Hi Everyone,
Brad here – I’m a new volunteer here at Yellow Arrow. (Learn more about the rest of our staff here.) One of the things that has drawn me to YAP is the part of its mission that involves giving a voice to the voiceless. This attraction is, in part, because YAP’s mission dovetails with my own academic interests, which have most recently been focused on a modernist technique that I usually refer to as “textual exclusion.” Textual exclusion is the manner in which authors silence marginalized – often female – voices in their texts, rather than simply describing characters’ alienation and exclusion and letting the reader draw his or her own conclusions. For the last couple of years, I have worked pretty exclusively on exploring this technique in a single, almost forgotten Italian novel called L’esclusa.
L’esclusa translates in English most happily as “the outcast woman” – my own translation of the novel is called simply The Outcast. This is the earliest novel written by Luigi Pirandello, who completed a first draft in 1893. The novel was eventually serialized in 1901, then published as a stand-alone volume in 1908, and finally published in its definitive edition in 1927. You struggling authors out there know very well that it can take many years for projects to see the light of day, but The Outcast’s road to publication was particularly long, dark, and twisty. The funny thing is, Pirandello wrote many highly regarded novels and short story collections early in his career, and later, when he shifted his main literary output from literary fiction to drama, his work gained international recognition, inspired Absurdism and any number of other modernist movements, and he eventually won a Nobel Prize for works like Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV. So why did this novel have such a hard time finding its way to publication?
The Outcast tells the story of Marta Ajala who, as our story begins, is a young wife who has been kicked out of her marital home by her husband, Rocco, after he has discovered her standing in their kitchen, reading a letter from a man he suspects is a potential suitor, Gregorio Alvignani. The strictures of 19th-century Sicilian village life being what they are, Rocco is compelled to “send her back” to her father’s house, despite her not having committed adultery, and indeed despite her being several months pregnant with their (Marta and Rocco’s) first child. This act puts into motion a series of events, including the death of her baby in childbirth, the loss of the family business and their home, and the death of her father, who agrees with Rocco’s decision and has retired from public life out of shame. She and her mother and sister are plunged into poverty. The people of the village, led by Rocco’s corrupt father, turn on her, and despite acing the national examination to become a teacher, she is not allowed to work for “moral” reasons. She flees to Palermo and starts a new life, but despite her ingenuity and drive, she encounters many of the same problems there. With nowhere left to turn, she is – irony of ironies – driven into the arms of Alvignani, who by that time has become a senator and is in a position to help her. In the end – spoilers ahead – Rocco has a change of heart as he and Marta sit vigil before his dying mother, who was kicked out of her home by Rocco’s father for reasons similar to those that compelled Rocco to send Marta packing. Rocco’s mother has, we come to learn, almost certainly committed suicide. In a final climactic scene, Rocco sees the error of his ways, and even though she is now pregnant with Alvignani’s child, he offers Marta his forgiveness, and the novel leaves us there, with what seems like something of a happy ending.
But it’s not a happy ending at all, and the deeper below the surface of the novel one gets, the clearer it is that Pirandello’s intentions are not to point us in that direction. Rocco has attempted a reconciliation more than once over the course of the novel, and whenever he has done so, Marta reminds anyone who will listen that it is not up to him to forgive her; she has not forgiven him (or her father, or the townspeople), and remains vehemently and consistently opposed to returning to her previous life, even if it means poverty and difficulty for her and what remains of her family. Of course, in that final scene, we don’t get to hear Marta’s response to Rocco, which is presumably why many critics have mistakenly reported that Marta and Rocco are reconciled at the end of the novel. In fact, we don’t get to hear Marta say a whole lot in the novel. She doesn’t even get to speak in earnest until Chapter 4 of The Outcast, at which point all of the major characters have discussed her situation at length, and her fate has been decided. Marta is young, capable, intelligent, and resourceful, but her patriarchal society does not recognize those qualities as being valuable in a woman, and as a result, they shut her out. Rather than just describe this exclusion, Pirandello opts to reinforce this point by what amounts to excluding her voice from the novel, at least at key points.
And this, I think, is why the novel had such a difficult road. It’s not because of the subject matter – there are plenty of late-nineteenth-century novels that take adultery as their theme, and plenty with wronged women and strong female protagonists. Pirandello is doing something different here. By excluding Marta’s voice, he makes a leap towards the modern by making us feel her absence. She is silenced. Her voice is lost, and, despite the novel’s faux-happy ending, that voice is not recovered. Indeed, the death of Rocco’s mother reinforces the potential tragedy of this loss of voice. Later, more outwardly experimental writers would use this sort of metatextuality to incredible effect – one can hardly imagine the masterpieces of high modernism and, for that matter, postmodernism, without it – but in the 1890s and 1900s, I’d like to suggest, the world just wasn’t quite ready for it yet.
Most novels try to uncover lost voices – to demonstrate oppression and exclusion – by telling. What I love about this novel and novels like it is that it does just the opposite; it shows us exclusion, and, in doing so, makes us as readers of the novel complicit in Marta’s silencing. That wasn’t easy for readers to understand a hundred years ago. But we’re catching up.
All the best,
Bradford A. Masoni