Matilde Serao’s Fantasia: An Author in Search of a Character

Abstract

In an article entitled ‘The Feminine Vision of Matilde Serao’, an American critic, Judith Jeffrey Howard, has pointed out that, in spite of Serao’s own long and prolific career as a high profile journalist and novelist, ‘there were no Matilde-Serao-lady-journalists’ in her work (Howard, 1975, pp. 68–9).¹ It is true that the fact that her own life was highly unorthodox for the times seems to have had little effect on her portrayal of women and their lives. In her novels and short stories she limited herself to ‘the basic feminine roles of her day as she saw them’ (Howard, 1975, p. 68), and ‘therefore constricted not only a woman’s social and economic role, but also her psychic life, to the point of personality distortion’ (Howard, 1975, p. 69). Howard attributes this shortcoming to Serao’s basic ideological conservatism, to the fact that she was ‘a rather outspoken anti-feminist who viewed the world through her perception of her proper role as a woman’ (Howard, 1975, p. 55). Nor is Howard alone in thinking this way: several Italian critics have also assumed Serao’s portrayal of women to be a direct result, or reflection, of her publicly expressed views on women in society.²

This essay was completed with the help of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.