source: neither in a single event nor in a unique character. It lingers, then, not so much as a cause or even a theme but an immanent potential, a movement that may erupt at any moment. Even if one agrees with DeSalvo that this example of “repression” is programmatic of Woolf’s revisionary practices, it is now clear to me that it must also constitute an essential step in Woolf’s philosophical development, that is, her cultivated sense—cultivated through her writing and her reading—that one comes close again and again to the blows of this sadness and that to survive such blows one must learn to compose, to create, and to gain a kind of imaginative and reasonable power over such contingencies. One senses this sadness, for instance, in the parenthetical statements in the middle of To the Lighthouse (1927), many of which declare, almost coldly, the deaths of main characters presented in the first part of the novel. While these statements appear cold, they nevertheless bespeak this immanent sadness, the blows of which erupt accidentally, even arbitrarily, as the natural world passes indifferent to such blows. This rereading, which is admittedly not as developed as DeSalvo’s, nevertheless brings me to my major critique of her analysis, a critique learned not from others but learned, rather, in the very reading of her own pages. This critique concerns the death of Rachel Vinrace. In her erudite and exhaustive tracking of Woolf’s thematic, symbolic, allusive, and intercharacterological structures, DeSalvo conflates the planar elements of this work, reading the cause and the meaning of Rachel’s death in structures that are neither causal nor easily insightful when thinking about how and why Rachel’s death occurs.8 In other words, the allusive and thematic structures that DeSalvo convincingly recomposes from the unordered manuscript pages of Woolf’s novel she goes on to attach unproblematically to the causally linked events of the novel’s plot. No doubt, Rachel’s death relates in certain iterations and versions of the novel “to the difficulty of communication, to her inability to communicate with her father, to the impossibility of her communicating to him the terror and agony of being a woman” (First Voyage 141) and “with her kissing Dalloway and tumbling with Helen in the grass” (135). But what 8. For instance, late in her book, DeSalvo reads a single shift in allusion as a key to reading the “full significance” of Rachel’s death. Late in her revisions, Woolf changes an allusion to Agamemnon to an allusion to Antigone. DeSalvo explains, “Like Antigone, whose choice was to die, whose choice was to be walled up underground because of her love for the dead members of her family, Rachel has similarly chosen death” (153).

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the nature of this relation is goes untheorized in DeSalvo’s readings, and the relations are thus reduced to a causality, as if the reason Rachel becomes ill and dies is locatable in her earlier erotic liaisons or in literary allusions that produce a thematic unity without necessarily having any effect on the elements of the novel’s plot. Perhaps the death of Rachel, like Helen’s mysterious grief, is utterly wrapped up in an immanent sadness without significance, a sadness that is itself overwhelmingly saddening not because it can be attributed to imbalanced power structures or the repression or redirection of libidinal energies but because, in spite of these dramas, Rachel’s death is utterly random, utterly without explanation, and thus radically and utterly contingent. In many ways, then, my reading resonates with the passages from the earliest manuscript pages of Woolf’s project (in which Rachel is named Cynthia). According to DeSalvo, these pages produce a powerful sense of the late Mrs. Vinrace—that is, Cynthia’s / Rachel’s mother—as a “powerful, continuing presence . . . like the energizing, yet potentially dangerous power of a natural phenomenon” (First Voyage 17). Here, DeSalvo cites a fascinating passage: “all incidents when a person of such magnitude dies, are as sparks from one immense furnace, enduring, inexplicable as the sun” (17). In many ways, this early passage lays the groundwork for how we as readers may eventually come to feel in reading the death of Rachel in the novel Woolf finished and published some seven years later, an event that renders all other events in its plot mere sparks, overwhelming one with its endurance and its sheer inexplicability. Perhaps this reading resonates more with that of Thomas Caramagno, who reads at the heart of The Voyage Out “a deliberate strategy to invite the reader to experience a failed reading and to deal with the frustration of pointlessness when critical acumen meets an intractable text,” but it is a reading that I have come to learn not through my encounters with his work, but that I have come to learn, rather, reading DeSalvo’s archival and textual criticism (157). All this is to say that DeSalvo teaches me how to read, how to confront, and how to linger with elements of Woolf’s life and work that have always unnerved me, elements that I (and others) have always sought to revivify by reconfiguring them into radical (and even politically laced) acts of resistance, that is, as so many attempts to speak truth to power. In other words, as a young Woolf scholar so taken with Woolf’s life and work, so completely transformed by it, I often desire (and not without good reason or evidence) to read her madness, her abuse, and her suicide as acts or occasions of critical and even theoretical counterdiscourse. What is so rich about DeSalvo’s work, then, is that it teaches me to read and to feel such things— even if only occasionally or temporarily—as merely (though still intensely) sad. Far from rebranding Woolf as purely passive, this admission to let oneself feel saddened by such things allows one to view Woolf, as DeSalvo does, with all the more admiration. She writes in her preface to her later edition of Melymbrosia (2002), “The young Virginia Stephen who wrote Melymbrosia was heroic. She was an incest survivor who wrestled throughout her life with its aftermath in a society that did not offer her a paradigm for understanding what had happened to her. This, instead, she did herself” (xxvi). Indeed, Woolf wrestled with a great deal that her society did not have a paradigm to explain (or to explain away). Perhaps to further my voyage with Woolf and with those who have criticized, admired, and studied her far longer than I have is not to achieve a readymade or foreseen goal or to correct those with whom I find myself disagreeing but to turn back, to the side, ahead, beneath, and / or above . . . in short,

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to turn to others as a means to admire and to revere. This would be a further voyage, which DeSalvo herself prefigures in Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage, through a history of reading.

Works Cited Altman, Meryl. “Posthumous Queer: Hemingway Among Others.” The Hemingway Review 30, no. 1 (2010): 129–141. Bishop, Edward. “The Alfa and the Avant-texte: Transcribing Virginia Woolf’s Manuscripts.” In Editing Virginia Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist Text, ed. James M. Haule and J. H. Stape, 139–157. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Caramagno, Thomas C. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. DeSalvo, Louise. “Introduction: Recovery of the Text of Melymbrosia.” Melymbrosia by Virginia Woolf: An Early Version of The Voyage Out. Ed. Louise DeSalvo, xiii–xliii. New York: New York Public Library, 1982. ———. Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980. ———. “The Voyage Out: Two More Notes on a Textual Variant.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 5 (1976): 3–4. ———. “ ‘A Wound in My Heart’: Virginia Stephen and the Writing of Melymbrosia.” Introduction to Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia, ix–xxvii. San Francisco: Cleis, 2002. Felksi, Rita, and Susan Stanford Friedman. “Introduction.” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (2009): v–ix. Froula, Christine. “Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5, no. 1 (1982): 63– 90. Hite, Molly. “The Public Woman and the Modernist Turn: Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Elizabeth Robins’s My Little Sister.” Modernism / Modernity 17, no. 3 (2010): 523–548. Marcus, Laura. Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988. Taylor, Julie. “Revising The Antiphon, Restaging Trauma; or, Where Sexual Politics Meet Textual History.” Modernism / Modernity 18, no. 1 (2011): 125–148. Wisor, Rebecca. “Versioning Virginia Woolf: Notes Toward a Posteclectic Edition of Three Guineas.” Modernism / Modernity 16, no. 3 (2009): 497–536. Wollaeger, Mark. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1925–1928. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1994. ———. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929–1932. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. New York: Mariner, 2010. ———. Melymbrosia. Ed. Louise DeSalvo. San Francisco: Cleis, 2002. ———. The Voyage Out. New York: Harcourt, 1948.

The Context of Louise DeSalvo’s Impact I N C EST IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S BIOGRAPHY

Mark Hussey

I was immensely pleased by your letter, and I think I’d rather please you than anyone, if only because I feel that its [sic] all your doing if I have any wits at all. Where should I have been if it hadn’t been for you, when Hyde Park Gate was at its worst? You must admit the Apes were a fair handful in those days. I’m longing to hear what else you think, when you come to the end—if you ever do. I’m a little surprised that it gives you the horrors. When I was writing it [Night and Day], I didn’t think it was much like our particular Hell—but one never knows. — v irginia woolf to va n e s s a b e l l , o c t o b e r 27 , 1919

“Virginia Woolf” the cultural icon—not to be confused with the modernist writer of that name, despite a large degree of overlap between the two—was given wide currency by the New York production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1962. With the London production in 1964, the fame of her name spread, and in 1966 a film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton brought the name “Virginia Woolf” into the consciousness of many more thousands of people who had never read a word that Woolf wrote. In her richly detailed account Virginia Woolf Icon, Brenda Silver remarks that the movie “transformed Virginia Woolf into a household name. Even if you hadn’t seen the film . . . you were . . . likely to have heard of it . . . . From this moment on, and the point cannot be overstated, ‘Virginia Woolf’ acquired an iconicity that exists independently of her academic standing or literary reputation” (9).

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For American women aspiring to a professional academic life as the second wave women’s movement gathered momentum in the early 1960s, Woolf became a powerful icon of a different kind, one whose writing and life story offered not only a trenchant critique of patriarchal values and practices, but also a model of woman devoted to the life of the mind. Louise DeSalvo has written that around the time Albee’s play opened on Broadway, she sat as a student in Carol Smith’s classroom at Douglass College in New Jersey and there learned “to love Virginia Woolf.” She wrote: “I observe that it is possible to be a woman, to be brilliant, to be working, to be happy, and to be pregnant. And all at the same time” (“Puttana” 48). One result of the influence of second wave feminism on Woolf’s steady rise in status in the 1970s and 1980s was to make the study of her work virtually synonymous with feminist literary criticism. Patricia Joplin, for example, wrote in 1983 that it would be hard to find any major work of American feminist theory, particularly literary theory, that is not to some degree indebted to A Room of One’s Own. . . . There Woolf provided virtually every metaphor we now use. She made available a set of questions, a way of asking them, a possible vision of what lay behind and beyond women’s silence. (4)

Although some feminist critics have warned against drawing too much authority from Woolf, her fundamental importance to the structures of American feminist literary criticism is undeniable. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s three-volume War of the Words, as well as Kate Millett’s groundbreaking Sexual Politics, are Woolf’s direct descendants in the necessary work that began in the late 1960s of rewriting literary history to include women and of examining the effect on literature of what Woolf termed in A Room the “straight dark bar” of the masculine ego. Woolf’s metaphors, and the issues they illuminate, continue to make their presence felt in women’s writing, and in writing about women’s writing. Phrases from A Room such as “we think back through our mothers if we are women,” “no common sentence ready for her use,” “women as looking glasses reflecting man at twice his natural size,” “Chloe likes Olivia,” “Anon . . . was often a woman,” or “interruptions there will always be” have provided a conceptual shorthand for several generations of feminist critics in the United States. In the early 1970s, there was often an intense identification with Woolf among women in the American academy. Ellen Hawkes Rogat describes making what she termed a “pilgrimage” to the Berg Collection, the major repository of Woolf’s manuscripts at the New York Public Library: “In a strange way,” she wrote, “her experiences and mine began to reverberate. Not only did her thoughts structure mine, not only were my feelings so often filtered through hers, but I also began to understand, almost vicariously, her responses to experience” (1). Echoing Woolf’s account in A Room of studying in the British Library, Rogat recounted being across the table from a “scholar . . . who berated his wife, in a strained library whisper, for copying a manuscript too slowly” (1). For DeSalvo in the 1970s, even being allowed into this “sacred recess where . . . I would soon sit next to all those famous literary scholars whose work . . . I had read and do work of . . . my own” was her version of “The American Dream” (“Puttana” 36). Through her association not only with feminist literary criticism but also with the narratives of women’s lives that were privileged through consciousness-raising, Woolf assumed a central position in the turbulent cultural politics within American universi-

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ties in the early 1970s. However, just at the moment feminists were working to codify women’s “ways of knowing,” women’s life-writing, and women’s history, American universities were importing radical new theories of depersonalization, primarily in the form of translations of Continental European theorists. Roland Barthes’s announcement in 1968 of “The Death of the Author” was a profound challenge to what Nancy Miller has described as “the question of female subjectivity, the formation of a female critical subject” (103). Nevertheless, workers in what Domna Stanton termed “that post Woolfian ‘room of our own’ we call Women’s Studies” (132) were busily researching women’s lives, designing courses around the work of women writers, and beginning to establish a female literary canon. So when Michel Foucault, in a famous essay, asked, “What difference does it make who is speaking?” those who were thinking back through Woolf as their literary foremother answered that it made a very significant difference indeed. Relations between biography and fiction were of continual, intense interest to Virginia Woolf, who retained throughout her life an ambivalent attitude toward the possibilities of biography, and often played with the generic boundaries between fiction and biography in a manner that continues to infuriate some critics.1 Among her very earliest works were fictional biographies, or histories, such as “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.” Her essays on the relations between fact and fiction, and especially her own fiercely contested biography, played a significant role in the transformation of autobiography and biography studies that also began in the 1970s.2 Linda Anderson has pointed out that “throughout her work, in both fiction and non-fiction, Woolf was profoundly concerned with the problems of how to write a life, particularly a woman’s life” (13), and the French critic Daniel Ferrer has questioned whether it is even possible “in Virginia Woolf’s case, to separate the text and what is outside it, the writing and the life” (quoted in Anderson 49). As Anderson explains, “Woolf’s radicalism and importance as an autobiographer is precisely the extent to which she understood the connection between identity and writing and the need to deconstruct realist forms in order to create space for the yet to be written feminine subject” (13). In the often bitter opposition between “essentialist” feminism and “social construction” theory, Woolf’s writings have appealed to both camps. The dynamism of Woolf’s theorizing in works such as Three Guineas, as well as in the innovative narrative structures of her fiction, extended also to the autobiographical subject embodied in her letters, diary, and memoirs, making her an exemplary figure for an American feminism perennially negotiating the divide between equality and difference, between the urge to deconstruct and eradicate sexual difference, and to emphasize that difference as a political strategy. Concurrent with this tumult in the academy, of course, was the upheaval in society more generally that the women’s movement had brought about. As Elizabeth Wilson

1. See, for example, Ray Monk’s “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography and Reality” and see my response to Monk in “Virginia Woolf: After Lives.” 2. It is hard to think of another modern writer for whom so many biographies exist. Here is just a selection: Quentin Bell (1972); Phyllis Rose (1978); Roger Poole (1978); Lyndall Gordon (1984); Shirley Panken (1987); Alma Bond (1989); Louise DeSalvo (1989); Thomas Caramagno (1992); James King (1994); Panthea Reid (1996); Hermione Lee (1996); Mitchell Leaska (1998); Herbert Marder (2000); and Julia Briggs (2005).

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has noted, incest was for many years “deemed so rare . . . that it hardly seemed worth talking about” (35). This situation altered dramatically in the 1980s with the publication of such signal works as Florence Rush’s The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children (1980), Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman’s Father-Daughter Incest (1981), Ellen Bass and Louise Thornton’s edited volume I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse (1983), and Diane Russell’s The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (1986), all of which DeSalvo drew upon in Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work.3 Also relevant to the context within which DeSalvo’s iconoclastic 1989 book on Woolf appeared was what would come to be termed the “feminist sexuality debates,” or more colloquially, the “sex wars.” 4 The feminist infighting about sexuality and its relation to violence and danger was brought to a wider public consciousness in April 1982 at the Scholar and the Feminist conference at Barnard College, when antipornography feminists picketed the event in protest against the presence of speakers identified with the lesbian s / m movement. In a review- essay of several books on sexuality for Feminist Studies, published that spring, Martha Vicinus had written that “the present state of sexual studies is exciting and promising in ideas, historical understanding, and insight into present conditions” (135). Looking back to this review several years later, B. Ruby Rich remarked that when Vicinus wrote, she could not have known “that her article would appear simultaneously with the disappearance of the landscape it described” (Rich 526). The confrontation at the gates of Barnard on April 24, 1982, marked a turning point in the transformation of a landscape wherein feminist work on sexuality proceeded at a scholarly pace and with academic tolerance for different points of view, a landscape that is, where “academic” and “political” were mutually exclusive terms. The women planning the Barnard conference the previous fall had noted that the “feminist movement [was] in a political crisis, in part concerning sexuality” (Alderfer 13), and in the ensuing arguments of that political crisis, the issues of testimony, of naming, and of whom to believe would become acute and divisive. DeSalvo’s widely reviewed book thus reached a feminist readership already divided over questions of sexuality, harm, testimony, and memory. Her work is a centrally important contribution to the formation of Virginia Woolf as icon, but it also has had farreaching influence within Woolf studies and, consequently, on those whose first (or only) encounter with Woolf is in a classroom. Given Woolf’s iconicity, it is typical for students beginning to read her work to know only that she was sexually abused and that she committed suicide. DeSalvo’s thesis, baldly stated in her book’s first sentence, continues to mark a dividing line within Woolf studies, and especially within its enormous biographical subsidiary, tacitly demanding either allegiance to or repudiation of that thesis: “Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child; she was an incest survivor” (Impact 1). As Rebecca Sutcliffe noted in 1993, “Embedded in the critical reaction to 3. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis’s The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1988), the “Bible of the American incest-recovery movement” (Wilson 49), was published the year before Impact. 4. See, for example, Ann Ferguson’s “Sex War: The Debate Between Radical and Libertarian Feminists.”

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DeSalvo’s project is the question of who has the power to name an act and to evaluate its effects” (157). Within Woolf studies, “incest” and “sexual abuse” are words that continue to trigger impassioned argument, most often around speculation over the consequences of what Woolf herself, after all, described as something “I have no motive for lying about” (“Sketch” 69). Working on Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon, DeSalvo had noticed similarities between its language and images “accounted for by the incestuous experience of the central character Miranda” (Impact xii) and those in Woolf’s writing. Beginning with the hypothesis that Woolf might “be tracing how life felt to her as a child who had been sexually abused” (xii), DeSalvo soon expanded the scope of her book to include a discussion of Victorian childrearing practices. Impact is, therefore, a biographical interpretation of Woolf’s writing that traces a substantial narrative of sexual abuse embodied in her fiction, as well as a description of Woolf’s family, the Stephens, as a paradigm of Victorian dysfunction. “What happened to Woolf,” DeSalvo wrote, “is far more common than had ever been imagined” (8).5 Indicating the prescience of DeSalvo’s approach, Mary Jean Corbett has recently pointed out that although Woolf did draw upon her own experience, she also read widely in the biographies of Victorian daughters: “Woolf came to interpret her own first family situation as symptomatic of a dysfunction within her culture, and she used all of the tools at her disposal to diagnose it” (177). The first part of Impact devotes a chapter to each of Woolf’s sisters, Laura, Stella, and Vanessa. Laura Stephen, the daughter of Leslie Stephen’s first marriage to Minny Thackeray, is depicted by DeSalvo as having been an example to the young Virginia Stephen of what might happen to her should she “misbehave” (Impact 25). Laura taxed the patience of her parents to such an extent that she was eventually institutionalized, but DeSalvo speculated that some of the symptoms Laura exhibited—“choking, rages, doing poorly at reading although she knew how to read” (Impact 33)—were congruent with accounts of the symptoms of victims of sexual abuse (a speculation corroborated by Elizabeth Wilson, who writes that “the effort to maintain the appearance of normality, even achievement, is a source of significant stress in the lives of many victims of abusive childhood experiences. The maintenance of such appearances often requires a strenuous effort to repress rage” [49]). Stella, the daughter of Julia Stephen and her first husband, Herbert Duckworth, is presented by DeSalvo as worn into submission by her mother’s harsh treatment of her, and prey to “mad” cousin James Kenneth Stephen, whose pornographic poems DeSalvo reads as implying Stella’s rape by him. Furthermore, DeSalvo suggests that following Julia’s death, Leslie Stephen may have involved Stella in a sexual relationship. A chapter on Vanessa Bell, the first daughter born to Leslie and Julia Stephen, explores her record of depression in letters and autobiographical writings, and suggests she experienced incestuous abuse similar to that described by Virginia. DeSalvo also presents Vanessa’s daughter Angelica Garnett’s 5. Wilson (1995) remarks of “important historians of middle- class sexuality” of the Victorian period such as Peter Gay, Steven Marcus and Michael Mason that it “would have been interesting to see what they might have discovered if a concern for child sexual abuse had also animated their investigations” (44).

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memoir (Deceived with Kindness) as further evidence of the family pattern of abuseinduced depression.6 In the remaining two parts of Impact, with the Stephen household established as conforming to the pattern typical of incestuous families as described in the research published throughout the 1970s and 1980s, DeSalvo focused her attention on Virginia Woolf’s own accounts of her childhood and adolescence in both fiction and nonfiction. DeSalvo reads stories Woolf wrote as a teenager, autobiographical fragments, as well as her diary and her late, incomplete memoir “A Sketch of the Past,” as an account of growing up in an abusive household where violence and sexual threat were pervasive. Impact was explicitly a rebuttal of existing biographies of Woolf such as those by Rose, Bell, and Gordon (see note 2) that had depicted Woolf’s family life as an idyll shattered only by the premature deaths of her mother, brother, and half-sister. DeSalvo’s biography of Woolf has been bitterly attacked by Woolf’s descendants, by critics and by journalists; it has also been hailed as a breakthrough not only in Woolf studies but in the writing of women’s lives. What often has remained unexamined, however, is the context within which DeSalvo’s Impact was published. Janice Haaken has argued that in the 1980s “there was a decisive shift from rape to incest as paradigmatic of women’s sexual oppression” (126). Even before that, as Ian Hacking points out, in the 1970s the “public conception of child abuse and neglect was shifted to sexual abuse and incest” (Rewriting 28). However, before the revolutionary work in incest and trauma studies that emerged in the late 1970s, even so fierce a campaigner against patriarchy as Andrea Dworkin described a vision of a radical sexual future in which the incest taboo was “a particularized form of repression” (189), the destruction of which was “essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism” (189).7 In Dworkin’s later works, in keeping with the shift in attitudes described by Haaken and by Hacking, incest “becomes a paradigm of women’s oppression” (Jenefsky 39). Despite what subsequent criticisms of DeSalvo’s interpretations or methodology there may have been, this rather quickly achieved shift to the paradigmatic status of incest ensured that her biographical work had a profound and lasting influence on the iconic cultural presence of Virginia Woolf. For DeSalvo, as for many feminist writers in the 1970s and later, incest “can be seen as the fullest expression of misogyny” (Impact 9). Woolf herself inaugurated the image of herself as a paradigmatic survivor of incest in the account she gave in her unfinished memoir “A Sketch of the Past,” first published in 1976.8 6. As if to continue the pattern, Angelica Garnett’s daughter Henrietta Garnett’s first novel, Family Skeletons (1987), centers on an orphan who is the offspring of her mother’s incestuous union with her brother. 7. Dworkin later explained her early view of incest as having sprung from immersion in countercultural notions of sexual liberation, as well as her reading of Freud in an effort to “figure out abstractly what this was all about” (Jenefsky 139 n. 1). 8. I am quoting from the first edition of Moments of Being as it was there that Woolf’s own account of sexual abuse within her family was first published. Subsequently, another part of the typescript of “A Sketch of the Past” was discovered in the British Museum Library in 1980, and this was included in a second edition of Moments published in 1985.

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Woolf there recounts the memory of her half-brother Gerald Duckworth sexually molesting her when she was “very small” (69), and describes her instinctive feeling that it was “wrong to allow” herself to be touched in this way as proving that “Virginia Stephen was not born on 25th January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past” (69). DeSalvo’s interpretation of this incident as part of a pattern of incestuous abuse that extended well into Woolf’s early twenties and involved most of the other members of her immediate family, emerged from the context of a body of knowledge that was quite unfamiliar to most literary critics, and was certainly completely alien to Woolf’s English editors and readers. Thus, when the editor of Woolf’s diaries, Anne Olivier Bell, took issue in the pages of Virginia Woolf Miscellany with DeSalvo’s work, she explicitly drew attention to a cultural difference. Bell wrote that DeSalvo not only had combed Woolf’s writings but also had underpinned her interpretation of those writings with “a vast largely recent American literature on the subjects of child abuse, incest, rape, adolescent psychiatry, family life, child-rearing, sexuality, and pornography in Victorian England.” The implication, presumably, was that all of this had no place in discussion of a writer’s life. In subsequent issues of the Miscellany, a lasting divide emerged between those who found DeSalvo’s work transformative, and those who lamented reading Woolf in terms “of woeful victimization and exploitation” (Moynahan), or who complained that “there must be an unwritten rule that Woolf criticism must have a political or psychiatric orientation. What ever happened to literary literary criticism?” (Hoff). Responding to Bell, DeSalvo reviewed the state of studies of incest and trauma, but, of course, Bell’s point, and that of her supporters and of DeSalvo’s detractors, was that such work should be kept apart from “literary” studies. This argument transcends the more local arguments about the veracity or accuracy of DeSalvo’s claims in Impact. It is an argument that has continued to play out within American feminism over questions of female agency, the place of personal testimony in shaping public discourse, and of the reality and definition of trauma.9 DeSalvo regards Woolf’s writing as testimony, and was direct about why: “I am now convinced that the language of contemporary critical discourse cannot possibly be used to describe a work of literature that conveys the experience of incest survivors without obscuring its pain or the heroism of the act of writing about it” (“Virginia Woolf” 165); “I read contemporary literary critical discourse as an act that abuses the work. . . . It behaves in relationship to the work much as the incestuous parent behaves in relationship to the child. It commits a violation” (“Virginia Woolf” 166). To name as sexual abuse what other biographers and critics termed “malefactions,” or a “nasty erotic skirmish,”

9. See, for example, Haag: “Perpetually annoyed critics Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Christina Hoff Sommers indict institutional academic feminists for exaggerating the dimensions of women’s ‘victimization’ and thereby denying, in Hoff Sommers’s naïve coinage, that women are ‘free creatures’ rather than victims. From another perspective, academic feminists influenced by poststructuralism have assailed the precepts of identity politics, and its view of the victim, by challenging the sex / gender distinction on which they are based and reevaluating the ‘essentialist’ view of female identity allocated to second-wave feminism” (24).

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was a political act consonant with the general tendency of literary studies during the 1980s to move into a wider cultural field within which issues of power, agency, and coding would become significant foci of attention. Given that Woolf herself often wrote explicitly in her diary about the political aims of her fiction, it was prescient.10 As Kristin Bumiller has pointed out in her recent critique of the feminist movement against domestic violence’s reliance on the state, the growth of neoliberalism in the late 1970s led to the production by feminists of “narratives about sadistic violence that took place in the home, often fixated on a primal scene of incest, ripe for appropriation within a larger cultural setting” (8). That larger cultural setting, which is the proper context for any discussion of DeSalvo’s book on Woolf, might be seen as having its roots in Freud’s “abandonment” of the seduction theory in 1897 (incidentally, the year that Woolf described as “the first really lived year of my life” 11). Jeffrey Masson’s polemical The Assault on Truth, published in 1984, gave support to feminist writers on incest who had been arguing that women’s testimony about sexual abuse must be believed, not dismissed as fantasy. Freud, in Masson’s characterization, was too timid, too careful of his status among his peers, to continue to argue that what he was hearing from his patients was true, deciding to consign the stories of abuse to the realm of wishful thinking and fantasy.12 Ian Hacking marks the publication in 1962 of Henry Kempe’s article on “The Battered Child Syndrome,” 13 as the starting point of a process by which incest, and subsequently the category “childhood sexual abuse,” entered the public consciousness in the second half of the twentieth century. In his genealogy, Hacking refers to a speech given by Florence Rush in 1971 to the New York Radical Feminist Conference (Rewriting 62), and to the publication in 1975 of an article in Children Today that was eventually the basis for a cover article in Ms. Magazine in May 1977.14 The mainstream media soon disseminated the feminist and anti-Freudian view that sexual abuse of children was prevalent, using a shifting terminology: “It is interesting,” writes Hacking, to look at indices of newspapers or journals. Throughout our century there was a stable category “cruelty to children” until about 1966, when the indices start saying “cruelty to children: see child abuse.” Then gradually cruelty to children disappears. Still there is an 10. For example, of Mrs. Dalloway, “I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense” (Woolf, Diary 2 248); while writing The Years, a novel that began with the idea that it would concern “the sexual lives of women,” she worried that “this fiction is dangerously near propaganda” (Woolf, Diary 4 300). 11. See “1897: Virginia Woolf at Fifteen” in DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf. 12. Recent feminist work has, however, “acknowledged that Freud and many psychoanalysts did treat this abuse seriously. ‘You must not suppose, however, that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest male relatives belong entirely to the realm of phantasy. Most analysts will have treated cases in which such events were real and could be unimpeachably established’ ” (Smart 66, quoting Sigmund Freud in “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms”). See also Jen Shelton’s “ ‘Don’t Say Such Foolish Things, Dear’: Speaking Incest in The Voyage Out.” 13. See Henry Kempe et al. “The Battered Child Syndrome.” 14. See S. Sgroi, “Sexual Molestation of Children: The Last Frontier in Child Abuse.”; E. Weber, “Incest: Child Abuse Begins at Home.” See also Florence Rush’s The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children.

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entirely different category in the indices—“incest.” About 1977 one sees, for the first time, under “child abuse,” the entry “Also, see incest.” By about 1982 (it varies from index to index) incest involving minors is simply filed under “child abuse.” (“Making” 278)

Hacking also notes that incest did not form part of English common law until the passing of the Punishment of Incest Act in 1908, but Carol Smart has recently contradicted the idea “that agencies, professionals and governments did not ‘know’ about sexual abuse or that there was a monolithic silence prior to the 1980s,” pointing out that feminist campaigners following the passage of the 1908 Act “fought hard to extend the definition of adult- child sexual contact as harmful” (56). By the 1980s the harm of sexual abuse was named as “trauma,” and it is the wide use of this term within literary and cultural studies that has to some extent maintained Woolf as an iconic presence within these fields. In 1980, the third edition of the hugely influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association included for the first time the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This term, according to Ruth Leys in her skeptical account of the term trauma’s genealogy, “has come to stand for an entire post-Holocaust, post-Vietnam crisis of truth and history, in which not only the actual victim of trauma but everybody in the postcatastrophic condition is trapped” (204). That the notion of the twentieth century as “a century of historical trauma” (Henke xi) has become deeply rooted in all kinds of cultural and literary studies in the United States is inarguable. By the 1990s, there was within American cultural discourse a common narrative about trauma that held that an individual “is traumatized by a life-threatening event that displaces his or her preconceived notions about the world” and that the representation of such trauma can never capture its impact (Tal 15). The trauma of sexual abuse became a paradigm of women’s oppression, as Kalí Tal made clear when she praised a collection of writings brought together by Toni McNaron and Yarrow Morgan, for “its apparent universality. All women, the authors make clear, suffer the injuries inflicted by the patriarchy” (176). As Woolf scholar Suzette Henke has argued, much of the impetus behind women’s life-writing in this century has been connected by emotional webs and filaments to a wide range of traumatic episodes . . . many of these experiences have had a profound impact on the construction of female subjectivity; and . . . a number of women authors have instinctively turned to modes of autobiographical expression to implement the kind of healing made possible through the public inscription of personal testimony. (xxii)

DeSalvo’s Impact, thus, was participating in 1989 in a discourse that was beginning to emerge into wider public consciousness, and that was also a significant aspect of the feminist challenge to literary studies’ resistance to the subjective. Jane Tompkins had remarked in 1977: “The fig leaf of critical objectivity has been removed, but no one has yet looked straight at the consequences” (“Criticism and Feeling” 169). A decade later, those consequences were beginning to be seen more clearly: “I’m tired of the conventions that keep discussions of epistemology, or James Joyce, segregated from meditations on what is happening outside my window or inside my heart. The public-private dichotomy, which is to say the public-private hierarchy, is a founding condition of female oppression”

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(Tompkins, “Me” 169). Woolf had given impetus to the feminist recovery of women’s literature, and with the publication of DeSalvo’s book she became an important figure in another kind of recovery. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman writes: This is a book about restoring connections: between the public and private worlds, between the individual and community, between men and women. It is a book about commonalities between rape survivors and combat veterans, between battered women and political prisoners, between the survivors of vast concentration camps created by tyrants who rule nations and the survivors of small, hidden concentration camps created by tyrants who rule their homes. (2–3)

Anyone familiar with Woolf would immediately have recognized the allusion to her feminist-pacifist essay Three Guineas: “the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; and the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other” (168). Herman adapted Woolf’s language to claim, “It is now apparent also that the traumas of one are the traumas of the other” (32). In “A Sketch of the Past” Woolf dwells at some length on the function and operations of memory in ways that show a remarkable congruence with discussions of memory in the later twentieth century. She speculates that, for example, “strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start” (Woolf, “A Sketch” 67). She also recognizes that recollection of the past is significantly affected by present experience (“What I wrote today I should not write in a year’s time” [75]). In 1890 William James wrote, “An experience may be so emotionally exciting as almost to leave a scar on the cerebral tissue” (quoted in Schachter 202). Leys has noted that “recent studies of real-life events tend to show that strong emotions aid in the accurate recollection and retention of details directly concerned with the emotion-arousing event” (247). Brain researcher Daniel Schachter remarks on the appeal of the idea that all experience remains stored in the brain, but while acknowledging that this “can never be disproved on purely psychological grounds” (78), he points out that research does not support the notion. However, he also explains that “memories are records of how we have experienced events, not replicas of the events themselves” (6), and it is in the narrativizing of traumatic memory that Woolf has had her major influence on discussions related to childhood sexual abuse as a paradigm of the wrongs of woman. Haaken’s argument, for example, is that childhood sexual abuse “holds primacy as a cause of women’s difficulty not because of automatic effects that result from it but because of its social symbolic meaning for women” (285 n. 51). But the question of what “sexual abuse” in a family context is has driven much of the argument. Schachter, in a book about what neurological research tells us about memory, is implicitly instructive in explaining why DeSalvo’s work elicited such strong resistance in some quarters. He asks: “But what of a woman who was emotionally brutalized by a neglectful parent, or perhaps exposed to sexually inappropriate language, behavior, or fondling, and then remembers incest when none occurred? The incest memory is illusory, and should be regarded as such, but it may capture something important about the past that should not be dismissed” (Schachter 277, my emphasis). What is “illusory” for Schachter is just what DeSalvo argued was central for Woolf. What Haaken describes as the “rich generativity” of the story of child-

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hood sexual abuse “spanned a vast domain of female emotional experience, from everyday insults to dramatic violations of the self, and this generativity formed the basis for a new kind of oppositional storytelling” (57). For some, like Haaken, this was to the detriment of feminism because it depended upon the notion that women always speak the truth of their own experience. David Denby has complained about feminist critics reading Woolf’s “entire work as an attack on the patriarchal family, or in terms of the childhood sexual abuse she was subjected to” (quoted in Silver 42). What Denby calls “the mad American victimconsciousness” provides a convenient shorthand for dismissing political readings that emerged in the wake of DeSalvo’s book (none of which, pace Denby, read her “entire work” in terms of any one thing). What has been productive about DeSalvo’s work is the ensuing attention to how Woolf’s art embodies the discursive structures of traumatic experience, how her ceaseless pondering of the relations between art and life speak very directly to recent theorizing of the relations between trauma and narrative.15 It is not possible to know precisely what occurred or did not occur 150 years ago inside 22 Hyde Park Gate. But it is possible to know that William Booth wrote in 1890 that “Incest is so familiar as to hardly call for remark” (Bailey and Blackburn 710), that in 1907 H. B. Simpson of the Home Office said that “cases can easily be imagined in which intercourse between a half-brother and a half-sister might take place without exciting any of the feeling of horror which the other forms of incest aimed at in the [1908 Punishment of Incest] Bill excite” (716), and that Virginia Woolf’s paternal uncle, James Fitzjames Stephen, wrote in his History of the Criminal Law (1883) that the entry of incest into the criminal law had likely been hindered by its having always been treated by ecclesiastical courts, that is as a moral rather than criminal transgression (709).16 Such facts are of interest when debating a secular, legal definition of incest. But the contemporary emotional freight of the term “sexual abuse” speaks less to such a history and more to its traumatic effects and the effort to find words to articulate them. There is little discussion these days of “incest,” but “sexual abuse” still grips the public imagination, as can be seen in the proliferating stories of abuse within the Catholic Church, and more recently in those emerging about the culture of abuse that prevailed within the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s. That “Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child” (DeSalvo, Impact 1) is uncontested within Woolf scholarship17; that “she was an incest survivor” (1) and what that may have meant for her life and work remains a question that provokes heated argument.

15. See Henke and Eberly, whose collection explores “a haunting, if sometimes repressed trauma narrative [that] can be found embodied throughout Woolf’s texts” (1). 16. See Corbett, chapter 3, for further discussion of sibling relationships within the context of the dramatic shift in attitudes to incest in the early twentieth century in England. 17. It remains dismissed, however, by her descendants. Writing in The Independent on the seventieth anniversary of Woolf’s suicide, Emma Woolf (Leonard and Virginia’s great-niece) described Woolf’s last letter to her husband as rendering “meaningless all the speculation and rumours which have surrounded Virginia since her death: suspicions of childhood abuse, sexual frigidity and lesbian tendencies, her childlessness and mental illness, the failure of her marriage.”

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But it is an argument that has more to do with our relations to texts and their interpretation than to “truth”—that is to say, it is a literary argument. Nevertheless, it is a literary argument that can be vital to our understanding of lived experience. For example, in his introduction to Woolf’s early diaries, Mitchell Leaska questions why she sent the manuscript of her second novel, Night and Day, to her half-brother Gerald for publication, “even after the Hogarth Press had been established” (xxxiv). This action is, writes Leaska, “hard to understand if the effects of his abuse were as destructive and traumatic to her as has been claimed” (xxxiv). He raises old questions (we heard them in the US Senate during the 1991 hearings into the conduct of Clarence Thomas toward Anita Hill): Why did she say nice things about him? Why did she follow him? Why, in Woolf’s case, did she send the manuscript of that novel that gave her sister “the horrors” to Duckworth’s publishing house? To answer such questions, DeSalvo approached Woolf’s texts “always with a woman’s heart” (Fraser 154), an empathy that was both prescient and a product of its time.

Works Cited Alderfer, Hannah, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson, eds. Diary of a Conference on Sexuality. New York: Barnard Women’s Center, 1982. Anderson, Linda. Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures. London: Prentice Hall & Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1987. Bailey, Victor, and Sheila Blackburn. “The Punishment of Incest Act 1908: A Case Study of Law Creation.” Criminal Law Review (1979): 708–718. Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Ed. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday, 1977. Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Bell, Anne Olivier. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 38 (Spring 1992): 2. Bumiller, Kristin. In an Abusive State. How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. DeSalvo, Louise. “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” In Between Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, 35–53. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. ———. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. ———. “Virginia Woolf, Incest Survivor.” In Virginia Woolf Miscellanies. Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow-Turk, 164–171. New York: Pace University Press, 1992. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974. Ferguson, Ann. “Sex War: The Debate Between Radical and Libertarian Feminists.” Signs 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 106–112. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Fraser, Kennedy. “Ornament and Silence.” The New Yorker, November 6, 1989. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Garnett, Henrietta. Family Skeletons. New York: Knopf, 1987.

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Haag, Pamela. “ ‘Putting Your Body on the Line’: The Question of Violence, Victims, and the Legacies of Second-Wave Feminism.” differences 8, no. 2 (1996): 23– 67. Haaken, Janice. Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Hacking, Ian. “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 253–288. ———. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Henke, Suzette. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Henke, Suzette, and David Eberly, eds. Virginia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts. New York: Pace University Press, 2007. Hoff, Molly. “From the Readers.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 39 (Fall 1992): 2. Hussey, Mark. “Virginia Woolf: After Lives.” In Virginia Woolf in Context, ed. Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman, 13–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jenefsky, Cindy, with Ann Russo. Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin’s Art and Politics. Boulder: Westview, 1998. Joplin, Patricia. “ ‘I Have Bought My Freedom’: The Gift of A Room of One’s Own.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 21 (Fall 1983): 4–5. Kempe, Henry, et al. “The Battered Child Syndrome.” Journal of the American Medical Association 181 (July–September 1962): 17–24. Leaska, Mitchell A., Introduction to Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Miller, Nancy K. “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader.” In Feminist Studies / Critical Studies, ed. Teresa deLauretis, 109–120. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Monk, Ray. “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography and Reality.” Philosophy and Literature 31 (2007): 1–31. Moynahan, Julian. “From the Readers.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 39 (Fall 1992): 1. Rich, B. Ruby. “Feminism and Sexuality in the 1980s.” Feminist Studies 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 525–561. Rogat, Ellen Hawkes. “Visiting the Berg Collection.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 1 (Fall 1973): 1. Rush, Florence. The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Sgroi, S. “Sexual Molestation of Children: The Last Frontier in Child Abuse.” Children Today (May–June 1975): 18–21. Shelton, Jen. “ ‘Don’t Say Such Foolish Things, Dear’: Speaking Incest in The Voyage Out.” In Incest and the Literary Imagination, ed. Elizabeth Barnes, 224–248. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Smart, Carol. “Reconsidering the Recent History of Child Sexual Abuse, 1910–1960.” Journal of Social Policy 29 (January 2000): 55–71. Stanton, Domna. “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?” In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 131–144. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

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Sutcliffe, Rebecca. “Really Writing: Feminist Biography and the Languages of Pain in Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work.” In Emerging Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow, 156–163. New York: Pace University Press, 1994. Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Tompkins, Jane. “Criticism and Feeling.” College English 39, no. 2 (October 1977): 169–178. ———. “Me and My Shadow.” New Literary History 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 169–178. Vicinus, Martha. “Sexuality and Power: A Review of Current Work in the History of Sexuality.” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 133–156. Weber, E. “Incest: Child Abuse Begins at Home.” Ms., May 1977: 64– 67. Wilson. Elizabeth. “Not in This House: Incest, Denial, and Doubt in the White Middle Class Family.” Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995): 35–58. Woolf, Emma. “Literary Haunts: Virginia’s London Walks.” The Independent, March 28, 2011. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. San Diego: Harcourt, 1978. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. San Diego: Harcourt, 1982. ———. “A Sketch of the Past.” 1939. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. Sussex: Sussex University Press, 1976. ———. Three Guineas. 1938. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2006.

“Thirty-seven Is the Unraveling Time” and Other Fictions of Fidelity in the Works of Louise DeSalvo Jenn Brandt

To read Louise DeSalvo attentively is to realize how little one knows about her. An odd claim, admittedly, to make about a memoirist. And yet, a Woolf scholar, which DeSalvo also happens to be, might come to recognize these lines as an echo of Woolf’s opening to “George Eliot.”1 DeSalvo certainly must have poured over this piece, which offers readers not only a glimpse into the worlds of Woolf and Eliot, but also an insight into the way writers view other writers and writing in general. Like Eliot and Woolf, DeSalvo is a writer who understands the relationship between life and craft and the inextricable links that wed the two. But, as DeSalvo herself cautions, “how can we ever know everything, something, anything, about anyone else? How can we say with certainty what someone has or hasn’t done?” (Adultery 100). While this question lies at the core of DeSalvo’s 1999 treatise Adultery, it has deeper implications that go beyond the marital bed. It gives readers a clue into the writer’s world, challenging them to question the very 1. “To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than herself” (Woolf 162).

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nature of truth, intimacy, and the creative process in both the fictions we read and those that we create for ourselves. Adultery hit shelves fresh on the heels of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the same year that Andrew Morton’s Monica’s Story was published and periodicals from Ms. Magazine to Time Magazine had something to say about extramarital affairs.2 Simply put, infidelity was “in.” The same could not be said some twelve years earlier when DeSalvo attempted to find a US publisher interested in her only novel, Casting Off (1987), a fictional account of adultery. The novel’s two female protagonists, Maive and Helen, are married and polygamous. As she describes, “editors were almost universally outraged by the book,” specifically that the main female characters’ “lives aren’t destroyed, and that they survive, even flourish” (Adultery 27). While Casting Off did find a publisher in Great Britain, its printing was limited, and it was not long before the novel fell into obscurity. It would not be until DeSalvo included an excerpt of the novel in Adultery that it received any sort of mention, significant attention, or was published— even in part—in the United States.3 The initial failure of Casting Off to find a publisher in the United States is less an indication of the quality of DeSalvo’s writing and more a reflection of the conservative values espoused by popular culture during the Reagan era of the 1980s and the “rise” of the Christian Coalition. During this time, Newsweek (in)famously and erroneously reported that women over forty had a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married.4 Only a few years before, Pat Robertson issued a dire warning that “feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”5 That is all to say that the prevailing “wisdom” of the time was that ambition made women miserable, and that feminism was a threat to the greater social good. In reality, Casting Off found itself looking for a publisher in an uneven time of public opinion and politics that paralleled the shift from second wave to third wave feminism. Admittedly, the relationship between feminism and marriage has never been the most civil of unions. The primary concern of early feminists, along with securing women the right to vote, was a reevaluation of contract and property rights and opposition to “chattel” marriages. Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), referred to the institution as “slavery” for women. Years later, suffrage leader Lucy Stone became a pioneer for women’s rights when she refused to take Henry Blackwell’s last name upon their 1855 marriage, declaring instead no promise of “voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage” as they did not recognize the wife as

2. See Ms. Magazine’s special issue “Adultery” and Duffy’s “Monica Lewinsky Up Close” in Time Magazine. 3. In 2014, Bordighera Press released the first US printing of Casting Off, with substantial revisions by DeSalvo and an introduction by Nancy Caronia. 4. Newsweek’s June 2, 1986, cover carried the headline “The Marriage Crunch” and warned college- educated women that if they had not married by the time they were thirty, their chances of doing so were only 20 percent. In 2006, Newsweek apologized for the cover, admitting that the statistics cited were misleading and / or false. 5. See Robertson in “Equal Rights Initiative in Iowa Attacked.”

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an independent, rational being, while they conferred on the husband “an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should posses [sic]” (quoted in Calhoun 122). Traditional feminine roles—dutiful wife and devoted mother—are the departure points for DeSalvo’s protagonists in Casting Off. Using satire as a means to highlight the stereotypical nature of what it means to be a good version of both, DeSalvo demonstrates the ways in which these ideals have always been fabricated on a lie. As long as Helen is able to get a warm breakfast on the table—as she does when she makes her husband and son fresh corn muffins before embarking on her affair—she fulfills society’s expectations of married women. Casting Off makes the bold suggestion, however, that women have wants and desires outside these selfless, servile responsibilities. It is through this suggestion, not through any endorsement of infidelity, that Casting Off positions itself as a feminist text. Historically, the social institution of marriage has been tied to issues of economics and procreation. Reproduction—not love—has been the principal goal, and marriage acts to ensure parentage on the behalf of the father and economic security on behalf of the mother. It was not until “women’s liberation” and the sexual revolution, which became synonymous with the second wave of feminism in the United States during the 1960s and the 1970s, that these notions were contested with any significant results. Betty Friedan first called attention to “the problem with no name” in 1963 with The Feminine Mystique, challenging women to find a meaningful identity outside of the home. Only a few years later, the legalization of hormonal birth control in the form of “the pill” meant that women could indefinitely delay or prevent pregnancy, affording them a freedom previously unknown.6 These freedoms would come with their own costs, and DeSalvo’s Casting Off considers the effects of these advances on women coming of age during these shifting times—women who clung to traditions of the past while, at the same time, desiring new opportunities. For many of these women, feminism provided autonomy outside the bounds of patriarchal society and conventional gender roles. Birth control and the legalization of abortion allowed women a sexual agency that presented them the opportunity to think of sex as pleasure, not as an obligation. These cultural phenomena, coupled with the sensational publication of books like Nena and George O’Neill’s Open Marriage in 1972, gave women and men clearance to redefine marriage and negotiate independence within and outside of monogamy. While, in retrospect, the advice offered in Open Marriage seems both faddish and dated, its popularity and success spoke to the need to reassess marriage in accordance to shifting gender roles and expectations.7

6. Griswold v. Connecticut legalized access to the birth control pill for married couples in 1965, but it would not be until Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) that unmarried women were granted the same legal rights. 7. Nena O’Neill writes in the “Update” to the 1984 edition to Open Marriage, “The major benefit of open marriage was to give individuals new insights about partnership and a different way of looking at marriage. Open Marriage provided a practical platform for liberation and equality in marriage, and along with the pioneering foundation work of the women’s movement and the libertarian climate it radically altered our thinking about husband and wife roles” (2).

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Still, even within the extreme context of an open marriage, adultery remains taboo. This is particularly true in more “modern” notions of matrimony, where love is seen as the basis for marital union. Infidelity has existed as long as marriage, but it is almost historically and universally the case that society is far more forgiving of male adulterers. Chastity is expected of women as a safeguard of family honor, and literature has long been a tool to warn women of the terrible fate that awaits them should they stray sexually from the marital bed. Therein lies the rub with DeSalvo’s Casting Off. Neither of its protagonists swallows arsenic nor throws herself in front of a train. Indeed, they not only live, but, more importantly, they feel no remorse and receive no sanctions. DeSalvo describes Maive in the novel’s opening pages as someone who “didn’t know the meaning of the word guilt, so she passed from one temporary fling to another abortive affair, seemingly unaffected by them when they went wrong, incredibly invigorated by them when they turned out all right, managing to juggle husband and family and friendships and a job with apparent ease” (Casting Off 5– 6). Maive’s description as a free-spirited and guiltfree adulterer provides context for the aforementioned reaction of American publishers when faced with Casting Off in the late 1980s. In addition to finding the novel “immoral” and “perverse,” publishers found the premise to be “totally unrealistic,” despite the fact that DeSalvo based the novel upon personal interviews with women across the United States (Adultery 27). More troubling, though, is that publishers dangerously missed the point that, in DeSalvo’s own words, the novel “spoofed people’s responses to adultery” (26). This experience leads DeSalvo to realize that “we know a lot about adultery . . . and we know nothing about it at all” (30). Even when adultery breaks all of the rules, there are rules that go along with being an adulterer—rules that have to do with who commits adultery, when to commit adultery, and the consequences of adultery. Casting Off breaks the “rules” about adultery not through the subject matter of infidelity itself, but through the novel’s depiction of unapologetic female empowerment. What we “know” about adultery is that it destroys lives and ruins families, but what we do not know is that this knowledge is only one—albeit the most familiar—“truth” of infidelity. DeSalvo’s protagonists in Casting Off refuse this familiar trope and demonstrate adultery as a more complex and less linear path. In many ways the two female protagonists are total opposites. Helen appears to be reserved and quiet, while Maive is brash and flamboyant. Here is how they are described early in the novel: “Unlike Helen’s carefully controlled, carefully regulated household, Maive’s was always on the verge of coming apart at the seams” (Casting Off 6). In portraying these women in such contrasting ways, DeSalvo is debunking the myth of the “type” of woman who cheats, or the notion that there is one set profile of adultery. Even their marriages work toward dispelling this notion. Helen gives the appearance of being more committed to her husband than Maive is to hers, which is not the case. Maive loves her husband as much as her lovers, confirming this fact at the end of the novel when she sends her kids off to the movies so she can “screw the living daylights out of her husband” (229). Maive, then, becomes the hyperbolic representation of the liberated woman. While DeSalvo portrays her as excessive, at times even farcical, she is also careful to underscore that what makes Maive truly strong and unique is her unapologetic love of herself. For example, although she is described as being on a perpetual diet, and therefore

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could represent a stereotype of femininity, Maive has a very nuanced relationship with her body: After spending so much of her time being pinched by a waistband that was too tight or compressed unmercifully into a pair of pants that were made for a woman who had no thighs, when she finally took her clothes off at the end of the day, she would stand in front of her full-length mirror and marvel at the fact that although she had had four pregnancies and two abortions and although she was, according to every weight chart that she had ever consulted and according to every gynecologist she had ever seen, more than twenty-five pounds overweight, with all her clothes off, she had, in her own words, “a body that men just love to fuck.” (4)

Maive embodies contradictory notions of femininity and empowerment. Her passions and body are literally girdled in by society’s expectations of feminine beauty, and yet she revels in the glory of her self-image. This image reflects both the pregnancies and abortion her body has endured. Maive derives satisfaction not only from her own enjoyment of her flesh, but also from the fact that men love her body. Rather than being ashamed of her sexuality and its consequences, Maive indulges her appetite, sexual and otherwise. The irony of this image, which publishers neglected to see, was that Maive’s experiences in the area of new flesh weren’t all that many either. But she managed to maintain the image of herself as a kind of superabundant earth goddess, even though, if the truth were to be told, Maive had probably not fucked illicitly more than fifteen or twenty times during her marriage. (5)

DeSalvo makes a clear distinction between image and reality early in the novel. What follows, then, is a type of fantasy that these women are living out. On the one hand, the fantasy plays off the media-fueled image of the excessive “earth goddess,” and pokes fun at the stereotypes of feminism and its effects on women. On the other hand, the exploits are a fantasy. In describing them in this way, DeSalvo is offering a parody of both the “glamorous” and “tragic” depictions most often associated with adultery. These “truths,” these stories, lie at the heart of both Casting Off and Adultery. DeSalvo is interested in adultery as fiction—both in our lives and on the page. More important, these fictions, mediated through the filter of adultery, try to “discover the relationship between what we desire and who we are; between what we want and what we need; between what we have and what we don’t have and how that drives us” (Adultery 31). It is this search that inspires DeSalvo to conclude: “an adultery story is always about autonomy” (31). Casting Off is then a novel about autonomy, and that female autonomy, ultimately, is what publishers found to be “perverse,” “immoral,” and “unrealistic.” If one acknowledges adultery as a source of “emotional satisfaction” and “an assertion of independence,” then Casting Off is far more than a silly satire about middle- class marriages in the 1980s (Adultery 59). Instead, the novel becomes the means by which to understand the possibility for self-fulfillment within the structures of patriarchal and heteronormative society. Casting Off suggests that women are sexual beings in their own right, separate from conventional notions of romance and marriage. The novel, then, rather than lampooning marriage, demands that one reconsider personal assumptions

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regarding fidelity, trust, and commitment. The complexities of these notions speak to the intricacy of adult relationships and the ways in which there is no set rule on what is “right” or “wrong” in a marriage, only shallow proclamations that cover the myriad ways in which one feels committed and fulfilled. More than just a commentary on marriage, though, Casting Off is a deeper meditation on women’s creative expression and the ways in which it has been stifled by traditional notions of femininity. DeSalvo makes this distinction clear early in the novel when she writes, Helen remembered reading once a long time ago that women’s handiwork was considered to be very dangerous because it was at those times when women were engaged in performing routine tasks with their hands that their thoughts were most susceptible to reaching down into the dense moist regions of their minds where fantasy cohabitated with eroticism. (Casting Off 12)

The connection here between handiwork and eroticism is important. It speaks to the tradition of squelching women’s desires with domestic duties and responsibilities. The monotony of the tasks associated with housework and their seemingly never- ending cycle serves to both distract from and deaden feelings of want and desire. The concept of “casting off,” then, suggested by the novel’s title, has a number of possible interpretations. It is obviously an allusion to the knitting technique used at the end of a project when the last row of stitches is cast off in order to make an edge that does not unravel.8 To “cast off,” though, can also mean to push one aside or to set off on one’s own. DeSalvo begins Casting Off with a poem that opens with and repeats the line “thirtyseven is the unraveling time.” The poem plays on this theme of knitting as a way to tie women to domesticity, but suggests that at thirty-seven things start to fray at the edges, that “what was made before must be unmade,” and concludes by asserting, “thirty-seven is the unraveling time / the time when / variegated skeins / are loosened / when the cords are / tied end to end / are / cast / off” (1–2).9 Helen MacIntyre, the novel’s thirty-seven-yearold protagonist, thus serves as one model for “casting off,” embodying all of the ambiguities that go along with such a phrase. For Helen’s thirty-seventh birthday, Maive gives her friend “a book called How to Make Love to Yourself, which Maive had read from cover to cover a few years before” (86). While the book is a practical guide to masturbation, it has a much deeper effect on Helen. Maive, who embraces life for all of its pleasures, gives it to Helen, knowing it will spark a reaction, and because she thinks it will be good for her friend to look at some

8. Perhaps coincidentally— or not—Monica Lewinsky told Barbara Walters in her 1999 20 / 20 interview that she “survived” the backlash and scandal resulting from her affair with Bill Clinton by knitting. 9. It is also, perhaps, not coincidental to note, that Virginia Woolf observes of George Eliot: “one recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven, and that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself with a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For long she preferred not to think of herself at all. Then, when the first flush of creative energy was exhausted and self- confidence had come to her, she wrote more and more from the personal standpoint, but she did so without the unhesitating abandonment of the young” (169).

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things she has been “hiding” from herself. Here is what Helen discovers—and laments to her friend: I’m sexually backward, not hip, not even Victorian. That I’m probably frigid. And hopeless. Maive I don’t have a fantasy life. At least not one I’m aware of. And, for a woman who’s almost forty, who’s almost over the hill, I haven’t had very erotic impulses. Maybe seven. And I don’t even know what to do about it. (86– 87)

Here Helen’s proclamation gets at the heart of her dilemma. DeSalvo’s use of the word “erotic” is deliberate, as it is not merely a reference to sex, but is suggestive of Audre Lorde’s notion of “the erotic as power,” which sees the erotic as a “resource within each of us that lies in the deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (Lorde 53). Lorde’s notion connects eroticism with power, and divorces the term from its sexual connotations. Eroticism becomes a form of empowerment in the sense that it speaks to fulfillment in all areas of a woman’s life, and the connections between work, the body, and the mind. At the age of thirtyseven, Helen is coming to terms with the fact that, outside her static duties of wife and mother, she has no “fantasy life.” She realizes that she has been depriving herself of the power that comes with the creative impulse of desiring and fulfilling one’s own needs. At the age of thirty-seven, then, Helen begins living for herself for the first time. While part of Helen’s “casting off” is her affair with the younger Julien, the deeper, more lasting effect, is her reconnection with the creative self. DeSalvo articulates this idea more broadly in Adultery when she writes, Sometimes I think that the only reason we have affairs is so that we will have a completely new story to tell ourselves about who we are, and so that we will have a completely new, startling, and (we think) exciting story to tell others about ourselves, a story that will show others that we’re not who we were [or, I might add, who they think we were]. For doesn’t an adultery story transform our image of a person? (29)

The act of adultery is not significant in and of itself. The fictions of adultery preoccupy DeSalvo in both Casting Off and Adultery and form the basis for the interrogation of the creative process and power. It is not a coincidence that Helen is a writer, “even though she didn’t really think of herself as one” (Casting Off 51). Having left behind her dreams of becoming a writer at a younger age, Helen denies the creative self, stating, “All I do is write the sayings for greeting cards. . . . You don’t need any particular talent for doing that. Just a sense of language, and not a very good one at that” (51). Helen’s affair with Julien, then, becomes a way for her to reawaken and channel the creative impulse. Helen and Maive spend hours, privately and together, discussing their adulteries, inventing personas for themselves and their loved ones in the process. As Helen herself admits, adultery “was the raw material for the stories that she [Maive] could then dramatize for her friends. She seemed to care less about the experience itself than she cared about whether or not it would make a good story later on” (12). Adultery distracts from the minutiae of the tedious day-to- day chores of married suburbia. The act of infidelity provides an opportunity for reinvention of the self that is of the utmost significance. Further, it is through the act of storytelling that these acts gain legitimacy and the new

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identity is solidified. The impulse toward adultery, then, is not betrayal, but a fidelity to the self, an acknowledgement of unfulfilled potential, and the desire to expatiate the boundaries of self-knowledge. All of this is not to say, though, that DeSalvo is advocating the act of adultery. That is too simplistic and misses the point. Her argument is more sophisticated and persuasive in that it begs the question of not what happens when one cheats, but why one would want to cheat in the first place. She reiterates this point in Adultery when she writes, I am interested in adultery stories and in thinking about the very significant role adultery stories play in our lives. I like to think about how and why people tell adultery stories to one another (for telling is always risky) and also why we listen to them and read them and write them and rewrite them. (29)

DeSalvo, who chronicles her response to her husband’s affair in Adultery, does not deny the emotional toll and damage that infidelity can, and does, inflict on people’s lives. What she is concerned with, however, is how the act of adultery is understood and represented through fiction—the fiction that we read, as well as the fictions that we tell to ourselves and others. What is powerful about DeSalvo’s own experience is her refusal to be cast as the victim. She takes possession of the adultery story, and writes: I broke all the rules about how you were supposed to act if you were a woman in my situation. I called everyone I knew, including his parents and mine, and told them my husband was fucking around. I asked them for financial help until I could start supporting myself. (110–111)

In rewriting the conventional script of secrecy and shame, DeSalvo is able to craft a new ending to the standard adultery tale, one that finds both she and her husband growing and gaining from the experience. DeSalvo’s use of her husband’s affair to embrace the erotic in her own life was transgressive both personally and professionally. Taking a risk in her marriage by going against the standard adultery “script” not only freed DeSalvo from the fate of the “scorned” woman, but also paved the way for the risks she would take in her work—namely, the transgressive nature of Casting Off and her nonfiction pieces. It is no secret, then, that it is this experience, at least in part, that spurred DeSalvo to write Casting Off and, later, Adultery. As DeSalvo explains in Adultery, the impetus for Casting Off came to her one night after an erotic dream, and “something in the nature of this dream signaled trouble. So I knew I had to do something domestic quickly” (34). She chooses to bake, and as her muffins are cooking, she writes, “The day before Helen MacIntyre began to have her second affair, she got up in the middle of the night to make her children cornmeal muffins for breakfast” (35). These lines appear, slightly altered, at the beginning of the second chapter of Casting Off, and again, once more slightly altered, at the end of the novel while Helen contemplates a third affair. The cyclical nature of this pattern works in tandem with the eroticism of domesticity and creativity, and the ways in which writer and character fulfill each other. The blurring between fiction and nonfiction and the relationship between the two in Casting Off and Adultery is purposefully destabilizing, perhaps the one “truth” DeSalvo is willing to admit about adultery. Ultimately, she does not want readers to know of any

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later responses to her husband’s affair other than the act of writing. She explains: “This doesn’t mean that I have had an affair. Nor does it mean that I have not had one. I choose to admit to neither. For admitting to either tells you more about me than I’d like you to know” (106). What does become known, though, is that both she and her protagonist create, and they do so in a way that carves out a creative space that is theirs alone and not connected with the domestic duties of wife or mother. If there is anything “scandalous” about Casting Off, or Adultery for that matter, it is that these women become the heroines of their own stories, rather than the victims of society or someone else’s plot. In doing so, they provide readers with the opportunity to reflect on patriarchal limitations set on women, and how these limitations do not necessarily need to be internalized and/or taken as truth. Reading these two works in conversation is also an invitation to consider the usefulness of literature and its role in our everyday lives. Rather than just entertain, fiction offers us the opportunity to explore the limits of our own honesty and fidelity to the self. This notion of truth is what is at the core of any “radical” response to Casting Off. Taking inspiration from women and writers like Woolf and Eliot, DeSalvo, too, understands “the burden and complexity of womanhood were not enough; [and that] she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art and knowledge” (Woolf 172). The fruits of the relationship between art and knowledge may not always be pretty, but that does not make them any less true or necessary. That being said, having “read” DeSalvo, I cannot say with any certainty that I “know” her, or that in rereading her I truly know anything more about her than before. But what I do know is that to read DeSalvo is an occasion to know oneself better, an offer to consider one’s own truths, and an acknowledg ment of the creative impulse that lives within us all. With this in mind, then, a reconsideration of Casting Off in light of its creative circumstances and publication history reveals the larger significance of this work. As a feminist text, Casting Off serves as a creative expression of female autonomy and empowerment. Its “eroticism” is not an endorsement of adultery, but an invitation to reexamine all the elements of one’s life that makes us whole, and to value the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that make up the force for personal and societal change.

Works Cited “Adultery.” Ms. Magazine 9, no. 3 (April–May 1999): 50– 61. Calhoun, Arthur Wallace. A Social History of the American Family from Colonial Times to the Present, vol. 3. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1919. DeSalvo, Louise. Adultery. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. ———. Casting Off. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987. ———. Casting Off. 1987. Introduction by Nancy Caronia. New York: Bordighera Press, 2014. Duffy, Michael. “Monica Lewinsky Up Close.” Time Magazine, March 15, 1999. Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 53–59. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984. O’Neill, Nena, and George O’Neill. Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples. 1972. Rev. ed. Lanham, Md.: M. Evans and Co., 1984.

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Robertson, Pat. Quoted in “Equal Rights Initiative in Iowa Attacked.” Washington Post, August 23, 1992. Walters, Barbara. “Interview with Monica Lewinsky.” 20 / 20. ABC Television, March 3, 1999. Woolf, Virginia. “George Eliot.” In The Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition, 162–172. New York: Mariner Books, 2002.

Life Online SK ATING A ND BREAKING THE SURFACE OF THE SELF

Amy Jo Burns

In his novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Gary Shteyngart describes a not-soalternate, digitized world that operates “post-book,” a dystopia where social networking is paramount and “writing” as we know it no longer exists. The protagonist, Lenny Abramov, a hapless Luddite with a shelf full of antiquated books, fears he has become obsolete. “Reading is difficult,” he muses. “People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age” (277). A satire, Super Sad True Love Story shrewdly observes today’s changing technological trends: Human “contact” often occurs online, and the “self” found in the tangible world is increasingly secondary and subject to the “self” one creates on the web. This phenomenon of the quickly multiplying “self” is quite pertinent to writers— especially memoirists who trade in the art of capturing a life lived. Contemporary writers can no longer write a novel and pass responsibility for selling it on to literary agents; they must master multiple methods of online and print communication in order to remain current and connect with their readers. Through her Writingalife’s Blog, the scholar and memoirist Louise DeSalvo has chosen to transform her writing style to fit the ad-hoc, conversational blog form as a means of connecting with her growing readership. Her first post, on January 4, 2010, “Thinking about Audience,” dealt directly with this growing cyber-reality. At the same time, she acknowledges: “When you go into your writing space, [you] go into it alone. The truth you find there will be hard- earned, and only you will know when you’ve found it. If you think about anyone else, you’ll

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never strike gold.” DeSalvo’s blog is a successful example of “genre-straddling.” She has brought together two seemingly disparate genres—the contemplative memoir and the hurried, of-the-moment web log—to bridge the “past” of life-writing and the “present” of the blogosphere. Using the blog as a medium to describe in real time the evolution of a memoir-in-progress, DeSalvo demonstrates the art of authenticating a life lived in a digital age. In her article “ ‘Hit Sluts’ and ‘Page Pimps’: Online Diarists and Their Quest for CyberUnion,” Elizabeth Podnieks explains how the onset of the blog culture is altering how we view and interpret life narratives. She believes that the popularity of various online diary sites has led us to live “in an era of computer-mediated confession” (126). Such technological developments might indicate that every user becomes a digital memoirist when he posts his first entry. But simply logging one’s daily activities under the guise of “memoir” does a disser vice to a genre that is often misunderstood. In her blog post “Some Criteria of a Completed Memoir,” DeSalvo writes that “memoir doesn’t simply tell a life, it reveals a life.” Memoir is not aboveground work; it defies the two- dimensional selves that are plastered across the Internet. The art form of memoir exists in the subterranean; the exploration of one’s life goes beyond a record of events. By this definition, life writing and cursory blogging oppose each other. Yet, DeSalvo does not consider this increasingly popular outlet to be a threat to the more established art form of memoir; rather, she has discovered and developed the cross-section between the two genres. DeSalvo is a writers’ magician, and surfing her blog is akin to leafing through her book of spells. From Writingalife’s Blog’s outset in 2010, she offers no introduction on what she hopes for the blog, what she will try to do, or what she will try to avoid. Instead, she acts, keeping her focus narrow and pointed. Each post is self- contained and cogent, absent of the meta-musings that clog up the blogosphere—bloggers worrying aloud if they are meeting their blog’s intent, apologies for negligence in posting, and the like. Within a media outlet rife with writers’ guilt made public, DeSalvo remains committed to the blog’s stated purpose. Her decision to promote an online presence reflects how the Internet medium has become an increasingly prominent platform for both professional and recreational writers. In late 2001, the number of personal blogs saturating the Internet reached what Andrew Sullivan dubbed a critical mass. In an editorial for the Sunday Times of London, he predicted that the blog as a genre had “only begun to transform the media world.” Sullivan’s assessment is prescient. The year 2004 brought the advent of social networking in the form of Web 2.0, which transformed the Internet from a mere portal from which to access information into a dynamic communication hub for users to interact with one another in real time.1 1. Paul Longley Arthur studies this development in his article “Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online,” where he uses the term “cyber-biography” to describe the online flush of blogs, status updates, and Tweets. Web 2.0 took the cyber population beyond “simply accessing the internet”; now “users could enter it, present themselves (however they wished), and engage directly with other users” (80). With an instant audience available for response, the popularity of social networking continues to balloon.

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Now, almost a decade after Sullivan’s prediction, owning some incarnation of an online personality is more common than owning a home phone line. With so many avenues for digital communication—blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr—more people are “writing” than ever, though the definition of the word is expanding to encompass these online forms of communication. Technological advances in social networking raise questions about the diverging uses of this term. Is “writing” merely logging, recording, and documenting? What is the difference between “writing” and “typing?” How are these developments affecting the way we think, communicate, and conceptualize our lives? DeSalvo uses her blog as a means of self-study. For example, she is an avid reader, eager to cull lessons from her daily reading repertoire. In the blog’s nearly one hundred posts, she references over a hundred different creative works, sometimes delving into the drafts of famous writers such as Virginia Woolf. She also references other artists— sculptors, filmmakers, and even glass blowers. In a post titled “Radical Work Takes Time” from July 14, 2010, she applies the methods used by Henri Matisse, who spent eight years working on his painting “Bathers by the River.” After reading a New York Times article that analyzed the different layers of the painting, DeSalvo becomes a student of her own creative method: “I’ve witnessed, in my own process, that the earliest versions of my works are constrained, safe, knee-jerk. I reach for solutions that have worked for me before, or for those that have worked for others” (“Radical Work”). DeSalvo continues in her self-analysis, stating that around the eleventh draft, “it starts coming, a crazy kind of order, a few parentheses with wild stuff inside thrown in, a flash forward and flashback in the same paragraph, a shift in tenses, past to present to past within a page, an image that just happens (thank you, creative spirit wherever you are) that’s dynamite, a title (glory, glory).” This exemplifies the key difference between a writer who blogs and a blogger who writes. The medium changes the means of presentation, but the quality of thought, reflection, and application remain unscathed. Nicholas Carr has conducted extensive research on the social and cognitive effects of the constant access to portals of limitless online data on the human brain and psyche. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he demonstrates how the easily searchable Internet is altering the way we digest information. He even charts the way his brain has adapted to technological advancements—he claims that he is less likely now to sit and absorb a lengthy article that he would rather scan for information. “Once,” he writes, “I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” He continues to observe that “our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.” With a slew of information available, the human brain tends to seek out the headlines and then move on. This development is paramount for memoirists like DeSalvo since online channels for self- expression are changing the way we conceptualize and present our lives. “Media are not just passive channels of information,” Carr writes. “They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” Expanding that premise into the realm of cyber-self-expression, Paul Longley Arthur posits that technological innovations are shifting “concepts of self and identity; truth and fiction; memory and imagination;

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reality and fabrication; public and private” (75). This development is exciting for writing as an art form; never has it been so fluid or dynamic. Writers of any genre now have many channels through which to share their work without needing a third party to approve its publication. Never has it been so efficient or accessible for a writer to converse with her audience. But this question remains to be answered: Are these online outlets simply auxiliary, or are they superseding their in-print counterparts? And if they are, why does it matter? When the mode of information adapts, the quality of thought and reflection runs the risk of adulteration, as Carr has pointed out. These new concepts of self and identity tend to dilute the forms of the biography and the memoir into little more than image management. Users whittle their self-identities down to a “profile,” including various details such as place of employment, birthdate, educational information, and perhaps they toss in a favorite quote or book.2 This online “self” flattens its actual equivalent, rendering this brand of social networking as digital chitchat or nothing more than a sound bite rather than authentic writing. Dave Eggers teases out these nuances when he echoes Carr in an interview for The Observer: “Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn’t written anything for a year.” For many, online versions of communication are supplanting all other forms of expression. This phenomenon may have as much to do with connection as convenience. Because blogs tend to be more audience- directed and conversational than traditional forms of literature, the author’s physical presence is felt in the text. The curtain is pulled back; there are fewer constructs, no narrative arcs. The writer’s work becomes a conversation piece rather than an item for consumption. These online blogs and diaries are now a marriage of original text and reader response. Though Carr’s outlook on these cyberdevelopments remains somewhat bleak, Paul Longley Arthur’s assessment gives reason to hope in these technological trends: “Whether they are perceived as exciting or threatening, these innovations open up opportunities for new biographical forms and understandings to emerge” (76). These “biographical forms” are interactions rather than presentations. DeSalvo uses this developing means for two-way communication. She creates a platform from which she launches examinations of creative work-inprogress and shares her struggles with her diagnosis of breast cancer as it pertains to her writing process. Consistent with DeSalvo’s in-print work, Writingalife’s Blog intertwines multiple themes that, when joined, extend the traditional concept of the “life narrative.” The blog

2. The Internet is the best source for concrete information and has little use for ambiguity. According to Arthur, online records are “routinely ‘mark[ed] up’ records to characterize and identify lives—born here, married there, died then, for example—but these basic facts do not provide a strong foundation for a more complex and interconnected depiction of lives online” (84). These simple facts, which often accompany users’ online profiles, may qualify as basic biography, but they lack the essential causal connection of how the past informs the present that gives memoir an essential role in today’s literary landscape. This is the kind of connection that DeSalvo seeks to establish in her own work, both online and off.

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clusters in roughly six thematic sections, or what I name writers’ virtues: Preparation & Organization, Apprenticeship, Writers’ Rest, Building & Finishing a Book, Failure & Success, and Memoir as a Genre. The blog also speaks to the writer’s life—the working of it, the devotion to it. DeSalvo includes a subtextual underpinning in each post that calls us to respect the writer, and respect the work. But “respect the work” does not demand unattainable perfection. Rather, it imparts the necessity of revision, a skill to which the blogging model does not lend itself. The term “revision” is an archaic concept in a medium that favors speed and economy. In “Revision,” posted on March 31, 2010, DeSalvo uses the blog to broach the subject of imperfection when she discusses what she learned about the Italian artist Agnolo Bronzino’s process from an exhibit at the Met. In comparing his various sketches with his completed work, she noticed that he revised “his earlier more complex vision into something approaching saccharine sweetness.” Though she places no fault on Bronzino, an artist who painted for his livelihood, she uses this finding as an opportunity to put forth a challenge toward writers to remain authentic to their art, however experimental it may be. This kind of traditional revisionist model is revolutionary since it promotes the raw nature of instinctual art as well as the importance of revision in one’s unique creative process, regardless of the medium. DeSalvo demonstrates that writing on demand, as a blogger often writes, does not necessitate slipping standards. Each of her posts, however brief, has a well- developed and supported thesis; in other words, her purpose is always clear. Additionally, she pulls creative gems from other activities and hobbies—such as knitting, cooking, and karate. She also uses her own setbacks (writing and otherwise) to unearth literary wisdom. For example, a stress fracture in her foot was the precursor to her post “Slow Writing” on May 31, 2010, in which she analyzes the number of words Virginia Woolf wrote per hour, according to Susan Dick’s transcription of a draft of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Shocked by the “small” number—231—she reflects on what she might gain from “really ‘being’ in the work.” DeSalvo never stops short by merely recounting a day’s events; she consistently connects them back to her original purpose, the craft of writing a life. The manner in which DeSalvo transmutes her tangible surroundings into digestible lessons exemplifies a key tenet for any writer wishing to shepherd others: the best mentor will always remain a keen apprentice. Not only does she engage in the painstaking study of other writers, DeSalvo observes herself at work, as she does in “Five Minutes Work” on April 6, 2011. This blog post is prompted by “a beginning writer’s” question: “Can you tell me what seasoned writers do when they write?” Her approach to this question—and the tone of the blog in general—is reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke’s epistolary “answer” to the “young poet” in Letters to a Young Poet. In “Five Minutes Work,” DeSalvo details how she spent a five-minute period at her writing desk, using the “Next To Do List” she had prepared the day before. In this short span of time, she read aloud, revised, and reflected on whether the portraits of her parents were true-to-life. She conducted this exercise not to demonstrate how much she can or cannot complete in a few minutes but to show that even seasoned writers have to reread and revise their own material multiple times. She offers access to her writing process in this and other posts, sometimes detailing her “Successful Outcomes” list, her research notes, and her

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to- do lists. DeSalvo is a student of her own creative process, and through the blog, she allows us to observe her observing herself. When DeSalvo marries this “self-observation” with her documentation of a book in progress, she reveals the depth of process that otherwise remains unseen in a manuscript’s final draft. Throughout her blog posts, DeSalvo’s episodic entries chart the setbacks, challenges, and victories of writing her memoir “Father Gone to War.” She explores all phases of the writing process, from initial research to rough drafts to final revisions. The blog allows DeSalvo to capture the messy process of a book coming into being and to pen her book’s autobiography, not as an exercise in self-flagellation or narcissism, but as an opportunity to give credence to the idea that a book is not simply hatched, but it results from a disciplined commitment to showing up at the writing desk. The time frame for DeSalvo’s blog posts coincides with the writing of her latest book; this online documentary of her creative process extends the conventional “writer’s journal,” kept by writers such as May Sarton, Virginia Woolf, and John Steinbeck, into the digital age. In addition to Rilke, DeSalvo’s blog can be considered alongside Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. A compilation of letters written to his editor in 1951, the collection chronicles the process he underwent to complete the classic novel. On February 12, 1951, Steinbeck devised his plan: “I intend to keep a double- entry book—manuscript on the right-hand side and work diary on the left. Thus, they will be together” (5). As DeSalvo does with her blog, Steinbeck reiterates the importance of writing during the creative process, rather than in hindsight. Though not contemporaries, Steinbeck echoes DeSalvo’s sentiments about creative respect. In the same letter, Steinbeck wrote: “Surely I feel humble in the face of this work” (5). Both seasoned writers exhibit an awe and trepidation that fuels their creative energy as they confront the blank page. Steinbeck’s writing journal provides insight into the double meaning of DeSalvo’s title Writingalife’s Blog. While thinking through his project on the page, Steinbeck further defined it. “In a sense it will be two books,” he wrote on January 29, 1951. “The story of my country and the story of me” (3). This kind of “doubling effect” speaks to DeSalvo’s achievement in her blog, which delves into the details of her own life, as well as the life of her work-in-progress, “Father Gone to War.” DeSalvo’s dual “cyberbiography” may qualify as what Arthur calls a “second life,” the digital representation of a life that runs parallel to its actual counterpart (77). As DeSalvo charts the growth of her book from infancy to adulthood, the blog’s readers benefit from both her insights and frustrations in bringing a book to fruition. Online media forms create a virtual “communal” space, and DeSalvo’s blog extends beyond the isolated experiences of the “I” into the collective territories of the “we.”3

3. Podnieks suggests: “the technological innovations offered by the Internet stimulate, enhance, and multiply the means for self- expression” (125), and blogs continue to be the multitasker’s literary genre of choice. There is no doubt that the Internet has increased both the number of writers and the size of their audiences; however, Podnieks believes that the initial impulse to share one’s life remains unadulterated by these new media channels. “They do not inherently change the motivations for life writing,” she says, “which has arguably always been to communicate and connect not only with our own disparate selves but also with those of others” (125). Despite any

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Routinely in her posts, DeSalvo refers to the act of writing as “our work.” For example, she devotes a post to “Structuring Our Work” on April 16, 2010, and another to “Successful Outcomes of Our Work” on May 25, 2010 (emphasis mine). Similarly, in the post on Matisse, “Radical Work Takes Time,” she writes: “How long are we willing to wait to get our most radical work? Are we stopping short of when our work begins to sing its true song? I suspect that many of us do, and it’s too bad. I’m suggesting that we don’t, that we shove on until our work starts to surprise us, even startle us with what it’s becoming.” Educational and illuminating, Writingalife’s Blog cannot be mistaken for a set of pithy writing “how-tos” that will guarantee happiness and success. The blog draws out the complexity of the writing process and arrives at epiphany only through devotion to the work itself. This blog is not an instructional “e-booklet” with a formulaic response to all the maddening creative hiccups. It is not a tell-it-all of a single writer’s creative experience. It is a documentation of discovery, or as DeSalvo herself says in “Paradigm Shifts: The Turn in Understanding Our Work” (emphasis mine) on November 11, 2010: “You only learn what your life is about as you write about it.” Beyond the communal atmosphere that “our” establishes, “work” creates its own emphasis. Her definition of “work” refers to the act of writing itself, or more accurately, the “task” of writing. In her post “Why Memoir?” from January 29, 2010, she discusses the genre’s intent. It is “to transmit to humankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul. This, then, is the task of memoir.” DeSalvo emphasizes the importance of continually articulating a project, a creative tactic also found in John Steinbeck’s letters. On January 29, 1951, he wrote that his novel would be “the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate . . . how these doubles are inseparable” (4). Both writers stress a critical aspect of “work” that further defines what the “work” is while allowing the definition to develop as the creative process progresses. In the spirit of continued and communal practice, many of DeSalvo’s posts include a “task” or a challenge for the reader to undertake if she or he so chooses. For example, in “Double Time” on August 13, 2010, she discusses the dual nature of time in memoir: how an event happened, and how we interpret it now. She encourages writers to search for the “small” moment: “So dig into what you’ve written. Look for a big moment, look for a small moment, it doesn’t matter. But if you look for a big moment, try to recall a small moment you haven’t yet narrated. . . . In that way, you’ll be sure to employ that double perspective, the ‘then,’ the ‘now.’ ” A tangible “task” such as this aids writers in tackling such amorphous challenges like memory and imagery, and clearly maps out the processes that are necessary to creating vivid narratives. This task is not necessarily easy, but DeSalvo provides a means for writers at all stages of their writing careers to take a confident step forward in their processes. The blog articulates DeSalvo’s writing process, as she also uses it to continue sculpting a working definition of the contemporary “memoir.” With the slew of personal reflections and statements that hit the Internet each minute, some may argue that a blog and search engine’s goal to eliminate uncertainty, humans cannot sustain an isolationist lifestyle. They still crave the connection and relationship that ambiguity fosters.

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the cyberworld supplant the place of the written and revised life narrative. Even Podnieks states: “it would be too easy to dismiss the [blog] genre as a shallow or degraded form of traditional autobiography” (144). What Podnieks’s statement reveals, however, is the existence of a new genre, one that does not need to preclude already existing genres from flourishing—as DeSalvo’s blog, now being transformed into a book, “Slow Writing,” proves. Most posts on the Internet are crafted to be consumed in one sitting, and DeSalvo has adapted her work to fit the medium. Each of her entries can be digested in less than ten minutes, and almost every post includes a “tweetable” nugget of writing wisdom— one that is short and to the point, but still requires the introspection that Carr believes is largely absent from the blogosphere: “There’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation [in a blog],” he writes. “Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”4 Carr is suggesting that ambiguity breeds depth, shadow, and imagination— qualities organic to the human psyche that an online search engine cannot equate. This, then, is the charge of memoir: to breed such increasingly rare ambiguities. What is most remarkable about DeSalvo is that she finds a way to engage with the ambiguities of life and writing within the context of her blog. While doing this, she manages to create potent aphoristic examples: “Memoir recounts not the facts of a life, but the experience of a life.” “Don’t ignore the power of using a single word.” “Pay attention to the seemingly insignificant.” “Say yes to much, say no to more.”

Perhaps her most striking “tweetable” snippet comes in the title of her post from September 26, 2011, “Always Writing,” as she is in the middle of contemplating surgery for her then recently diagnosed breast cancer. Rather than give a charge to her readership, she casts an image of a working writer meeting her desk morning after morning, despite “those events in life that have kept writers from filling blank pages with words.” DeSalvo claims that “double vision” often pulls a writer through these difficult moments, moments that are almost always part of the foundation of a memoir. In naming the process as a “double vision,” she admits: For the first time in my life, all I’ve wanted to do was take walks, look at children playing, be with my family, talk to my students via email, read, take baths. And not write. At least not at my projects. But I have written a bit about what I’ve been going through which might, or might not, turn into a book about this experience. Like most of us writers, getting through a hard time often entails experiencing it, and watching yourself experience it. This double vision— call it detachment, if you will—has served me well in the past. Like you, I’ve tucked away conversations as I was having them; I’ve noted some incongruity when I’ve experienced it; I’ve talked to someone and

4. Sven Birkerts, author of The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, states: “the search for patterns and connections is the real point—and glory— of the genre [of memoir]” (6).

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noticed something in the background that I might use in my work. And that’s been happening to me too. (Italics mine)

Steinbeck possessed the same devotion to his work; when he started East of Eden after what he called a few “painful” years, he wrote about commitment. “I either write the book or do not,” he told his editor on January 29, 1951. “There can be no excuses” (3). An undeniable benefit of the blog genre is that little else is required aside from commitment for one to share his work with a digital audience. There is no third party dictating what gets read and what does not; a writer’s efforts need not be finite, but can develop and change over an undefined time span. DeSalvo acknowledges then that she is “tucking” away the experience and even writing about it, but she cannot think about what it might mean down the road, since what is happening in the present needs all of her attention. DeSalvo looks to the future and offers her readers the ambiguous nature of a life lived through action by posing the question: “Who knows the shape this Writing a Life blog will take?” By merging the memoir and blog genres into one, Writingalife’s Blog teaches us how to move beyond skating across the surface of ourselves, and to break through to what lies beneath. Even in Gary Shteyngart’s contemporary world, where literature and selfreflection have become superfluous, the characters still betray a need for connection, not only with others, but also with their memories and their very selves. On the night that Lenny Abramov first falls in love, he says to himself, “Remember this, Lenny; develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you’ll never figure out what’s important” (23). The art of memoir grounds us in a quickly changing sea of online identity, reinforcing our innate desire to value the past, and DeSalvo has demonstrated that the two thriving genres need not be mutually exclusive. In repurposing a fledgling genre, a blog like DeSalvo’s offers a guide to what memoir is and is not, and a guide to the genre’s possibilities.

Works Cited Arthur, Paul Longley. “Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 24, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 74– 89. Birkerts, Sven. The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2008. Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” The Atlantic, July–August 2008. Cooke, Rachel. “Dave Eggers: From ‘Staggering Genius’ to America’s Conscience.” The Observer, March 7, 2010. DeSalvo, Louise. “Always Writing.” Writingalife’s Blog, September 26, 2011. http://writingalife .wordpress.com. ———. “Double Time.” Ibid., August 13, 2010. ———. “Five Minutes Work.” Ibid., April 6, 2011. ———. “Paradigm Shifts: The Turn in Understanding Our Work.” Ibid., November 11, 2010. ———. “Radical Work Takes Time.” Ibid., July 14, 2010. ———. “Revision.” Ibid., March 31, 2010. ———. “Slow Writing.” Ibid., May 31, 2010. ———. “Some Criteria of a Completed Memoir.” Ibid., May 3, 2011.

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———. “Thinking About Audience.” Ibid., January 4, 2010. ———. “Why Memoir?” Ibid., January 29, 2010. Podnieks, Elizabeth. “ ‘Hit Sluts’ and ‘Page Pimps’: Online Diarists and Their Quest for CyberUnion.” Life Writing 1, no. 2 (2004): 123–150. Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House, 2010. Steinbeck, John. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Sullivan, Andrew. “A Blogger Manifesto: Why Online Weblogs Are One Future for Journalism.” The Sunday Times of London, February 24, 2002.

The Fruits of Her Labor L OUI SE De SALVO’S MEMOIRS OF FOOD AND FAMILY

Mary Jo Bona and Jennifer-Ann DiGregorio Kightlinger

L’antipasto Iteration invites personal growth. This is a lesson we learn from Louise DeSalvo’s memoirs. DeSalvo’s realizations—sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious— encourage her to probe further in her subsequent life writings. The 1996 Vertigo, DeSalvo’s first foray into memoir writing, is intimately connected to its 2004 sequel, Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. The follow-up memoir might be called a “prequel,” for DeSalvo’s intensive study of Mezzogiorno culture propelled her into archives both historical and familial, but returned her to places paradoxically unknown to her intellectually and regionally. Vertigo unleashed the detective in DeSalvo, whose scholarly work on behalf of Virginia Woolf aided her when she excavated her family’s histories. The vehicle that enables DeSalvo to shift from what we will call feminist confessional memoir (Vertigo) to ethnic memoir (Crazy in the Kitchen) is the author’s focus on food. Through food, DeSalvo manipulates the malleable boundaries of autobiographical writing in order to develop a new image of Italian American women. DeSalvo peels away the lugubrious old-world nonna stirring the sauce to uncover a shared cultural history marked by hunger, deprivation, starvation, and suffering.1 In the memoirist’s hands, food serves not to elevate Italian American culture, but to reveal a buried past, unknown to DeSalvo’s parents. DeSalvo’s food talk is less about nourishment and more about loss.

1. See Daniela Gioseffi’s “Beyond Stereotyping” (1992) for an earlier, important attempt to correct the false images attached to being a woman of Italian American origin.

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This loss is intimately tied to the loss of the Italian language, including its regional dialects. In her memoirs, DeSalvo becomes a spokeswoman for Italian migration and its effects on future generations in America. The most significant mark of Italian migration is the loss of language. This loss made the telling and transferring of regional and family histories impossible. Loss of language results in a distancing from the past that haunts later generations who, like DeSalvo, feel isolated and unmoored.2 Food becomes the vehicle that transports and physically reconnects her with the past of her ancestors. DeSalvo does not merely write about food in these memoirs, for in the midst of her writing, she becomes a gourmet chef in her lived life. The genre of memoir provides insights into the importance of DeSalvo’s cooking as a step toward wellness. Preparing and eating foods associated with her culture connects her to a history clouded by time and considerable loss. Yet, DeSalvo carefully makes distinctions between her grandmother’s Italianness, marked by peasant fare, poverty, and abuse (which remains unchanged in America), and her own cultural identity, increasingly shaped by affluence, education, and gourmet cooking. DeSalvo’s intensive research and broad reading in sociology, history, and literature contextualize Crazy in the Kitchen vis-à-vis Vertigo, in which bits and pieces of family history are imagined and unearthed. The power of Crazy in the Kitchen lies in DeSalvo’s ability to move fluidly between personal and shared ethnic histories. The generic shift from feminist confessor in Vertigo to ethnic autobiographer in Crazy in the Kitchen also enables a transition from a drama of incoherence to one of healing. With only few details about the personal history of her step-grandmother, including the fact that as a child DeSalvo was not told that her grandmother was not her biological grandmother, the author is at a loss to understand her mother’s fury at the older woman. In her formative years, the young DeSalvo is exposed only to emotional outbursts and not the reasons undergirding her mother’s unbridled anger at her stepmother and her inconsolable grief after her father’s death. Without context, the young DeSalvo feels unanchored and often responds to familial crisis in a similar manner as her mother—she feels incoherent with grief and unable to think or express her thoughts in ways to help diminish her pain. Vertigo paves the way for Crazy in the Kitchen where DeSalvo offers more context to understand (and forgive) her family of origin.

Il Primo: First Course In Vertigo, for the first time in autobiographical Italian America, readers are given an inside look into the “unlikely narrative of how a working- class Italian girl became a

2. Nancy Carnevale’s A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890–1945 (2009) explores the ways in which “the individual experiences language—the degree to which language informs a personal conception of ethnic identity as well as issues related to immigrant consciousness and thought” (9). Carnevale examines the politics of language in Italy and in the United States—upon arrival and in later years, considering public and private spheres. Her work helps to better understand the reasons behind second and third generation Italian Americans’ feeling of loss and isolation from ancestral home place.

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critic and writer” (xvii). That DeSalvo elides the adjectival descriptor “American” is no accident, though she uses “Italian American” earlier in that same paragraph. She is only beginning her journey to understand her cultural identity. Rita Felski describes a feminist “counter-public sphere” that serves as an “oppositional discursive space within contemporary society defined in terms of a notion of gender identity perceived to unite all participants” (84). In Vertigo, DeSalvo unabashedly develops a feminist subjectivity that she shares with her “projected community of female readers who will understand, sympathize, and identify with the author’s emotions and experiences” (Felski 90). Vertigo can be placed firmly within the context of feminist autobiography and within a subgenre of prominence in recent years: feminist confession. Yet, in the context of feminist confessional autobiography, Vertigo arrives quite late on the scene.3 Not until 1996 were the descriptors “Italian American,” “woman,” and “working class” prominently displayed and reiterated as they were in Vertigo. The publication of this memoir paved the path for subsequent writers of Italian America.4 Because Vertigo arrived on the literary scene at the end of the second wave of feminism, its focus on “consciousnessraising,” that is, making public that which has been private, departs from a logic of confessional discourse emerging directly from the women’s movement (of the 1970s), thus allowing DeSalvo to encode a female audience whose subjectivity is inflected by multiple categories of identity, including ethnicity and race (Felski 83, 86). DeSalvo’s confession is divorced from religion in the orthodox sense of admitting sin and transgression. For DeSalvo, as for many feminist autobiographers, literary autobiographical exploration is motivated by a “personal crisis which acts as a catalyst” (83). Felski adumbrates two other characteristics of feminist confession that underscore the strategies through which feminist autobiographers pursue the truth of their subjective experiences: through uncensored expression distanced from traditionally aesthetic criteria of literature and through an invitation to the reader to examine conflicted identity according to the proscriptive ideologies on gender and class (86, 90). Dispensing with obvious literary features such as poetic language and elaborate narrative structures, DeSalvo succeeds in persuading her cherished readers that they are “reading an intimate communication addressed to them personally by the author” (86).

3. Feminist confessional memoirs from the 1970s and 1980s include such works as Marie Cardinal’s The Words to Say It (1975), Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980), and Ann Oakley’s Taking It Like a Woman (1984). For a more extensive list, see Felski, “On Confession,” 83. 4. Many memoirs by Italian American women have followed DeSalvo’s Vertigo. Some include: Flavia Alaya’s Under the Rose: A Confession (1999), Maria Laurino’s Were You Always an Italian? Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America (2000), Beverly Donofrio’s Looking for Mary: Or, the Blessed Mother and Me (2000), Carole Maso’s The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth (2000), Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001), Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (2001), Theresa Maggio’s The Stone Boudoir: Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily (2002), Louise DeSalvo’s Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004), Kym Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006), Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen: A True Story (2006), Mary Cappello’s Awkward: A Detour (2007), Jean Feraca’s I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio (2007), and Joanne Clapps Herman’s The Anarchist Bastard: Growing up Italian in America (2011).

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(Il contorno 1: Over the past decade, we have taught Vertigo to upper- division undergraduate students at Stony Brook University. Female and male students alike admitted feeling as though “Louise” was speaking directly to them, enabling them to feel an intimacy with the author and to validate their feelings about their own fraught parental relationships.) DeSalvo examines her Italian American family of origin as fundamental to her emotional development and to her personal turmoil in Vertigo. This is DeSalvo’s central preoccupazione and it is unrelenting and persuasive. If the writer of feminist confession, as Felski explains, can be described as “walking a fine line between self-affirmation and self-preoccupation,” then DeSalvo treads finely on that line at all times (91). Despite her physical responses to loss in her childhood—resulting in fainting and episodes of vertigo—the adult DeSalvo repeatedly manages to find balance through writing and cooking. She has her female mentors to thank for this achievement: from her neighbor, Mrs. Neil, an English teacher who employs the young DeSalvo to organize her vast library, to Virginia Woolf, whose engagement in life beyond writing teaches her of the necessity of “integrating work and pleasure” (Vertigo 227–228). As DeSalvo attests, if feminism informs all of the writing she does, then cooking makes that writing possible (240). In attempting to reverse the culinary history bequeathed to her by her depressed mother, DeSalvo takes charge of her nourishment in adulthood, remembering a hunger that was not sated, emotionally or physically, in infancy and childhood. She confesses, “in my earliest memories, I am hungry, always hungry” (48). Thus, throughout Vertigo, liberally sprinkled references to food compensate for her mother’s lack of culinary expertise and inability to love the young DeSalvo the way that any daughter needs to be loved. Unable to be emotionally available to her children, DeSalvo’s mother, often depressed, retreated into silence when she was exhausted or into furious bouts of cleaning when she was angry. Neither of these behaviors benefited an intellectually curious child whose emotional development was modeled by a primary caretaker who struggled mightily to survive the quotidian realities of daily life. While the memoir remains focused on parental conflict and the ways DeSalvo responds to it through intellectualism and sexuality, the chapter most devoted to food—“Anorexia”—is placed toward the end of Vertigo, when DeSalvo recalls her first year away at college. Stinging but now self-consciously aware of the culinary disasters in her mother’s kitchen, DeSalvo reprises the theme of this chapter in Crazy in the Kitchen with the focus shifting from feminist confessional perspective—“Fainting is one way of disappearing. Anorexia is another” (Vertigo 208)—to an ethnic autobiographical lens—“ ‘No . . . there will be no cannolis’ ” (Crazy 197)—and a reinterpretation of her mother’s food anxiety. DeSalvo shifts to writing as an ethnic autobiographer in Crazy in the Kitchen. Her memoir becomes multigeneric in the sense that Anne Goldman describes a text as it “doubles (triples) as an essay in cultural criticism and as an autobiographical document [that] . . . simultaneously write[s] the self and represent[s] the culture(s) within which that self takes shape” (Take My Word x). DeSalvo has always embraced the multiple ways in which she defines herself. Here is an incomplete list: Italian- descended, Italian American Working- class, child resident of Hoboken, New Jersey

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Post World War II child Feminist intellectual Scholar, writer, and memoirist Daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother Gourmet chef

By the time DeSalvo writes Crazy in the Kitchen, she has developed both rhetorical and narrative strategies that give her memoir a gravitas that blends several ingredients, including “how cooking can be a language for more than food” (Goldman, Take My Word xii). In becoming a literary ethnographer who explores the effects of Mezzogiorno culture on immigrants and their progeny, DeSalvo shifts her agenda from the pursuit of writing herself into a subjectivity that “promises power and control” (Felski 90) to the pursuit of self- contextualization. Analyzing working- class autobiographies that focus on food, Goldman describes the balance writers must strike between the privileged “I” that gains authority through writing and the collective “we” that represents an ethnic culture that has been paradoxically silenced and commodified. Goldman writes: “the desire to speak autobiographically is negotiated in narratives that simultaneously write the self and the representation of culture(s) within which that self takes shape” (Take My Word x). Once cultural context takes precedence, DeSalvo reexamines and offers a more nuanced interpretation of the maternal and the maternal specifically in relation to her mother’s depression. Through the embedded discourse of food, DeSalvo revisits, reevaluates, and extends the topics she examined in Vertigo, producing a narrative that itself becomes, as Susan Leonardi says of Nora Ephron’s memoir, Heartburn, “a kind of recipe—[on] how to survive” (346). DeSalvo survives and transcends a lack of maternal love by becoming another kind of sleuth: a literary ethnographer. In the process, she develops an ethnic “I / eye” that metonymically serves both intraethnic and interethnic readers, since she is both affiliated with and isolated from her culture of origin. As Sau-ling Cynthia Wong says of writers of immigrant autobiography, “reading by ethnicity is a necessary act of tradition- and identity-building for those whose literatures have been rendered invisible by subsumption” (309). Recognizing the injury attached to losing ethnicity, DeSalvo reasserts her Italianness through the study and practice of foodways. In order to nourish herself, she must explore the cultural impoverishment from which her family suffers and from which her mother suffers in extremis. To do that, she must examine the consequences of abandoning food traditions, a topic she explores in Crazy in the Kitchen.

Il secondo: Second Course Helen Barolini writes, “Mangiando, ricordo. [While eating, I remember; as I eat, I remember.] My memory seems more and more tied to . . . a full table of good food and festivity; to the place of food and ritual and celebration in life . . . Food is the medium of my remembrance, of my memory of Italy and family” (13). Eating transports the immigrant and her children back to the home place. In preparation for writing Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo went spelunking through the annals of immigration histories. The historical overviews she inserts into Crazy in

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the Kitchen offer readers a pedagogy of suffering for nineteenth- century Italian working poor.5 While many recently published food memoirs risk stereotypic reduction, DeSalvo’s Crazy in the Kitchen examines food to characterize the relationships between self and ethnicity, individual and family, and present and past.6 This postmodern, feminist memoir is critical of historical and social perceptions of Italian Americans in suburban America, shining a light on the assimilative challenges they faced in the United States. Crazy depicts the early immigrants’ desire to cling to foodways as a means of maintaining identity and the choice to abandon Italian foodways as reflective of a desire to become fully American and escape stereotypes associated with negative perceptions of their ethnicity. Maintaining foodways helped immigrants represent cultural folkways that were increasingly forbidden in post-Risorgimento Italy and to embrace (albeit marginally) notions of Americanization. Crazy in the Kitchen’s representations of food illustrate the crossing and the dilution of borders between Italian and American, work5. Here follows a brief outline of that story: Italian peasants suffered a long history of hunger and abuse under foreign rule and Papal authority. The fight for unification was supported by the expectation that these abuses would be curbed, but little changed after Italy was declared a nation in 1861. In Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, sociologist Hasia Diner explains that the poor had a limited diet, feeding mainly “upon regionally determined staples” that were considerably compromised in the winter months and “jeopardized” by “crop failures, droughts, storms” (32). They rarely ate meat and often foraged to survive. Greater variety was seen in the communal barns or stables of the poor but only on holy days. The wealthy, in contrast, “ate a range of complicated dishes,” regularly enjoying a variety of meats, cheese, pastas, vegetables, and fruit (Diner 27). Diner’s study includes reports of ethnographers in 1920s Sicily, which declare that “ ‘the real symbol of . . . household unity is the common table’ ” (35). In America, cheese, meat, and macaroni— foods scarce in Italy and only eaten on special occasions—were available in abundance. The Italian family “as the unit of everyday life could not be separated from food” (35). Understandably, Italians in America often gauged success by the food on their table. Diner suggests that by “grafting onto their everyday lives” foods enjoyed on holidays and holy time, “these immigrants derived not only an ethnic identity but a sense of well-being” (50). Considering that hunger was at the core of suffering in their homeland, Italians understood food as symbolizing prosperity in the United States. Italians also clung to traditional ethnic foodways as a way of maintaining regional and family Italian identities. Kitchens became the primary site for maintaining “traditional foodways and ways of eating [that helped] form a link with the past and help[ed] ease the shock of entering a new culture; thus many [immigrants] struggle[d] to hold on to them despite pressures to change” (Kalčik 37). The Italian immigrants’ conscious, deliberate choice to prepare homeland foods, and to reestablish and teach traditions surrounding daily meals, holiday feasts, and religious feste, suggests a desire to perform an ethnicity or create a shared ethnic identity, grounded in cuisine, and that is observable in communicating definitive difference from an American culture that threatens to overwhelm new arrivals. 6. In her consideration of DeSalvo’s work, Edvige Giunta suggests that “cooking and eating” and the “processes by which and material conditions in which recipes are transmitted, food prepared, conserved, offered, or refused . . . dramatically articulates both a perception of the domestic space as oppressive and an awareness of the ways in which women empower themselves within that traditionally oppressive space” (105). Giunta goes on to suggest food as a “vehicle by which Italian American women can articulate the complexities of ethnic identity” (109).

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ing and middle- class consciousness, financial success or failure and the degree of Americanization DeSalvo’s family has embraced, proving Arlene Voski Avakian’s assertion that “cooking can sometimes keep women in ‘our’ place and sometimes help us out of a place” (“The Triumph of Fassoulia” 113). Arguing the possible reappropriation of the traditionally devalued and often oppressive kitchen space, Avakian suggests cooking as “a vehicle for artistic expression, a source of sensual pleasure, an opportunity for resistance and even power” (Through the Kitchen Window 7). DeSalvo was writing Crazy in the Kitchen in the new millennium, a time when Italians had long assimilated into the dominant culture and Italianness had become almost invisible. This public invisibility, with exception only to stereotypic depictions (DeSalvo, like her mother before her, is deeply disturbed by the persistent representations of Italian Americans as mobsters), compels the author to reclaim her ethnic culture. Yet, DeSalvo seeks not to romanticize familial or cultural history, but to expose historical mistreatment, explore perceptions of Italian Americans upon arrival in the United States in terms of race, color, and ethnicity, and to understand her family relationships in the context of this history. DeSalvo’s memoir benefits from first-, second-, and thirdgeneration historical and sociological accounts of the Italian American immigrants’ assimilative challenges; the author’s historical positionings invite clearer perceptions of assimilation models. Crazy in the Kitchen is shaped by the memoirist’s research and by the remnants of family experiences (as they were told to her or imagined). Through descriptions of the bread served in her childhood home, DeSalvo exposes the memoir’s central familial conflict, namely the emotional turbulence surrounding her grandmother’s Italianness and her mother’s desire to Americanize. She describes her grandmother’s home-baked bread as a “big bread, a substantial bread . . . a good bread . . . A thick- crusted, coarse- crumbed Italian bread” (Crazy 9). Refusing to eat this home-baked bread, DeSalvo’s mother buys “white bread, sliced bread, American bread” (12). Her gesture is not merely assimilative, but also expresses her desire to disidentify with a stepmother who does not love her. Nonetheless, DeSalvo makes evident in her earlier Vertigo that her mother’s culinary habits continue to be inflected by Italian traditions; it was the young Louise who “wanted to pass for American,” ashamed of the foods she ate (Vertigo 204). Rethinking the issue of shame, DeSalvo observes her mother’s ineluctable shift toward American foods during the years her stepmother, now widowed, comes to live with the family that has moved from urban, Italian Hoboken to suburban Ridgefield, “the promised land” (87). The choice between two breads—thick- crusted versus white bread—comes to represent the historical conflict between Italian and American identities, the discord between Italian immigrants and their children, and the difficult inheritance of familial unrest the third generation must negotiate. DeSalvo presents a self-image of contemporary Italian American female identity shaped by the food she consumes in her childhood, prepares for her husband, children, and grandchildren and the food choices of women in her family who have passed away but have not passed from her consciousness. Both memoirs suggest that Italian American identities are formed in relation to food preparation, consumption, and representation. Both DeSalvo and her mother make choices about food in order to negotiate assimilation and establish identity. Crazy in the Kitchen

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uses food to place Italian American identities in historical contexts larger than the individual family unit. In “Wild Things,” Crazy in the Kitchen’s prologue, DeSalvo describes the historical moment from which her grandmother Libera emerges, highlighting the connection between southern Italian history and the value Italian Americans place on food. In the Mezzogiorno there were wild, raging seas . . . wild sandy winds . . . wild gangs of children without parents . . . wild gangs of bandits . . . who would beat you . . . steal from you . . . maybe kill you . . . there were ferocious invading armies as far back as anyone could remember. . . . Some would murder everyone in a village . . . leave no evidence of life. . . . And this was why . . . men and women . . . joined wild bands of peasants and brigands and anarchists who fought the invaders . . . fought for their right to a crust of bread even though the government called up armies to fight our people when they rebelled. (Crazy 1–4)

Libera is named in the tradition of radical politics practiced in her native Puglia, “called the land of chronic massacres” where the “government troops routinely fired into crowds of unarmed strikers” (136). Her emigration to the United States was perceived in her native country as a rebellion. She left Italy in hopes of finding freedom, but DeSalvo suggests that her step-grandmother did not escape a life of servitude. Libera’s arranged marriage is one of opportunity (for emigration) and convenience (DeSalvo’s recently widowed grandfather needs a wife and caregiver for his child, Louise’s mother). Libera suffers a loveless marriage, the scorn of her stepchild, and the burdens of a working class life. After her husband’s death, she is taken from her Hoboken Little Italy to live in the New Jersey suburbs. Isolated from her culture and distanced from her family, Libera withdraws and asserts her identity only when cooking and doing needlework. Looking back, DeSalvo sees this work as an art that gave her grandmother “a sense of worth and some small scrap of human dignity . . . affirming her right to exist in a world that did not want her” (83). Libera bakes bread several times a week with flour borrowed from her stepdaughter, DeSalvo’s mother. For her grandmother, DeSalvo notes, food “outweighs all the evil of this new country that she has come to” (20). She insists that she would never return to Italy because “no matter how hard you worked, you stayed poor. . . . Wherever you could earn your crust of bread, wherever you didn’t go hungry . . . is where you should call home” (5). She kneads the bread dressed only in her underwear, shedding her cumbersome clothes as she works. After kneading, she sets the dough to rise in her bedclothes. The “swaddling of the bread,” her granddaughter writes, is her “most tender gesture” (26). DeSalvo documents the careful process of bread making—“getting the fresh yeast, assembling the ingredients, mixing the bread, letting it rise, punching it down, letting it rise again, shaping it, letting the loaves rise, baking them, letting them cool, storing them properly” (19). These images—all verbals—reappear later in the text when DeSalvo makes the bread for her own grandchildren. DeSalvo’s detailed description of making one’s own bread is slowed down through her grammatical syntax—mixing, shaping, baking, storing—and becomes an homage to the lives of traditional women, whose work is ceaseless but also creative. Building on Leonardi’s analysis of recipes in literature,

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Goldman suggests the recipe serves as “metaphor for the reproduction of culture . . . the act of passing down recipes from mother to daughter works . . . to figure a familial space within which self-articulation can begin to take place” (“ ‘I Yam What I Yam’ ” 172). In her examination of Viramonte’s “Nopalitos,” Benay Blend suggests: Food and women’s bodies, writing, and cooking, are incorporated into auto- ethnographic discourse built on a maternal authority. Memories of [a] mother’s cooking establish [her daughter’s] presence, placing her in a culinary family line. Her childhood memories gender culinary and cultural traditions. (156)

DeSalvo does not include a traditional recipe for her grandmother’s bread, but her careful description of its preparation does the same work. She recalls that “making the bread” as a child was a “welcome ritual. . . . A time I share with [my grandmother], sometimes wordlessly, sometimes accompanied by her stories . . . and . . . food I like . . . food that does not disgust me, food that . . . sustains me and nourishes me” (Crazy 22). DeSalvo experiences a sense of wellbeing when preparing food with her grandmother that she is denied in her mother’s presence. Libera calls her granddaughter “mia figlia” (my daughter); her cooking and storytelling help solidify the young Louise’s Italian American identity, which DeSalvo later communicates and shares with her granddaughter. Auspiciously named Julia—invoking the memory of one of the world’s greatest chefs— the child’s own obsession with the Food Network and her grandmother’s cooking suggests an ethnic inheritance passed through the generations via foodways. Despite these moments in which we catch a glimpse of the familiar Italian nonna, the narrative resists nostalgia. Libera is not permitted her own flour by her stepdaughter and is denied money from her deceased husband’s pension. Her stepdaughter refuses her storage space in the kitchen, and looks upon her with disgust when she prepares traditional Italian dishes. The grandmother does not eat with the family, DeSalvo notes, but alone in a corner of the kitchen, near the radiator from a chipped bowl with a “large metal spoon” (79). A “landowner” now herself, DeSalvo’s mother unconsciously mimics Mezzogiorno landlords who controlled access to foods for landless peasants. While she is central to Crazy in the Kitchen, the character of Libera is immersed in the mystery of her past and the sadness surrounding what little is known of her life. DeSalvo’s travels to Libera’s hometown of Rodi Garganico in Puglia sadly produce the realization of a personal history lost in the passage across the sea and the silences that followed. Libera’s silence functions as both her tool of empowerment (her refusal to engage her stepdaughter causes the younger great frustration) and her attempt at invisibility. The desire for invisibility, the wish to disappear, recurs. In Vertigo, DeSalvo interprets her own desire to disappear as a defense mechanism. When she can no longer endure the pain of neglect, she faints, escaping (if only momentarily) her fears and anxieties. She compares her desire to disappear to her sister’s suicide and her classmate’s anorexia. The anorectic’s death, discovered years after the two had lost touch, seems to affect DeSalvo intimately: What made her want to disappear? And why didn’t what happened to her happen to me? . . . Years later, whenever I read about anorexia, I think of my classmate. Wonder

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what her story was. What her story really was. What made her want to die. I think: fainting is one way of disappearing. Anorexia is another. (Vertigo 208)

For the anorexic, food is perceived as a physical and psychological threat. While DeSalvo does not suffer an eating disorder, she understands the dangers associated with food. She recalls a relationship with a college friend largely characterized by an ongoing conversation they called “if foods could kill.” While overtly humorous, the friends’ long lists of revolting meals conveys an underlying gravity suggesting the two have been traumatized by a neglect that leaves an ineradicable mark. Edvige Giunta suggests DeSalvo “reverses the narrative of sustenance” in her treatment of anorexia and foods that could kill (109). In Vertigo, food harms. The characterization of food as potentially harmful is carried over into Crazy in the Kitchen. In the descriptions of DeSalvo’s mother in the kitchen, a new narrative of disordered eating emerges. We may consider her mother’s refusal to eat meals with the family, choosing instead to clean while they eat, nibbling only on leftovers after the meal, as symptomatic of an eating disorder. Eating disorders are often linked to cycles of abuse, neglect, and obsessive behaviors. DeSalvo never addresses this possibility directly, though she does admit “food was a problem” for her mother (Vertigo 218). With the suggestion of some larger conflict with food looming, DeSalvo explores her mother’s battle with Italian food in Vertigo. When her father was alive, DeSalvo’s mother was a willing participant in the practice of traditional foodways and encouraged her daughter to adopt a similar attitude. It is the young Louise, not her mother, who is horrified to be offered the ceremonial lamb’s eye by her grandfather at an Easter meal. She refuses to put such “an offensive thing” inside her mouth and to be “singled out” as the star child in the extended family (69). DeSalvo portrays herself as the precocious child, the family’s prodigy, and recognizes her mother’s collusion in this depiction of young Louise as the smartest child of the family—a position often signified through the offering of special foods, like the lamb’s eye. No mention is ever made of her mother’s unwillingness to eat and prepare Italian foods during Louise’s younger years, when the family is living in the Italian American ethnic enclave. However, after her father’s death, DeSalvo’s mother remains inconsolable, and slowly transforms into a woman seemingly fearful of the associations ethnic food suggests and, after the move to the suburbs, she becomes preoccupied with upward mobility. DeSalvo’s mother outwardly scorns her stepmother and her peasant bread. “[I]t is everything that my grandmother is,” DeSalvo writes, “and everything that my mother, in 1950s suburban NJ, is trying very hard not to be” (Crazy 9). Instead, her mother orders bread from the “Dugan’s man”—a white, sliced, American bread. “Maybe my mother thinks,” DeSalvo speculates, that if she eats enough of this other bread, she will stop being Italian American and she will become American American. . . . Maybe my mother remembers the incarcerations, deportations, and lynchings of Italians, the invasion of Italian neighborhoods in Hoboken, NJ during the war when we lived there. Maybe my mother thinks eating this bread will keep us safe. (13)

The history of prejudice against Italian Americans prompts DeSalvo in Crazy in the Kitchen to imagine a rationale behind her mother’s contempt for the thick Italian bread.

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Her reasoning suggests that preferences, attitudes, and behaviors related to cuisine may be deconstructed to gain insight into a particular individual or group mindset with regard to their social, economic, and cultural history. As Warren Belasco argues, the connection between identity and consumption gives food a central role in the creation of community . . . we use our diet to convey images of public identity. If we are what we eat, we also are what we don’t eat. . . . To eat is to distinguish and discriminate, include and exclude. Food choices establish boundaries and borders. (1)

DeSalvo’s mother, an adult woman during the World War II era, is a product of assimilation and upward mobility. The Dugan’s bread symbolizes both ambitions—a desire to Americanize and to be safe—a need to be seen as part of white, middle class America. Her rejection of Italian cuisine coincides with a fear of being associated with stereotypical Italian images—mafia men and old women in black. “Food habits give people visibility and identifiability,” anthropologist Susan Kalčik argues, “and hence a group [or an individual] may seek to hide such signs or to maintain them depending on its desire to remain visible or invisible” (47). In refusing traditional ethnic meals, DeSalvo’s mother establishes a boundary between self and familial ancestry and attempts to erase signs of Italian American ethnicity. DeSalvo’s mother engages in a performance Camille Cauti terms “ ‘culinary passing’ [that] involves attempting to gain acceptance among an ethnic group to which one does not belong via the preparation and eating of certain foods” (10). In this way, she is performing American identity, passing as an American in her choice to prepare and eat American foods. Rejecting Italian American cuisine, culture, custom, and language, DeSalvo’s mother rejects the institutional labels suffered by her stepmother—dark, foreign, other. These are labels discussed at length in “Dark White,” a chapter of Crazy in the Kitchen in which DeSalvo considers the physical description printed on her grandmother’s naturalization forms. (Il contorno 2: Despite her reluctance to renounce her birth nation, Libera becomes an American citizen to avoid suspicion during World War II. Ignoring her light skin, her naturalization papers read: “ ‘color White; complexion Dark’ ” (Crazy 91). The “dark” label, DeSalvo surmises, is connected to prejudices against Italians since they were not considered “white” in the decades following early migration. Breaking from her personal narrative, DeSalvo takes on the role of historian and etymologist to explore various definitions of naturalization, ultimately suggesting immigrants were considered “unnatural” until they renounced ethnicity. Libera’s papers suggest, despite Italian Americans’ attempts at assimilation and in spite of the access to privileges enjoyed by white Americans, the immigrant will always be othered.)7 DeSalvo’s mother’s rejection of her stepmother, and the life she represents, stems from the prejudices about and perceptions of Italians held by the dominant culture. But 7. For a historical overview of the treatment of Italian Americans during World War II, see Lawrence DiStasi’s Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II (2001). See also Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001), especially chapters 1–3, for an autobiographical perspective on the effects of the war on second-generation parents.

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childhood trauma also plays a part. Neglected and abused by family members after her mother’s death, DeSalvo’s mother fails to thrive. Deprived of love by her stepmother (Libera fulfilled basic maternal obligations, but she did so with resentment), she continues to struggle physically and emotionally into adulthood. The text suggests her stepdaughter’s disgust for all things Italian and her unwavering dedication to assimilation may be the result of associating Libera’s neglect with her Italian American ethnicity, which is then abetted by the dominant culture’s disdain for all things Italian during the era of World War II. In spite of her desire to Americanize, DeSalvo’s mother does not emerge as a traditional 1950s housewife, but as a woman in turmoil who is uneasy in the kitchen. She pays little attention to food preparation; she is distracted, and shows a lack of regard for ceremony. Eventually, DeSalvo remembers, her mother “abandoned cooking foods that required much preparation and began cooking things that were cooked already”— prepackaged, frozen, and canned foods (Crazy 32). DeSalvo describes small ways in which her mother punishes herself. For example, she engages in senseless manual labor, refusing to rest or play with her children. She spends more and more time compulsively cleaning her home and less time with the children, who are expected to care for themselves. She attempts to impose some order on a life that feels unmanageable, but ultimately, her attempts are futile. Her depression becomes so debilitating that she forgets to cook and neglects her children. On the rare occasions when DeSalvo’s mother does prepare Italian foods, the meals come at great personal cost and almost always involve tears. She cries and injures herself with knives, broken dishes, and scalding water. While describing the danger her mother battles while cooking Italian, DeSalvo repeatedly returns to the abuse and neglect her mother suffered in childhood as if to suggest her mother’s self-harm (purposeful or accidental) is the result of learned behavior—an internalization of early mistreatment. It is not accidental that her self-injury seems most frequent in the kitchen. The reader comes to understand the link between abuse and the food she seldom prepares. The suggestion is, as Barolini writes in Festa, “mangiando, ricordo”—“while eating, I remember,” or, more liberally translated, “eating is remembering.” For DeSalvo’s mother, the kitchen comes to represent the physical and emotional nourishment she was deprived of as a child. According to Donna Gabaccia, the Italian American kitchen and the “comfort foods” traditionally prepared within “are usually heavily associated with women as food preparers and organizers of the family’s emotional life. . . . Immigrants and their children glorified their mothers as ‘feast makers’ and culinary artists in words that emphasized the warm sensuality that linked food to maternal love” (We Are What We Eat 180). DeSalvo’s mother suffers from her biological mother’s early death. Her subsequent failure to thrive transforms the kitchen into a place linked not to maternal love, but to devastating loss. In the kitchen, the loss of the mother continually resurfaces and cannot be repressed—not even by obsessive cleaning rituals. The ever-present Libera occupies the space rightfully belonging to her biological mother. The kitchen, a space of memory, becomes increasingly dangerous. Eventually, DeSalvo writes, “eating became very dangerous for her. Once, she stabbed her hand with a fork. Another time, she cut herself instead of cutting the food” (Crazy 117). The danger in her mother’s kitchen follows the food to the table.

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With little patience for her daughters, DeSalvo’s mother turns them over to her husband at dinner; the family table becomes a place for discipline enacted through verbal abuse and physical intimidation. The young Louise is fearful, but understands resistance is necessary to survival. Considering her sister’s passivity and eventual suicide, DeSalvo writes: “The cost . . . of being the ‘good child’ was death. In our household, it was fight back or die. Being the child my parents hated was better than being the child they loved. My parents’ love erased my sister, erased who she was, who she might have been” (40). She rewrites the dining space to suggest an appropriation of food to wield power. But in DeSalvo’s mother’s kitchen, food’s power is destructive. DeSalvo’s mother wields power in choosing American foods for the family, restricting her stepmother’s practice of traditional foodways, and depriving her daughters their culinary ethnic inheritance. Similarly, she and her husband co- opt family meals—a traditional symbol of love and togetherness—to dictate appropriate behaviors. When the young Louise resists parental authority, the power struggles in the family kitchen— between stepmother and stepdaughter, mother and children, father and daughters— escalate. DeSalvo recalls a table set with mismatched plates because “we were always breaking glasses, smashing dishes to the floor” (40). When her father threatens his daughter with a knife, her grandmother intervenes to protect her. Her mother’s only successful dinner is the one she prepares for DeSalvo’s future husband, Ernie. This food event incurs the daughter’s anger and resentment, especially when it is recalled in Vertigo. Ironically, DeSalvo ends her chapter “Anorexia” with a detailed description of that dinner. In true confessional fashion, DeSalvo’s interpretation of her mother’s superb culinary presentation is met with fury, causing her mother to wonder honestly what “she’s done to get me so upset this time” (Vertigo 217). DeSalvo writes from the perspective of a sophomore college student who has achieved physical distance from a mother who largely made it possible for her daughter to be the first person in her family to go to college. Uncensored and blatant, DeSalvo reveals those privately accusatory thoughts directed toward her mother, whom she accuses of committing culinary infidelity: “to me, this meal means that my mother knows what’s good, and that she has known what’s good all along. She just hasn’t cooked what she knows is good for me” (217). Feeling betrayed by what she falsely assumes is her mother’s deliberate high jinks, DeSalvo avoids filtering mechanisms, unafraid to present herself at her most unattractive and graceless. In the next paragraphs, she juxtaposes the churlish sophomore with the thankful memoirist, offering the context of her mother’s depression as a way to sympathize and recognize the gift her mother gave her daughter, despite the fact that “food was a problem” for her (218). Her reprisal of the same scene occurs in the final section of Crazy in the Kitchen, “Communion,” where DeSalvo places the same event in several contexts, including her admission that she has learned how to love her mother in the years following her death. Juxtaposed with DeSalvo’s anxiety regarding her mother’s cooking capabilities is her awareness of the effort her mother made during the dinner: bella figura is maintained on all fronts, the mother displaying an ebullient charm and preparing a delicious dinner of lobster tails, double-baked potatoes (for which DeSalvo includes the recipe), Le Sueur peas, and Ernie’s favorite dessert, Indian pudding with vanilla ice cream (Crazy 199). Gone is DeSalvo’s rage. What follows this scene is a self-mocking memory of Louise and

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Ernie’s dinner party thrown for two of their friends, prepared in DeSalvo’s mother’s kitchen. That DeSalvo reprises the Ernie DeSalvo dinner event at the end of the chapter is no coincidence, for DeSalvo now takes some responsibility for how unhappy her mother “has been with me” (205). Despite her recognition that she will never learn how to cook well from her mother (199), DeSalvo concludes the chapter with a focus on her mother’s hospitality and graciousness toward the man her daughter will eventually marry: “My mother leans forward, smiles at Ernie across the table, asks him if he’d like another helping” (205). This memory of the dinner functions as a necessary reprieve from the tension and combative environment of DeSalvo’s family of origin. DeSalvo’s accounts of kitchen violence work against traditional narratives of the Italian American feast.8 Crazy in the Kitchen dismisses stereotypical images of three generations of the extended Italian American family cooking and then sharing a meal in the spirit of a collective familial and ethnic identity. In place of these, DeSalvo offers disturbing images of a nuclear family nearing collapse. The characters around DeSalvo’s table—mentally ill mother, violent father, abused and neglected children, invite a reconsideration of the kitchen space in the immigrant home and suggest an oppressive inheritance that has little to do with family recipes. DeSalvo senses a rage behind her mother’s cooking, behind family dinners marked by shattered glass and threats with wielded knives, a rage that is contagious, a rage she does “not want to catch,” but admittedly does anyway (10). The rage DeSalvo inherits from her mother is most evident in her behavior in the kitchen, but has been transformed into a different kind of “craziness.” In reaction against her mother’s inattention, negligence, and disregard, cooking becomes DeSalvo’s obsession in adulthood. DeSalvo senses the loss of her ethnicity and seeks to reclaim it through traditional foodways. In her analysis of “culinary passing,” Cauti suggests that white Americans engaging in culinary passing gain temporary acceptance as “honorary” ethnics and benefit from insight into a new culture. Ethnics, passing as Americans, eventually assimilate and risk losing both culinary and cultural ethnic identity (Cauti 11). DeSalvo feels this loss. Preparing traditional peasant fare is a way of remembering the past, commemorating her grandparents’ sacrifices—long hours as a factory worker in the sweatshop, indentured servitude as a railroad worker under the padrone system, and oppression under the tyranny of a loveless, arranged marriage. DeSalvo knows little of her grandparents’ lives in Italy. Trips to their homeland prove scant help in uncovering truths behind individual lives, although she does discover shocking political realities. “When I thought about my grandmother’s Italy,” DeSalvo writes: “I did not imagine invasion, conquest, war, hunger, thirst, fatigue, resignation, despair. I did not see a waterless, sunbaked, grief stricken, apocalyptic land bleeding its people to America” (Crazy 76). Unable to reconcile this history with romanticized notions of Italy, DeSalvo spends much of her time in Italy visiting with chefs, procuring recipes, and discussing tradi8. Conflict and violence in the Italian American kitchen are not uncommon fare in women’s narratives. Two striking examples include the throat slashing of the grandmother by her Alzheimer’s-suffering husband in Lynn Vannucci’s “An Accidental Murder” and recurring bouts of debilitating illness during holidays for the grandmother in Alane Salierno Mason’s “Respect.”

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tional foodways. “Without a history,” she insists more than once within Crazy in the Kitchen’s narrative, “there can be no present, without a past, there can be no future” (137). Carol Field’s “Rites of Passage in Italy” explores the ways in which food traditions have changed after the “end of the mezzadria, the sharecropping system that essentially indentured families of agricultural workers to the landowner for whom they worked,” attributing changes to increased wealth, the appearance of supermarkets, women in the workplace and noting “regional borders are ever more porous” (36). These changes to tradition make the task of reclaiming ethnicity ever more difficult. However, regardless of changes to “private rites of passage” including the addition of “new ingredients and dishes,” Field argues: “the Italians continue to value the past and its deep connection to food. What seems old may be new and what is new may seem old. Both make legitimate claims on their place in tradition” (37). For DeSalvo, food becomes a signifier of the past—a palpable, tangible, connection to an Italian American identity that can be ingested, consumed and known completely—a kind of adopted language practiced in the absence of shared words. “You see,” she writes, “I am obsessed with food. I’m always trying to find some new cooking technique to perfect, always trying to find something new to cook” (Crazy 180). DeSalvo may be looking for new food, but the subtext suggests that she is seeking so much more. Her hunger for authentic Italianness is never fully sated, despite her hours in the kitchen, in part because of the vast distances between her grandmother’s Italy, the Italy she encounters in adulthood and the Italian villages of DeSalvo’s imagination constructed while she and her grandmother prepare Italian foods. DeSalvo’s food obsession marks a desire to recreate the villages of her childhood imagination and feel, once again, her grandmother’s protection. Libera and her food provide both spiritual and physical nourishment that DeSalvo’s mother does not. DeSalvo consciously chooses not to replicate the cycles of abuse fundamental to her family history. Looking back, DeSalvo recognizes her grandmother’s role in saving her life—not only by intervening on her behalf when her father threatened her, but in teaching her love, the importance of ritual and ceremony, and the role of physical nourishment in spiritual and emotional wellness. These are the tools DeSalvo uses to stop the cycle of abuse. Reclaiming the memory of her grandmother as the one who provided her with spiritual and physical nourishment, DeSalvo teaches her grandmother’s lessons to her own children and grandchildren. Only after her grandmother’s death does DeSalvo come to understand the full weight of Libera’s influence, and she finds herself plagued by regret. “This is what I think about when I remember my grandmother,” DeSalvo writes, “How she baked her bread. And how she cleaned her bowl. And how I never thanked her for all that she had done for me” (Crazy 239). As regret overshadows DeSalvo’s food obsession, so, too, does the ghost of her mother’s kitchen. This haunting manifests as a type of madness connected to her mother’s control issues—the obsessive cleaning, meticulous organization, and refusal to permit Libera access to counters and cupboards. In turn, DeSalvo finds herself micromanaging her kitchen; she distrusts other cooks and even admits to being poor company in restaurants. The way in which DeSalvo seeks to manage all manner of food parallels her mother’s behavior. Both women attempt to exert some control over their present, fix the past, and

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move forward. The difference between them lies in DeSalvo’s ability to admit the importance of the past and the luxury of being able to do so without fear of prejudice. Education, introspection, and “writing as a way of healing” help DeSalvo better understand the inherited madness and present opportunities for personal growth and wellness.9 In Crazy in the Kitchen, when her husband tells her she is “ ‘pazza nella cucina,’ ” she admits, yes, I am crazy in the kitchen. And one day, I hope I will not be. I hope that I can become, in the kitchen, the person I am in other places. I can work on this, I know. Can work on it the way I work on perfecting my breads . . . my minestrones, my pastas, my risotto. With care, attention, reverence, and discipline. (166)

DeSalvo’s compulsion to cook is connected to her compulsion to write. “My kitchen is my refuge,” she writes, in an attempt to explain the obsession; “My cooking makes my writing possible” (186). Cooking’s rewards are immediate, she reasons, and “temper the reality that the rewards of writing are few, infrequent, and unpredictable” (226). Despite this rationale, the pleasure good food provides is, perhaps, its most significant reward. “With every excellent meal I make,” DeSalvo writes: “I drive away the phantom of my mother’s kitchen, try to obliterate the want of my ancestors” (187). The obsession with cooking seems less connected to the immediacy of reward than to the relationship of food to wellness that she learned as a child in her grandmother’s care.10 As her mother lay dying, DeSalvo imagines the two breaking her grandmother’s bread together—her mother finally able to accept her ethnicity. The breaking of bread now embodies the cultural and spiritual communion of three generations of women. DeSalvo is deliberate in describing the tearing of the bread—there is no knife, no opportunity for hurt or violence. She is careful to resist falling into nostalgia. She has never cooked alongside her mother, never broken this bread with her, and never shared this closeness. This dream is set against DeSalvo and her mother’s shared dream she calls “Nightmare (Without Food).” In this dream, she and her mother are lost, fearful of some impending violence, unable to secure their safety, unable to go home. This is a nightmare, DeSalvo writes, “of exile . . . leaving . . . never being able to return home,” of losing self (159). This dream is a metaphor for the Italian diaspora, but also for the dislocation both DeSalvo

9. See especially Chapter 4, “Writing Pain, Writing Loss” of DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. 10. DeSalvo’s attempt to perfect traditional ethnic recipes and her obsession with foods shared with her grandmother recall Sherrie Innes’s work in both Secret Ingredients—a book-length consideration of cookbooks and food television as they inform race, class and ethnicity, and Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai—an edited volume exploring writers’ relationships to ethnic foods and familial culinary inheritance. Despite our desire and repeated attempts, Innes suggests, “we can never re- create the foods of our childhoods. Like childhood itself, they remain forever just outside of our grasp” (2). Lynn Z. Bloom supports Innes’s claim, arguing “no recipes corroborate” the ethnic food legacy, although, she admits her “family dotes on recipes even as [they] recognize that much of their meaning, as with any other writing, lies between the lines” (75).

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and her mother feel in the face of abuse and neglect.11 That dislocation is exacerbated by the absence of food—their only link to the past. DeSalvo’s memoir reveals food as a means through which one may remember and reclaim family and cultural history; for DeSalvo, this is largely a maternal inheritance often marred by hunger, anger, mental illness, and death. Steeped in a culture of indirection, the women in DeSalvo’s Italian American family mediate conflict through food. For these women, food becomes a means of communication, a language used when there are no spoken words of mutual understanding. When the opportunities for communion with food are absent, DeSalvo believes there is hope for healing in the printed word. Writing about food helps to uncover the past to better understand the present and imagine a future. The words on the page nourish the living and the dead, as do the biscotti she pushes “deep into the soil” of her family’s grave insisting people should bring food instead of flowers (229).12 DeSalvo depicts traditional foodways as a bridge to her southern Italian lineage. Recognizing that “Italian immigrants faced tremendous pressure to change their eating habits” (Levenstein 2), DeSalvo links her mother’s refusal to prepare or eat Italian foods 11. Robin Cohen constructs a taxonomy to describe different types of diasporas, evoking horticultural imagery to explain dispersal: weeding includes the victim / refugees such as Jews and Armenians; sowing describes imperial / colonial movements, including the ancient Greeks, British, and Dutch; besides the Italians, transplanting also describes the ser vice / labor of indentured Indians, Chinese and Japanese; layering refers to trade / business / professional diasporas and includes Venetians, Lebanese, and Chinese; and cross-pollinating is Cohen’s metaphor to describe hybrid or postmodern diasporas, analyzing the Caribbean in this category. Use of the term “diaspora” is highly contested with regard to Italian migration history. Stefano Luconi’s “The Pitfalls of the ‘Italian Diaspora,’ ” “investigates whether the notion of diaspora offers a feasible paradigm to define the migration of the Italian people . . . [and] eventually suggests that the nature of the push factors and the contents of the expatriates’ orientation toward their homeland make diaspora a concept that is hardly appropriate for an understanding of the exodus from Italy and the dispersion of that country’s population in foreign lands” (145). Characterizing diaspora as a “homogenizing paradigm” that “fail[s] to take into account the specific features of the exodus from the Italian peninsula,” Luconi suggests “placing aside the idea of diaspora will help focus on both the emigrants’ individual or family agency and the circularity of an experience that was often characterized by repatriations and temporary sojourns rather than by a definitive physical separation from the homeland” (166). We agree with Donna Gabaccia, who argues that migration for Italians rarely “created a national or united Italian diaspora. But it did create many temporary, and changing, diasporas of peoples with identities and loyalties poorly summed up by the national term, Italian. . . . Theirs was no involuntary or sudden scattering into exile without end. Italy’s diasporas more resembled that of the ancient sea-going and entrepreneurial Greeks (merchant diasporas) than that of enslaved Africans or persecuted Jews” (Italy’s Many Diasporas, 5– 6). 12. The notion of feeding the dead is embraced by many cultures. Kalčik describes an often embraced Italian tradition requiring “survivors” to leave a “loaf of bread and a candle near an open door for three days after the death, when the soul was believed to settle” (49). Other traditions require food offerings for the dead thought to return on All Souls Day. Food is often served at funeral ser vices to mourners, or placed in the coffin to nourish the deceased. Kalčik suggests this food sharing expresses “an acceptance of death and union with dead friends and family” (49).

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to historical abuses of early immigrants and stereotypic depictions of Italians in the media. DeSalvo’s examination of her mother’s Americanization is not meant to positively portray the entry of the ethnic into the mainstream, nor does it try to argue the ethnic as worthy of acceptance. Rather, Crazy in the Kitchen documents the harm assimilation threatens. The crossing, and effective erasure, of all boundaries marking ethnicity— language, location, food, and culture—threaten DeSalvo’s mother’s mental and physical health, and are linked to her sister’s suicide, her grandmother’s isolation, and her own depression. Recognizing the injury attached to losing ethnicity, in Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo chooses to reassert her Italianness through the study and practice of Italian foodways. DeSalvo studies the history of Italian foodways, the influence of southern Italy’s occupying rulers, and she reads cookbooks as she travels to Italy to observe Italian chefs and talks her way into kitchens to cook with them. In this way DeSalvo shares company with sister memoirists such as Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (Italian Days, 1989), Susan Caperna Lloyd (No Pictures in My Grave, 1992), and Theresa Maggio (Mattanza: The Ancient Sicilian Ritual of Bluefin Tuna Fishing, 2000), all of whom are drawn to the motherland for deeply personal reasons, or, as Harrison suggests, to experience a journey of “reconciliation.” DeSalvo’s obsession is fed by the Food Network, and maintained with frequent trips to Whole Foods. She collects pots, pans, and cooking gadgets; she becomes a gourmet chef. In her essay, “Eating the Hyphen,” food writer Lily Wong describes eating “traditional” Chinese dumplings—nontraditionally frozen, packaged and shipped from Boston’s Chinatown. “Literally butchering” them with fork and knife before dipping the inside meat in ketchup and devouring crushed dumpling skins with chopsticks (20), Wong’s “step-by-step guide to an entirely new dumpling eating experience” (19) juxtaposes Chinese ancestral culture and “the States” (20). Wong understands the tension between the food and the condiment, calling her dumpling eating “slightly fraught” especially for one who subscribes to the idea of authentic Chinese cuisine being marked by “pigs ears and fungus” and involving “jellyfish and sea cucumber” (20). Wong accepts the contradiction, however, in ways similar to DeSalvo, noting “eating dumplings in my own style has become the hyphen between Chinese and American in my identity” (20). While DeSalvo’s crossing between Italian and American is much more fluid than the crossing Wong describes, both writers bridge ancestral and American cultures with the employment of food, recognizing the necessity of building that bridge however “fraught” it may seem. The irony associated with the ways in which DeSalvo’s food obsession manifests, does not escape her. She acknowledges her status as a wealthy, privileged, fully assimilated, white academic. We eat “organic. Hydroponic. We are careful about what we eat,” she writes. “We spend a fortune” (Crazy 163). DeSalvo admits feelings of guilt, knowing her ancestors were forced from their homeland by starvation, poverty, and abuse, but believes the meals she prepares go a long way in healing wounds: “With every excellent meal I make . . . I drive away the phantom of my mother’s kitchen, try to obliterate the want of my ancestors” (187). DeSalvo convincingly depicts food as an ethnic and gendered marker at work in migration events, assimilative efforts, and cultural histories. Armed with an incomplete

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family history, historical and sociological accounts of Italians and Italians in America, memories of a childhood marked by abuse and neglect, and a desire to recover the sense of wellness she experienced while cooking with her grandmother, DeSalvo uses traditional ethnic food as one tool to reclaim an Italian American identity she was deprived of as a child.

Il Dolce: Dessert The fruits of DeSalvo’s labor are bittersweet. This memoirist knows how to indorare la pillola—how to sweeten the pill. For DeSalvo, the practice of and writing about traditional foodways authorizes a position in the family’s lineage; the passing of recipe and ritual down through the generations encourages awareness of self as informed by ancestry. Cooking and food writing also help to create a collective Italian American culinary experience that may persist in spite of linguistic, geographic, economic, or educational boundary crossing. As Rose Romano precisely put it, Everybody must know that we eat. Until we have a right to this place. (26)

Yet, cooking and writing cause DeSalvo great pain. Taking hours long trips to the supermercato, examining labels and considering the quality of each ingredient, obsessing over preparation techniques and cooking tools, DeSalvo reveals a relationship with food that is both celebratory and fraught with a discomfort that stems from the great divide between her grandmother’s peasant meals and her own gourmet dishes. These contradictions in her relationship with food make DeSalvo’s work authentic and her memoirs painful and inviting at once. Our own familial relationships to food strikingly parallel and diverge from DeSalvo’s memoirs. For both of us, they are equally agrodolce, bittersweet. Our own admixture of food memories was inspired by Louise’s memoirs and we recall them briefly in conclusion. Mary Jo’s mother taught her daughter the joys of cooking. Together they would howl with laughter at their kitchen mistakes (dropping the tub of nonpareils waiting to be sprinkled on the pupa cu l’uova). But it was Mary Jo’s paternal grandmother who haunted her dreams with the story of the basket of holes her granddaughter would surely receive in purgatory after all the food she wasted as a child. Bittersweet. Jennifer recalls the escape her grandmother’s kitchen provided. A place where the sweet smell of tomato sauce and the pungent odor of cabbage (“garbage” in her grandfather’s accent-inflected English) mingled, Ermelinda’s kitchen provided a respite from a social world in which she often felt othered. Now, when Jennifer watches her daughter Emily, her grandmother’s namesake, cooking with her own mother in the family’s Brooklyn apartment, she wishes that same respite for both her daughters, understanding, well, how quickly that sense of wellness may be compromised by age, illness, exhaustion, and the darkness of one’s mind. DeSalvo admits that darkness into her kitchen. It is an ingredient in all her recipes. The shadows of the past are as integral to her pizza making

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as the dough itself. Their presence raises the stakes—for the chef, the memoirist, and her readers, demanding a consideration of the food on the plate and the elusive nature of its origins.

Works Cited Avakian, Arlene Voski, ed. Through the Kitchen Window: Women Writers Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ———. “The Triumph of Fassoulia, or Aunt Elizabeth and the Beans.” In Innes, Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food, 102–115. Barolini, Helen. Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays. New York: Harcourt, 1988. Belasco, Warren. “Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field.” In Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, ed. Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton, 2–23. New York: Routledge, 2002. Blend, Benay. “ ‘In the Kitchen Family Bread is Always Rising!’ Women’s Culture and the Politics of Food.” In Innes, Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai, 145–164. Bloom, Lynn Z. “Writing and Cooking, Cooking and Writing.” In ibid., 69– 83. Brown, Linda Keller, and Kay Mussell, eds. Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States. Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. Carnevale, Nancy C. A New Language, a New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890–1945. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Cauti, Camille. “ ‘Pass the Identity, Please’: Culinary Passing in America.” In A Tavola: Food, Tradition, and Community Among Italian Americans, ed. Edvige Giunta and Samuel J. Patti, 10–19. New York: American Italian Historical Association, 1998. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. DeSalvo, Louise. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. Vertigo. New York: Dutton, 1996. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling our Stories Transforms our Lives. San Francisco: Harper, 1999. Diner, Hasia R. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. di Prima, Diane. Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. New York: Viking, 2001. DiStasi, Lawrence, ed. Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2001. Felski, Rita. “On Confession.” In Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, 83– 95. Field, Carol. “Rites of Passage in Italy.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 10, no. 1 (2010): 32–37. Gabaccia, Donna R. Italy’s Many Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. ———. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Gioseffi, Daniela. “Beyond Stereotyping.” Ms. (September / October 1992), 70–72.

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Giunta, Edvige. Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Goldman, Anne. “ ‘I Yam What I Yam’: Cooking, Culture, and Colonialism.” In Decolonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 169–195. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. ———. Take My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti. Italian Days. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1989. Innes, Sherrie A. “Eating Ethnic.” In Innes, Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food, 1–13. ———. Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Innes, Sherrie A., ed. Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Kalčik, Susan. “Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity.” In Brown and Mussell, Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States, 37– 65. Leonardi, Susan J. “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie.” PMLA 104, no. 3 (1989): 340–347. Levenstein, Harvey. “The American Response to Italian Food, 1880–1930.” Food & Foodways 1, no. 1 (1985): 1–23. Lloyd, Susan Caperna. No Pictures in My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992. Luconi, Stefano. “The Pitfalls of the ‘Italian Diaspora.’ ” Italian American Review 1, no. 2 (2011): 147–176. Maggio, Theresa. Mattanza: The Ancient Sicilian Ritual of Bluefin Tuna Fishing. New York: Penguin, 2000. Mason, Alane Salierno. “Respect.” In Beyond the Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience, ed. Kenneth A. Ciongoli and Jay Parini, 62–73. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Romano, Rose. Vendetta. San Francisco: Malafemmina, 1990. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Vannucci, Lynn. “An Accidental Murder.” In The Voices We Carry, ed. Mary Jo Bona, 371–376. Montreal: Guernica, 2007. Wong, Lily. “Eating the Hyphen.” Gastronomica 12, no. 3 (2012): 18–20. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach.” In Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory, 299–315.

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Italians and Greeks arrived en masse in the United States between 1890 and 1924 (Serra 10; Moskos 11). Raised in a strict patriarchal milieu, Greeks left their homeland, driven away by poverty, squalor, and the wars of the expanding Greek state (Moskos 8, 10). Deprivation and social injustice propelled the flight of southern Italians (Mangione and Morreale 73, 75).1 Upon their arrival on Ellis Island, both groups were received with negativity, ranging from blatant racism and hostility to condescension and ridicule (Anagnostou, Contours 10). Greeks and southern Italians were considered colored (Kalogeras, Entering 83) and were called “niggers” or “half niggers” (Roediger 46). For more than half a century, these ethnic groups were segregated and demonized, their folklore castigated and their languages silenced, all in the name of assimilation. David Roediger notes that Greeks, like Italians, often resorted to a glorious ancient past in order to claim superiority over other Caucasian peoples (108). In their struggle to be entitled to “full political, cultural and economic citizenship” (9), Greek and southern Italian immigrants, 1. Initially, most emigrants from both groups intended to return home. Family- centered cultures were nourishing, especially to males. The men’s sense of familial love and duty was the central reason fueling Italian and Greek migratory movements (Moskos 8; Mangione and Morreale 92).

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like other new immigrants, pledged allegiance to a privileged white America. They adopted its customs, its ethics, and even its racist attitudes toward other ethnic groups, including Africans, Mexicans, and Chinese (108). They chose this pathway so that they would not be cast as the despised Other. The dismantling of the ethnic ghettos in the urban center, intermarriage, higher education, and upward class mobility, as realized through suburban residence, baptized the southern European immigrant into the waters of hyphenated whiteness. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the civil rights movement, with its emphasis on difference and pluralism, inaugurated a new era for the immigrants of Mediterranean origin. In the spirit of white ethnic revival, artists and scholars of Greek and Italian origin have systematically attempted to preserve, record, and examine their ancestors’ connections with their countries of origin and lay claim to an ethnic culture that has flourished on American soil. Scholars of Italian American studies have created a body of interdisciplinary writing that has much to teach scholars in the fledgling field of Greek American studies. At the 2005 Italian American Studies Association conference, Yiorgos Anagnostou remarked that “the impressive range and scope of the conference shockingly illuminates the unrealized potential of [the Greek American Studies] field” (“What Can Greek American Studies Learn”).2 In “Persephone’s Daughters,” one of the few essays to consider the two literatures, Edvige Giunta underlines the common cultural past of American women of southern Italian and Greek origins.3 While stressing the relevance of the myth of Persephone in the creative processes of these two groups—the traumatized female figure, the crucial bond with the mother, and the negotiation with the harsh new environment in which the young woman is transplanted— Giunta concludes by lamenting the absence of critical recognition for both ethnic groups and for their literary production (782). Although both Greek American and Italian American studies have grown substantially since the publication of Giunta’s essay, much remains to be done. As Josephine Gattuso Hendin argues, a comparative exploration “can serve as the basis for an understanding of an innovative and even revolutionary aesthetic that it may share with other ethnic writing” (13).4 In this regard, a comparative approach between Greek and Italian American literatures can be beneficial not only to the recognition of both ethnic cultures, but also to understand the dynamics of agency, assimilation, and privilege in these cultures. Italian American and Greek American women were raised within a shared mythological and cultural framework, with strict gender roles, and the expectation that they would emulate the Madonna prototype prevalent in conservative Catholicism and

2. Until 2012, the Italian American Studies Association was known as the American Italian Historical Association. Anagnostou is quoting from a scholarly article that he wrote on diaspora and Greek American studies. For excerpts of the article, see, “Where Does ‘Diaspora’ Belong?” 3. At this writing, Valentina Seffer, a doctoral student in Sydney, Australia, is also at work on a dissertation, “The Myth of Persephone in Memoirs by Italian American Female Authors,” which examines the memoirs of Joanna Clapps Herman, Susan Caperna Lloyd, and Kym Ragusa. 4. Yiorgos Kalogeras, with his interest in ethnic literature and filmography, and Maria Kotsaftis, with her comparative background and her interest on female writing, are two of the most important Greek American scholars working comparatively.

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Orthodoxy. Migration to the United States, in some ways, exacerbated this paradigm. These women were decreed loud and unruly wives, mothers, and daughters of ignorant “off-whites.” The legacy of immigrant mothers to their daughters and the daughters’ vacillation between two worlds and cultures is apparent in the literature of contemporary Italian American and Greek American women writers. Memoirs, autobiographies, and novels of the mid- to late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries illuminate the Italian American and Greek American female immigrant experiences in ways that are essential to understanding white ethnic female agency in the United States. A comparison between the unconventional and passionate narrative of Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo (1996) and the stories of two Greek American works—Helen Papanikolas’s three-generational saga, The Time of the Little Black Bird (1999), and Ariadne Thompson’s autobiographical novel, The Octagonal Heart (1956)—offers fruitful possibilities to better understand the dynamics shaping female character and agency in Italian American and Greek American cultures. In the opening pages of Vertigo, DeSalvo explains the scope of her writing and the hurdles she has faced en route to personal and professional success. She uses “reading, writing, meaningful work, and psychotherapy . . . to escape the disabling depression” to which both her mother and sister succumbed (Vertigo xxxvii). DeSalvo’s childhood and adolescence were framed by the socioeconomic circumstances and the limiting horizons of a patriarchal ethnic culture that prescribes female subservience. These elements also affect female self-definition in the two Greek American novels. Their authors underline the ways their heroines manage or fail to overcome obstacles. Papanikolas is the matriarch of Greek American letters, whom Maria Kotsaftis has called “an ethnic voice par excellence” (127). Papanikolas’s Time of the Little Black Bird is a bildungsroman that outlines the creation of an empire in which the female ethnic remains, throughout the twentieth century, the figure behind the male breadwinner. Set during the First World War era, but published in the 1950s, Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart portrays a mid-twentieth-century upper middle class ethnic woman. Far from DeSalvo’s radical and vociferous approach, the two Greek American writers present more conventional narratives. Their female characters’ reactions to the pressures they are subjected to are not as bold or as apparent as those of DeSalvo’s narrator in Vertigo. Yet, their heroines suffer behind the facades of domestic security. In this sense, the Greek American female narratives complement DeSalvo’s portrayal of the female immigrant experience of gendered oppression.

The Socioeconomic Milieu Early in Vertigo, DeSalvo focuses on family history through detailed descriptions of her parents’ personalities. She thus sets the framework for the ethnic woman’s struggle—a struggle that is prescribed before birth. The Italian American author’s working class first-generation immigrant mother and father have endured traumatic childhoods. They lived hand to mouth. There was no warmth and tenderness in their upbringing. Revealing the ugly face of the American Dream, DeSalvo tells us that her mother, the daughter of a railroad worker, was abused and neglected. She grew up under the painful presence of an unloving stepmother who had been shipped from Italy as a picture bride. As a result, DeSalvo’s mother becomes a joyless adult who has little self- esteem and lives in

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extreme austerity. Inevitably, DeSalvo’s relationship with her mother is tumultuous, but her connection to her father is no more peaceful. DeSalvo’s father’s childhood was the destitute life of many immigrant children. His indolent and absentee father frequently abandoned his large family to go to Italy. His father’s absence forced DeSalvo’s father, as the only male child in a family with four daughters, to become the breadwinner. From the age of five, he worked in a factory buttoning shirts next to his mother. He became a marginalized student, perhaps also due to his dyslexia, and a juvenile delinquent who dropped out of school to support his family (Vertigo 42). DeSalvo depicts him as a war veteran with a violent streak, a despotic, raging father who targets his argumentative and strong-willed firstborn daughter. DeSalvo’s parents are ultimately incapable of providing their two daughters with tender parental guidance. This Italian American family is further troubled by the everyday hurdles of its working class life in postwar Hoboken. Yet DeSalvo’s difficult family environment fuels her love for life and her ambitions, which eventually lead her to become a writer. Papanikolas places survival and trauma at the forefront of The Time of The Little Black Bird. Focusing on “the immigrant experience, inflected by regional, class, and gender differences” (Anagnostou, “Research Frontiers” 13), Papanikolas tells the story of the Kallos family and the empire they build in Salt Lake City. Although her male protagonists dominate as the dynamic actors in the world of business, the first and final chapters of the novel are devoted to the women, those supporters who are kept backstage, beginning with Marika, the unfortunate sixteen-year- old picture-bride who arrives in the United States in 1913.5 Maria Kotsaftis argues that the Kallos women have had “stringent gender roles imposed on them by society, and [the narrative stresses] how these roles shape and often cripple them” (134). This underlying feminist message of Papanikolas’s saga is reminiscent of DeSalvo’s memoir. The novel opens with Marika, the last matriarch of the Kallos family. Her uncle sells her to the highest bidder, a man who treats her like an animal. He coerces her into bearing children and taking care of the household, including the filthy boarders her husband takes in.6 Marika’s victimization makes it possible for the family fortune to grow. As soon as her children, especially her firstborn, Stavros, can follow orders and do chores, they also fall prey to their father’s greed. As a toddler, Stavros helps with the irrigation. He witnesses his mother being beaten and is beaten himself when he forgets to water the family’s fields. In this Dickensian setting, from the age of three, Stavros carries the coal for the stove; by the age of five, he is in charge of feeding the chickens and rabbits; when he 5. According to Evangelia Tastsoglou and George Stubos, 500,000 Greeks from both Greek and non- Greek territories (Russia, Turkey, and so forth) immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1920 (176). See also Charles C. Moskos’s Greek Americans: Struggle and Success (1989). 6. Many married Greek immigrant women in the West took in boarders (Tastsoglou and Stubos 180). Additionally, E. D. Karampetsos claims that Marika seems to be the epitome of the ethnic woman victimized at home. In Karampetsos’s words: “Except for their insistence that their Greek brides be virgins, the men have little regard [for] them as individuals, but see them as unpaid laborers whose job is to keep house and bear children. The men in Papanikolas’s stories have their work, their coffeehouses and other activities outside the house to fill their lives. The women are limited to their housework and the care of their children” (73), and, in the case of Marika, the boarders upon which her husband insists.

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turns six, he is put to work at his father’s hotel, where his uncle beats him on his first day for making noise while sweeping (Papanikolas 27). Seven-year-old Stavros’s long days of work present a bleak image of the life of Greek immigrant children. What becomes telling, however, is that Marika regrets that her firstborn is not a daughter, since a girl could have helped her with the cooking and ironing, even at the age of four.7 Marika’s reflections on the obligations of the female offspring in her immigrant family make clear what the norm is for the young immigrant girl of Greek origin.8 As Steve Frangos states, “for Helen Papanikolas, the problem has never been what Greeks achieved or did not achieve, but with the emotional, cultural and psychological costs incurred along the way” (121). Marika and her children represent the pioneer Greeks in America, whose lives were marked by hard labor, domestic violence, and squalor in the race for social ascent. DeSalvo’s and Papanikolas’s depiction of family life can be regarded as paradigmatic of the immigrant families who were cramped in American ghettos during the early to mid-twentieth century. Thompson’s The Octagonal Heart offers an exception to such a paradigm by recounting the idyllic life of an upper-middle- class Greek family in St. Louis. Thompson’s narrator and heroine, Ariadne, a second-generation immigrant, lovingly reminisces about the holidays, which she has spent in her aunt’s mansion with her extended family, servants, and governess: “As I look back on the lovely, lost days at Parnassus, they all seemed edged with gold, as if sunlight and magic touched them in a special way” (59). Brought to America by their pioneer grandfather, a scholar and a priest, the heroine’s mother and aunt are among the most sophisticated and sought-after young women in the Greek American community. Their lives are a far cry from Marika’s hardships and DeSalvo’s mother’s struggles. Ariadne’s mother and aunt make successful marriages to two Greek consuls, which grant them a luxurious life for their children, who seem utterly loved and spoiled by both parents. In recognition of the love and care she received as a child in the octagonal house, Ariadne states: “With nectar and honey they filled our days, while they made sure the cup from which we drank was most properly and prudently made” (59). In contrast to DeSalvo’s cramped cold-water flat in Hoboken, with its primitive bathroom that had to be shared with the grandparents next door, Thompson’s characters live in a Victorian house of the early century, complete with a cupola and hammocks in well-trimmed gardens. The benevolent father and the impulsive, artistic mother in Thompson’s novel contrast the violent parents in Papanikolas’s novel. The children in The Octagonal Heart are spared the brutality and suffering experienced by the children in Time of the Little Black Bird and Vertigo. If living in the tiny apartment of the ethnic enclave of Hoboken has caused the young DeSalvo suffering, abandoning the ethnic neighborhood for suburbia leaves her

7. In this sense, from an early age, the Greek immigrant children’s lot resembles that of the Italian immigrant children. As Mangione and Morreale attest, “children were expected to contribute to the family’s support as soon as they were strong enough to do manual labor” (232). 8. For Penelope Karageorge, one of Papanikolas’s reviewers, the author’s directness and matter- of-factness is among her prominent characteristics: “In her wonderful short stories, all rooted in Greek Americana, Papanikolas proved herself a courageous writer who is able to ‘tell it like it is’ without sitting in judgment of her characters, their inhibitions, their familial commitments, their enormous pride and Greekness, their stubbornness” (85).

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feeling disoriented and rootless.9 Nothing can replace the familiarity of the ethnic neighborhood with its fire- escape chatters and play companions. DeSalvo hates the move to Ridgefield, where “there is no pulse, no energy, no razzmatazz” (Vertigo 91). The seven-year- old narrator experiences deracination and transplantation: The shock of being torn away from Hoboken, a place that had started to feel safe and familiar to me, and moving to Ridgefield, which feels like alien territory, I experience as a permanent and complete rupture from home, a home that felt, by turns, impermanent and dangerous, permanent and safe, but like home. (92)

The rough edges of her working-class neighborhood and family life in Hoboken represent the only refuge that she has ever known. Her nostalgia for the lost neighborhood echoes the longing of other ethnic subjects—especially women forced to sacrifice the warmth of a tightly knit community for suburban life. Envisaging the family move within the broader frame of midcentury immigrant upward mobility, DeSalvo writes: “in moving, our family loses much and it suffers, as all city people do who move to the suburbs” (90). Grieving the loss of the urban environment, the “homeless” author shares a “quasi-immigrant” experience, replicating her ancestors’ aches for the world they forever lost once they boarded the ship to the United States. DeSalvo admits that her selfperception, her class-consciousness, her diction, and mentality have been shaped by the tough urban streets where she lived until the age of seven. At the age of forty, she returns to Hoboken, “where . . . my memory has found a place to live” (93). On her “pilgrimage,” she longs to “find . . . the secret of what happened to my soul, to find the thread that will take me back to my past” (93). A symbol of assimilation and social ascent, the house in Ridgefield represents, for DeSalvo’s parents, not only privacy and a better quality of life, but also an investment in their daughters’ futures. In “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar,” DeSalvo explains that “in the 1940s and ’50s many Italian Americans like [her] parents, buried the past, perhaps because it was shameful, and tried to assimilate, perhaps because it was necessary” (62). The relocation to Ridgefield represents the realization of upward class mobility. As the author puts it, “suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably, we can be solidly, and respectably, middle class” (Vertigo 87). DeSalvo does not hesitate to admit that living in Hoboken would have given her life a different course because “there was enormous pressure for working- class Italian American girls to be anti-intellectual” (90). Her intellectual curiosity profits from the American educational system in the new suburban setting. She deploys her skills and abilities to secure the passport that allows her to leave her family’s working class ethnic confines.

Ethnicity and Gender DeSalvo seems utterly alone in her voyage towards self-representation. She lacks any empowering cultural link to the past. In Vertigo, DeSalvo does not discuss any initiation 9. Angelika Bammer’s discussion of displacement in postmodern times is helpful to understand the predicament of DeSalvo’s heroine: “to ‘be’ in the postmodern sense is somehow to be an Other: displaced” (xii).

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into her ancestors’ culture: there is no reminiscing of the past, no stories from Italy or pre-immigration, and no references to rituals and folklore passed on to the next generation. As DeSalvo explains in her second memoir, Crazy in the Kitchen, assimilation will secure a better American future for DeSalvo, but omertà muffles the few cultural ties with the past.10 DeSalvo’s personality is similar to her father’s: Her courage, curiosity, and adventurous streak, desirable qualities for her brave father, the fireman, are deemed unacceptable for a good Italian American girl. These traits lead to constant friction, especially when DeSalvo asserts herself. DeSalvo’s collision with patriarchal authority is evident from the first page of Vertigo: “I am not docile. I am not sweet. I am certainly not quiet. And, as my father tells me dozens of times, I am not agreeable” (xxxiii). The turbulent atmosphere in her home is the result of a cultural context that demands different behavioral codes for males and females. Contrary to DeSalvo’s early experiences of female solidarity when the men were away at war, she finds that her journey toward self- expression is also hindered by her mother’s acceptance of traditional female roles. As a second-generation immigrant, DeSalvo’s mother oscillates between an American idea of emancipated womanhood and an ancestral southern Italian notion of submissive femininity. Thus, DeSalvo’s mother disapproves of her daughter’s rebelliousness and discourages her from outdoor activities. Yet, she displays proudly the badge that she was once awarded for her writing when she was a student. She also cultivates the young Louise’s love of books by insisting that she read mystery novels and undertake intellectual activities like public speaking. Torn between female domesticity and the American ideals of success and personal development, DeSalvo’s mother embodies Helen Barolini’s notion of the “dual pulls from opposing cultural influences” (The Dream Book xv). With her ambivalent attitude, DeSalvo’s mother embodies the struggle of the hyphenated woman. DeSalvo’s mother is a depressed and overworked homemaker, a dissatisfied, unsmiling wife, and a miserable mother, who violently reacts against her stepmother. DeSalvo desperately wants to escape this model. In her struggle to define herself, a lonely, young Louise is certain of one thing: “my life isn’t going to be anything like what my mother is doing with her life” (Vertigo 148). Instead of following her mother’s footsteps and falling into despair and inertia like her younger sister, the young DeSalvo fights against the maternal legacy of depression. She distances herself from the family battlefield and finds shelter in the company of books, often in the haven of a library. A similar pattern of patriarchal authority and female submission pervades Papanikolas’s saga in which Marika and her husband Andreas embody traditional male-female prototypes. The Papanikolas family dynamics are typical of Greek immigrant families that “made a rigorous attempt to keep itself cohesive by keeping its gender role structure intact, and by preserving its strong patriarchal orientation and traditional values” (Tastsoglou and Stubos 179). Andreas works outdoors and rules at home, while Marika, as 10. Not only is the American-born heroine in Vertigo deprived of insights into the collective past that could assist her in her quest for identity, but she also has to conjecture about her parents’ personal stories: “What I learned about my parents’ histories came to me piecemeal. Usually, it was something I overheard when I entered a room, when I walked past an open door, or when I listened to an argument” (40).

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the family cornerstone, weaves intrigues to bend her husband’s commands. Papanikolas’s American-born heroines, Penny and Georgie, who become adolescents in the 1920s, are pressed, advised, and criticized, especially by their snobbish Aunt Myrsini, for not being ladylike. They are expected to follow their mother’s example: They should marry well, have children, and honor the family name. Unlike Penny and Georgie, DeSalvo, who becomes an adolescent in the 1950s, receives an education because her mother values it. DeSalvo’s persistence and hard work are rewarded in the American school system. Regardless of the discrimination the young student faces in the classroom, she is still a child prodigy who skips grades. The gift of reading that her mother gives her grants the young Louise access to the world of creative imagination and passage out of the family feuds. She aspires to be paid not for her physical labor, as her father is, but for her intellectual capacity. She develops her writing talent in order to pursue teaching, a profession about which she is passionate. Thus, she becomes the first person in her family to go to college. If education liberates DeSalvo from the constraints of her class and her gender, the Kallos girls in Papanikolas’s novel are motivated to follow a schooling that protects the family interests and does not challenge traditional gender roles. Aunt Myrsini is concerned that “working outdoors” (Papanikolas 76) might be dangerous for Penny and Georgie. She insists: “The girls should be home learning to become housekeepers” (76). But the girls become secretaries in their father’s business right after high school. Penny and Georgie are reminiscent of Carla, the second-generation immigrant daughter in Helen Barolini’s Italian American epic Umbertina. The Kallos girls sense that Aunt Myrsini’s recipe for womanhood no longer applies, even as they are, like Carla, too weak to reject the expectations of their milieu. What the Kallos girls want to do, instinctively, is escape the female ethnic prototype that their mother Marika, another Umbertina, attempts to impose on them. They loudly complain, “So we’ll be cooped up in these four walls! Is that all you want us to do—wash dishes, cook and wait on everybody?” (76). Higher education for female ethnics is not a frequent option in the late 1920s; however, the university is seen as the ideal place to socialize with eligible bachelors, as Solly Kallos, the second-born son, suggests. Afraid of losing control over her daughters and being ridiculed in the community, Marika is bewildered at first, since she believes that “nobody wants educated girls for daughters-in-law” (85). Still, she gives in and sends her daughters to college.11 The two girls learn about an American façade, complete with trendy outfits, makeup, and carefree attitudes, even though they have been prepared for motherhood and wifehood the Greek way (and have been educated in a Greek school) to become the “curators” of an ethnic culture they hardly understand (52).12 Like DeSalvo’s

11. While the two sisters conveniently fall into the trap the patriarchal system has set up for them, they relish upper-middle- class life. E. D. Karampetsos notes: “The narrow focus on the importance of one’s family produces a large number of women with inflated ideas of themselves” (74). Anna Karpathakis places emphasis on the feminist connotations of assimilation for ethnic women, since “it entails the acquisition of rights, freedoms, power, and privileges in the home and in relation to the husband. Assimilation is assumed to free the woman from Old World patriarchy and enable her to enter into more gender- equal relations” (152). 12. The Kallos brothers are exempt from Greek school.

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mother, the Kallos girls are caught between ethnic cultural dictates and progressive, feminist trends in the United States.13 They live through failing marriages and suffer years of depression, which is, as Kotsaftis underlines, characteristic of almost all female figures in Papanikolas’s novel (131). Penny expects her life to begin with her husband’s death, but he does not pass away until she is elderly, and Georgie is married to a man who has always despised her origins and lack of sophistication. According to Kotsaftis, the two sisters have not been “encouraged to reach beyond the traditional roles of wife and mother, [and] they are once more victimized. Now, in their old age, they are the walking denunciation of the system that crippled them. The fact that they are financially well off does not cure their malaise related to their marginal role” (135). Like DeSalvo’s mother, ultimately Penny and Georgie have little control over and say in their lives or their families’ lives. Thompson’s women are also the transmitters of ethnic culture, but in the case of The Octagonal Heart, highbrow culture is imbued with ancient wisdom, grandeur, and mythological scripts passed on in the lustrous surroundings of the Parnassus mansion. Thompson’s Aunt Eleni and Ariadne’s mother wander around the house and gardens in Muse-like outfits, as though they are only one step removed from traditional Greek goddesses. These fairytale creatures patiently school their female children in the Greek cultural traditions of mythology, morals, and ethnic pride. Their ladylike demeanor sharply contrasts the usual “clumsiness” and “roughness” of first-generation Greek women (Laliotou 114). Yet, in this idyllic atmosphere, female fulfillment and personal evolution is not any more in evidence than in DeSalvo’s and Papanikolas’s narratives.14 Thompson’s heroines, despite upper class privileges and luxuries, suffocate under the pressure of a patriarchy that straightjackets their actions and life aspirations. The American born-heroines in Thompson’s novel are torn between the pull of opposing forces: past and future, traditionalism and Americanization. Women like Aunt Eleni are portrayed as the pillars of tradition, whereas men like uncle Demetrius are more tolerant of the children’s assimilation into American culture. Vicky Gatzouras suggests that “in a modern social organization there [is] no place for ethnic sentiments” (211), as is reflected in the way the children are taught Greek. Each child is given an ancient Greek name and provided with ample exposure to their ethnic culture, but none really has a command of the Greek language. If Aunt Eleni and Uncle Demetrius symbolize the contrast between tradition and assimilation, Ariadne’s mother and father exemplify the clash between patriarchal authority and feminist ideals. Like Penny in The Time of the Little Black Bird, Ariadne’s mother is an artist forced by her husband to abandon her dream.15 Even though her mother is depicted as a feminist, paving the way for a better future for her daughters—

13. According to Karampetsos, “Although physically in America, the daughters were expected to behave as if they were in their parents’ village” (76). 14. The nineteenth- century Greek arrivals in the United States were not pivotal to the foundation of well-known Greek-American institutions, according to Moskos, since these institutions emerged from the labor of the twentieth century’s poorer emigrant population (8). 15. This case is also vaguely reminiscent of Marguerite’s suppressed artistic needs in Barolini’s Umbertina.

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Ariadne and Aphrodite—she uses her beliefs only “to win the intellectual victory” (Thompson 86). She spends her energy on debates with her husband, becoming an “alternative” role model for her daughters and nieces. The family’s happiness is overshadowed only by the university studies of the eldest daughter, Aphrodite, and her wedding to a non- Greek. Although Aphrodite wants a career as a doctor, her mother, the tradition keeper, wants to deny her the opportunity to continue medical school. However privileged Aphrodite may be thanks to her social class and financial status, she is deprived of her mother’s support for her education, a support that DeSalvo instead receives from her mother. Unlike DeSalvo, Aphrodite has an open-minded father and a feminist aunt as well as a progressive church bishop who support her aspirations. The Orthodox Church is viewed as “the most persistent champion of the concept of a Greek diaspora” (Georgakas 8). In Aphrodite’s case, the church bishop grants her wish. His decision prompts Aphrodite’s transformation—from a popular girl expected to find a good Greek American husband to a novice scientist. Aphrodite’s mother loses the battle over education, but she remains adamant about dictating the terms of her daughter’s marriage. Unlike DeSalvo, who looks for a husband who will respect and support her growth, Aphrodite must submit to the pressure to choose among her coethnics merely based on their pedigree, origin, and social status. Like many second-generation women of her era, Aphrodite risks being excluded from her community if she marries outside her ethnic group. Faithful to the fairytale-like plot and aura, the problem is resolved by softening the mother’s resistance to her daughter’s German American beau. Even though Aphrodite has found a career about which she is passionate and does marry a man she chooses, the Greek American heroine still has a long way to go before asserting herself and reaching DeSalvo’s sexual freedom and experimentation. In keeping with Greek tradition, Aphrodite’s future husband still meets with her parents in private to secure her hand in marriage. Vertigo, The Time of the Little Black Bird, and The Octagonal Heart offer insights into the twentieth- century female immigrant “at the intersections of histories and memories” (Chambers 6). Among these texts, DeSalvo’s memoir features the most assertive character, a character who rises above the gender limitations and norms of her ethnic working class world and her turbulent family life. DeSalvo achieves a balanced and fulfilling life as a writer, a scholar, and a wife and mother. Her struggle for self-representation and her survival skills are striking, especially juxtaposed against those of Papanikolas’s and Thompson’s Greek American female characters. What DeSalvo presents as a tooth-andnail fight for one’s selfhood, Thompson portrays in the hushed voices of propriety. Papanikolas’s heroines, in turn, emerge as weak, repressed, and depressed women who hide behind the facade of affluence in order to find relief from their empty lives. Each of these ethnic heroines enriches the American literary canvas and confirms Hendin’s statements on the “emerging ethnic aesthetic,” which “introduces new approaches to the interaction between America and its ethnics” through both “a powerful return to realism about the continuities of history, and to symbolism in dealing with the complexity of individual experience” (14). John Lowe views this “cultural diversity” not as an aesthetic concern, but a social construct that is “an essential nutrient of democratic society [that] can only lead to a better sense of cultural richness and proud, but tolerant, democratic solidarity” (viii). By examining the oscillation between patriarchal tradition and

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American assimilation of women—as in the cases of Ariadne and Aphrodite in The Octagonal Heart, Penny and Georgie in The Time of the Little Black Bird, and DeSalvo and her mother in Vertigo—readers can better comprehend the historical trajectory of women of southern European origin in the United States. This reading of Papanikolas, Thompson, and DeSalvo underscores the pain, the persistence, and the dynamism of the immigrant woman of Italian and Greek origin. In comparison to the pioneering spirit of Aphrodite in Thompson’s novel and the repression of Penny and Georgie in Papanikolas’s, the passion for life and self-advocacy of DeSalvo in Vertigo represents a radical shift toward female agency and its actualization. Inevitably, DeSalvo’s determination not to surrender to a prescribed female role provides a model for the future of ethnic women writers. After the long battles, victories, and defeats of immigrant women before her, DeSalvo survives the domestic battleground and emerges as a resilient and inspiring woman, one who is strong enough to set her own course.

Works Cited Anagnostou, Yiorgos. Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. ———. “Model Americans, Quintessential Greeks: Ethnic Success and Assimilation in Diaspora.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 12, no. 3 (2003): 279–327. ———. “Research Frontiers, Academic Margins: Helen Papanikolas and the Authority to Represent the Immigrant Past.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 34, nos. 1–2 (2008): 9–29. ———. “What Can Greek American Studies Learn from Italian American Studies?” Immigrations—Ethnicities—Racial Situations weblog, October 11, 2012. http://immigrations -ethnicities-racial.blogspot.com. ———. “Where Does ‘Diaspora’ Belong? The View from Greek American Studies (excerpts from a scholarly article).” Ibid., September 18, 2012. Bammer, Angelika, ed. Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Barolini, Helen. The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women. 1985. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. ———. Umbertina: A Novel. 1979. Afterword by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 1999. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. New York: Routledge, 1994. DeSalvo, Louise. “Breaking the Jar / Mending the Jar.” In Breaking Open: Reflections on ItalianAmerican Women’s Writing, ed. Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino and Justin Vitiello, 59–72. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2003. ———. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. Vertigo: A Memoir. 1996. Introduction by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. Frangos, Steve. “Preservation and Loss in the Writings of Helen Papanikolas.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 29, no. 2 (2003): 108–126. Gatzouras, Vicky Johnson. “Family Matters in Greek American Literature.” PhD dissertation, Blekinge Institute of Technology, 2007. Georgakas, Dan. “The Greeks in America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 14, nos. 1–2 (1987): 5–53.

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Giunta, Edvige. “Persephone’s Daughters.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33, no. 6 (2004): 767–786. Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. “Social Constructions and Aesthetic Achievements: Italian American Writing as Ethnic Art.” MELUS: Special Issue Italian American Literature 28, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 13–39. Kalogeras, Georgios D. Between Two Worlds: Ethnicity and the Greek-American Writer. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1984. ———. “Entering through the Golden Door: Cinematic Representations of a Mythical Moment.” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 77– 99. Karageorge, Penelope. “Helen Papanikolas: The Time of the Little Black Bird.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 26, no. 2 (2000): 82– 83. Karampetsos, E, D. “Helen Papanikolas: When Manoli Turned His Coat Inside Out and Called Himself Manolio.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 28, no. 2 (2002): 57– 85. Karpathakis, Anna. “ ‘I Don’t Have to Worry About Money Anymore, and I Can Live Like a Lady’: Greek Immigrant Women and Assimilation.” In Greek American Families, Traditions and Transformations, ed. Sam J. Tsemberis, Harry J. Psomiades, and Anna Karpathakis, 151–175. New York: Pella Publishing, 1999. Kotsaftis, Maria. “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Greek American Persephones in Helen Papanikolas’s The Time of the Little Black Bird.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 21, no. 1 (2003): 127–137. Laliotou, Ioanna. Transatlantic Subjects: Acts of Immigration and Cultures of Transnationalism Between Greece and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Low, John. Foreword. In Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, eds. Mary Jo Bona and Irma Maini, vii–xi. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Moskos, Charles C. Greek Americans: Struggle and Success. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989. Papanikolas, Helen. The Time of the Little Black Bird. Athens: Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 1999. Roediger, David R. Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Serra, Ilaria. The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States Between 1890 and 1924. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. Tastsoglou, Evangelia, and George Stubos. “The Pioneer Greek Immigrant in the United States and Canada (1880s–1920s): Survival Strategies of a Traditional Family.” Ethnic Groups 9, no. 3 (1992): 175–189. Thompson, Ariadne. The Octagonal Heart. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956.

DeSalvo’s Rialto ON M OV I NG A S A LIVABLE BRIDGE

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Louise DeSalvo’s On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again (2009) is a book about homes, about memories and rooms, about closets and drawers. It is a book about personal effects. This extended essay focuses on that search for home that ultimately underscores the journey of immigrants like DeSalvo’s grandparents, who, she states in Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004), believed that “wherever you earn your crust of bread, wherever you don’t go hungry is where you should call home” (5). In On Moving, DeSalvo treats the text as an architectural narrative space through which to bridge her experiences with different homes and with moving, and to connect her grandparents’ experience of home with her own. In dealing with moving, DeSalvo makes space a key element in her writing. Sandra Cavicchioli explains that the semiotic use of space in a literary text demonstrates a “correlation between the spatial mise-enscene and the mechanism of knowledge” (39). Analyzing Virginia Woolf’s short story “In the Orchard,” Cavicchioli finds the perfect example of fusion among “senses, space, and mood”—“i sensi, lo spazio, gli umori” (39)—where space works as a psychological dimension that produces further understanding of the protagonist’s position and identity. In her earlier book, Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo also privileges physical space. Crazy in the Kitchen relives familial tensions and frustrations experienced inside the kitchen. Memories seep from every drawer and appliance; emotions rise like yeast in bread. In her discussion of space, Cavicchioli describes a “homologation between timic [emotional] dimension and spatial asset” (175). Similarly in Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo, recognizes that every feeling and every revelation, every moment of self-knowledge

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requires a specific setting, a corner, a spatial perspective of narration. On Moving leaves the kitchen and leads the reader through a walk from house to house, while meeting other writers in their rooms and witnessing DeSalvo’s life from the perspective of the different addresses she has inhabited. If every book creates a livable “space” for its readers—a book opens invisible doors and gives symbolic shelter—Crazy in the Kitchen and On Moving take this trait to the extreme, with a style that is nuanced by spatial vibrations. While Crazy in the Kitchen closes inward (its central metaphor is a stuffy room) and focuses on DeSalvo’s family, On Moving is airy and open to other writers’ experiences of changing homes. On Moving serves as a bridge through which the author connects her different homes, present and past. By doing so, DeSalvo builds, in effect, a house upon this bridge. She acknowledges and embraces mobility. She does not shun it. She looks directly at unsteadiness. She does build a bridge—not for crossing from side to side, and forgetting, but for accepting mobility and change. She makes “on moving” livable. She builds a living space suspended in the void, on the instability that she could be tempted to deny. Such an exercise in equilibrium brings to mind a unique endeavor in Italian architecture: the ponte abitabile or “livable bridge,” the best examples of which are the Rialto Bridge in Venice and the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. These bridges connect two sides of the river and host shops and homes. They are suspended yet solidly defensive and comforting spaces. In the midst of a stressful move, DeSalvo searches for security. Writing for her becomes the tool to connect, make sense, and find a pattern to the oddities of life. The purpose of her livable bridge is to make moving a part of inhabiting.

Bridge and Door: The Genesis of the Book DeSalvo is used to imagining new houses for herself, as a writer may do (every book, a metaphorical house): “I’ve lived in seven places, but in my imagination I’ve lived in far more” (On Moving 12–13). Yet, when, in 2003, she decides to leave the home where she spent most of her adult life, for a new—more beautiful—house, the tear is too hard to bear (“surely a move shouldn’t feel like mourning the passing of a family member. But it did” [1]). DeSalvo gives us license to imagine her writing her pages under a yellow lamp in her study room, in the silence of an all-adult household, by piles of thoroughly read books. Quietly, she connects places, homes, and people. First, she builds a foundation using the experience of writers and writings of the past: she is astonished by how much other writers were vexed by the act of moving, and how they were able to weave their own personal philosophy or mythology about moving. Second, she gathers memories of her own family history. She draws a link between moving and migrating. Like other Italian American writers, DeSalvo grapples with the conundrum of instability. Third, she reflects on the meaning of rooms and home addresses to make them speak about their inhabitants. On her livable bridge, she draws connections without denying the separation, in an exquisitely human act. According to sociologist Georg Simmel, the human being is a “connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating,” a “bordering creature who has no border” (69). Being human is about recognizing the separation and connecting the distance; it is about building roads to shape our mental landscape. Simmel

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proposes that two architectural inventions commonly represented in the arts, the bridge and the door, evoke this inescapable separation and reunion: “The bridge indicates how humankind unifies the separatedness of merely natural beings, and the door how it separates the uniform, continuous unity of natural being” (69). On Moving centers on the need to make sense of these marvelous yet painful paradoxes. DeSalvo closes doors without letting go of the handle.

Writers and Space The anguish of moving—the desire and yet the malediction of moving—was clear even to the distressed Roman poet Horace who called himself “ventosus” (Epistolae, I, 8), or voluble and mobile like the wind, desiring to be in Tivoli when he was in Rome, and longing for Rome when in Tivoli. DeSalvo does not mention Horace, but on the verge of moving she looks to the past and interrogates numerous creative people who suffered from the same syndrome: they are voluble and in the wind’s power, desiring to be somewhere else, all the time. The problem, as Horace had discovered, is not in the place, but rather in our experience of place. Marcel Proust famously noticed how we do not need new landscapes, but new eyes. However we see it, the issue is always in ourselves. DeSalvo asks the connoisseurs of the human heart: she carefully chooses her “movers” among her writers, and among squads of their protagonists. DeSalvo packs up with Virginia Woolf. She loads with Henry Miller (who reread all his notebooks but left them behind before moving to Greece). She travels with D. H. Lawrence, who moved a hundred times because “the easiest way to change, he believed, was to move” (On Moving 128). She unpacks with Sigmund Freud and tidies up with Emily Dickinson. This is not the usual moving crew. The high level of research and the literary base that supports the architecture of On Moving elevates the sweaty, mundane action of moving and transforms it into poetical act. This book bridges literature and life and employs poetry to make life more bearable. DeSalvo is interested in how these authors deal with displacement. There are those, like Virginia Woolf, who used house worries to remove older and painful thoughts: “when she thought about moving, she stopped dwelling on the past” (19). Looking for a safe house, Woolf even found it in the streets of London and adopted house imagery to describe the city: London winter is full of bright rooms, dark passages to brilliant scenes. There are those who, like Percy Shelley, believed in a house’s aura, that a house could contaminate or cure the inhabitants. When he found Casa Magni, in the Gulf of Spezia, he thought it was haunted and trying to harm him. He died in the waters nearby. There are writers for whom moving is essential, like D. H. Lawrence. He moved so often in order to feel like “a free spirit, bound to no domicile, no set of people, no community, no country” (139). There are others, like composer Allen Shawn, for whom moving is “losing part of yourself” (63), and still others, like playwright Eugene O’Neill, to whom the sight of a suitcase provoked uncontrollable violent rages “because it reminded him of all the difficult moves of his childhood, his mother’s hatred of these moves, and his parents’ battles about them” (58). Through the words of these writers, DeSalvo recognizes that moving is never easy, and she debunks American myths of painless mobility, celebrated by recent popular

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American reality TV programs such as House Hunters: “In the family’s new dream house, the past is left behind, the future filled with possibilities. The American dream of ownership . . . of upward mobility, of the idea that the purchase of durable goods always converts into newfound happiness is reenacted day after day” (37). DeSalvo recovers all the dreadfulness of the uprooting that immigrants know all too well. Appalled, she discovers that the typical American moves an average of 11.7 times in a lifetime. It means that every single year, a quarter of the American population is moving. She appraises this extended trauma that shakes the inner self. Sorting “stuff” releases memories and ghosts, and she notes: “Nothing has prepared me for the agonizing choices I will now have to make” (64). DeSalvo further writes: “I become ashamed of all the stuff I have” (65), and acknowledges that moving awakens treacherous thoughts about human life: “Going through these items makes me think of all the time that has vanished; it forces me to recognize what I often overlook: that time is fleeting and our lives are finite” (65). In a privileged Western society the uprooting has scaled down to moving from city to city, from neighborhood to neighborhood, or from house to house—DeSalvo’s is a luxurious moving from a house with a cathedral-like living room to a beautifully restored Craftsman corner house—but even this move proves destabilizing.

Moving as Migrating The power of houses to rouse ghosts is clear to many a writer. DeSalvo observes how packing or unpacking “unmoors us and often reveals more than we’d like to know” (58). Helen DeMichiel’s movie Tarantella (1996) and Pamela Redmond Satran’s novel Suburbanistas (2006) use the specter as a narrative device. These two works rely on similar plots: after her mother’s death, a young woman comes home to sell the house that she has inherited. The ghosts of the past haunt her and force her to confront and rediscover the parts of herself that she has forgotten or negated. The choice thus remains open: continue on her path with a light suitcase of symbolic objects (Tarantella) or give up false dreams for the stability of her hometown (Suburbanistas). The ancestors, as specters, help their descendants as they cope with the present. In an emptied house, the specter of migration stirs and awakens. DeSalvo’s grandparents, who left Italy years before her birth, still haunt her with their desperate determination. Knowing well the trouble of moving, the immigrant generation becomes the ideal godparents for DeSalvo’s move. They give her strength to cope with her own overwhelming experience of moving. They regale her with wisdom. They help her bridge the distance and the horror vacui. DeSalvo starts to feel the anguish of her grandfather’s move from the southern Italian region of Puglia to Hoboken. She comes to a new understanding of his waiting forty years to become a naturalized citizen, as if recognizing his not-belonging. She discovers the deep meaning of simple repetitive gestures that helped him make his move bearable by creating a home away from home: “Gardening on his fire escape; leaning out his kitchen window with a slingshot to kill pigeons, which he would fry on his coal stove; making wine in the basement. These small pleasures mattered, made life meaningful” (180). Acceptance and resignation were her grandparents’ daily bread, which made, perhaps, things easier for them. Nevertheless, the restlessness of the immigrant still preoccupies average Americans, including DeSalvo. As she puts

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it, there are those who are “transient” people “because [they] are descended from those who’ve come from afar, hoping for a better life” (6). Earlier Italian American immigrant generations knew well the hardship of displacement, and Italian American literature readily absorbed and displayed their experiences. Perhaps none has explained the drama of the immigrant woman better than the pioneer of Italian American women writers, Helen Barolini, who based her novel Umbertina (1979) on the rhetoric of place. Three women struggle with their “quaquaversal” identities— their obsession with place and positioning in life: Umbertina, the first-generation migrant woman, who has a direction in life; Marguerite, an insecure “perpetual wanderer” (184); and Tina, who frames her search for place through academic work. Tina relinquishes the search for a physical home of her women ancestors and accepts the dimension of moving as a part of living, provided that her soul is steady and centered. She writes an academic paper on place and movement: She quoted Plutarch: “it is not the places that grace men, but men the places.” Shakespeare: “o place, o form / how often dost thou with thy case, thy habit, / wrench awe from fools.” Bacon: “as things move violently to their place and calmly in their place, so virtue . . .” and Toynbee: “Civilization is movement, not condition, a voyage and not a harbor.” The writing had given her peace. She had learned that Grandmother Jowers’ saying [“a place for everything and everything in its place”] was from Emerson. (392)

This summary seems to offer a footprint for DeSalvo’s On Moving. Shifting from the urgency of living to the luxury of writing about it is the third and fourth generations’ privilege. Tina, like DeSalvo, can struggle with her own trauma while transfiguring it through literature. The generation of DeSalvo and Tina knows that “one had to get more out of life than the slot where one was born. Positioning meant moving” (399). Who better than their immigrant ancestors to show the way? For the Italian immigrant, moving is an all-American discovery. Seldom do we find a positive reading of moving in the first generation. Constantine Panunzio is a rare exception when he values “a mobile and free attitude toward life” (277) as the first of his American mental awakenings. Panunzio, who left Molfetta in 1902 and eventually became a Methodist pastor, contrasts Italian stability (“life in our little city, as throughout all Italy, is pretty much static” [278]) with the American “freedom of movement”: the longer I live here, the more I feel that is one of the outstanding characteristics of the people as a whole. Life for them is a great adventure. They do not hesitate to leave the old for the new, especially if they see in the new an advantage of any kind . . . I have come to recognize mobility, a freedom of movement in life, as a distinct advantage. . . . I have adopted it as the first plank, I might call it, in my American philosophy of life. (279–280)

For Panunzio, positive mobility was a surprising discovery, completely foreign to his Italian mind. The next generation will adopt mobility as an American trait and even a necessity to break away from the family tradition. Jerre Mangione comes to mind. In his memoir Mount Allegro (1942), moving away from the family meant finally leaving Sicily and entering America. When he left for college, the event stirred up a kind of hell in his family, since they maintained that moving out was an American bad habit: for them,

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“you never left your flesh and blood of your own free will. You left only when it was impossible to make a living near them, or when you died” (Mangione 227). Indeed, for the majority of first-generation Italian immigrants, moving spelled primarily danger and loss. As a rule, first-generation immigrant writers and characters always acknowledged the tragedy of moving: Tommaso Bordonaro, a Sicilian who migrated in 1947, even created a neologism to define the unnatural act of leaving: la spartenza, the “disdeparture” (dolorosa e straziande è stata la spartenza: “painful and excruciating has been the disdeparture” [46]). Being unnatural, negating the order of life, departures need a negative prefix. For an anonymous aging immigrant, migrating meant losing a healthy stability. She saw the hazard of being caught in the whirlwind: “ ‘Bread rises,’ she said, ‘only when it’s allowed to stand a while. The soul, too, has its own yeast, but it cannot rise while it’s running. . . . I had things in Italy which in America I still cannot find—yeast, yeast for the soul’ ” (quoted in Barolini, “Italian American Women Writers” 215). For the immigrant poet Emanuele Carnevali, born in Florence in 1898, moving meant losing humanity. He migrated to the United States, but found only hardships and had to return, discomfited, to Italy. While on the returning ship, facing the bay of Naples, he reproached America as a land where rest was impossible: In the hurry people forget to love in the hurry one drops and loses kindness. (Carnevali 71)

Carnevali was deeply bruised by the metaphorical tornado of New York and died sick and lonely in an Italian hospital. Moving can also give vertigo when it offers the “blasphemous dream” of America, as it does to Lucia Santa, a first-generation immigrant in Mario Puzo’s most personal novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964). This novel paints a shared destiny among the uprooted. The Italian immigrant mother loses her identity and her security once she is far from the safe boundaries of her town. In Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò (1950), Anguilla laments, “Un paese vuol dire non essere soli” (“a town means not being alone”) (15). Anguilla is a returned immigrant who is condemned to solitude and roaming. He is transfigured into an archetypal immigrant, trapped in an existential moving and condemned never to find home to his soul. Other times, moving cripples the immigrants and leaves them unsatisfied wherever they are. Carmine Biagio Iannace, a first-generation immigrant from the Benevento province, bore the split in his soul. He confesses in his autobiography, written in the imaginative but simple style of an unskilled worker, that after a return to Italy, he felt the luring calls of the United States. His wife calls him uccello fuitizzo (“bird who has escaped”). Iannace admits: You have tasted the air of America and sometimes you are here and sometimes you are not. You’re like a bird out of a cage. Have you ever observed your blackbirds when they are left out of the cage? They sing more than the others. They flirt about more than the others, they hop, they rub their wings in the dust, but they refuse to go away. They’re free and they’re not free’. . . . Agnesella was right. Had I not considered that time an intermission, a period of wiling away the time, I would have died of a broken heart. I had to return to America. It was as if there [Cavuoti, Italy] I lacked air. (190)

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Giuseppe Prezzolini diagnosed this alienating syndrome as diffuse among the many Italian immigrants he met in New York while teaching at Columbia University in the 1920s and 1930s. With condescension not free from hauteur, he noticed that many of his fellow citizens were affected by “chronic unhappiness”: “They long for Italy, but when they return, they cannot stop desiring America. It is like the vice of a drug” (330). First-generation writers and characters seem never to overcome the curse of moving. Metaphorically, they start limping, as if forced to drag behind a heavy foot that pulls them to one country or the other. Thus, Nino, an immigrant father, hobbles behind his rebellious daughter in Josephine Gattuso Hendin’s novel The Right Thing to Do (1988), and poet Sandra Mortola Gilbert wonders about her grandfather by asking what accident in the mid-Atlantic “left you and your dragging foot behind?” (55). DeSalvo writes the last chapter. She comes to terms with displacement—once forceful, now chosen, but always disabling.

A Bridge between Literature and Life DeSalvo’s fellow writers, like Dante’s cotanto senno, influence On Moving. The author feels completely “at home” in this party of well-known and respected forbearers. She treats them as equals and endows her treatment of their lives and their books with a light, friendly, almost conversational style. She tells us what vegetables Elizabeth Bishop planted in her Brazilian garden or where Sigmund Freud put his collection of antiquities in order to make his home “a site of pleasure” (On Moving 123). DeSalvo introduces us to these masters at the most human level, in the most common act of packing and unpacking. Did you know that Marguerite Duras kept dead flowers in glass jars around the house to acknowledge mortality? Or that Virginia Woolf gave Vita Sackville-West her first handpress as a housewarming gift, which Vita placed on her staircase landing? Or that Vita and her husband Harold had to walk through the garden at every meal to reach their only gathering place, the dining room? DeSalvo brings the reader in intimate contact with writers, almost as though the reader was able to walk in the authors’ house slippers. She is interested in these authors’ qua: where they worked, painted, created. She analyzes their relationship with the places in which they lived, their contact with a specific space, and the different results it bore. Writing and inhabiting become for the writer DeSalvo the same thing. She releases a knot when she realizes that, instead of waiting to feel comfortable in the house to start writing, she should start writing in order to feel comfortable in the house. Words have long been the writer’s house. The outcome is a “peopled book” of literary criticism. DeSalvo’s bridge unites the archive (study) with the street (life), with an original use of her sources. Most noticeable is the innovative encounter between critical and archival perspectives and creative writing. The “Notes on the Sources” almost constitute their own chapter. They are hardly a bibliographical list, but they provide an excellent annotated bibliography that satisfies the desire for detailed references. It also provides a notable example of fertile academic research, one that leaves the library to enter the living room. Academic research gives her throbbing and usable results. Bibliographic material has been metabolized to create the new, the helpful, and the intimate. Throughout the book, DeSalvo moves among different genres: from literature to popular culture (the TV program House Hunters), from ethnography (the nomadic tribe

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of the Wodabee in Niger) to migration studies (her own grandparents, or Marie Arana’s move from Peru to Chile to Wyoming), from sociology (Alain de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness) to psychoanalysis (Jung’s building of his Bollingen house). And yet, in its richness, the tone of the book is not fragmented or harsh, it provides no steps or steeples. It is instead a pensive prose, placated and quiet. It does not betray pain, but rather a quiet, satisfied resignation, once the tempest of moving has quieted. It is the tone of someone who has found her “place.” In one of the most intimate moments of the book, the author allows her house to drive her pen. She unexpectedly relinquishes her authority, and humbly asks her house for advice after reading Sara Jenkins’s This Side of Nirvana (2001). Jenkins, after moving into a new home, engages in, as DeSalvo explains, “the observance of a ‘Sabbath’ to see if it would calm her continuous feelings of restlessness” (158). DeSalvo takes Jenkins’s example and develops her own quiet observance of and relationship with her new home: I haven’t met this house on its own terms: haven’t let it tell me how to live here. . . . And so slowly, I let myself become the person the house seems to want me to be. A woman who has chosen to become more private, to turn her back on much of public life, to become more solitary, quieter, slower, a woman who is surprised by the person she is becoming. A woman who spends more time knitting than reading. (158)

DeSalvo is now ready to accept the portrait of herself painted by the house. It leads the way into an original technique of self-writing that DeSalvo is ready to undertake in the last chapters. I would call this type of writing “self-topo-analysis” because it leads to self-understanding through the analysis of the places we inhabit or have inhabited.

Through the Memoir Window In the last two chapters, “Moving On” and “Afterwards”—in which DeSalvo gives us a beautiful exercise in memoir writing—she avoids the shortcomings of the genre, that is, the awkwardness of the personal, the first-person pathos, talking over oneself; in other words, these chapters are not an easy consolation in the style of the self-help manual. Here the personal becomes literary and framed in precious critical research. The window of memoir that she opens on her life is not the kitchen window of her soul, but the colorful stained glass of literature. By the time DeSalvo puts into practice her suggestion that “everyone planning a move ponder the significance of their earlier moves” (7), we are safely on the highest floor of her livable bridge. The last two chapters grow out of a specular relationship between space and narrative, or, as Cavicchioli maintains, “the descriptive data fully enter into a regime of signification” (232). Places speak of DeSalvo’s soul: rooms describe her feelings, and different addresses chronicle her life. In the chapter “Moving On,” an elbow to DeSalvo’s ancestors leads the way to the present tense of “The Pattern of My Moves,” where the author turns to the memorial tone and identifies a sense in the senselessness of moving. In this section of self-topo-analysis, she searches for answers in the logic of her return address mailing labels. Pondering her moves, she explains how each address has changed or molded her personality. She suggests that we are our addresses. If we question our street numbers, we may understand why we are who we are. In house searching, our priorities

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illuminate our personality. DeSalvo believes that our houses’ shapes may have influenced our activities, their locations influenced our communal life, and their neighbors changed our relationships. Events that occurred in those houses will haunt the houses and us for a long time. Among her discoveries, we find that community is as important as the house itself and that beauty is as necessary as comfort and safety are in a house. In The Poetics of Space (1957), Gaston Bachelard asserts: “Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten, are ‘housed’. Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves. . . . The house images move in both directions: they are in us inasmuch as we are in them” (xxxiii). Consequently, each period of our life is marked by the rooms we lived in, the cakes we baked, the books we read and letters we wrote, the illnesses we slept through, the parties we hosted, the relatives who shared that space with us, the sights we saw through the windowpanes, the memories we still keep. In a long “Afterword,” DeSalvo walks through the rooms for a last farewell, finally ready to take leave from her home of thirty years. Her fellow writers are still walking with her, through rooms that feel alive with the people who inhabited them, her sons, her husband, and her friend Edi. Every little event reveals a symbolic stature: her maniacal sweeping becomes a rite of leave-taking; the ticking of the water in the sink gives the rhythm of the time she has lived in the house; the rusted circle of her children’s wading pool in the patio—inerasable—is “the mute testament to the life we lived here” (On Moving 214). DeSalvo is here at her most terse poetic writing. Without acknowledging it, the author is walking in the footprints of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, an image-maker par excellence, who envisioned his house as having the power to speak and resurrect old ghosts. In 1921, while in his casetta rossa on the Grand Canal in Venice, D’Annunzio writes his painful Notturno. Calling himself the orbo veggente (“blind seer”), he lives in half- darkness, a band over his wounded eye, aged and sick. Memory brings him back to his birth home in Pescara. He is overcome by emotion with every step inside the house, which leads him closer to his dying mother. His house becomes alive with past life and strong feelings. It is my little homeland. It is sensitive here and there, as my skin. . . . My door seems smaller. The hall is damp and silent like a crypt with no relics. I sway on the first step of the staircase. I fear this silence. . . . I hear the well chain shriek. The past falls on me with a thunder of avalanche, it bends me, it crashes me. I suffer my house up to the roof, to the chimney, as if I had made her beams with my bones, as if I had whitened it with my paleness. (121–122; my translation)

D’Annunzio walks through the room of his house wondering how the past “can still re-live in me, terribly” (122). He walks through the doors, until, in the third room, something happens: “my knees break, and the walls take me, tie me to them, turn me around, as in a torture wheel” (122). He ends this walk through the house by encountering his mother in agony. Death is the destination. DeSalvo reaches the same conclusion when she feels the cold breath of a tomb on her face, upon entering her abandoned house: “I feel as I once did when I walked down into the earth in Mexico, down into a tomb devoid of light and air and life” (On Moving 204). Death seems to be lurking—mingled with new beginnings—in DeSalvo’s book: “house hunting is inevitably a memento mori, a re-

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minder of our own mortality and of time’s passage” (42). The roots of this deadly feeling dig deep and reach to her immigrant forbearers, for whom the connection between death and migration was vivid. In “America scordarola,” poet Rocco Scotellaro wrote for his paesani migrating from Lucania, “for you who leave without saying farewell / where you cry death on your side” (94). DeSalvo writes of her immigrant grandmother: “There it was, dying and moving, all tangled together. Moving is a kind of death” (On Moving 80).

Conclusion: DeSalvo’s caso della casa Houses are more than just shelters. They are metaphors for human essence and character. The shape we give to our house is the shape we give to our selves. A house holds together what would otherwise be dispersed: “The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. . . . Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world” (Bachelard 6–7). Robert Viscusi has noticed how often Italian American authors give importance to the houses in which they lodge their dramas, because of “their passion for stability” (59). In their books, their architectural choices become symbolic and explain their philosophy of life. Viscusi describes four main house typologies: (1) a shrine of old world values (Puzo’s Fortunate Pilgrim, 1965), (2) a villa showing the migrant dream (Fante’s Brotherhood of the Grape, 1977), (3) a palazzo of communal life (Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, 1939) or an embodiment of good fortunes (Garibaldi Lapolla’s Great Gennaro, 1935), and (4) even an embassy negotiating space (Barolini’s Umbertina, 1979). DeSalvo’s house in Crazy in the Kitchen could fall between the shrine and the villa, and it is certainly a battleground. This is a house centered on the fighting ring of the kitchen, where wild things run free and memories and identities and love and hate crash over pots and pans. In DeSalvo’s own moments of “crazy-in-the-kitchen way,” cooking means exorcising and ritually reenacting her family history: “With each perfect meal I make, I can undo the past. Undo that my mother couldn’t feed me, undo her fury at my grandmother. Undo my father’s violence. Undo my ancestors’ history” (Crazy 166). While Crazy in the Kitchen implodes in a claustrophobic kitchen under a heavy smell of sauce, On Moving quivers with the rootlessness of moving, and is suspended, spacious and open with other writers’ experiences. DeSalvo has moved on—On Moving becomes, in the final chapter, “Moving On”— to a more contemporary, much more ventilated, literary house. She embraces and cherishes the impermanence of the livable bridge. Standing by the side of the Irish poet Eavan Boland, DeSalvo realizes “that change is the only permanent thing in life” (On Moving 77).

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Barolini, Helen. “Italian American Women Writers.” In The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, ed. Pelligrino D’Acierno, 193–265. New York: Garland, 1999. ———. Umbertina. 1979. Afterword by Edvige Giunta. New York: Feminist Press, 2011.

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Bordonaro, Tommaso. La spartenza. Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Carnevali, Emanuel. Furnished Rooms. Boca Raton, Fla.: Bordighera Press, 2006. Cavicchioli, Sandra. I sensi, lo spazio, gli umori e altri saggi. Milan: Bompiani, 2002. D’Annunzio, Gabriele. Notturno. Milan: Mondadori, 1994. DeMichiel, Helen, dir. Tarantella. Independent Television Ser vice (ITVS), 1996. DeSalvo, Louise. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Gilbert, Sandra Mortola. “Mysteries of the Hyphen. Poetry, Pasta, and Identity Politics.” In Beyond the Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience, ed. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Parini, 49– 60. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. The Right Thing to Do. 1988. Afterword by Mary Jo Bona. New York: Feminist Press, 1999. Horace. Q. Horatii Flacci. Epistolae ad Pisones, et Augustum: with an English commentary and notes, to which are added critical dissertations by the Reverend Mr. Hurd. London, 1776. Iannace, Carmine Biagio. La scoperta dell’America. Un’autobiografia. West Lafayette, Ind.: Bordighera Press, 2000. Mangione, Jerre. Mount Allegro: A Memoir of Italian American Life. 1942. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Panunzio, Constantine. The Soul of an Immigrant. New York: Macmillan, 1921. Pavese, Cesare. La luna e i falò. 1950. New York: Appleton Century- Crofts, 1968. Prezzolini, Giuseppe. I trapiantati. Milan: Longanesi, 1963. Puzo, Mario. The Fortunate Pilgrim. 1965. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. Raymond Satran, Pamela. Suburbanistas. New York: Downtown Press, 2006. Scotellaro, Rocco. “America Scordarola.” In Oh Mia Patria. Versi e canti dell’Italia Unita, ed. Vanni Perini, 3:93– 94. Rome: Ediesse, 2012. Simmel, Georg. “Bridge and Door.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, 66– 69. London: Routledge, 1997. Viscusi, Robert. “Il caso della casa: Stories of Houses in Italian America.” In Buried Caesars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing, 59– 68. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006.

The Knife and the Bread, the Brutal and the Sacred L OUI SE De SA LVO AT THE FAMILY TABLE

John Gennari

I A tavola si sta sempre in allegria. At the table, one is always happy. I recently reencountered this Italian adage in the introduction to Michele Scicolone’s 1,000 Italian Recipes (xi). The sentiment resonates through the Italian food and cooking mania that has seized the imagination of the American bourgeoisie over the last couple of decades, shifting foodie notions of the gastronomic good life from Julia Child’s Francophilia to the Mediterranean ideal. Marvelous cookbooks like Scicolone’s, Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s The Splendid Table give us not just recipes but also a code for living well, organizing our lives around fresh ingredients and daily rituals of culinary transubstantiation. The Slow Food movement, Italian in origin but now global in impact and a badge of righteous hipness in eco-sustainability epicenters like Berkeley and Burlington, propagates a farm-to-table ethos at once good for the planet and good for the soul. Television cooking shows abound with Italian personalities ranging from hot to cool, charismatic and sexy to maternal and sentimental. Mario Batali dances to tarantella bumper music while chopping onions, spinning anecdotes about his travels in the old country, and singing the praises of the old copper kettles essential for polenta. Giada de Laurentiis, a fetching Mediterranean beauty with Sophia Loren–like élan and plunging neckline, gushes orgasmically when she goes for the money-shot first taste of her finished dishes. Michael Chiarello glides around his fabulous California wine country

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kitchen with all the insouciance of a West Coast jazzman, anointing this plate with a drop of extra virgin olive oil, that one with a shaving of Parmigiano Reggiano. Lidia Bastianich tenderly feeds her granddaughter from a steaming pot of hearty minestrone; together they sing an Italian folksong. We know these sweet and savory images are confections, advertising clichés stoking consumerist fantasies. Yet we are happy to wink at the manipulation and distortion—the unsexy prep work edited out of the cooking shows, the airy cookbook rhetoric of perfection, even the elitist leanings of Slow Food’s authenticity fetish—because we want to believe, no matter the vexed and grubby reality, that, finally, at the table, one is always happy. It makes us happy to believe in the ideal of the happy table, the table as a space of familial communion, of storytelling and singing and laughter, of nurture and love, of memory and redemption. I speak here in particular of Italian Americans who wear as a badge of ethnic pride their reputation as nonpareil masters of the domestic kitchen and table—and talk endlessly, sometimes wearyingly, about this reputation, perhaps because there is otherwise little else of their ethnic identity they continue to hold onto; perhaps because they enjoy the envy they sense from deethnicized or never-ethnicized Americans; or perhaps because of the envy they themselves feel when they see these same values strongly expressed in the Asian, African, and Latin American immigrant cultures of more recent vintage. These matters are deeply personal, and they become more intensely so during times of family crisis. When my father was in the last weeks of a terminal heart illness, I gathered with my mother, my wife and children, and my brother and sister and their families at my parents’ kitchen table to tell stories. In this space of food preparation and ceremony, most of the stories were about—as they had always been about—the procuring, cooking, and eating of food. There were stories about my father’s boyhood on a farm in Marola, a small village close to Vicenza, in the Veneto region: stories about milking cows and butchering pigs, about making cheese and salami. There were stories about my father’s garden at our home in western Massachusetts: its bounty of herbs, vegetables, beans, aromatics, and lettuces; its beauty (a marvel of weedless Palladian elegance); its almost sacred status as a site of heroic labor. Hunting stories. Winemaking stories. Stories about foraging the Berkshire woods for mushrooms and blueberries. Stories about recipes: the risotto with chicken gizzards, a dish my mother inherited from my father’s mother. Stories about the stories (“You remember the time Uncle Abbey told the one about . . .”). My mother, old and frail of health herself, legally blind from macular degeneration, pressed on with her cooking, feeling her way around the kitchen strictly from muscle memory, sound, scent, and instinct. When the hospice nurse said my father’s heart numbers had worsened, that the end was near, my mother still held out hope. “He’s still eating well,” she assured us. “He still wants to come to the table.” It makes me happy (or at least less sad) to believe that my father, in his last weeks and days, was taking pleasure from my mother’s cooking and fondly remembering the good times at the table: the risotto with gizzards, the laughter, the stories.

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II A tavola si sta sempre in allegria. No one wants to believe in the truth of the adage more—and no one is more aware of its falsity—than Louise DeSalvo. In her memoir Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004), the family table of her 1950s New Jersey childhood is a space of punishment, cruelty, and torture; a space where insults are hurled like spears (“You no good motherfucker”; “you son of a bitch”; “you atrocious bastard” [DeSalvo 38]); a space where parents and children menace each other with forks and knives; a space where blood is shed. “We stood chest-to- chest, so close to one another, that we swallowed each other’s saliva,” DeSalvo says of the operatic shouting matches in her natal family’s kitchen (38). In this home, there was “no happy Italian family gathered around the table stuffing themselves with meatballs and spaghetti, sausage and peppers, everyone talking at the same time” (123). Instead there was “a can of Campbell’s soup diluted with an extra can of water to ‘stretch’ it” or “two burnt toast cheeses for the four of us” (123). “Our supper table,” DeSalvo vividly writes, “was like that of a badly run prison where someone is putting the food money in their pockets instead of on the table. My sister and I waited through meals like two inmates watching the guards through half- closed lids, to see whether or not they were dangerous” (123). The early pages of DeSalvo’s memoir give us not allegria a tavola, but instead a family table shadowed by the deep sadness and anger of the people who gather there: a mother who hates to cook, deeply resents her live-in stepmother (DeSalvo’s grandmother), and tries to banish nonna’s body-and-soul-sustaining traditional breads and soups from the kitchen; a father who still suffers from the neglect and waywardness of his own father, struggles to repress the trauma of World War II, and fails more often than not to control his hot temper; one daughter (DeSalvo’s sister Jill) who responds to the mayhem by trying to be a good girl, and the other (Louise) who assiduously cultivates the persona of the bad girl. DeSalvo’s description of her mother’s inability to feed and nurture is premised on a concept of motherhood that puts food and feeding at the center of familial interdependence and obligation. This concept of motherhood cuts deep in DeSalvo’s memoir, taking shape not just at the micro level of her own family but at the macro level of the entire southern Italian diaspora. Crazy in the Kitchen is a memoir of self and family that connects the family table to history—in this case, to the history of southern Italian poverty and hunger. In DeSalvo’s imagination, Italy itself is figured as a bad parent, indeed the worst kind of parent—a parent who starves some of its children. Crazy in the Kitchen opens with a stunning prologue, a lyrical rebuke to the beautiful but counterfeit romantic ideal of Italian land and spirit as maternally based nurturance found in the standard cookbook photographs and cooking show travelogues. “Wild Things,” DeSalvo titles this section, which she has stitched together out of recovered memories of her grandparents’ stories triggered by her reading about the Mezzogiorno. The wildness this prologue evokes in its poetic cata loguing of southern Italian nature and culture—flora, fauna, weather, history, social relations—is brutally elemental, primordial, scary. We hear of raging seas, earthquakes, sandy winds from Africa, scorching sun, swarming mosquitoes, vipers, tarantulas, feral cats, wild dogs, baby-stealing

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wolves. We read of ferocious raging armies, brigands, bandits, and anarchists; of raging men who beat their wives and sisters; of peasants so poor and dispossessed they “did not even own their own shit” (4), which the landlords used to fertilize the fields. “They spit on that place,” DeSalvo says of her grandparents’ feeling toward their homeland, “because there, no matter how hard you worked, you stayed poor” (5). “The place they came from,” DeSalvo writes in words she heard from her grandfather, “was like a parent who wouldn’t feed its hungry children, a parent who cast out its daughters and sons to scavenge for food in other places” (5). Could there be a more definitive antidote to the romanticized Italy of the aristocratic Grand Tour, of countless artists’ and writers’ bohemian adventures, of the heritage vacation tour packages we see advertised on television during our favorite Italian cooking shows? In contemporary US culture, “Italy”—when it is not Mafiosi or Berlusconi’s sex life—is Super Tuscan wines and agritourism, Eat, Pray, Love–style self-help escapade, helicopter parents on eating tour rambles behind their children on junior year abroad in Florence or Bologna. In the early pages of DeSalvo’s book, “Italy,” by contrast, is the long arm of la miseria reaching from the killing fields of Calabria and Puglia to the crazy kitchens of Hoboken, Ridgefield, and Teaneck. Not fantasies of bourgeois pleasure in the wealthy urban north, but painful memories of the oppressed agricultural south leading to much unpleasantness in New Jersey. Not la dolce vita, but rather, “You no good motherfucker.” As readers of Crazy in the Kitchen, we are asked to drink and eat the young Louise’s pain and suffering in the kitchen and at the table of her parents’ home. We are asked to acknowledge, in the hunger and misery of her grandparents’ generation, an Italy and an Italian history that belie pleasurable images of Mediterranean and Tuscan beauty and abundance that prevail in contemporary bourgeois food culture. DeSalvo has struggled mightily to become the sort of person who delights in her Williams-Sonoma cookware and knows how to put the crucial citrus grace note on a veal piccata. She is a foodie not out of consumer envy or class status anxiety but out of retaliation, a lifelong vendetta against her mother’s bad food and the brutal mistreatment of her grandparents in Italy. “I want the food I make to be perfect,” she writes, because “with each perfect meal I make, I can undo the past . . . undo my ancestors’ history” (166). It is hard to imagine a more impassioned, fanatically intense attitude toward cooking dinner. But excessive, even violent passion and fanatical intensity are precisely the defining traits of the character DeSalvo creates of herself in Crazy in the Kitchen: indeed, the Louise DeSalvo of this memoir is figured as yet another southern Italian “wild thing,” a sister to the vipers, tarantulas, and wolves of the book’s prologue. DeSalvo wants us to know that she is a dangerous woman capable of hurting people—not something you would normally expect from a college English professor who made her bones as a Virginia Woolf specialist. The kitchen is a space of heightened danger: there, the professor “lingers after her prey like a wolverine” (161). The memoir takes its title from an episode in which DeSalvo bounds across the kitchen, “butcher knife in hand, as if . . . ready for assassination” (163), to wrest a head of lettuce away from her husband, Ernie. Ernie is an amiable, mild-mannered man with a high tolerance for conjugal abuse. He likes helping out in the kitchen, but his skills do not always measure up to his wife’s tyrannical perfectionism. He should know that the root clump on the organic, hydro-

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ponic Boston lettuce must be cut away with a sharp knife, not twisted and pulled, lest he mangle the delicate, bottom leaves of the lettuce. Ernie has every reason to think his wife will turn the knife on him after she deals with the lettuce; he knows of what his wife is capable. Once before, when they were in the kitchen fighting about something, DeSalvo flung a pot of boiling water with Brussels sprouts at him. (The scalding sprouts missed Ernie but caught her thigh, burning it and leaving a permanent scar—a stigmata of sorts.) Alas, this time with the lettuce DeSalvo gets control of herself, backs down, and even apologizes. “I’m used to it,” Ernie valiantly responds, explaining: “You’re always crazy in the kitchen” (166). A knife-wielding crazy person is the oldest and one of the most clichéd, offensive Italian American stereotypes in the book. One might suppose DeSalvo, as a leading Italian American writer, should feel obligated to condemn and counteract such stereotypes. And yet as an Italian American woman writing herself as a character, she is not only willing to put the knife in her own hands; she absolutely relishes putting the knife in her own hands. In DeSalvo’s world, much hinges on who controls the knife, exactly how it is used, and for what literal and metaphorical purposes.

III Even for a fierce, knife-wielding wild thing like DeSalvo, is it really possible or even desirable to undo one’s ancestors’ history, or any history for that matter? Just what does “undo” mean in this context? Surely, for DeSalvo, it does not mean to slice cleanly away, to erase, to expunge from record or memory. A history that is erased, that is made to disappear, is by definition a history that cannot be remembered. Crazy in the Kitchen is a memoir, an exercise in remembering, and as such it needs to recall and bring to vivid life the very history it proposes to undo. This is a daunting, maybe even Sisyphean challenge. Perhaps this explains why DeSalvo has produced a book so crowded with stories— intricate, tangled stories that do not easily align into a straightforward narrative—it can prove difficult for the reader to keep the characters, time frames, and places straight. And yet the book dares to be even more than the labyrinth of memories and stories DeSalvo shoehorns into it: more, say, than the story of her maternal grandfather working as a cook on the Lackawanna Railroad, foraging the countryside for wild onions and dandelions, killing rabbits and squirrels with his handmade slingshot; more than the story of her paternal grandmother working slavishly in an Italian vegetable canning factory, sliding some of the tomatoes, beans, and carrots into a concealed basket to bring home to feed her hungry children. One reads Crazy in the Kitchen with a constant sense of the book straining, pushing, anguishing after something. The book is not simply a remembrance of DeSalvo’s ancestors through the telling of their stories; it palpably and decisively intervenes in their history, to make their history right and just. When DeSalvo fantasizes about undoing her ancestors’ history, what she really means is that she wants to memorialize her ancestors’ experience; to redeem, honor, and dignify that experience by reconfiguring her own (and, crucially, her readers’) relationship to history. In this effort, DeSalvo extends the work she and Edvige Giunta began in their 2002 anthology The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, a volume whose purpose, in part, was “to begin to trace and establish a

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sense of cultural legitimacy and dignity for ourselves, equivalent to that accorded to women of other displaced and oppressed peoples” (12). The poems, essays, and stories in The Milk of Almonds (“Kitchen Communion,” “Dealing with Broccoli Rabe,” “Coffee an’,” “she’s doing the dishes,” Italian Grocer,” “We Begin with Food,” to sample just some of the wonderfully evocative titles) poignantly testify to the myriad ways Italian American women living in the twentieth century have engendered and commandeered food customs, rituals, and material culture at the very foundation of Italian American social life: the routine labors of gardening, shopping, and daily cooking; the handcrafting of tablecloths and other linens central to the aesthetic and ceremonial significance of the family table; the shrewd diplomatic finessing of that table’s arcane, often treacherous personal politics. At its best, such literature eschews the hackneyed image of the “apron-clad mama” spoon-feeding us her gustatory love in favor of brutally honest, fearless reflections on the terrible and the wonderful and everything in between. At its most acute and penetrating, such literature is about the fundamental politics of gender and power, since control and mastery of food and food spaces historically has often been, as food writing editor Antonia Till has said, “the only kind of power women are permitted to employ” (DeSalvo and Giunta 8). In the absence of other forms of power, alas, power over food can be its own form of powerlessness: witness the apron-clad mama trapped in a life of thankless subservience. But it can also be the most awesome power of all: the power over life itself, power over the body and what sustains it. Behind DeSalvo’s desire to intervene in her ancestors’ history lies the premise that food—what we eat, and how we organize our lives around the production and consumption of what we eat—is nothing less than our embodied essence, the self-identity created first through our ancestral family body, our lineal flesh and bones, the shared blood and mother’s milk coursing through our veins and arteries. In Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo is careful to distinguish between her intellectual understanding of her immigrant family’s poverty and oppression—garnered from reading recent scholarship on the southern Italian diaspora—and her deeper corporeal knowledge of her ancestors’ hunger, with its attendant traumas: “perhaps we knew these things in our bodies. Perhaps my mother relived the life of her ancestors in the way she treated food. Perhaps my father’s rage began there” (137). And it is here, in her keen visceral awareness of the hungry, suffering family body, that DeSalvo locates her fervid desire for the emotional comforts of food abundance: “Perhaps this is why I horde food, treat it as if it’s sacred, revere it, let it nourish me. Let it excite me, calm me, placate me, spend as much time with it as I can; perhaps I do this because my people could not” (137). Crazy in the Kitchen links the dramatized intensity of DeSalvo’s persona to the acute existential struggle of poor southern Italian American immigrants. Her psychic connection to food is outsized—in the parlance of American food culture, her passion about food is supersized. The supersized abundance of her food emotions is directly correlated to the outsized food deprivation suffered by her ancestors. In this way, DeSalvo’s narrative recapitulates the whole history of Italian and Italian American food. In their introduction to The Milk of Almonds, DeSalvo and Giunta note that “the history of food in Italy is often marked by the intertwining narratives of abundance and deprivation” (5). In fact, the economic dialectics of hunger and plenty created both Italian America and modern Italy. Several recent books—among them Carol Helstosky’s Garlic and Oil: Food

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and Politics in Italy, John F. Mariani’s How Italian Food Conquered the World, and Simone Cinotto’s The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City— explain how the emigration of millions of hungry southern Italians was the necessary precondition for creating abundance for all Italians, both on the peninsula and in the Americas. The mass exodus of fully a quarter of Italy’s population left more food to go around for the three- quarters who remained. These emigrants, using the wages they earned in the New World to import foods they never could afford at home, furnished the capital that spawned an Italian mass-produced food industry. The tomatoes, dried pastas, cheeses, and other products were marketed and became the foundation for a nationally unified (if greatly simplified) globally popular Italian cuisine. This is the core story of how twentieth- century Italian economic modernization was inextricably intertwined with Italian American consumer culture and entrepreneurialism. It is a core story of how the most fundamental form of consumption, eating food, produces the nation. As such, it is also a core story of US ethnicity. America is a country that receives abused and deprived immigrants and then abuses and deprives them some more. It is also a country where many of those immigrants achieve comfort and prosperity, and along the way both reinvigorate and redefine the national culture. Nowhere is this truer than in the history of American eating. In her book We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, historian Donna Gabaccia shows how generation after generation of immigrant groceries, restaurants, and family cooking traditions begin as cultural and economic pillars of their ethnic communities, quickly draw in culinarily curious neighbors, and eventually attract the interest of corporate managers and advertisers who market the food to the rest of the country. Today, one would be hardpressed to find an American middle-class household refrigerator freezer that is not stocked with pizza, bagels, or burritos. In gastro-hip American cities, certainly, but even in the small-town hinterlands, a good number of those refrigerators on any given day will contain leftover Thai noodles, Korean kimchi, Moroccan couscous, or some other au courant ethnic food. When it comes to what Americans eat, we are, as Gabaccia cleverly puts it, “not a multi- ethnic nation, but a nation of multi- ethnics” (231–232). The heart of all food cultures, and the cynosure of the American multiethnic food culture, is bread. No food is more central to the life and identity of the ethnic tribe, or to the exchange and interaction between ethnic tribes. Across cultures, no food has more practical significance or more symbolic, ceremonial, and religious meaning. No food is more deeply expressive of the relationship between the land, the elements, agriculture, and culture—the intercourse of grain, water, and fire. No food is more tightly linked to the rhythms of deprivation and abundance. No food better signifies both the grim struggle for subsistence and the indulgent pleasure of plenty. In DeSalvo’s world—in her own life, and in the ancestral history that I am suggesting she can memorialize but not undo—much hinges on bread.

IV The beguilingly unsettling cover of Crazy in the Kitchen, designed by Julie Metz, is one of those rough- edged, sepia-toned photographs we have learned to read as a sign of nostalgia, a cherished token of heartwarming memory. The sepia has a dull reddish hue, not

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unlike the shade of vermillion favored in Italian roofing tiles and rustic kitchen design, lending the image an extra charge of heritage authenticity. A hand clutches a hearty, dense loaf of bread, while a knife, facing upward, slices through the loaf’s center. It is the knife that unsettles—the blunt edge, the force, and, most of all, the dangerous upward thrust of the blade toward the body of the person cutting the bread. What sort of person cuts a loaf of bread this way? “Cutting the Bread” is the title of the first part of DeSalvo’s memoir; she has a great deal to tell us about the significance of bread in her family. The bread in question is the handcrafted peasant bread made by DeSalvo’s maternal grandmother, an immigrant Italian widow whose presence in her stepdaughter’s home is a source of endless confl ict and pain. DeSalvo’s mother has never gotten over the loss of her birth mother, who died of influenza in 1919, when she was still an infant. The stepmother—the woman DeSalvo embraces as her nonna—was brought over from Italy in a semi-arranged marriage with DeSalvo’s grandfather to care for his daughter. This stepmother / stepdaughter relationship, based on an interdependence lacking the blood bond so crucial to traditional Italian notions of authentic kinship, grows more and more strained through the years, especially after DeSalvo’s grandfather dies and his widow moves in with her stepdaughter’s family. As DeSalvo narrates, the family moves from a World War II–era cramped apartment in an Italian neighborhood in Hoboken to a Victorian fixer-upper in the postwar middleclass suburb of Ridgefield. The friction between her mother and her grandmother feeds into a larger story about Italian immigration and Italian American assimilation, a story that DeSalvo captures in a dramatic microcosm through the figure of the bread. For DeSalvo’s grandmother, the making, cutting, and eating of the bread is an enactment of her primordial identity as a southern Italian peasant, an identity she clings to as psychological refuge against her displacement and despair in an unfamiliar country and an unwelcoming household. Growing up poor in Puglia, DeSalvo’s grandmother— her name, Libera, suggests an anarchist family background— often had little to eat aside from bread. Landowners and overseers, operating a system that ex-slaves Frederic Douglass and Booker T. Washington said was more brutal than the plantations of the American South, kept their workers on a subsistence diet, prohibiting their consumption of the very fruits and vegetables their labor helped produce. Libera was not a slave, at least legally speaking, and her southern Italianness was just barely northern enough an identity to ensure that she was “white on arrival” (to borrow historian Tom Guglielmo’s term) as an immigrant to the United States. This, however, was still not enough to insulate her from the brand of racism that southern Italian immigrants endured in the new country, even on the white side of the color line. In a chapter of Crazy in the Kitchen that was first published as “Color: White / Complexion: Dark” in Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, DeSalvo recounts the story of her grandmother arriving at Ellis Island and having to endure the dehumanizing experience of racial classification. In this story of a customs agent’s aggressive confusion, of his decision to classify Libera as “dark” or “not quite white” (not true white, which is to say—to use the term of the time—Nordic white), we come poignantly face to face with the issue of Italian Americans’ vexing racial ambiguity (DeSalvo 84– 94). Emigration to America for DeSalvo’s grandmother and fellow refugees from the impoverished Mezzogiorno did not necessarily bring riches and security, but it did

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bring access to many of the foods that they had been denied in their homeland. DeSalvo remembers her grandmother being happiest when she helped her cousins farm a small plot of land on Long Island, growing tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, basil, beans, corn, and the like. It is during these summer excursions that young Louise hears her grandmother sing Pugliese folk songs praising the gifts of the land—gifts she had enjoyed in Puglia only rarely, alas. In America, her grandmother is able to make her own bread, to dip the bread not only in water and wine but also the hearty soups and stews she makes from scratch with her homegrown vegetables. The bread is at once a reminder of poverty and a symbol of bounty. To make and partake of this bread is a humble but holy act, a prayerful reckoning with a life lived as never- ending struggle. Far from bringing the family closer together, however, this bread cleaves deeper and sharper divisions within it: “My mother was not her blood, and so she would not break bread with her” (79)—this lack of blood kinship is how DeSalvo explains why her grandmother preferred to eat alone, outside of her stepdaughter’s kitchen. This absence suits DeSalvo’s mother just fine: for her, this peasant bread is an embarrassing symbol of ethnic backwardness, much like her stepmother’s “black dresses and head scarves” and her “infrequently washed Old World long wool undergarments” (12). She prefers commercially produced white bread, a symbol of safe assimilation into suburban white America. This white bread is delivered by the uniformed “Dugan’s man,” comes evenly sliced, and contains preservatives that give it a long shelf life. This white bread goes well with the other processed and precooked foods and labor-saving kitchen appliances DeSalvo’s mother embraces as a woman with a deeply ambivalent relationship to food and cooking, and perhaps also as a woman whose awareness of American antiItalian racism—the history of defamation, incarceration, deportation, and even lynching that marks the Italian experience in the United States—compels her to seek camouflage behind the shiny, optimistic facade of American postwar consumer culture. For during the Cold War this standardized, mass-produced white bread—as Aaron Bobrow-Strain argues in White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf—represented the promise of an American capitalist, industrial abundance deemed crucial to vouchsafe health and discipline, strength and security, in the fight against communism. For young Louise, there is more romance in her grandmother’s simple, archaic ways than in her mother’s desperate straining for a spic-and-span American identity. She hates this white bread just as she despises everything about her mother’s kitchen performance, with its premium on timesaving convenience and soul- deadening cleanliness. She loves watching her grandmother messily spread cupfuls of flour out on the kitchen table. She loves the tactile, visual, and olfactory pleasures of bread making: the kneading and punching of the dough, the shaping of the loaves, the smell of the yeast. She loves the long stretch of time it takes to make the bread: time for stories of the old country, time for learning how to “curse and swear like a Southern Italian peasant woman” (20). Sixty years on, DeSalvo’s Proustian sense-memories center on all of the goodness that comes of her grandmother’s magical transformation of the white flour: savory and chewy pizza, silky and sweet zeppoli. But it is the thick- crusted, coarse- crumbed bread loaf that holds the most power and the most meaning. The young Louise knows this when she sees her grandmother tenderly swaddling the bread in a blanket, as if “putting a child to sleep” (26), perhaps mourning the birth child—sangue del mio sangue—she has never

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had. And she knows it when she witnesses the solemn ritual that unfolds when her grandmother undertakes to cut the bread: My grandmother would bend over the bread that she had made, turn it right side up, and make the sign of the cross over it and kiss her fingertips, weeping. My grandmother would weep because to her the bread was sacred and to her the only way to cut the bread was to pull the knife through the bread toward your heart. And perhaps she was weeping, too, for all that she had lost, for all that she never had, and for all that she didn’t have. For the insufferable life she was forced to live. (31)

This lyrical braid of ritual, symbolism, and memory gives us the narrative hook we need to make literal sense of the book’s cover photograph (an image we now notice, looking back, that takes the shape of a cross—a clever if didactic touch lending a macabre glow to the book’s pagan-inflected folk Catholicism). Now we have an alluring character (an old-school Goth nonna bedecked in black shawl, rosary beads, and an air of perpetual mourning); the outline of an iconic story (namely, the sacrificial suffering of the dispossessed immigrant); and, best of all, a memorably dramatic action (the thrust of the knife toward the heart), laden with powerful symbolic meaning. This is rich sentimental territory DeSalvo is moving us through, and in the hands of a timid writer such sentiment, like the sepia tone of the book’s cover, could run to the trite and the generic. But DeSalvo is a fierce writer drawn to bluntness, literalness, and violence. She will, as a result, tell us more about that knife: The knife that my grandmother uses to cut the bread is not a bread knife, not a serrated knife like every well- equipped American kitchen now has. No. The knife that my grandmother uses to cut the bread is a butcher knife, the kind of knife that figures in nightmares, in movies like Psycho. The same knife, incidentally, that my father will use when I am a teenager, when he threatens to kill me. (30)

The two passages appear three paragraphs apart in a terse two-page chapter titled “The Knife.” Read in tandem, they may seem to signal a stark vacillation in DeSalvo’s feeling toward her family, a volley between warm-blooded wonder and cold-blooded terror. But it is in the very simultaneity of—the interpenetration of—the warmth and the terror, the sacred and the brutal, that this memoir finds its stunning central motif. In both its prose style and its themes, this is a book that pivots seamlessly between elegiac sentimentality and slasher film histrionics. The grandmother’s wielding of the same knife associated with the father’s violence—later DeSalvo tells us that her grandmother would protect her from her father’s rage by placing her body between them—marks the DeSalvo kitchen as a space in which familiar comforts and sources of safety and succor coexist with threats of danger and violence; indeed, the safety and the danger, the succor and the violence, are inseparable. The knife and the bread together go straight to the heart of the most intense desire and pain that Louise DeSalvo feels as she seeks to remember and redeem her troubled natal family. The invisible line between safety and danger, the intertwining of life and death— these are defining themes of the horror aesthetic and the immigrant experience both. The Hoboken of Louise’s early years, with its tenement and brownstone architecture, bustling streets, and intense population density is a decidedly urban space, but an urban

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space that spotlights certain rural, gothic-flavored peasant folkways of its European immigrant inhabitants. The smell of neighbors’ cooking— cooking that owes nothing to Betty Crocker—forever lingers in the nostrils. DeSalvo’s grandmother scavenges dandelions and other wild greens growing in the neighborhood’s fugitive grasses; her grandfather shoots pigeons with a slingshot and stone. Her grandparents, in short, “won’t eat anything that doesn’t come in the home alive” (66). Such kitchen primitivism plays on young Louise’s active mind: “I am curious about, horrified by, how my grandparents wring birds’ necks, pluck their feathers . . . kill fish by plunging a knife between their eyes” (66). This leads to even more macabre imaginings: “I am beginning to wonder when life becomes non-life, beginning to think about death, beginning to have nightmares in which I, too, am dressed for cooking” (66). DeSalvo’s childhood obsession with death is no joke. This obsession lodges deeply in her psyche since, as a three-year- old, she discovers her grandfather’s dead body after he has suffered a massive heart attack. Not thematically inconsequential is the fact that the young Louise finds the body in the Hoboken kitchen, a space of keen adventure, discovery, and horror for her. Camille Paglia has written evocatively of “the Italian way of death,” a kind of residual paganism in which “the primitive harshness of agricultural life, where food, water, shelter, and sex are crucial to survival” carries over into Italian American attitudes toward dying and dead bodies and their attendant rituals. “Italians,” Paglia suggests in a cultural generalization that seems both atavistically tribal and utterly true, “recognize both the inevitability of death and its unique grisly signature, which seems fascinating to us in a way that strikes other people as morbid or insensitive.” In DeSalvo’s deadpan, unsentimental description of her grandfather’s death, she moves quickly from the kitchen to the funeral parlor. There, young Louise approaches the casket without a hint of squeamishness. When a neighbor asks her what her dead grandpa smells like, DeSalvo replies, “Like wine” (DeSalvo 102). In death as in life, the body is an expression of the food and drink it consumes. Food and drink are themselves expressions of animal and plant bodies in various states of ripeness, transfiguration, and decomposition. Catholic liturgy provides a ritual space of symbolic transference between blood and wine, bread and flesh, but in the archaic preChristian worldview where Paglia locates the origin of Italian attitudes toward death, the human body completes the cycle of fertility, destruction, and rebirth not through divine mediation but rather through the mundane physical processes of nature itself. In this respect, DeSalvo’s childhood obsession with death can be understood not as a ghoulish fetish, but rather as a desire for connection with the deepest, most elemental sources of life. Much later in the memoir, DeSalvo visits the New Jersey cemetery where her grandparents, mother, and sister are “all crammed into death . . . like we were all crammed in life into our tiny tenement apartments” (228). She has an epiphany “about how we all die and how the dead outnumber the living and how the trees outside my house will be there after I’m dead” (228). And it occurs to her that “you shouldn’t bring flowers to people’s graves, you should bring food to the dead, that you should bring them the kinds of meals they like to eat in life, that you should feed the dead, that you should have little picnics at their grave sites” (228). In this striking image-linking of barbarous sensuality with

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sentimentality and nurturance, DeSalvo conjures the deepest possible bond with her family, one rooted in a timeless, hungerless present, a never-ending banquet table existing outside the contingencies of history and geography. The message is simple: In an Italian family, people need to be fed— even if they happen to be dead and buried.

V For Italians, conventional thinking has it, family is sacred, family is foundational, family— in the words of Luigi Barzini—is “the only fundamental institution in the country” (191). But for that reason—for the reason that in Italy the family has had to serve as a bulwark against disorder owing to the weakness or transience of other social institutions— we must understand this Italian family as a cultural figure shaped by lack and desire. This idea is no less true of the American imagination, where tropes of Italian American ethnic soulfulness, warmth, and loyalty serve as antidotes to the individualism, materialism, and capitalist instrumentality of the dominant mainstream culture. We see this in ubiquitous media images of Italian American women cooking and feeding their families, and of Italian American men tying their identities to food and fraternal intimacy. Crazy in the Kitchen ingeniously challenges and complicates not just feel-good American narratives of ethnic food- centered familial warmth, but also the image of Italy itself as a benevolent and indulging landscape and culture. In centering her memoir on the female- centered domain of the kitchen, DeSalvo taps directly into the visceral emotional core of Italian and Italian American culture, into ancient mythologies of maternal succor that connect the icon of the Madonna of la Pietà to the cult of the Sunday gravy mamma. DeSalvo has real admiration for her own mother: “My mother was the most moral person I ever knew,” she writes. “She believed in justice; hated inequity; despised violence” (218). DeSalvo’s mother was smart and literate, and she encouraged the young Louise in her education and her writing—an unusual thing among Italian Americans of this time, when females were expected to honor and serve only the family. Her failure as a mother was more primal; it took place at the level of the body. Her mother seems to have great difficulty breastfeeding the infant Louise; she is producing milk, but it is not clear that she wants to feed it to her daughter. This ambivalence or confusion about her role as a mother extends to and amplifies with her cooking. She does know how to cook, indeed to cook well. DeSalvo is astonished by the creativity, quality, and abundance of the meals her mother can produce when she is so inclined—such as the lobster tails, double-baked potatoes, fresh peas with baby onions, and Indian pudding with ice cream she prepares the first time Louise brings Ernie home to meet the family (199). She collects recipes and writes out menus. She clips a pious “Kitchen Prayer” from a woman’s magazine and hangs it over her kitchen counter to remind herself that “with each meal I make, I will remember that my work is a form of worship” (41). Still, almost every one of her meals is so abominable, so free of the spirit and craft of good and happy cooking, they seem like willed efforts of denial and resistance against her role as a nurturing mother. “It seemed like she wanted to starve us,” DeSalvo writes of her mother’s feelings toward her and her sister Jill. “Like she wanted to starve us because she wanted us dead, because she didn’t know what to do with us, how to care for us” (122).

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As a feminist, DeSalvo is well aware of the danger inherent in linking motherhood primarily with nature and the body, the danger of reducing women to a natural essence that defines them by their biological role in the birthing and nurturing of their children. Not only does such thinking limit women’s scope of opportunity for self-realization and achievement, even in their roles as mothers; it also obscures the capacities and obligations that men should exercise and embrace in the work of nurturing their children. As an Italian American, on the other hand, DeSalvo is heir to an Italian culture whose most sacred image is that of the Madonna and child; a culture in which, as Maria Laurino has written, to be a mother “inherently means to sacrifice a piece of oneself for another” (32). Laurino is an Italian American writer whose feminism has been informed by her experience growing up as the daughter of a mother who had “inherited the Mediterranean instinct to keep young and old close to home” (36), as well as by her own experience as a mother, the kind of mother who seeks “intimate communication with my son through food” (202). Her book Old World Daughter, New World Mother wages a critique of mainstream American feminism for having uncritically accepted assumptions about freedom and autonomy derived from rationalist and capitalist notions of individual autonomy born in post-Enlightenment, Protestant northern Europe. “A feminism that is chiefly about autonomy is bound to liberate one person at the expense of another” (55), Laurino declares, believing that “if equality is truly to be within reach for women—we must rid ourselves of our fictive notion of independence; we are nested in a complex, ancient, and biological system of attachments and dependencies” (154–155). She cultivates for herself a “connection-based feminism” that honors the virtues of compassion and sacrifice inherent in the noblest ideal of the Italian family, an ideal that centers on the needs of mothers and children. Hers—and DeSalvo’s—is a savory Mediterraneanflavored, Catholic-inflected feminism that starts with food and feeding. In Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo tells the story of driving from Rome to Florence with her husband and their two sons when the boys are young adults. They are all hungry, and when they are stuck in a traffic jam for hours, they start screaming at each other—a distinct echo of the kitchen fights of DeSalvo’s childhood. DeSalvo looks into the other cars, wondering why the Italian families are not fighting. “Mothers,” she sees, “are pulling out little treats and snacks for their families and handing them around. Biscotti and bottles for the babies. Panini and Orangeade for the grown-ups. These mothers, Italian mothers, understand what happens to Italians when they are hungry” (173). To dramatize her childhood pain and suffering, as we saw earlier, DeSalvo trenchantly deromanticizes both Italian American immigrant life and Italy itself. But then, to capture her hard-won late-middle-age happiness as a mother and grandmother, DeSalvo, in an abrupt and perhaps contrived narrative turnaround, re-romanticizes Italy by way of renegotiating her and her family’s relationship to it. She trades la miseria for allegria a tavola, as it were, redeeming Italy in a way that makes her sound like a righteously ethnocentric Slow Food propagandist. The Italians, she writes in breathless rapture, “caress eggplants the way a mother caresses a baby’s bottom. . . . They care about food in a way my mother never cared about food” (188). We might think of DeSalvo’s late-blooming romance with Italy as rooted in the Homeric concept of nostos, the longing for return to the ancestral home. This concept, as Joanna Clapps Herman reminds us, lies at the heart not just of The Odyssey but also of

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the immigrant experience (9). What is most at stake in DeSalvo’s nostos is motherhood. Crazy in the Kitchen was written in the wake of DeSalvo’s mother death; the memoir embodies (among other things) DeSalvo’s effort to learn how to love her mother, to love the memory of her. It also captures DeSalvo’s effort to learn to love the mythical Italian motherland, which has been dead to her for much longer. On their travels to Italy, and in their cooking back home in New Jersey, the now middle-aged Louise and her stalwart husband Ernie dispense with small-time symbolic gestures of heritage nostalgia (photographs, souvenirs, and the like) and instead concentrate their efforts on a campaign of full-scale culinary vengeance. The mission is this: In retaliation for Italy’s starving of their ancestors, they undertake to eat Italy. To even the score for poor southern Italians who were denied a place at the Italian national table, the married couple master Italy’s regional cuisines, gourmet home- cooking their way from a Puglian period to a Tuscan period to a Ligurian period, and so on across the peninsula. Whereas their Italian forebears left the homeland penniless and bereft of food, they check in at Milan’s Malpensa airport for a return flight home weighed down with fifteen pounds of expensive specialty food items. “With every excellent meal I make using my special ingredients,” DeSalvo reasons, “I drive away the phantom of my mother’s kitchen, try to obliterate the want of my ancestors” (187). Overcoming her dislike for restaurants—“If my own mother fucked up my food, why should I trust a stranger?” (187)—DeSalvo and her husband eat at some of Italy’s finest, indulging in “pastas my family never tasted” (140). The vengeance is sweet and just: “It is here, in a land that starved my grandparents until they were forced to leave for America,” DeSalvo declares, “that I truly learn the pleasure of the Italian table” (191). To forgive and redeem her family, DeSalvo has had to forgive and redeem Italy. And for that to happen, Italy has had to feed her, to mother her, to recognize her as part of its family.

VI As mentioned earlier, Gabaccia tells us the United States is not a multiethnic nation, but a nation of multiethnics. Because of my own eating habits, I know this is true in the way Gabaccia means it. I know it because of the half-hour or more I am happy to spend with scores of other hungry people lined up in front of a Burlington, Vermont, street cart, patiently waiting to be served phenomenal made-to- order Chinese pork dumplings by a woman who moved to our community from Beijing ten years ago. I know it because as much as my adopted Ethiopian twin daughters enjoyed the gnocchi with sage butter and pecorino romano I served them the other night, they would have been much happier going to Moe’s Southwest Grill for burritos and tortilla chips. I know it because of the sushi and the Cha Tzu style eggplant (I am just guessing now) next to the leftover pasta in Louise and Ernie DeSalvo’s refrigerator. Yes, there is something quite wonderful about our polyethnic smorgasbord, something for Americans to feel good about, especially if it points the American diet away from industrially processed foods (which it does not necessarily do, of course, with all those frozen pizzas and bagels in Americans’ freezers and all that sugar-laden jarred tomato sauce and commercial pasta in their cupboards). So wonderful, in fact, that the

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pleasures of ethnic abundance we in the bourgeois elite take for granted can blind us to the wounds of ethnic struggle and deprivation borne by the workers who produce those pleasures for us but cannot afford them for themselves. I have seen the long, hard hours Hong (of Hong’s Chinese Dumplings in downtown Burlington) puts in, and I seriously doubt she has the time or energy at the end of the day to enjoy kebabs and baklava from the Greek food cart across the street from hers. If the narrative of US ethnicity comes to be all about the pleasures of consumption, abundance of choice, and heartwarming spectacles of multicultural diversity, the point is, histories of deprivation, oppression, violence, and suffering become much easier to forget— even for the people who bear those scars. DeSalvo cannot cut into a loaf of crusty Italian bread without thinking about la miseria; most of us can. Who wants to think about Agent Orange while tucking into a plate of savory Vietnamese spring rolls flecked with lemongrass and baby basil leaves? Certainly not the American gourmand unburdened by any sense of national guilt, but also not the Vietnamese American immigrant trying to make a new life for his family. Once spaghetti ceased to be an “ethnic” food in the United States, Italian Americans were happy for that—if it meant they too could be real Americans rather than despised “ethnics.” We would all be better off if Calvin Trillin got his way and spaghetti carbonara replaced turkey on the Thanksgiving dinner table (Trillin 259–267). But there would still be little appetite in the United States for any kind of official national reckoning with the memory of the scores of Italian Americans who were classified as enemy aliens during World War II. This may sound glibly self-righteous, but what is ethnic and racial identity, fundamentally, if it is not a claim for the recognition ethnic / racial subjects feel is owed to them? There is a glibness, too, in what I have described as DeSalvo’s retaliatory gourmandism: as if her buying of luxury medallion- embossed pasta really makes up for Italy’s brutalization of her ancestors. The story of Italian food is darker and more morally complex than Eat, Pray, Love, Molto Mario, and Lidia’s Italy let on, however, and we need the kind of counternarrative Crazy in the Kitchen offers if we are fully to reckon the hidden costs and debts incurred in our eating. The cultural critic Greg Tate has popu lar ized an expression that speaks bluntly to the issue of unrecognized, uncompensated historical and cultural debts owed to African Americans. The phrase, “everything but the burden”—the title Tate gave one of his books—comes from a poem of that name written by Tate’s mother, Florence. “Mom once wrote a poem [called ‘Everything But the Burden’],” Tate explains, to decry the long-standing, ongoing, and unarrested theft of African-American cultural properties by thieving, flavorless white folk. A jeremiad against the ways Our music, Our fashion, Our hairstyles, Our dances, Our anatomical traits, Our bodies, Our soul, continue to be considered ever ripe for the plucking and the biting by the same crafty devils who brought you the African slave trade and the Middle Passage. (1)

This is tasty cultural nationalism catnip of the sort that has been crucial to post-1960s African American consciousness in a way that Italian Americans can only envy. For the frank reality is that Italian Americans never have mounted political or cultural programs on the order of the Black Arts movement and the Black Power movement. Perhaps that is why we are not accustomed to thinking about the huge American appetite for pizza,

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pasta, gelato, and espresso as mass larceny on the part of the flavorless, gastronomically challenged people who executed Sacco and Vanzetti and worked others of our kinfolk to slower deaths. I say this, and it gives me a bracing jolt of righteous ethnic pride to say it, but then I wonder if there is any honest moral claim for thinking this way. Perhaps the very concept of cultural property (food, music, fashion, language) is a self- defeating trap. Perhaps when we insist on thinking of something as ours and ours alone, there is no way not to perpetually suffer the feeling that someone is trying to steal that thing from us. Perhaps any abundance worth having must originate in deprivation—the bountiful glory of blues, jazz, soul, and hip-hop comes, after all, from the music’s origins in the harsh agricultural work, migrations, and urban struggles black men and women endured to feed their families—and perhaps any abundance worth having is best enjoyed through the sharing of it. Perhaps culture itself, at its essence, is both love and theft. Perhaps there is no way to undo histories of theft, deprivation, loss, and injustice. Perhaps the best we can do is to insist on sharing not just the pleasure but also the pain. Perhaps the best we can do—the best Louise DeSalvo can do—is to face the horror, even (or especially) the horror of our own tribe and family, and to tell the blunt, violent truth. Perhaps that is the purpose of literature, the reason it exists and the reason we need it. Perhaps writing of DeSalvo’s sort is our necessary daily bread, our soul food. Or— better, because this fi nally is the most profound thing Crazy in the Kitchen shows us—perhaps our daily bread, and the knife that cuts through it, is our purest, most soulful literature.

Works Cited Barzini, Luigi. The Italians: A Full Length Portrait Featuring Their Morals and Manners. 1964. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Bobrow-Strain, Aaron. White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. DeSalvo, Louise. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. DeSalvo, Louise, and Edvige Giunta, eds. The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. Gabaccia, Donna R. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. Guglielmo, Thomas A. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Helstosky, Carol F. Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Herman, Joanna Clapps. The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011.

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Laurino, Maria. Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom. New York: Norton, 2009. Mariani, John F. How Italian Food Conquered the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Paglia, Camille. “The Italian Way of Death.” Salon, August 4, 1996, www.salon.com /weekly /paglia960805.html. Scicolone, Michele. 1,000 Italian Recipes. New York: Wiley Publishing, 2004. Tate, Greg. Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture. New York: Broadway Books / Random House, 2003. Trillin, Calvin. The Tummy Trilogy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

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Afterword. Crazy in the Study TRY I NG TO CLA IM A TRADITION IN LOUI SE DeSALVO’S AC C E NTE D W RITING

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Preliminary Thoughts In Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo, Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta have compiled a list of excellent, keen readers of one of the most intriguing writers in the United States. Intriguing, first of all, because Louise DeSalvo has done it all: fiction, memoir, theory, literary criticism, biography, and essay; intriguing, second of all, because she has done so very much within an ItalianAmerican framework;1 intriguing, yet still, because in so doing, she has succeeded in working within a so- called American milieu while also articulating a clearly “new image of Italian American women,” as Mary Jo Bona and Jennifer-Ann Di Gregorio Kightlinger state. Louise DeSalvo appears, in the end, as a person who can do it all. But what is apparent is that it has not been easy. We come to understand this, and from different perspectives, as we read from one essay to the next. But this book is important for another reason. It is, in its own way, a new articulation of the Italian-American female writer. We have certainly seen this aptly expressed by the likes of Bona, Giunta, and others in their gender-based critical writings. Bona’s Claiming a Tradition and Giunta’s Writing with an Accent are fundamental readings in

1. I have opted to use the hyphen here in the same spirit in which I had once suggested replacing it with a slash: namely, that such adjectival phrases of nationality and ethnicity that are binomials require a diacritical mark. See Anthony Julian Tamburri, To Hyphenate or not to Hyphenate.

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this regard.2 What makes this current collection different—not better, but to some degree more effective in this specific regard, I would underscore—is the kaleidoscope of the semiotic involved here. There are multiple voices, each of which brings a unique perspective to the table; together, they offer us an unparalleled figure of the Italian-American woman that embodies what we might call the sign /Louise DeSalvo/. What I shall do in the space allotted is highlight two of the major themes in DeSalvo’s work (food and family) and see how they hold a dialogue within Italian Americana as we know it. I will also show how some of our esteemed colleagues have dealt with such themes. All of this, for sure, will eventually lead us to yet another step in our ongoing conversation about Americana in general and Italian Americana specifically: namely, how an Italian fits into this societal fabric we insist on calling America.3

Food Bona and Kightlinger raise the bar on food as sign in their essay. Within Italian and Italian-American studies, food has become a vexing theme, to be sure, disquieting to a notable degree as well.4 It seems that people want to define, indeed reduce, many forms of italianità to food. We all know that food has come to define, to a significant degree, Italians and Italian Americans. But the challenge for scholars is to be able to concentrate on food as theme and yet, also to identify its semiotic buttresses without falling into the trap of “stereotypic reduction,” as our two critics highlight. In DeSalvo’s case, we continue to read, her “Crazy in the Kitchen examines food to characterize the relationships between self and ethnicity, individual and family, and present and past.” Equally important in this essay is the scholars’ acknowledgement of 2. See Mary Jo Bona, Claiming a Tradition, and Edvige Giunta, Writing with an Accent. In a recent publication, I stated the following about Bona’s book: “In this study, Bona sets up an interpretative journey based on themes, not chronology. Concentrating on eight significant voices since the 1940s, she divides her work into five chapters, offering her reader well researched, acute, and discriminating interpretations of the genre of Italian / American women writers, in general, and the specific books analyzed, in particular” (Re-reading Italian Americana: Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism 149). In that same venue, I stated the following about Giunta’s first volume: “Giunta’s book [among other things] draws attention to the notion of Italian Americana at large, shedding light on the fact that Italian Americana is still in need of some ‘grass-roots’ intellectual activism. It is, I would submit, this manifesto-like tone to Giunta’s study that helps to characterize its unique place in what is still a young critical tradition within Italian America” (150). 3. The questions begged here are numerous, I realize. Further still, I am also aware that this is also not the space in which to discuss such issues. But let us at least keep one thing in mind at this juncture, as we move forward and discuss the semiotic underpinnings of some of these discussions on DeSalvo’s work: the very term “American” (and its derivatives) and what it may conjure up in any reader’s mind is problematic to be sure. In just one instance, we can say that it wants to flatten everything to this one term and what a / the dominant cultural discourse wishes for it to signify. 4. I would point out three books as starting points for the reader’s consultation: Edvige Giunta and Sam Patti, eds., A Tavola: Food, Tradition and Community among Italian Americans; Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta, eds., The Milk of Almonds; and Helen Barolini, Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays.

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how food is a sort of mediator, the sign of what many have called the Italian’s propensity to the “culture of indirection.” They write: “The breaking of bread now embodies the cultural and spiritual communion of three generations of women. DeSalvo is deliberate in describing the tearing of the bread—there is no knife, no opportunity for hurt or violence. She is careful to resist falling into nostalgia.” There is so much to ponder in these few words. First, there is the reference to violence, however brief it may appear here. It is, to be sure, the use of the sign /knife/ that is absent in the breaking of bread, a sign that was forever present in the early mediatic images of the Italian as symbol of his, yes male, propensity to violence.5 Further still, male violence thrust upon ItalianAmerican women was something articulated by others, yet muted to a significant degree in any secondary material.6 Thus, among the women the knife is poignantly absent. Then, of course, there is reference to the sign /bread/ and all that it semiotically offers its reader. The “tearing of bread” is biblical, on one hand, for we know those who broke bread with Christ and ate it would not lose their communion with him. In a similar fashion, as Bona and Kightlinger explain, we can readily state the same for Italian Americans and their notion of food, meals, and the kitchen. Yet, bread is also, mundanely speaking, nourishing, and thus to have means not to starve. In fact, in speaking about the “family table,” a most apt synonym for bread, John Gennari states something similar in his essay: “Crazy in the Kitchen is a memoir of self and family that connects the family table to history—in this case, to the history of southern Italian poverty and hunger. In DeSalvo’s imagination, Italy itself is figured as a bad parent, indeed the worst kind of parent—a parent who starves some of its children.” Gennari underscores the importance of food and its profound significance in DeSalvo’s semiotic universe. The sign /kitchen/ and all that it pertains is, for sure, as Gennari notes, that “badge of ethnic pride [that symbolizes] their reputation as nonpareil masters of the domestic kitchen and table.”7 As sign, of course, food is something more; it also represents the negative in 5. See my “Reflections on Italian Americans and Otherness,” specifically where I reproduce the 1888 drawing from the magazine The Mascot (48), in which a knife figures prominently among the Italian’s “diversions.” 6. Three works that come to mind are Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), Rachel Guido deVries, Tender Warriors (1986), and Gianna Patriarca, Italian Women and Other Tragedies (1996). In addition, in discussing his “urban villagers,” Herbert J. Gans stated the following in his introduction: “Alcoholism, mental illness, desertion, the death of loved ones, serious financial difficulties, and even violence were familiar to everyone” (17) (my emphasis). Joseph Lopreato, in turn, points out something similar in his study: “Until recent times, poverty, subordination, and insecurity tended to brutalize the peasant farmer of southern Italian society. His pent-up ire against nature and his lord was often displaced onto his wife and children” (50) (emphasis mine). Finally, Joseph Sciorra refers to Richard Gambino’s notion of the “l’uomo di pazienza”: “This principle was not always the lived experience of numerous Italian American women and children who dealt daily with the abuse and violence of patriarchal power as did Lucia and her family. Lorenzo Carcaterra (1992), Rachel Guido deVries (1996), Annie Rachele Lanzillotto (2013), Gianna Patriarca (1994), Vittoria Repetto (2006), Karen Tindori (2007), and other writers have penned verse, novels, and memoirs to expose, purge, and heal the psychological and physical damage of patriarchal brutality” (quoted in Tamburri 54). 7. The kitchen as sign is so ubiquitous within Italian-American cultural products. In this limited space, I would point out the famous scene in the film Moonstruck (1987), when the important

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DeSalvo’s early life, as Gennari tells us; her mother’s “bad food and the brutal mistreatment of her grandparents in Italy” are all undone, or so she desires, in DeSalvo’s obsession with food: “ ‘I want the food I make to be perfect,’ she writes, because ‘with each perfect meal I make, I can undo the past. . . . Undo my ancestors’ history.’ ” But food—together, especially, its locale of production and consumption—is ambiguous at best. It is, even more, a semiotic container of coincidentia oppositorum that may or may not coexist. Discussing DeSalvo’s two-page chapter entitled “The Knife,” Gennari tackles the probable stark vacillation in DeSalvo’s feeling toward her family, a volley between warm-blooded wonder and cold-blooded terror. But it is in the very simultaneity of—the interpenetration of—the warmth and the terror, the sacred and the brutal, that this memoir finds its stunning central motif. . . . The grandmother’s wielding of the same knife associated with the father’s violence . . . marks the DeSalvo kitchen as a space in which familiar comforts and sources of safety and succor co- exist with threats of danger and violence; indeed, the safety and the danger, the succor and the violence, are inseparable.

How utterly poignant that through such a sign as the /knife/ the ambiguities of the “Italian” home come to the fore; the home embodies comfort and safety, yet it possesses, at the same time, all the dangers of that menacing, misogynistic inside and outside world that, in permeating the home / kitchen threatens the “Italian” home. The root of the male violence that emanates from DeSalvo’s father can readily be placed at the feet of the dominant culture, that violence, as Gans and Lopreato put it, which was “familiar to everyone” (Gans 17) and, “in the end, was often displaced onto his wife and children” (Lopreato 50).

Family and . . . Family is that ever-present theme we associate with the Italian and / or Italian American. Regardless of what one says about his or her Italian-American self, family seems always to be inserted in some form. As I approach this theme in this context, I am reminded of that special issue of Granta magazine from 1991 with the theme “The Family: They Fuck You Up.” 8 The internal chaos that can originate from one’s family is discussed widely in the essays in this collection on Louise DeSalvo. The results we find in Theodora Patrona’s topic of family members’ behavior comes to the fore, the kitchen is the locale in which such serious topics are discussed. Indeed, the film’s emotional climax takes place in the kitchen. 8. In part because of its title, borrowed from a poem by Philip Larkin, many considered this issue of Granta controversial. When it hit the newsstands, the verb “fuck” had a white piece of tape over it. Notwithstanding, Granta 37 includes powerfully significant descriptions and / or memoirs about impactful relationships. In addition to Mikal Gilmore (on his infamous brother Gary) and Sappho Durrell (on her father, the novelist), the contributors included William Wharton, Geoffrey Wolff, Seamus Deane, Mona Simpson, Harold Pinter, and Giorgio Pressburger. Of course, a publication of this sort tells us that tragic familial situations are widespread and by no means limited to Italians and / or Italian Americans. To speak about them, as DeSalvo does, only underscores her courage and the necessity to do so if we are ever to succeed in curbing abuse.

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essay tell us that Italian Americans are not alone. Her analysis of Greek and Italian families, for instance, illustrates the notion of a more widely characterized entity, one that is not necessarily tied to limited geocultural boundaries. Some of the similarities are those that, alas, we might want to shun. DeSalvo’s work, Patrona tells us, prepares “the framework for the ethnic woman’s struggle”; and in like fashion, Helen Papanikolas’s Greek-American novel exemplifies the exaggerated “stringent gender roles” that can, as we read, situate the young women in dehumanizing roles as they are auctioned off to the highest bidder. It boils down to a “pattern of patriarchal authority and female submission” that, as we shall see, includes exploitation of the worst kind. Peter Covino’s essay takes us into the world “of family dysfunction and incest and the role writing has in conceptualizing and understanding these issues.” He shows how DeSalvo’s writing has allowed her to deal with the tragic events of incest and suicide, and how her writing of these events from one work to the next engages in an intertexual dialogue that allows the author / narrator to cope and, to a certain degree, make peace with these events.9 Indeed, according to Covino, in her theorization of “the ethics of exploring trauma,” DeSalvo insists “that successful literary forms help writers look at ‘causes and consequences’ of trauma, thus enabling them to transform themselves from victims into survivors.” While dealing with the challenging aesthetics of balancing such delicate personal issues within a narrative discourse, Covino’s essay reveals along the way how family, for DeSalvo, was a boiling pot of extreme behavior, be that behavior violence, incest, sexual abuse, promiscuity, and, tragedies of all tragedies, suicide. Much of this, Covino points out, DeSalvo relates to a “complex chain of events, including the larger socioeconomic realities of the working class and the lack of access to proper mental health services.” The family continues to present challenges to its female members, as we read in Margaux Fragoso’s exceptional essay. Here, two things come to the fore. First, we realize that “silence and denial are deeply entrenched protective systems within [DeSalvo’s] family,” as with most other Italian-American families. Second, Fragoso shows us that DeSalvo’s revelations of her own traumas help others who have suffered similar tragedies to deal with their own. Fragoso elegantly turns her essay back on to her own situation, after she has guided us through a keen and thorough reading of DeSalvo’s familial situation. In the second part, Fragoso offers a first-person narrative of her own struggles with sexual abuse and pressures of family expectations. “ ‘Better to die than to be raped,’ [her] father once said to [her]. ‘This way you still have your pride.’ ” This perverted sense of bella figura, we come to see, wrecks irrevocable damage on the family members who are forced to follow such haughty ways; and, indeed, women are the ones who typically find themselves in these damaging situations. As Fragoso emphasizes, the patriarchal notions of control is “the decree that your sexuality as a woman is never yours to begin with. It isn’t yours to give 9. While I tend to shun recognizing the narrating voice (i.e., “implied author”) with the “real author”—as the structuralists would have it—since we are dealing with the genre of memoir and / or autobiography, I do not feel the need for a totally distinct separation in this situation. That notwithstanding, I do adhere to the notion that autobiography and its related genres do indeed benefit from techniques used in fictional narratives. For a discussion of other notions of autobiography and its relationship to narrative fiction, see Lejeune and Parati.

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freely; neither is it yours to speak of as violated.” As such, these notions all but dehumanize the female figure. As a result, she falls victim to the misogynistic “‘hand of authority’ . . . one whose mission is to eradicate difference in every capacity; it often justifies its actions by referring to lofty ideals such as honor, dignity, and respect.” As mentioned, Fragoso keenly intertwines her reading of DeSalvo into her own experience of rethinking and rewriting her own story of sexual abuse and the challenges that followed. It is this performance, I would contend, that speaks most clearly to the validity of a sort of anti-Bloomian “[Tranquility] of Influence,” through which, in reading DeSalvo’s revelations of her and her family’s struggles, Fragoso can finally come to the realization, and comfort we might add, that “the truth is always so fresh and novel when spoken aloud.” She is thus able, through narrative, to resolve “fractures within myself.” And for this, she credits DeSalvo, because, through example, “by becoming active readers, writers, and speakers we can all work to transform supercilious and damaging notions of honor into our own personally empowering truths.” Also through example, as Joshua Fausty writes, “one of the persistent messages of Vertigo [and we might extend this to other works] is that we can never simply leave the past, or the people and the pains of the past, behind: rather, we need to take them with us and find ways of integrating them in our lives in order to heal.”

Provisional Thoughts for a Nonconclusion: Or, Dancing on the Hyphen As I close this afterword, I would ponder how we might categorize Louise DeSalvo within the discourse of the “hyphenated.” 10 Why? Because among those who have openly waved the tricolor banner of American writers of Italian descent, she has boldly gone where no one before her has. As should be apparent to anyone who has read her work and / or now reads these essays, it is patently clear that Louise DeSalvo has dedicated a great deal of her intellectual (read, also, creative writing) career to the various themes that underscore an Italian-American mindset, and among her thematic repertoire there are those which only few others have approached. No one, in any event, has tackled head on and with the persistence with which DeSalvo has those themes that have forever remained greatly muted if not silenced altogether.11 Louise DeSalvo has brought them out of the many attics and basements; and not only for herself, but for others as well—Margaux Fragoso and Lia Ottaviano are among those who write of this influence. Indeed, then, for this, her hyphenated status should be reconsidered.12 And, indeed once more, for this, we should 10. I find continued discussions on the hyphen relevant for a series of reasons. First, we are a mixed population in the United States, and ethnic and racial contamination (read, influence, interference) proves ever so present and, I would add, constitutive in United States cultural productions. Second, such discussions are constructive additions to a critical viewing of such films as Full of Life (1956) or Big Night (1996). With regard to the latter, I would note my “Viewing Big Night as Easy as One, Two, Three: A Peircean Perspective.” 11. As early as 1984, she wrote as a working- class Italian-American woman in her essay, “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” 12. While I do not want to rehearse here, once more, who has contributed to the discourse on the various generations of Italian Americans and where they might fall within the various sche-

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all reconsider her status within the various curricula we continue to construct within and about Italian Americana. From a literary point of view, Daniel Aaron was the first to discuss these stages in his essay on first-, second-, and third-stage writers.13 The first-stage writer is the “pioneer spokesman for the . . . unspoken-for” ethnic, racial, or cultural group—that is, the marginalized (214). This person writes about his / her co- others with the goal of dislodging and debunking negative stereotypes ensconced in the dominant culture’s mindset. In the end, and abjectly conciliatory, this writer engages in placating his / her reader by employing recognizable features the dominant culture associates with specific ethnic, racial, or cultural groups. The second-stage writer, instead, abandons the use of preconceived ideas in an attempt to demystify stereotypes. Shunning preconceived notions popular among members of the dominant culture, this writer, instead, presents characters who have already sunk “roots into the native soil” (214). Further still, and by no means conciliatory, this writer readily indicates the disparity and, in some cases, may even engage in militant criticism of the perceived restrictions and oppression set forth by the dominant group. The third-stage writer, in turn, travels from the margin to the mainstream “viewing it no less critically, perhaps, but more knowingly” (214). Having appropriated the dominant group’s culture and the tools necessary to succeed in that culture—the greater skill of manipulating, for instance, a language acceptable to the dominant group—and more strongly than his / her predecessors, this writer feels entitled to the intellectual and cultural heritage of the dominant group. As such, she or he can also “speak out uninhibitedly as an American” (214) from a personal viewpoint.14 This writer, however, as Aaron reminds us, does not renounce or abandon the cultural heritage of his / her marginalized mata that have been offered, we surely need to take a glance of her possible standing in such constructs. The studies are not as numerous as they might seem. We can begin with Irvin L. Child’s Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict, in which he offers up three categories: the “in-grouper,” the apathetic,” and the “rebel.” Child’s three stages may indeed have their analogs in the different generations that Joseph Lopreato’s Italian Americans and Paul Campisi’s “Ethnic Family Patterns: The Italian Family in the United States” each describe and analyze: i.e., “peasant,” “first-,” “second-,” and “third-generation.” With regard to this fourth generation—Lopreato’s and Campisi’s “third generation”—I would state here, briefly, that I see the writer of this generation subsequent to Aaron’s “third-stage writer,” who eventually returns to his / her ethnicity through the process of re(dis)covery. 13. Taken from Daniel Aaron’s “The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters,” which was later revised in Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani. Here, I quote from the original version. Ten years after Aaron’s original version, Rose Basile Green spoke to an analogous phenomenon within the history of Italian / American narrative in her The Italian American Novel: A Documentation of the Interaction between Two Cultures; then, she discussed her four stages of “the need for assimilation,” “revulsion,” “counterrevulsion,” and “rooting” (see, especially, chapters 4–7). These two were then followed by my To Hyphenate or not to Hyphenate, Fred Gardaphé’s Italian Signs, American Streets, and my A Semiotic of Ethnicity. As I continue here, I shall revisit ever so briefly what I had stated in 1998. 14. There are undoubtedly other considerations regarding Aaron’s three categories. He goes on to discuss them further, providing examples from the Jewish and black contingents of American writers.

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group. Instead, she or he transcends “a mere parochial allegiance” in order to transport “into the province of the [general] imagination,” personal experiences which for the firststage (“local colorist”) and second-stage (“militant protester”) writer “comprised the very stuff of their literary material” (215).15 Louise DeSalvo surely falls within the third category of Aaron’s categories. But she does so without giving up the militancy one might readily expect from the second-stage writer. This militancy, as has come forth in the majority of her writings throughout her career thus far, is amply displayed in the many essays in this collection to one degree or another. It is, I would further contend, what makes DeSalvo the unique writer she is. She has clearly entered into the hallowed halls of the academic community with her almost twenty authored and edited books. She has published her books and essays with the most acclaimed presses and highly rigorous academic journals. She has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. And she has been the object of the critical attention of many. This has all occurred while she proudly and, dare I say defiantly, waved her tricolor flag. It is a defiance aimed at both the academy at large as well as, more specifically, at the Italian-American community, in that such themes as dysfunctional families, incest, violence, abundant sexuality, and adultery are all shunned as topics of discussion, be those discussions private (around the kitchen table) or public (in essays and memoirs). Louise DeSalvo has tied her private working- class, Italian-American female past to her intellectual and academic public present. To echo Jenn Brandt’s essay in this collection, as Louise DeSalvo has blurred the boundaries “between fiction and nonfiction [and thus] purposefully destabiliz[ed]” the status quo, she has also blurred—indeed thrust down—the boundaries between the Italian-American private and public spheres of the individual, especially the female’s. She is, as Covino stated in his essay, a “scholar, working class intellectual, culture worker, and psychoanalytically astute writer [who] has shaped texts full of reciprocal poetic resonances and nuances.” Thus, the title of this afterword, “Crazy in the Study: Trying to Claim a Tradition in Louise DeSalvo’s Accented Writing,” has a multiple semiotic function. In wanting to underscore the defiance and deviation in which DeSalvo engages, the status quo of the

15. One caveat with regard to this neat, linear classification of writers should not go unnoticed. There undoubtedly exists a clear distinction between the first-stage writer and the thirdstage writer. The distinction, however, between the first- and second-stage writer, and especially that between the second- and third-stage writer, may at times seem blurred. In his rewrite, in fact, Aaron himself has recognized this blurring of boundaries, as these “stages cannot be clearly demarcated” (13). This becomes apparent when one discusses works such as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) or Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1979). More significant is the fact that these various stages of hyphenation may actually manifest themselves along the trajectory of one author’s literary career. I believe, for instance, that a writer like Helen Barolini manifests, to date, such a phenomenon. Her second novel, Love in the Middle Ages (1986), revolves around a love story involving a middle-aged couple, whereas ethnicity and cultural origin serve chiefly as a backdrop. Considering what Aaron states in his rewrite, and what seems to be of common opinion—that the respective experiences of Jews and Italians in the United States were similar in some ways (23–24 especially)—it should appear as no strange coincidence, then, that the ethnic backgrounds of the two main characters of Barolini’s second novel are Italian for the woman and Jewish for the man.

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Italian-American community can only see her as “crazy”; hence, my use of that adjective here. She has also, we need to admit here, openly and brazenly challenged that traditional Italian-American mindset by going off on a tangent, so to speak, by straying off the straight and narrow, in her discussions of those many taboos in the open platform of her published writings. In so doing, DeSalvo clearly goes against tradition. Finally, in her insistence to plunge forward, she now appears for a younger generation of women writers (e.g., Fragoso and Ottaviano). She is that requisite model of courage and fortitude with regard to their own writing, so that they, too, may speak aloud their own liberating truths. Accented, for sure, because DeSalvo had decided early on in her career to wear the mantel of an Italian-American woman writer in “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” 16 In this, Louise DeSalvo has succeeded in furrowing new paths for the Italian-American woman writer who, through oppressive, historical restrictions, has remained silent much too long.

Works Cited Aaron, Daniel. “The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters.” Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani 3, nos. 4–5 (1984– 85): 11–28. ———. “The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters.” Smith Alumnae Quarterly (July 1964): 213–217. Barolini, Helen. Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Basile Green, Rose. The Italian American Novel: A Documentation of the Interaction between Two Cultures. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Bona, Mary Jo. Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Campisi, Paul. “Ethnic Family Patterns: The Italian Family in the United States.” The American Journal of Sociology 53, no. 6 (May 1948): 443–449. Child, Irvin L. Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943. DeSalvo, Louise. “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” In Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, 35–53. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. DeSalvo, Louise, and Edvige Giunta, eds. The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. The Family: They Fuck You Up. Special issue of Granta 37 (Autumn 1991). Gans, Herbert J. The Urban Villagers. 2nd ed. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1982. Gardaphé, Fred. Italian Signs, American Streets. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Giunta, Edvige. Writing with An Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 16. Let us not lose the irony of these two registers in the same title: “puttana” and “Woolf”; for they represent, each in its own way, a straying from the status quo and, in this venue, I would underscore the lowly Italian term “puttana” is juxtaposed and / or coupled with the now lofty literary name of “Woolf.”

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Giunta, Edvige, and Sam Patti, eds. A Tavola: Food, Tradition and Community among Italian Americans. Pittsburgh: American Italian Historical Association, 1998. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lopreato, Joseph. Italian Americans. New York: Random House, 1970. Parati, Graziella. Public History Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Sciorra, Joseph. “ ‘Why a Man Makes the Shoes?’: Italian American Art and Philosophy in Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers.” In Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development, ed. Luisa Del Giudice. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Tamburri, Anthony Julian. “Reflections on Italian Americans and Otherness.” The Status of Interpretation in Italian American Studies. In Proceedings of the First Forum on Italian American Criticism, ed. Jerome Krase, 45– 60. Stony Brook, N.Y.: FILibrary, 2011. ———. Re-reading Italian Americana: Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. ———. A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian / American Writer. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. ———. To Hyphenate or not to Hyphenate: The Italian / American Writer: Or, An Other American? Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1991. ———. “Viewing Big Night as Easy as One, Two, Three: A Peircean Perspective.” Unpublished conference paper, Indiana University International Conference on Italian Cinema, April 17–19, 2013.

Contributors Emily Bernard is a professor of English and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. Her publications include Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship (2004), which was chosen as a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, 2006. Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (2009), a book she coauthored with Deborah Willis, received an NAACP Image Award in spring 2010. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White was published by Yale University Press in 2012. Mary Jo Bona, professor of Italian American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University, is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (2010) and Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (1999). She is editor of The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women’s Fiction (1994); co- editor of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (2006); and the editor of the multiethnic literature series for SUNY Press. Jenn Brandt is the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at High Point University, where she is also an assistant professor of English. Brandt’s work focuses on gender and cultural studies in literature, popular film, and television. She is particularly interested in the ways in which politics shape and reflect contemporary literature and culture. Amy Jo Burns writes about the cross-sections between literature and television for Ploughshares. Her literary memoir Cinderland appeared in 2014. Nancy Caronia is a lecturer at University of Rhode Island. She teaches in the Honors Program, Gender & Women’s Studies, and in the departments of English and Writing and Rhetoric. She works on issues of transnationalism and globalization in contemporary American and Anglophone ethnic literature and film. Her scholarly essays, reviews, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture, New Delta Review, and Don’t Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her introduction to Casting Off will appear in Bordighera’s reprint of DeSalvo’s novel. Kimberly A. Costino is professor of English and director of the Teaching Resource Center at California State University, San Bernardino. Her research interests include Italian American women’s autobiography, literacy, composition, and critical race studies, particularly the politics of language, the relationship between language and identity, and issues of access to higher education. Her articles, including studies of Italian American literature, have been published in The Journal of Second Language Writing and The WPA Journal. Peter Covino is a poet, translator, editor, and associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. His most recent book of poetry is The Right Place to Jump (2012). In 2007, he received the PEN America / Osterweil Award for emerging poets. He is also the author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2005) and the chapbook Straight Boyfriend (2001),

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winner of the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize. With Dennis Barone, he co- edited the volume Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture (2012). Jeana DelRosso is professor of English and women’s studies and director of the honors program at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore. She is the author of Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives (2005). She is the co- editor of The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers: Critical Essays (2007) and Unruly Catholic Women Writers: Creative Responses to Catholicism (2013). Her articles have appeared in NWSA Journal and MELUS. Jennifer-Ann DiGregorio Kightlinger studies and teaches Italian American literature, nineteenth- and twentieth- century American literature, and international modernism. Her recent work examines representations of food in Italian American literature. She is currently co- editing Advocacy and Activism: Italian Heritage and Cultural Change, a volume of collected papers for IASA (Italian American Studies Association). Joshua Fausty is associate professor of English at New Jersey City University, where he teaches courses on literature, film, composition, the essay, and creative nonfiction. His articles, interviews, reviews, and creative nonfiction appear in Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture; TutteStorie; Afterall; VIA: Voices in Italian Americana; The Paterson Literary Review; and Screening Ethnicity. Margaux Fragoso holds a PhD from Binghamton University. Her poems, fiction, essays, and reviews have been published in Margie, Barrow Street, The Literary Review, Big City Lit, The George Eliot Review, NPR, and The New York Times. Her memoir Tiger, Tiger was named a best book of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly, The Washington Post, and Globe and Mail and has been published in twenty-five countries and translated into twenty languages. John Gennari is associate professor of English and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (2006), winner of the 2007 John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Book in American Cultural Studies, and of a 2007 ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for excellence in popular music criticism. Edvige Giunta is professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she teaches memoir and other literature and writing courses. She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and Dire l’indicibile. She is co-editor of The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (with Louise DeSalvo); Italian American Writers on New Jersey (with Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan); Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (with Kathleen Zamboni McCormick); and Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (with Joseph Sciorra). Benjamin D. Hagen received his PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island in 2012 and now serves as the English program coordinator at its College of Continuing Education. He teaches courses in modern literature and critical theory. His research on Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens has been published in journals such as Modernism / Modernity and TwentiethCentury Literature. Mark Hussey has been active in Virginia Woolf scholarship for nearly thirty years. In addition to his own many edited and authored articles and books on Woolf, he is general editor of the

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Harcourt Annotated Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, a member of the editorial board of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, a founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and a co- editor of Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Lia Ottaviano graduated from Hunter College’s Creative Nonfiction MFA program in 2011. She lives in Brooklyn by way of Coventry, Rhode Island, and is a senior editorial assistant at John Wiley & Sons Publishing. Theodora Patrona received her PhD from the American Department of the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her doctoral thesis is entitled “Novels of Return: Ethnic Space in Contemporary Greek-American and Italian-American Literature.” She is the recipient of the 2010 American Italian Historical Association (AIHA) Memorial Fellowship. Patrona is an adjunct lecturer at the Technological University of Crete, Greece. Kym Ragusa is the author of The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging (2006). A finalist for the Hurston / Wright Foundation’s 2007 Legacy Award in Nonfiction, it won the Premio John Fante, a literary prize for writers of the Italian diaspora. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, as well as in the journals Leggendaria and TutteStorie. Her films Passing and fuori / outside have been shown on PBS and at festivals throughout North America and Europe. She teaches writing at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and at MIT. Ilaria Serra is associate professor of Italian and comparative studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her research spans from Italian cinema and literature to the history of Italian immigration to the United States. She is the author of Immagini di un immaginario: L’emigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti fra i due secoli: 1890–1925 (1997); The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies (2007); and The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (2009). Julija Šukys is the author of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012) and Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). Epistolophilia won the 2013 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Literature. Šukys is assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she teaches creative nonfiction in the creative writing program. Anthony Julian Tamburri is Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, CUNY. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is codirector of Bordighera Press and past president of the American Italian Historical Association and of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. His books include Narrare altrove: diverse segnalature letterarie (2007); Una semiotica dell’etnicità: nuove segnalature per la letteratura italiano / americana (2010); Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema (2011); and Re-reading Italian Americana: Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism (2014). He is a cofounder of the Italian American Digital Project. Since 2007, he has been the executive producer of the TV program Italics.

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Index abortion, 15, 171, 173 abundance: capitalist, 241; food, 23, 194, 236, 238–239, 244, 246–247, 248; sexual, 173, 258 abuse, 91, 105, 107, 108, 190, 198, 200–201, 202, 203, 204–205, 207, 212, 236, 254n8; emotional, 45, 47, 164; environmental, 20–21, 47; incest, 13–15, 19–20, 24, 27, 28, 51, 53–54, 55, 56, 58–59, 91, 92, 99, 101, 105, 151, 157–166, 255, 258; physical, 19, 45, 47, 160, 201, 253n6; rape, 43, 47, 51, 110, 159, 160, 161, 164, 255; sexual, 37–38, 43–44, 45, 46–47, 52–53, 58–60, 92–93, 163, 165, 255–256; verbal, 201. See also trauma academia, 6, 113, 118, 124, 136, 156–158, 161n9, 206, 258 advertising, 234, 236, 239 adolescence, 4, 44–45, 88, 98–99, 101, 136, 160, 161, 212, 217 adultery, 15–16, 21, 101, 111, 112, 170, 172–177 Alaya, Flavia, Under the Rose, 19n42, 191n4 Albee, Edward, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 155–156 Albright, Carol Bonomo, American Woman, Italian Style, 18n39 Alexander, Meena, Fault Lines, 108 Allen, Graham, 52 Allende, Isabel, 11n26, 22, 51 Allison, Dorothy, 51; Bastard Out of Carolina, 19 alterity, 41, 87n5, 98–99, 101, 121, 127, 199, 207, 215n9, 253n5 Altman, Meryl, 144, 147–148; “Posthumous Queer,” 13n27 Americanization. See assimilation ancestors, 11n26, 22–23, 132–135, 138, 161, 190, 204, 206, 211, 215–216, 225, 226, 229, 231, 236–238, 246, 247, 254. See also lineage Anderson, Linda, 157 Angelou, Maya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 108 anorexia, 5–6, 44, 106, 107, 192, 197–198 Antin, Mary, Promised Land, 117, 120–123 Antonetta, Susanne, 7n17; Body Toxic, 19n42, 191n4; Make Me a Mother, 19n42 anxiety, 10n22, 40, 41, 76, 197; class, 41, 236; food, 192, 201; historical, 132; racial, 121 approximation (of language), 91 Arab American, 90 archives, 13n27, 76, 79–82, 87n2, 141–146, 151, 189, 228. See also manuscripts art: for art’s sake, 100; for the sake of life, 83, 100 Arthur, Paul Longley, 180n1, 181–182, 184 articulation (between literacy and assimilation), 118, 119–120, 123–125, 127 Ascher, Carol, 11; Between Women, 11, 16, 23n47, 76, 122

assimilation, 19, 59, 118n1, 195, 202, 206, 210, 211, 216, 218, 257n13; complicating notions of, 12, 23, 117–127, 195; and food, 41, 60, 194–196, 198–200, 202, 206–207, 240–241; and literacy, 117–127; and suburbia, 10n22, 194, 198, 215; and women, 11n26, 217n11, 219–220 asthma, 2–3, 20–21, 100–101 attitude, essayistic, 93, 97 autoanalysis, 92–93 autobiographical reconstruction, 93, 99, 117, 123, 124–125 autobiography, 10, 13n27, 18n14, 19–20, 64n3, 92, 94, 109, 117, 118, 119, 121, 146, 157, 159, 160, 163, 184, 186, 189, 190–193, 199n7, 212, 227, 255n9; compared to memoir, 1, 2, 7n17, 92, 98, 108. See also biography; memoir Avakian, Arlene Voski, 195 Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, 230 baking, 41, 119, 176, 230. See also cooking; food: bread Barnard College, 158 Barnes, Djuna, 112–113; The Antiphon, 56, 144n4, 159; Ryder, 56 Barolini, Helen, 10, 18, 193, 216; The Dream Book, 8, 17, 18n39; Festa, 200, 252n4; Love in the Middle Ages, 258n15; Umbertina, 10n22, 20n43, 217, 218n15, 226, 258n15 Barone, Dennis, 18n39 Barrington, Judith, 108n1; Writing the Memoir, 1n1, 2n3, 53n3 Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author,” 157 Bartkevicus, Jocelyn, “The Landscape of Creative Nonfiction,” 68 Barzini, Luigi, 244 Bass, Ellen: The Courage to Heal, 158n3; I Never Told Anyone, 158 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 165 becoming, literary process of, 25–26, 87–90, 98, 143 Belasco, Warren, 199 Bell, Anne Olivier, 143n3, 161 Bell, Quentin, 157n2, 160 Bell, Vanessa, 6n13, 14, 53, 59, 94, 155, 159–160 bella figura, 38–41, 43, 44, 48, 201, 255 Belluscio, Steven, To Be Suddenly White, 39n1 Benstock, Shari, 94; The Private Self, 1n1 bequeathings, 80, 134, 192 biography, 13n27, 55, 80, 140, 146, 157, 159, 180n1, 182, 184. See also autobiography; memoir Birkerts, Sven, The Art of Time in Memoir, 1n1, 186n4 birth control pills, 112, 171

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Bishop, Edward, 143–144 Blend, Benay, 197 blogs. See social media: blogs Bloom, Lynn Z., 204n10 Bobrow-Strain, Aaron, White Bread, 241 body, 39–40, 44, 67, 71, 78, 99, 100, 132, 133, 185, 197, 231, 235, 238–247 passim; connection with mind and spirit, 5, 7, 15, 76, 175; image, 110, 172–173; intelligence, 3–4, 7–8, 21, 100, 238. See also health Booth, William, 165 Bona, Mary Jo, 18, 26, 27, 207, 252–253; By the Breath of their Mouths, 18n39; “But Is It Great?,” 6n15; Claiming a Tradition, 18n39, 251–252 Bordonaro, Tommaso, 227 Boruta, Kazys, 82 Bosnia, 55 British Library, 156 Brodkey, Linda, 118 Bronzino, Agnolo, 183 Bryant, Dorothy, Miss Giardino, 20n43 Bugental, James F. T., 4n8 Bumiller, Kristin, 162 Burton, Richard, 155 Buss, Helen M., 94, 108n1 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble, 58 cancer, 106, 107, 110; breast, 20, 21n44, 25, 78, 182, 186 Cappello, Mary, 7n17, 137; Awkward, 19n42, 191n4; Called Back, 19n42; Night Bloom, 7n15, 19n42 Caramagno, Thomas, 151, 157n2 Cardinal, Marie, The Words to Say It, 191n3 Carnevale, Nancy C., A New Language, A New World, 3n7, 120n3, 190n2 Carnevali, Emanuele, 227 Caronia, Nancy, 8–9, 15n31, 170n3, 251; the girlSpeak Journals, 17n37; “Go to Hell,” 8 Carr, Nicholas, 182, 186; “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” 181 catharsis, 5n10, 57–58, 96n10 Catholicism, 17n35, 55, 211–212, 242, 243, 245; attendance of mass, 66–67, 71; Christmas, 40, 67; Church, abuse in, 165; Communion, 66, 67, 71; Confirmation, 67; Easter, 63, 72, 198; girls’ narratives of Catholic schools, 63, 67, 71; guilt, 66; holidays, 63, 67, 70, 72, 194n5; imagination, 63, 72; mass, 63; May crowning, 63, 69, 70; nuns, 63–64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73; original sin, 63, 66; sacraments, 63; saints, 63; schools, 63, 66, 68–73; sexuality, 71; women writers, 25, 26, 62–74, 245 Cauti, Camille, 199, 202 Cavell, Stanley, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 87n5 Cavicchioli, Sandra, 222, 229 ceremony, 57, 69, 72, 203; and food, 48, 198, 200, 234, 238, 239

Chernobyl (nuclear accident), 56, 109 childhood, 5n11, 17n37, 38, 44–45, 46, 65, 68, 71,72, 78, 82, 114, 132, 133, 162, 164–165, 197, 199–200, 204n10, 212–213, 224. See also DeSalvo, Louise: childhood of childrearing (in Victorian England), 13, 159, 161 Children Today, 162 Chinatown (Boston), 206 chronology, 58, 80, 90, 252n2. See also linearity Cinotto, Simone, The Italian American Table, 238–239 Ciresi, Rita, 7n15, 17n35 class, 14, 16, 19, 20, 24, 25, 41, 45, 54, 55, 63, 70–71, 98, 100, 109, 110, 117, 118, 204n10, 211, 236; identity, 7, 12, 18n38, 22, 26, 39, 54, 74, 87, 88, 101, 115, 118–119, 123–126, 127, 191, 194–195, 215, 217, 219, 256n11, 258; middle, 10n22, 14n30, 18n38, 59–60, 84, 115, 118, 120, 159n5, 173, 194–195, 199, 212, 214, 215, 217, 239, 240; poor, 14, 15n32, 120; upper, 6, 13, 87, 119, 218, 219; working, 3, 4n9, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15n32, 16, 18n38, 19n40, 22, 23, 25, 26, 39, 40, 41, 54, 55, 59–61, 63, 74, 87, 98, 101, 105, 106, 108, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123–126, 136, 190–196, 212–213, 215, 219, 255, 256n11, 258. See also laborer; poverty Clinton, Bill, 21, 101, 170, 174n8 Cobain, Kurt, 55 Cohen, Robin, 205n11 Cold War, 59, 77, 241 color, people of, 21n44, 100–101, 105, 108, 195, 199, 210, 240. See also race comic deflations, 51, 57, 58, 60. See also humor communion, cultural and spiritual, 91, 113, 116, 204, 205, 234, 253 community, 2n3, 9, 21, 45, 91, 160, 164, 199, 217, 219, 224, 230; urban versus suburban, 9–10, 215; of women during World War II, 66–67, 69; of writers, 1–2, 6, 8, 12, 23n47, 25, 83, 105, 191. See also Italian American: community comparativism, 26, 147–148, 211 compression, poetic, 56 concision, 51–54, 57, 59 consciousness-raising, 156, 191. See also public awareness consumerism, 107, 234, 236, 239, 241 content. See form Conway, Jill Ker, When Memory Speaks, 1n1 cookbooks, 204n10, 206, 233, 234, 235. See also recipes cooking, 42, 51, 78–79, 86, 115, 119, 131, 132, 133, 135–136, 183, 190, 192–197, 199, 200–208, 214, 217, 231–246, 254; as a craft, 244; gourmet, 190, 193, 206, 207, 246. See also baking; food: bread cooking television shows, 206, 233–234, 235, 236 Corbett, Mary Jean, 159, 165n16 courage, 5, 56, 79, 89, 90, 93, 112, 214n8, 216, 254n8, 259

Index cuisines: American, 195–196, 198–199, 201, 241, 246; British, 135–136; Chinese and Chinese American, 206, 246, 247; ethnic (various), 204n10, 239, 246–247; Greek, 247; Italian and Italian American, 23, 26, 27, 41, 78, 119, 133, 135, 138, 189–190, 192–208, 233–248, 252–254; Lithuanian, 78–79; Vietnamese, 247 Cyrulnik, Boris, 37, 38, 48 D’Acierno, Pellegrino, The Italian American Heritage, 18n39 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 230 Davis, Laura, The Courage to Heal, 158n3 death, 6, 39–40, 42–44, 57, 65–66, 77, 79, 86, 90, 112, 113, 124, 134, 146, 147, 148, 150–151, 160, 190, 197–198, 200–201, 203, 204, 205, 218, 223, 225, 230–231, 242–244, 246, 247–248, 253n6 DelRosso, Jeana, 25, 26; Writing Catholic Women, 63n2 DeMichiel, Helen, Tarantella, 225 Denby, David, 165 depression, 5n11, 18–19, 40–42, 51, 57–59, 73, 92–93, 101, 106, 110, 115, 148, 149, 159–160, 192, 193, 200–201, 206, 212, 216, 218, 219; physical manifestations of, 3–4, 76, 206. See also health: emotional and mental; illness: mental deprivation, 23, 175, 189, 200–201, 207, 210, 216n10, 219, 238–239, 246–248 De Rosa, Tina, 10; Paper Fish, 6n15, 15n33, 20n43 DeSalvo, Louise: academic success of, 18, 19n41, 70; Anglomania period of, 135; biographer role, 9, 6, 20, 22, 91, 99, 125, 136, 251; childhood of, 3, 4, 9, 12, 17, 28, 37, 58, 66–73, 77, 88, 93, 101, 108, 136, 190, 192, 195–198, 200–201, 203, 204, 207, 212, 235, 241–243, 244, 245; critic and scholar role, 4, 5–6, 7, 9, 11–12, 16, 19n40, 20, 22, 26–27, 53–55, 59, 60, 73, 76, 80, 87–88, 91, 92, 99, 100, 108, 118–119, 122, 124–125, 136, 141–152, 158–166, 190–191, 228, 229, 251; essayist role, 4, 82, 251; habit of mind, 4–5, 7, 25; Italian Americanness, explorations of, 7, 11, 12, 19n40, 20, 23–24, 61, 63, 70, 74, 76–77, 84, 87, 98, 101, 118–120, 123–127, 133, 189–207, 212–213, 215–216, 220, 225, 235–248, 252–253, 256, 258–259; memoir, 1–12 passim, 16–28, 55, 60, 62, 76, 87–101 passim, 105–108, 110, 123, 125, 127, 132, 136, 169, 180–190 passim, 193, 201, 207, 208, 229, 258; as a mother, 118–119, 193, 219, 245; pedagogy, 7n17, 9, 25, 26, 27, 28, 193–194; prologues, use of, 56, 57, 89, 90, 93, 97, 196, 235, 236; as a teacher, 1, 4, 10–11, 15, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 72, 73, 80, 82–83, 105–106, 107–108, 109, 110, 116, 124, 136–137, 141, 148–151, 187, 203, 217 DeSalvo, Louise, family of, 3–4, 9–10, 11n26, 16–18, 19n41, 20, 22, 27, 28, 38–42, 47, 48, 51, 53, 57–58, 60–61, 66–67, 69–74, 77, 86–87, 89,

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90, 91, 92, 98, 100, 101, 108, 114, 124, 125, 130–132, 136, 138, 186, 189–207, 212–216, 219, 222, 223, 231, 235, 238, 240–248, 252–256, 258; father, 3–4, 6, 17–18, 19, 24, 40, 42, 45–46, 47, 57–59, 66, 68n6, 69, 88, 91, 108, 119, 124, 125, 126, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 201, 202, 203, 212–213, 216, 217, 231, 235, 238, 242, 254; grandfather, 22–23, 39, 42, 44, 69, 123–125, 126, 132–135, 136, 190, 196, 198, 207, 225, 236, 237, 240, 243; grandmother, 11n26, 39, 41–43, 46, 69, 125, 126–127, 131, 132–133, 136, 190, 195–204, 206, 207, 216, 231, 235, 237, 240–244, 254; grandparents, 6, 9, 43, 130–134, 202, 222, 225, 228–229, 235–236, 243–244, 246, 254; husband, 7n16, 10, 21, 40, 45, 59, 112, 118–119, 131, 134, 136, 176–177, 195, 201–202, 204, 230, 236–237, 244, 245, 246; mother, 3–4, 5n11, 10, 17–20, 28, 38–43, 45–46, 47–48, 51, 57–58, 66–67, 69, 70, 73, 86, 89–90, 108, 117, 124, 125, 126, 136, 190, 193, 195–206, 212–213, 216, 218, 231, 235, 236, 238, 240–241, 243–244, 246, 254; sister, 4, 41, 42, 47, 48, 59–60, 66, 69, 73, 86, 125, 193, 216, 235, 243, 244; sister, suicide of, 6, 16, 19n41, 38–40, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57–59, 65–66, 91, 108, 197, 201, 206, 212, 255; sons, 21, 115, 134, 230, 245 DeSalvo, Louise, Woolf studies, 2n4, 6, 9, 10–11, 12–15, 25, 26, 27, 28, 53, 59, 60, 87–88, 92–93, 112–113, 119, 122, 124, 141–152, 158–166, 169, 181, 183, 189; methodology of, 6, 13n27, 27, 141–142, 147–148, 160; political dimensions of, 144n4, 161–162, 165. See also specific titles DeSalvo, Louise, works of: Adultery, 15n32, 16, 20, 21, 27, 100, 101, 111–114, 169–170, 173, 175–177; The Art of Slow Writing, 24; Between Women, 11, 16, 23n47, 76, 122; “Breaking the Jar/Mending the Jar,” 22, 77n1, 117, 118, 123, 125–126, 215; Breathless, 2, 20–21, 51n2, 100–101; Casting Off, 15–16, 21, 26, 27, 170–177; “Color: White/Complexion: Dark,” 117, 118, 123, 126–127, 240; Conceived with Malice, 16, 27, 112–113; Crazy in the Kitchen, 6, 11n26, 22–23, 24n48, 27, 39, 47, 48, 78, 101, 130–136, 138, 189–190, 191n4, 192–207, 216, 222–223, 231, 235–248, 252–253; “Faceless,” 40; “Father Gone to War,” 6, 24, 184; Green and Mortal Sound, 23n47, 24; “The Letters of Vita-Sackville West to Virginia Woolf,” 13n28; The Milk of Almonds, 8n18, 23, 24, 106, 237–238, 252n4; “My Sister’s Suicide,” 16, 51, 56, 57–60, 90, 93; On Moving, 20, 24, 27, 222–231; “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar,” 7n16, 11, 12, 16, 26–27, 76–77, 78, 80–83, 117–127, 256n11, 259; Vertigo, 3, 6, 7n16, 8, 16–28 passim, 37, 38, 40, 42, 51–61, 62–74, 83, 86–87, 90–101 passim, 108–109, 114, 115, 123, 126, 138, 189–192, 193, 195, 197–198, 201, 212–216, 219, 220, 256; Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood

268

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DeSalvo, Louise (cont.) Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, 14, 27, 53, 158–166; Virginia Woolf ’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making, 10, 27, 141, 144–152; “When the Story Is Silence,” 4n9; Writingalife (blog), 7, 24–25, 26, 27, 82, 83, 179–180, 181, 182–187; Writing as a Way of Healing, 20, 22, 26, 50–55, 59, 60, 76, 83, 95–96, 107, 116, 204n9 desire, 24, 47, 53, 58, 66, 99, 101, 110, 149, 171, 173, 174, 176, 187, 194, 195, 197, 199–200, 203, 204n10, 207, 224, 238, 242, 243, 244, 254 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), 163 dialectical tensions, 52 diary, 51, 52, 57, 80, 82, 93, 142, 147, 157, 160, 162, 180, 184 diaspora, 204–205, 211, 219, 235, 238. See also immigration Diaz, Junot, 51 Dickinson, Emily, 224 digitization, 6, 145, 179. See also social media Dillard, Annie, 68 Diner, Hasia, Hungering for America, 194n5 di Prima, Diane: Memoirs of a Beatnik, 18n40; Pieces of Song, 58n5; Recollections of My Life as a Woman, 19n42, 191n4, 199n7 displacement, 10, 26, 63, 163, 215n9, 224, 226, 228, 238, 240, 253n6, 254 dissociation, 65, 93 DiStasi, Lawrence, Una Storia Segreta, 199n7 documentary film, 10, 106 domesticity, 11, 16, 18–19, 40, 70, 119, 174, 176, 177, 194n6, 216 Donofrio, Beverly, Looking for Mary, 19n42, 191n4 Douglass College, 156 drafts, 13, 14, 72, 87n2, 141–150, 181, 183, 184. See also manuscripts; revision dream, American, 10, 108, 117, 156, 212, 225, 227, 231 dreams, 11, 81, 83, 124, 175, 176, 204–205, 207, 218, 225, 231 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 76 Dworkin, Andrea, 160 Duckworth, George, 6n13, 53n3 Duckworth, Gerald, 92, 161, 166 Duckworth, Herbert, 159 Duckworth, Stella, 159, 160 Eakin, Paul John, The Ethics of Life Writing, 1n1 eating disorder. See anorexia editing, 142–146. See also drafts; manuscripts; revison education, 117–118, 120–126, 190, 204, 207, 211; of women, 4, 16–17, 42, 70, 215, 217, 219, 244. See also Catholicism: schools Eggers, Dave, 182 Eliot, George, 169, 174n9, 177 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 87, 226 emotions, 4, 5n11, 6n12, 42, 51, 61, 73, 93, 99, 109, 119, 126, 145–146, 164, 173, 176, 177, 190,

191, 192, 195, 200, 214, 222, 230, 238, 244. See also feelings empathy, 39, 55, 59–60, 166 enmeshment, 5, 58 en process, 51 Ephron, Nora, Heartburn, 193 epilepsy, 91 epistemology, 92, 163 eroticism, 71, 151, 160, 161, 174–175, 176, 177 essaying, 22, 87, 88, 97, 147. See also memoir: essayistic ethics, 2, 26, 28, 44, 55, 88, 90, 91, 93–94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 144, 211, 255; relational, 86, 91, 99 ethnicity, 12, 19, 25, 54, 60, 63, 90, 122, 125–126, 193–195, 199, 204n10, 211, 234, 239, 251, 252, 257, 258n15; diversity in the U.S., 23, 24, 239, 246–248, 256n10; white, 23, 27, 109, 210–211. See also Greek American; Italian American; memoir: ethnic experience, constructed nature of, 118, 122, 123, 126 fainting, 192, 197–198 families, 4n9, 14, 17, 38, 43, 44, 47, 53, 55, 65, 70, 77, 78, 79, 82, 96, 98, 106, 109, 114–115, 131, 137, 150n8, 159–161, 164, 165, 172, 193, 194n5, 203, 204n10, 205n11, 205n12, 207, 210n1, 213–214, 216–219, 225–227, 234, 239, 244–245, 247, 248, 254–256, 257n12; fathers, 38, 43–44, 46–47, 64, 65, 78, 82, 109, 112, 114, 131, 146, 150, 171, 213–214, 217, 218, 219, 228, 234, 254n8, 255; grandfathers, 45, 78, 131, 214, 228; grandmothers, 77, 78, 131, 202n8, 207; grandparents, 82, 131–132; mothers, 44–45, 47, 58, 65, 75, 78, 81, 112, 114, 115, 131, 138, 151, 156, 159, 160, 175, 177, 197, 200, 207, 211, 212, 213–214, 216–219, 225, 227, 230, 234, 247; sisters, 14, 59, 94, 135, 159–160, 165, 166, 217n11, 218, 234, 236. See also DeSalvo, Louise, family of; motherhood family table, 201, 234, 235, 238, 253, 258 Fausty, Joshua, 25–26, 27, 256; “Trinh T. Minh-ha Essaying Ethics,” 87n3 fear, 4, 18, 21n44, 23, 42, 43, 45, 66, 77, 79, 92–93, 97, 112, 113, 116, 121–122, 131, 136, 197, 198, 199, 201, 204, 230, 238 feast, 194, 200, 202; religious, 7n15, 194 feelings, 6n13, 7, 21, 43, 48, 55, 57, 60, 66, 88, 89–90, 115, 119, 121, 149, 156, 161, 165, 174, 175, 177, 190n2, 192, 201, 206, 214–215, 229, 230–231, 236, 244, 248; contradictory, 3, 4, 46, 242, 254; and writing, 5n10, 59, 76, 92–93, 96n10, 222–223, 229. See also emotions Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Susan Jeffers), 56 Felman, Shoshana, 99, 130, 132–133; Testimony, 130n1 Felski, Rita, 147, 148, 191, 192; “On Confession,” 191n3

Index female submission, 18, 212, 216, 255. See also patriarchy feminine roles, traditional, 171, 174, 216–219 feminism, 10, 11–12, 13n27, 14, 17, 20–21, 25, 26, 52, 56, 82, 87n4, 108, 118, 119, 125, 156–158, 160–165, 170–171, 173, 177, 189, 191, 192, 213, 217–219, 245. See also memoir: feminist; women’s studies Feminist Press, 20n43, 23n47 Feminist Studies, 158 Feraca, Jean, I Hear Voices, 19n42, 191n4 Ferguson, Ann, “Sex War,” 158n4 Ferrer, Daniel, 157 Field, Carol, “Rites of Passage in Italy,” 203 first-person voice, 81, 229, 255. See also personal voice folkways, 134–135, 194, 210, 215–216, 234, 241, 242–243 food, 40–41, 51, 192–193, 194n5, 197–198, 200–201, 205n12, 236, 239, 248; bread, 28, 41–43, 48, 119, 131, 137, 195–199, 203, 204, 205n12, 222, 225, 227, 235, 239–242, 243, 247, 248, 253; brussels sprouts, 78, 135–136, 237; consumption of, 195, 199, 203, 238, 239, 240, 243, 247, 254; peasant (Italian), 190, 198, 202, 207, 240, 241; pizza, 134, 138, 207–208, 239, 241, 246, 247–248. See also baking; cooking; cuisines form, 5, 56, 93, 94, 95, 97, 101, 110, 132, 144n4, 157, 180, 181, 182, 186, 255; and content, 107, 108, 109 Foucault, Michel, 157 fractures, 19n41, 48, 93, 256 fragility, 94 Frame, Janet, 51 France: Paris, 79, 81; Toulouse, 79, 81 Frank, Arthur, The Wounded Storyteller, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 57, 160n7, 162, 224, 228 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 171 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 147, 148 Froula, Christine, 145–146 Fry, Roger, 94 Gabaccia, Donna R., 200, 205n11, 246; We Are What We Eat, 239 Gardaphé, Fred, 18, 19n41; From the Margin, 18n39; Italian Signs, American Streets, 18n39, 257n13 gardening, 225, 228, 234, 238 Garnett, Angelica, Deceived with Kindness, 159–160 Garnett, Henrietta, Family Skeletons, 160n6 Gay, Peter, 159n5 gender, 11, 16, 20, 25, 27, 58, 63, 70, 101, 115, 117, 118, 119, 127, 161n9, 171, 191, 206, 211–212, 213, 216–217, 219, 238, 251, 255 Gennari, John, 26, 27, 253–254 Genzlinger, Neil, 106 Gestapo, 79 Gilbert, Sandra Mortola, 10, 228; The Madwoman in the Attic, 12n26; War of the Words, 156; Wrongful Death, 12n26

269

Gillan, Jennifer: Growing up Ethnic in America, 23n47; Italian American Writers on New Jersey, 23n47 Gillan, Maria Mazziotti, 10, 18; Growing up Ethnic in America, 23n47; Italian American Writers on New Jersey, 23n47 Ginsberg, Allen, 51 Giordano, Paolo, From the Margin, 18n39 Gioseffi, Daniela, “Beyond Stereotyping,” 189n1 Giunta, Edvige, 8–9, 64, 123, 194, 198, 211, 230, 251; A Tavola, 252n4; Italian American Writers on New Jersey, 23n47; “Memoir and the Italian American Canon,” 1n1; The Milk of Almonds, 8n18, 23, 24, 106, 237, 238, 252n4; Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, 8n20, 9; “Teaching Memoir at New Jersey City University,” 3n6, 108n1; Writing with an Accent, 18n39, 119, 120n3, 251–252 Glück, Louise, 55 Goldberg, Natalie, 7 Goldman, Anne, 192, 193, 196–197 Gordon, Lyndall, 157n2, 160 Gornick, Vivian, Fierce Attachments, 108 Greece, ancient, 148, 205n11 Greek American, 210–214, 216–220, 255; women writers, 26, 27, 211–212, 213–214, 216–220, 255 Greeley, Andrew, 64, 72; The Catholic Imagination, 63 Green, Rose Basile, The Italian-American Novel, 18n39, 257n13 grief, 4, 39, 57, 89, 107, 108, 148, 149, 150, 151, 190, 202, 215 Gubar, Sandra: The Madwoman in the Attic, 12n26; War of the Words, 156 Guglielmo, Jennifer: Are Italians White?, 120n3, 240; Living the Revolution, 11n26 Guglielmo, Thomas A., 240 Haag, Pamela, 161n9 Haaken, Janice, 160, 164–165; Pillar of Salt, 93–94 Hacking, Ian, 160, 162–163 Hall, Stuart, 120n3 Hampl, Patricia, 72, 90, 109, “Memory and Imagination,” 63–64 Harding, Tonya, 55 Harrington, Walt, 62n1 Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti, Italian Days, 206 Harrison, Kathryn, The Kiss, 20 healing, 2, 4, 5, 48, 50, 53, 55, 57, 59, 62–63, 68, 76, 88, 91, 94, 95–96, 101, 107, 109, 116, 136, 163, 190, 204, 205, 206, 253n6, 256 health, 80, 86, 100, 147, 197, 227, 241; emotional and mental, 5–6, 16, 24, 44, 58, 59, 76, 96n10, 144n4, 203, 206, 255; physical, 5–6, 20, 76, 96n10, 134n2, 203, 206, 234. See also body; depression; illness Helstosky, Carol F., Garlic and Oil, 238–239

270

Index

Hendin, Josephine Gattuso, 211; The Right Thing to Do, 12n26, 20n43, 228 Henke, Suzette, 163, 165n15 Herman, Joanna Clapps, 211n3, 245–246; The Anarchist Bastard, 19n42, 191n4 Herman, Judith: Father-Daughter Incest, 14, 158; Trauma and Recovery, 164 Higham, John, 120 Hill, Anita, 166 Hing, Bill, 120 Hirschman, Lisa, Father-Daughter Incest, 158 historicization, 118, 123–127, 134 history, 23–24, 26, 51, 60, 62, 64, 73, 80, 91, 98, 101, 105, 107, 108, 109–110, 120–122, 130, 132–133, 140, 157, 163, 165, 219, 244, 247–248; family, 22, 47, 58, 90, 92, 96, 98, 130–131, 133, 136, 189–190, 202–203, 205, 206–207, 212, 216n10, 223, 231, 237, 238; literary, 141, 152, 156; personal, 74, 91, 92, 94, 96, 98, 109, 126, 135, 197; women’s, 24, 157, 220. See also Italian American: history Hitchcock, Alfred, 52 Hite, Molly, 144, 146; “The Public Woman and the Modernist Turn,” 13n27 Hoboken. See New Jersey: Hoboken Hoffman, Richard, 7n17; Half the House, 19–20 Hogarth Press, 166 Holocaust, 78, 105, 163 home, 24, 124, 196, 200, 222, 228, 244, 245, 254; leaving, 40, 89, 114, 115, 119; life at, 4, 5, 17, 19n41, 40, 66, 69–70, 118, 162, 164, 195, 202, 213n6, 216, 217, 235, 240, 254; moving, 215; 222–231; ownership, 10; returning, 91, 108, 115, 204, 225; women outside of, 10, 171 homeland, 54, 78, 133, 190n2, 193, 194n5, 197, 202, 205n11, 206, 210, 230, 236, 240–241, 245, 246 Home Office, 165 hooks, bell, 118 hope, 41, 80, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 98, 101, 175, 182, 196, 204, 205, 234 Horace, 224 House Hunters, 224–225, 228 humor, 57, 58n5, 60, 97, 198. See also comic deflations hunger, 77, 80, 124, 126, 189, 192, 194n5, 196, 202, 205, 206, 222, 235, 236, 237, 238–239, 243–244 Hunter College, 10–11, 21n44, 22, 25, 27, 106, 109, 137, 138; Graduate Program in Creative Writing, 11, 27, 105, 106 Hutcheon, Linda, “Cryptoethnicity,” 12n26 Hutu, 55 Iannace, Carmine Biagio, 227 identity, 19n41, 90, 95, 98, 112, 117, 161n9, 216n10, 222, 226, 231; American, 195–199, 206, 241; construction of, 118, 121, 124–126, 130, 176, 193; ethnic, 90, 110, 193, 247; gender, 26,

87n4, 118, 119, 161n9, 171, 191, 195; online, 181–182, 187; provisional, 118, 126; racial, 118, 119, 120n3, 121, 126, 191, 240, 247; scholarly, 12, 119, 124; sexual, 21n44, 110; and writing, 76, 157. See also class: identity; Italian American: identity; LGBT; sexuality illiteracy. See literacy illness, 2, 20–21, 57, 91, 99, 100–101, 105, 107, 108–109, 132, 147, 202n8, 207, 230, 234; mental, 3–4, 19, 40, 91, 108–109, 165n17, 205, 253n6. See also body; depression; health immigrants, 46, 106, 109, 120–122, 193, 210–214, 216–220, 234, 239, 247; Italian, 3, 9–10, 11n26, 12, 16, 19n41, 23, 25, 26, 39, 41, 108, 120, 123–124, 126–127, 132–133, 190n2, 193, 194, 195, 198–199, 202, 205–207, 210–216, 219–220, 222, 225–226, 227–228, 231, 238–240, 242–243, 245–246, 247 immigration, 120–122, 212–213; Italian, 10, 12, 22–23, 27, 101, 120, 123, 130, 190, 196, 205n11, 223, 239, 240–241. See also diaspora; narrative: immigration immune function, 96n10 incest. See abuse: incest infertility, 109, 110 infidelity. See adultery Innes, Sherrie: Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai, 204n10; Secret Ingredients, 204n10 instant poetry, 54 intertextuality, 26, 50–52, 53, 55, 56–61 invisibility, 47, 79, 86n1, 98, 122, 193, 195, 197–198, 199 Italian America, 12, 190, 191, 238–239, 252, 257–258 Italian American: community, 18–19, 20, 63, 109, 258–259; food and identity, 194–199, 201–202, 206–207, 234, 238, 239, 240, 244; history, 6, 11n26, 101, 120n3, 123–124, 126, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 189–190, 193–196, 198–199, 202–203, 205–207, 235, 236, 238–239, 241, 247, 253–254; households, 4n9, 6n13, 17–18, 133, 194n5, 114–115; identity, 3n7,12, 17, 26, 101, 119, 120n3, 123, 125, 126, 190–197, 201, 202, 203, 207, 227, 240, 244; literary tradition, 8, 12, 82, 120n3, 252n2, 258–259; neighborhood, 9–10, 59, 198, 214–215; oppressive nature of traditions, 17, 20, 23, 63, 70, 194n6, 258–259; pride, 234, 248, 253; radical politics, 11, 196; scholars, 8–9, 11–12, 18, 19n42, 76–77, 211; studies, 8, 12, 25, 211, 252; traditions, 41, 133, 138, 193, 226, 240. See also DeSalvo, Louise: Italian Americanness, explorations of; immigrants: Italian American; immigration: Italian American; cuisines: Italian and Italian American; food: peasant (Italian); narrative: Italian American Italian American women, 11, 17–20, 63, 77, 114, 119, 123, 135–136, 189, 194n6, 195–196, 200, 204–205, 211–212, 216, 219–220, 226, 238,

Index 240–241, 244–245, 251–253; working class, 7n16, 16, 26, 54, 74, 118, 125, 191, 256, 258; writers, 6n15, 8–9, 12n26, 17n37, 18, 19n42, 20n43, 23n47, 27–28, 120n3, 191n4, 202n8, 211–212, 220, 226, 237–238, 251–252, 259 Italian language, 3n7, 22–23, 27, 120n3, 190, 199, 206 Italy, 20n43, 54, 125, 190n2, 194, 203, 205n11, 206, 226–228, 235–236, 238–239, 244, 245–246, 253; Papal authority, 194n5; regional differences, 190, 194n5, 203, 246; Southern poverty, 6, 22–23, 77, 101, 126–127, 130–132, 134–135, 189, 190, 193, 194n5, 196, 197, 202, 206, 210, 235–236, 238–240, 246, 247, 253–254; unification of, 194, 239 Italy, locations in: Abruzzi, The, 24; Benevento province, 227; Bologna, 236; Calabria, 236; Campania, 24; Florence, 54, 223, 227, 236, 245; Lucania (Basilicata), 231; Marola, 234;Molfetta, 226; Pescara, 230; Puglia, 24, 39, 131, 132, 196, 197, 225, 236, 240, 241, 246; Rodi Garganico, 197; Rome, 224, 245; Salento, 135n2; San Gervasio, 54;Sicily, 24, 54, 131, 194n5, 226–227; Taormina, 54; Tivoli, 224; Liguria, 246; Tuscany, 246; Veneto, 234; Venice, 223, 230 James, William, 164 Jews, 7, 79, 118n1, 121, 205n11, 257n14, 258n15 Joplin, Patricia, 156 Joyce, James, 163; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 11 Kadi, Joanna, Thinking Class, 90 Kalčik, Susan, 199, 205n12 Kempe, Henry, “The Battered Child Syndrome,” 162 Kerrigan, Nancy, 55 King, Stephen, On Writing, 22 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 7n17, 109; The Woman Warrior, 108 kinship, 77, 96, 240, 241; blood as symbol of, 47, 226–227, 238, 240, 241 kitchen, 28, 38, 41, 60, 86, 113, 130–132, 192, 194n5, 195, 197–198, 200–207. See also baking; cooking; food knitting, 42–43, 137, 174, 183, 229. See also needlework Koch, Kenneth, On the Great Atlantic Rainway, 58n5 Kramer, Michael, 121 Kristeva, Julia, 26, 51–52, 60, 61 Kuhn, Annette, Family Secrets, 67–68 laborer, 3, 39, 44, 120n3, 123–124, 125, 126, 200, 205n11, 213n6, 214, 217. See also class: working Lacan, Jacques, 52 Lackawanna Railroad, 132, 237 Lamott, Anne, Bird by Bird, 22

271

landlord, 197, 236 Lanzillotto, Annie, L Is for Lion, 19n42 Larsen, Thomas, The Memoir and the Memoirist, 1n1 Laub, Dori, 130, 132–133; Testimony, 130n1 Laurino, Maria, 10; Old World Daughter, New World Mother, 19n42, 245; Were You Always an Italian?, 19n42, 191n4 Lawrence, D. H., 6, 11, 22, 51, 54, 113, 224; Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, 54; Etruscan Places, 54; Sea and Sardinia, 54; Women in Love, 56 Learned Optimism (Martin Seligman), 56 Leaska, Mitchell, 157, 166; The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 13n28 Leonardi, Susan, 193, 196–197 letters, 3, 13–14, 16, 47, 51, 73, 79–81, 82, 87n2, 125, 142, 143n3, 147, 155, 157, 159, 165n17, 183, 184, 185, 230 Lewinsky, Monica, 21, 101, 170, 174n8 Leys, Ruth, 163, 164 LGBT: gay, 108; lesbian, 108, 158, 165n17, 170; queer, 110. See also identity: sexual librarian, 17n36, 78, 79, 81 library, 4, 17–18, 19n41, 76, 79, 81, 83, 88–90, 100, 112, 119, 140, 156, 160n8, 216, 228. See also archives Libya, 56 lineage, 132, 134, 205, 207; literary, 82. See also ancestors linearity, 1, 52, 56, 58, 90, 144n4, 146n6, 172, 258n15. See also chronology lists (as poetic strategy), 51, 53, 56, 57, 192–193, 198 literacy, 26, 27, 117–125, 127, 244 literary criticism, 7n16, 9, 13n27, 18n39, 60, 64, 81, 87n4, 108, 121, 140–141, 143–151, 156–166, 211, 251–252, 258 literary life, 80, 88 literature, 9n21, 11, 21, 25, 42, 52, 63, 69, 73, 76, 80, 91, 140, 156, 161, 164, 172, 177, 182, 187, 190, 191, 193, 196–197, 211, 212, 224, 226, 228–229, 238, 248; American tradition, 12n26; British tradition, 12n26. See also Catholicism: women writers; Italian American women: writers; Greek American: women writers Lithuania, 26–27, 77–79, 81, 82, 84; German occupation of Vilnius, 79; Vilna Ghetto, 79; Vilnius, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82 Lloyd, Susan Caperna, 211; The Baggage, 10n23; No Pictures in My Grave, 206 Long Island, 58–59, 241 Lorde, Audre, 105, 109, 175; The Cancer Journals, 20–21, 191n3; Sister Outsider, 90n8; Zami, 108 loss, 2, 15, 57, 60, 86, 89, 107, 108, 189–190, 192, 200, 204n9, 215, 227, 240, 248; of Italian language and/or culture, 3n7, 10, 27, 189–190, 202 Luconi, Stefano, “The Pitfalls of the ‘Italian Diaspora,’ ” 205n11

272

Index

Lüdtke, Karen, Dances with Spiders, 134 Lukács, Georg, 91 Lyotard, Jean Francois, The Postmodern Condition, 118n2 Maggio, Theresa: Mattanza, 206; The Stone Boudoir, 19n42, 191n4 Mairs, Nancy: Plaintext, 88n6; Waist-High in the World, 6n3, 20–21 Mandela, Nelson, 55 Mangione, Jerre, 214n7; Mount Allegro, 10n22, 19, 226–227 Manning, Martha, 26, 62, 66; Chasing Grace, 69, 71 manuscripts, 79, 84, 109, 184; DeSalvo’s, 15, 24, 184; Woolf’s, 6, 13n27, 119, 125, 142–144, 145, 147, 150, 151, 156, 166. See also archives; drafts; revision Marchetto, Marisa Acocella, Cancer Vixen, 19n42, 191n4 Marcus, Steven, 159n5 Mariani, John F., How Italian Food Conquered the World, 238–239 marriage, 10, 12n26, 15–16, 21, 40, 57, 77, 82, 111–112, 114, 118–119, 133, 146, 159, 165n17, 170–176, 196, 202, 211, 214, 217, 218, 219, 240 Maso, Carole, 7, The Room Lit by Roses, 19n42, 191n4 Mason, Alane Salierno, “Respect,” 202n8 Mason, Michael, 159n5 Masson, Jeffrey, The Assault on Truth, 162 Matisse, Henri, 181, 185 May, Elaine Tyler, 109 May, Rollo, The Courage to Create, 89n7 Maynard, Joyce, 89 Mazza, Cris: Indigenous, 19n42; Your Name Here, 7n15 McCarriston, Linda, Eva-Mary, 55 McCarthy, Mary, 26, 62; Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, 65–66, 69, 70–71, 72, 73 McCormick, Kathleen Zamboni, Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, 8n20, 9 McNaron, Toni, 163 meditation, 76; Buddhist, 7 memoir, 1–3, 7–8, 11, 13n27, 14–15, 19–20, 25–27, 62, 63–65, 68–69, 71, 79, 80, 81, 91–98, 105–106, 108–110, 111, 142, 157, 159–161, 179–180, 181–182, 186, 187, 191n4, 194, 206, 211n3, 212, 226, 253n6, 254n8, 255n9; backlash against, 55, 107; contemporary, 1, 2n3, 7n17, 9, 65, 106–109, 185; essayistic, 6, 7n16, 11, 12, 16, 20, 25–26, 28, 51n2, 87–101, 118; ethnic, 189, 190, 192; feminist, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194; political dimensions of, 2–3, 19, 20–21, 50, 52, 56–57, 91, 93–94, 96, 100–101, 108–109, 238; self of, 1, 89, 96, 98; subject of, 98; tradition, 105–106; writing, 1, 2n3, 4–5, 22, 47–48, 53n3, 55, 68, 87, 88, 93, 94–96, 97, 109, 125, 184, 185.

See also autobiography; DeSalvo, Louise: memoir; narrative memory, 1, 9, 16, 26, 27, 28, 37, 43, 47–48, 51, 55–56, 58, 62–68, 70–74, 88–97, 99, 101, 106, 109, 123, 131–132, 133, 136, 138, 143, 149, 158, 161, 164, 181, 185, 187, 192, 193, 197, 198, 200, 201–202, 203, 205, 206–207, 215, 219, 222, 223, 225, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 241–242, 246, 247 memory work, 16, 22, 55, 101, 106. See also healing menstruation, 44, 52 mentorship, 82–83, 183, 192 metaphor, 27, 38, 39n1, 47, 57, 59, 67–68, 76, 91–92, 106, 116, 156, 197, 204–205, 223, 227, 228, 231, 237 Metzger, Nan, 63 mezzadria, 203 Mezzogiorno. See Italy: Southern poverty Miller, Henry, 6, 11n26, 51, 112–113, 224; Crazy Cock, 56; Tropic of Cancer, 56 Miller, Nancy, 157 Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics, 156 miseria, la, 236, 245, 247. See also Italy: Southern poverty Mitchell, Juliet, “Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of Language,” 47 modernist studies, 12, 13n27, 143n2, 144n4, 147 Monk, Ray, “This Fictitious Life,” 157n1 Moore, Christine Palamidessi, American Woman, Italian Style, 18n39 Morgan, Yarrow, 163 motherhood, 26–27, 75–77, 80, 82–84, 89, 111, 114, 115–116, 118–119, 148–149, 171, 177, 213n6, 217, 235, 244–246. See also DeSalvo, Louise: as a mother; DeSalvo, Louise, family of: mother; families: mothers Ms. Magazine, 162, 170 multiple sclerosis, 3n6, 75, 78 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 22n46; Being Singular Plural, 2n3 Nardini, Gloria, 48n2 narrative, 7, 9–10, 11, 16, 18, 19n40, 19n41, 20, 24, 24n48, 25, 26, 53, 64, 65, 66, 73, 82, 89, 91, 95, 96, 97, 100, 118, 130, 133, 136, 165, 229, 237, 245, 255; associative, 1, 50, 52, 56, 57, 90; device, 225; food, 26, 193, 198, 202, 238, 244, 247; familial, 27, 106, 159; fragmentary, 90, 93; for healing, 48, 50, 55, 256; historical, 122; immigration, 19, 23, 26, 117, 118, 120–123, 126, 127; Italian American, 23–34, 202, 238, 247, 257; life, 180–186; literacy, 26, 120–123; memoir versus autobiography, 1–2; memory, 9, 89, 94–95, 97, 164; metanarrative, 94; private versus political, 20–21; provisional, 64, 93, 123; recovery, 2–3, 106–107; school, 63, 67, 71; of the self, 125, 127, 193; structure, 15, 52, 90, 107–108, 122, 125, 157, 182, 191, 193, 222;

Index tentativeness, 92; testimony, 99; women’s, 20, 156–157, 162, 202n8, 212, 218. See also memoir; storytelling National Arts Club, 54 NATO, 56 naturalization, 120, 126–127, 133, 199, 225 needlework, 196, 238. See also knitting needs, artistic, 16, 218n15 neglect, 13, 77, 101, 160, 164, 197, 198, 200, 202, 204–205, 206–207, 212, 235 New Jersey, 9, 60, 54, 106, 143, 156, 196, 198, 235, 236, 243, 246; Hoboken, 9, 28, 59, 60, 70, 84, 126, 133, 136, 192, 195, 196, 198, 213, 214–215, 225, 236, 240, 242, 243; Jersey City, 9; Montclair, 24; Ridgefield, 3, 9, 10, 59, 60, 130, 136, 195, 215, 236, 240; Teaneck, 10, 24; Weehawken, 43 New Mexico, 54 New York Public Library, 156; Berg Collection, 142, 156 New York Radical Feminist Conference, 162 New York Times Book Review, 106 nonfiction, creative, 12n26, 25, 50–51, 62, 64, 65 nonna, concept of, 189, 197, 235, 240, 242. See also DeSalvo, Louise, family of: grandmother nostalgia, 12, 19, 187, 197, 204, 215, 239, 246, 253. See also sentimentality Oakley, Ann, Taking It Like a Woman, 191n3 obsession, 5, 134, 202, 203–204, 206, 207, 226, 243, 254 obsessive behavior, 198, 200, 203 Olds, Sharon, The Father, 55 Olsen, Tillie, 76 Omi, Michael, 122 O’Neill, Eugene, 224 O’Neill, George, Open Marriage, 171 O’Neill, Nena, Open Marriage, 171 openness, 4n8, 21n44, 22n46, 25, 37, 87, 88, 89–90, 97, 145, 223, 231, 259 oppression, 17, 18–20, 70, 78, 101, 117–124, 160, 163, 194n6, 195, 202, 212, 236, 237–238, 247, 257–259 padrone system, 124, 202 paganism, 242, 243 Paglia, Camille, 161n9, 243 pain, 4n8, 7, 10, 21n44, 42, 44, 47–48, 52, 56, 58, 60, 74, 80, 82, 91, 100, 107–108, 109, 123, 132–133, 134, 148, 149, 161, 174n9, 190, 197, 207, 212, 220, 224, 227, 229, 236, 240, 242, 245, 248, 256 Panunzio, Constantine, 226 Papanikolas, Helen, 27, 214n8; The Time of the Little Black Bird, 212, 213–214, 216–218, 219–220, 255 Parravani, Christa, Her, 19n42 partiality, 88, 90, 91–92, 98 passing, culinary, 195, 199, 202. See also food

273

patriarchy, 6, 39, 43–44, 63, 66, 70, 74, 118–119, 121, 156, 160, 163, 165, 171, 173, 177, 210, 212, 216–218, 219–220, 253n6, 255. See also female submission Patti, Sam, A Tavola, 252n4 Pavese, Cesare, La luna e i falò, 227 Pedraza, Sylvia, 121 Pennebaker, James W., 51, 96n10; Opening Up, 5n10 personal effects, 16, 28, 59, 86, 222 personal transformation, 26, 51, 55, 90, 100, 107, 109, 127, 255 personal voice, 7n15, 7n16, 50, 74, 77, 108, 109. See also first-person voice photographs, 66–68, 70, 91, 133, 235, 239–240, 242, 246 Pittsburgh, 8 Plath, Sylvia, 52, 76; “Edge,” 40 Podnieks, Elizabeth, “ ‘Hit Sluts’ and ‘Page Pimps,’ ” 180, 184n3, 186 pornography, 158, 159, 161 Portland, Oregon, 57, 59 possibility, 48, 53, 63, 86, 88, 89, 91–92, 97, 98, 107, 116, 173, 225 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 163 poverty, 2, 41, 77, 108, 132, 134, 190, 194n5, 196, 206, 210, 235, 236, 238, 240–241, 253. See also class: poor pregnancy, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 156, 171, 173, 213n6 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 228 Prince Edward Island, 131 Proust, Marcel, 224, 241 psychoanalysis, 50–51, 52, 57, 58, 61, 145, 162n12, 229, 258 psychology, 50, 60, 93, 94, 96, 97, 134, 144n4, 163, 164, 198, 214, 222, 240, 253n6 public awareness, 158, 160, 161, 162. See also consciousness-raising public spheres, 19, 21, 39n1, 43, 45, 57, 67, 70, 91, 92, 96, 108, 109, 134, 163–164, 180, 181–182, 190n2, 191, 195, 199, 229, 258 Punishment of Incest Act (1908), 163, 165 puttana, 11, 77, 259n16 Puzo, Mario, 10; The Fortunate Pilgrim, 10n22, 19, 227, 231, 253n6; The Godfather, 258n15 race, 12, 24, 25, 63, 90, 100, 115, 117, 118, 121–122, 191, 195, 204n10, 247, 256n10, 257; ideologies of, 27, 121–122, 123. See also color, people of racelessness, 118–120, 122, 123, 124, 126–127 racialization, 11n26, 118, 119–120, 122, 123, 126–127, 240 racism, 45, 101, 118, 124, 125, 126, 210–211, 240, 241 rage, 4, 41, 44, 58, 88, 109, 135, 159, 201, 202, 213, 236, 238, 242 Ragusa, Kym, 10, 25, 27, 211; fuori/outside, 10; The Skin Between Us, 10n22, 19n42, 191n4

274

Index

rape. See abuse: rape readers, 2–3, 7–8, 15, 21, 39, 56, 59, 60, 65–66, 67–69, 73, 74, 80, 81, 87, 96, 100, 106–107, 116, 132–133, 135, 140–141, 158, 169–170, 176–177, 179, 182, 184, 185, 190–191, 193, 208, 223, 228, 236, 237, 256, 257 reading, 3, 4n9, 6, 12, 16–18, 22, 42, 52, 73, 76–77, 88–90, 107, 114–115, 121–122, 123, 150–152, 159, 161, 179, 181–182, 186, 212, 216, 217, 229; occasional, 89–90; writers reading other authors, 7n15, 22, 47–48, 53, 82–83, 87–88, 93 recipes, 60, 86, 119, 193, 194n6, 196–197, 201, 202–203, 204n10, 207, 233, 234, 244. See also cookbooks reconciliation, 48, 87, 119, 202–203, 206 redemption, 27, 63, 234, 237, 242, 245–246 research, 2n4, 6–7, 9, 11, 12–14, 22, 26–27, 50, 51, 76–81, 83–84, 118–119, 141–143, 146, 147, 157, 160, 183–184, 190, 195, 224, 228, 229; clinical, 96n10; neurological, 164, 181 re-vision, 87 revision, 5, 24–25, 50, 63, 68, 90, 101, 121, 123, 125–126, 127, 133, 141–150, 170n3, 183–184, 185–186. See also drafts; manuscripts remembering. See memory responsibility, 2–3, 7n17, 21, 39, 57, 65, 66, 82, 84, 88n16, 96, 99, 100, 148, 171, 174, 179, 202 Rhode Island, 9; Johnston, 131; Providence, 131 Rich, Adrienne, 11n25, 76, 87 Rich, B. Ruby, 158 Ridgefield. See New Jersey: Ridgefield Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters to a Young Poet, 183, 184 risk, 18, 27, 39n1, 93, 108–109, 135, 141, 176, 182, 194, 219 ritual, 41, 46, 48, 57, 63, 67, 72, 78, 133, 134n2, 193, 197, 200, 203, 207, 216, 231, 233, 238, 242, 243 Rodriguez, Richard, 118 Rogat, Ellen Hawkes, 156 Roiphe, Katie, 161n9 Romano, Rose, 207 Romeo, Caterina, 18, 20n43, 63, 74 Root, Robert L., Jr., 67–68, 74; The Fourth Genre, 64 Rose, Phyllis, 157n2, 160 Ruberto, Laura: Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S., 18n38; Such Is Life, 19n42 Ruberto, Leonilde Frieri, Such Is Life, 19n42 Ruddick, Sara, 12, 24, 76; Between Women, 11; Working It Out, 11n25 Rush, Florence, 162; The Best-Kept Secret, 158 Russell, Diane, The Secret Trauma, 158 Russia, 77, 78, 82, 118n1, 121, 213n5; Polotzk, 121; Siberia, 78 Russian Revolution, 82 Ruta, Domenica, With or Without You, 19n42

Rwanda, 55 Ryan, Michael, Secret Life, 19–20 sadness, 141, 148–151, 197, 234, 235 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 131 Salerno, Salvatore, Are Italians White?, 120n3 Saracino, Mary, 10; Finding Grace, 10n22; No Matter What, 10n22; Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior, 19n42 Satran, Pamela Redmond, Suburbanistas, 225 Schachter, Daniel, 164 scholar, textual, 6, 7n16, 9, 16, 27, 125, 136, 142–152 Schulkind, Jeanne, 95, 96, 97, 99; Moments of Being, 95, 160n8 Schwartz, Mimi, 65; “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?,” 64 Scicolone, Michele, 1,000 Italian Recipes, 233 Scotellaro, Rocco, 231 Scott, Joan W., 118, 122 self-care, 7, 22. See also body; health self-injury, 200 self-knowledge, 7, 87n4, 109, 137, 176, 177, 222–223 semiotics, 52, 222, 252–254, 258–259 sentimentality, 12, 19, 23n47, 24, 26, 51, 59–60, 109, 233, 242, 243–244. See also nostalgia separate worlds trope, 118–127 Serbia, 55 Serra, Ilaria, 19n42, 26, 27; The Imagined Immigrant, 18n39; The Value of Worthless Lives, 18n39 Sexton, Anne, Live or Die, 52 Sexton, Linda Gray, Searching for Mercy Street, 19–20 sexuality, 15n32, 21n44, 25, 27, 42, 43–44, 59, 63, 71, 110, 147, 158, 159n5, 161, 162n10, 171–175, 192, 219, 255–256, 258. See also identity: sexual; LGBT Sgroi, S., “Sexual Molestation of Children,” 162n14 shame, 37, 39, 43, 45, 46, 71, 96, 173, 176, 195, 215, 225 Shelly, Percy, 224 Shelton, Jen, “Don’t Say Such Foolish Things, Dear,” 162n10 Shteyngart, Gary, Super Sad True Love Story, 179, 187 silence, 3n7, 14, 17n37, 18, 19, 20, 21n44, 23, 25, 26, 37–48, 77, 90, 95n5, 96, 99, 101, 112, 116, 132–133, 156, 163, 192, 193, 197, 210, 223, 230, 255, 256, 259 Silver, Brenda, Virginia Woolf Icon, 155 Šimaitė, Ona, 27, 78, 79–84 Simmel, Georg, 223–224 Simpson, H. B., 165 Simpson, O. J., 55 Slater, Lauren, 7n17; Lying, 91–92 Slow Food, 233, 234, 245

Index Smart, Carol, 163 Smith, Carol, 156 Smith, Sidonie, Reading Autobiography, 1n1, 108n1 social justice, 3, 88, 100–101, 109, 118, 119, 124, 125, 162n10, 210, 244, 248 social media, 24–25, 179–187; blogs, 180–182, 184n1, 186. See also DeSalvo, Louise, works of: Writingalife (blog) social transformation, 27, 87n5, 88 Socialist Revolutionaries, 82 Sommers, Christina Hoff, 161n9 Sonnenberg, Susanna, Her Last Death, 20 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 51 South Africa, 55 Soviet Union. See Russia space, experience of, 222 Stanton, Domna, 157 Steinbeck, John, Journal of a Novel, 184, 185, 187 Steinberg, Isaac Nachman, 82 Steinberg, Michael, 67–68, 74; The Fourth Genre, 64 Stephen, James Fitzjames, History of the Criminal Law, 165 Stephen, James Kenneth, 159 Stephen, Julia, 159, 160 Stephen, Laura, 159 Stephen, Leslie, 159 Stephen family, 159–160, 165 stereotypes, 172–173, 194, 237, 257 Stevens’ Towing Tank, 3 stonecarving, 131 storytelling, 3, 8, 16n34, 45, 48, 62–69, 72–73, 74, 77, 78, 81–82, 83, 91, 93–94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107–108, 109, 111, 114–115, 126, 132, 134–135, 164–165, 175–176, 177, 197, 207, 215–216, 234, 237, 240, 241–242. See also memoir; narrative; writing Stuckey, J. Elspeth, The Violence of Literacy, 118 subjectivity, 4n8, 50, 51, 87, 91, 94, 106, 157, 163, 191, 193 suburbia, 3, 9–10, 15, 59, 60, 84, 108, 175, 194, 195, 196, 198, 211, 214–215, 240, 241 suffering, 2n5, 3, 14, 23, 40, 44, 48, 55, 63, 82, 91, 93–94, 100–101, 106–107, 134, 136, 149, 163, 189, 193–194, 196, 199–200, 202n8, 212, 214–215, 218, 224, 230, 235–236, 238, 242, 245, 247–248, 255 suicide, 43, 53–54, 79, 112; “race suicide,” 121–122; of Woolf, 151, 158, 167n17. See also DeSalvo, Louise, family of: sister, suicide of Šukys, Julija, 25, 26–27; Epistolophilia, 84; Silence Is Death, 81 Šuras, Grigorijus, Užrašai, 79n2 survival strategy, 100 sustenance (food), 23, 78, 197, 198, 235, 238 Sutcliffe, Rebecca, 158–159 Syria, 56

275

Takaki, Ronald, 120 Tal, Kalí, 163 Tamburri, Anthony Julian, 11–12, 18, 27–28; From the Margin, 18n39; A Semiotic of Ethnicity, 18n39, 257n13; To Hyphenate or Not To Hyphenate, 18n39, 251n1, 257n13 Tarantism, 134–135 Tate, Greg, Everything But the Burden, 247 Taylor, Elizabeth, 155 Taylor, Julie, 144n4; Revising the Antiphon, Restaging Trauma, 13n27 teaching, 3, 9, 13, 21n44, 26, 27, 37, 38, 39, 42, 45, 55, 63, 66, 69–72, 73, 80, 83, 101, 105, 109–110, 124, 192, 194n5, 203, 207, 211, 218, 228. See also DeSalvo, Louise: as a teacher temperament, artistic, 93–94 testimony, 14–15, 99, 130n1, 132–133, 158, 161–162, 163. See also witnessing textual stability, 51–52, 141, 144n4, 145 Thackeray, Minny, 159 theft, cultural, 247–248 Thomas, Clarence, 166 Thompson, Ariadne, 27; The Octagonal Heart, 212, 214, 218–220 Thornton, Louise, I Never Told Anyone, 158 Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (Alice Miller), 56 Tompkins, Jane, 163 Torgovnick, Marianna de Marco, 12n26, 118 tradition, 39, 41, 48, 193, 197, 218–219. See also Italian American: tradition transformative nextness, 27, 87–88, 97 trauma, 2–3, 5n11, 10, 22, 24, 25, 26, 50–53, 55–59, 61, 88, 91, 93–94, 95–96, 99, 100, 107, 108, 146, 148, 161, 163–165, 198, 199–200, 211, 212, 213, 225, 226, 235, 238, 255; environmental, 3, 21; familial, 3, 19n41, 27, 38, 47, 57–58, 108, 199–200, 212, 235, 238; political, 3, 55, 56; sexual, 3, 14, 47, 58–59, 93, 160, 161, 163–166. See also abuse trauma theory, 93, 96 triangulation, 57 Trillin, Calvin, 247 Trussoni, Danielle, Falling Through the Earth, 19n42 truth, 7, 18, 20, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46–48, 151, 162, 165, 166, 172, 173, 202; in fiction and memoir, 27, 38, 47–48, 50, 55, 56, 62, 64–69, 73, 74, 87, 90–92, 96, 101, 116, 123, 166, 169–170, 173, 176–177, 179–180, 181–182, 183, 191, 235, 248, 256, 259; historical, 16, 91, 163 Tutsis, 55 uncertainty, 46, 65, 69, 84, 91, 97, 116, 185n3 United States, 26, 56, 108, 117–118, 119, 120–124, 125, 127, 133, 135, 156, 163, 170, 171, 190, 236, 251, 252. See also ethnicity: diversity in the U.S.; immigrants; immigration upward mobility, 9–10, 66, 117–118, 198–199, 211, 215, 225

276

Index

Vannucci, Lynn, “An Accidental Murder,” 202n8 vendetta, 236 vengeance, 112–113, 246 venting, 96n10 verse, 52, 73–74, 110, 253n6 vertigo, 52, 73–74, 192, 227 Vicinus, Martha, 158 Vietnam War, 105, 109, 163 Villanueva, Victor, Bootstraps, 117–118 violence, 3–4, 7n15, 14, 15n32, 19, 23, 43, 47, 55, 58, 88, 95n9, 99, 101, 108, 118, 125, 146, 158, 160, 162, 202, 204, 213, 214, 216, 224, 231, 236–237, 242–243, 244, 247, 248, 253–254, 255, 258. See also abuse; rage Viramonte, Helena María, “Nopalitos,” 197 Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 142, 144–145, 161 Viscusi, Robert, 18, 231; Buried Caesars, 18n39 voyeurism, 108 vulnerability, 4, 27, 47, 107, 108–109, 141 Waldie, D. J., 62n1 Walker, Alice, 7n15, 76 war, 16, 55, 56, 81, 91, 107, 202, 210. See also specific wars Weaver, Wendy A., 63 Weber, E., “Incest,” 162n14 whiteness, 27, 118–121, 126–127, 199, 211, 212, 240. See also race Whole Foods, 206 Williams, William Carlos, 54; Paterson, 51 Wilson, Elizabeth, 157–158, 159 Wilson, Sloan, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, 112 Winant, Howard, 122 Wisor, Rebecca, “Versioning Virginia Woolf,” 13n27, 143n2, 144n4 witnessing, 2, 9, 44–45, 64, 88, 96, 107, 109, 130n1, 132–134, 213, 223, 242. See also testimony Wollaeger, Mark, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, 147n7 Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 170 women, 6, 10, 15–16, 21n44, 24, 27, 39–40, 43–44, 58, 66–67, 69–70, 76–78, 87n4, 94, 108, 111–116, 119, 133, 147, 150, 156–158, 160, 161n9, 163–165, 166, 170–177, 191, 195, 197, 203, 213–220, 245, 255–256; ethnic, 27, 212–213, 217–220, 255; writers, 47–48, 74,

76–77, 82, 83, 94, 105, 109, 112–116, 125, 156–158, 162, 163–165, 259. See also Catholicism: women writers; Greek American: women; Italian American women women’s studies, 25, 87n4, 156–157. See also feminism Wong, Lily, “Eating the Hyphen,” 206 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 193 Woolf, Emma, 165n17 Woolf, Virginia, 2, 6, 14, 76, 94–98, 135–136, 140–152, 155–166, 174n9, 184, 222, 224, 228; as role model to DeSalvo, 5–6, 7, 15, 27, 53–54, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83–84, 92–99, 156, 169, 177, 192, 228. See also DeSalvo, Louise, Woolf studies Woolf, Virginia, works of: “George Eliot,” 169; Jacob’s Room, 56, 149; “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” 157; Melymbrosia, 10, 13, 20, 87n2, 141–151; Moments of Being, 95, 160n8; Mrs. Dalloway, 149, 162n10; Night and Day, 155, 166; A Room of One’s Own, 2n4, 76, 145, 146, 156; “A Sketch of the Past,” 6n13, 92–98, 160–161, 164; Three Guineas, 2n4, 13n27, 14, 157, 164; To the Lighthouse, 56, 149, 150, 183; The Voyage Out, 10, 13, 56, 87n2, 141–151, 162n12; The Years, 162n10 World War I, 77, 132, 212 World War II, 3, 16, 19n41, 24, 47, 59, 64–65, 66–67, 68n6, 69, 79, 80, 82, 89, 91, 108, 109, 126, 132, 193, 198–200, 213, 216, 235, 240, 247 writing: academic, 7n16, 12, 77, 113–114, 226, 228; act of, 4–5, 47, 80, 88, 95, 100, 121, 161, 176–177, 185; craft, 22, 24–25, 83, 108, 109, 169, 183; desire for, 5, 15, 82, 113; discipline in, 5, 14, 24, 72, 184, 204; fragments in, 18–19, 90, 93, 99, 110, 117, 142, 143n1, 144, 145, 147, 160, 229; free-writing, 96n10; and living, 4–5, 21n44, 87, 89–90, 107, 108, 111, 113, 226; making public, 96; meditative approach, 5, 25, 28, 101; methods, 56, 95–96, 149, 181; as physical act of the self, 8; as physical work, 8; practice, 5–6, 8, 22, 25, 28, 82–83, 109, 185; strategy, 5, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 62, 65, 68, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 100–101, 142, 151, 191, 193; style, 52, 77, 94–95, 141, 145–146, 148–151, 179, 223, 227, 228, 229, 236, 242; sustenance from, 4, 14, 23, 24, 55, 89, 98. See also community: of writers Zandy, Janet, Hands, 18n38

crit ical studies in italian am e ric a series editors: Nancy C. Carnevale and Laura E. Ruberto

Joseph Sciorra, ed., Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives Loretta Baldassar and Donna R. Gabaccia, eds., Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World Simone Cinotto, ed., Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities Luisa Del Giudice, ed., Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, eds., Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo