Female Masks: Luigi Pirandello’s Plays for Women

Abstract

In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the Father protests that he is ‘hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity’ in the image that the Stepdaughter has of him.¹ This notion of a person being ‘fixed’ by the gaze of another, forced to assume a mask and unable ever to be free of the roles that other people impose, was central to Pirandello’s prose works and to his plays throughout his life. In his Essay on Humour (1908), that set out the basis of his vision of the world and of the relationship between art and life, Pirandello wrote that:

The more difficult the struggle for life, and the more conscious we become of our own ineffectualness in the struggle, then the need for a universal stratagem of mutual deception becomes that much the greater. The feigning of strength, honesty, sympathy and prudence…of every virtue which seems to have a quality of greatness and truth about it, is merely our way of adjusting and adapting ourselves to the compromise of life…the humourist is quick to seize on these various pretences…he finds it amusing to tear off our masks.²