Women and Madness—Entitled Opinions 10/19/2023

10/19/2023

Women and Madness

A conversation with Maria Massucco, who earned her PhD in Italian at Stanford in 2023. Her dissertation is titled “Woundedness and Reintegration: The Phenomenology and Transmission of Women’s Trauma in Modern and Contemporary Italy.” Songs in this episode: “Helen” by Glass Wave, and “Ophelia” by Glass Wave.

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00:00:00.000	[Music]
00:00:04.000	This is KZSU, Stanford.
00:00:07.200	Welcome to entitled opinions.
00:00:08.960	My name is Robert Harrison.
00:00:10.800	We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
00:00:12.960	[Music]
00:00:24.960	Our topic today is women and madness,
00:00:29.520	especially in literature and what a copula that is.
00:00:33.920	How far back does the end of women and madness go?
00:00:37.920	All the way back to the crazed women of antiquity,
00:00:40.800	haunting our unconscious.
00:00:43.120	The medias, the meduses, the furries, the harpies, the main ads.
00:00:49.040	They all still rave inside of us and tigony along with them.
00:00:54.400	Such as the power of archetypes, they endure their stories reiterate,
00:00:59.600	they take on ever-new incarnations.
00:01:02.880	I've said it before on this program, almost all the archetypes in our collective unconscious
00:01:08.240	were discovered by the Greeks.
00:01:10.560	No one knows exactly why.
00:01:13.680	Shakespeare may be added a couple of new ones to the conventional,
00:01:18.400	Ophelia of the willows, for example.
00:01:21.760	Jeez the type of a more tender kind of madness,
00:01:25.120	the madness of an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.
00:01:30.640	Ophelia moves us rather than terrifies us.
00:01:33.680	Her passive, helpless, profoundly wounded folly
00:01:37.520	marks her as a modern rather than a classical feminine type.
00:01:42.240	Stay tuned friends, a show about what happens to the figure of the mad woman
00:01:46.000	across the 20th century coming up.
00:01:50.480	[Music]
00:02:07.760	Ophelia incapable of her own distress, climbing a willow tree that grows a slant of
00:02:14.000	brook, its branch falling into the river, with Ophelia on it.
00:02:20.320	Let me take this occasion to call on Conrad Arthur Hambou,
00:02:24.480	whose voice we haven't heard for quite some time on entitled opinions.
00:02:29.600	When he was 16 years old, Hambou wrote a poem about Ophelia
00:02:34.080	that remains one of the most exquisite of the modern French canon.
00:02:38.960	Here's how it begins.
00:02:42.240	[Music]
00:03:03.920	[Music]
00:03:22.480	On the calm, black wave where sleep the stars,
00:03:26.400	white Ophelia floats like a great lily.
00:03:30.240	Flotes very slowly lying in her long veils.
00:03:34.800	Far off in the woods you can hear them sound the mort.
00:03:39.360	For more than a thousand years, sad Ophelia has passed a white ghost
00:03:44.880	down the long black river. For more than a thousand years her sweet madness has
00:03:50.480	murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.
00:03:55.520	Ophelia, Opofo, she was made for poetry, made for opera.
00:04:03.520	Speaking of opera, I'm joined in the studios of KZSU today by Maria Masuko,
00:04:08.320	an eminently sane young scholar who started training as an opera singer.
00:04:14.160	While on that path she fell in love with the Italian language and then with
00:04:17.520	Italian letters, and then fell in love with our Italian studies program
00:04:22.000	here at Stanford where she recently earned her PhD in Italian literature
00:04:27.600	with a remarkable dissertation about what happens to the figure of the
00:04:31.280	hysterical woman across the 20th century.
00:04:35.120	And in particular about how various Italian women writers
00:04:38.880	have reworked and recast the figural tradition of sick,
00:04:43.200	neurotic, or languid female characters into something quite different
00:04:48.400	from the standard fair, Maria, welcome to entitled opinions. I'm glad you could join us today.
00:04:53.760	Thank you so much. It's an honored to be here with you.
00:04:56.960	The topic of madness and gender is a huge one to be sure,
00:05:00.800	but I'm curious about the rather tentative thesis I threw out there. It didn't sound
00:05:04.880	tentative, but in my mind it's still tentative that
00:05:07.920	Ophelia, the character from Shakespeare's Hamlet play,
00:05:11.760	is a more modern, more gentle, more tender, passive, modern,
00:05:17.440	feminine type of the mad woman. Do you think that there is this distinction between
00:05:23.040	a figure like an archetype, like Ophelia and those of the ancient world where you
00:05:27.200	have those mad, raving women? That is a kind of
00:05:32.080	deep and complex, but perfect place to start, I think, for a discourse on
00:05:36.800	madness and gender because really what we're doing is we're looking at two categories
00:05:41.520	of mad women and two binary manifestations of madness. You have the side of rage,
00:05:50.720	and you have the side of violence and and wrath and really fear-inducing figures that
00:05:57.600	leave a kind of scar of terror, but also absolute fascination in the imagination.
00:06:02.320	Then you have the haunting as the poem that you opened with, so
00:06:07.280	aptly depicts this haunting figure of the depressive, the one who slips away
00:06:13.680	into nothingness in response to the maddening circumstances rather than
00:06:17.920	being incited into a rampage. I think the way that you are dividing this between
00:06:24.720	the ancients and the moderns is one way to look at it, the other way to look at it is that
00:06:29.120	the reason that our modern world struggles so much with
00:06:33.360	gender and madness is because those two manifestations of madness have been
00:06:38.720	allocated along the gender binary as well, so one of the reasons it's been so
00:06:43.760	difficult historically to really treat and aid in
00:06:47.360	manifestations of madness is because they're instinctively
00:06:51.760	attached to correctness or incorrectness of sexuality, and so
00:06:57.040	there's been a bit of an admiration or let's say a fascination, a kind of
00:07:01.440	positive fascination in a way with the more masculine type of the manifestation of
00:07:07.680	madness that angry, violent, lashing out, and that's been pedestal in a sense
00:07:13.600	and in the way that our stories uphold those figures
00:07:16.880	despite often their punishment and their own storylines, and then there's the
00:07:20.640	more effeminate side of depression, and whenever someone who is along the
00:07:27.280	masculine side of that gender binary manifests the more
00:07:30.240	effeminate version of that madness that's not great in a patriarchal society obviously
00:07:36.000	to be classified along the effeminate side, so what you've opened up here with a
00:07:39.680	bunch of these early evocative archetypes is it's complicated from the get-go,
00:07:44.160	but for some reason women characters are always going to be the ones
00:07:48.080	showing us the different options for the manifestations of madness, and that's
00:07:51.920	what I find to be really fascinating.
00:07:54.560	Can you give an example of how things get confused when you have a male
00:07:59.600	depression that takes on what was conventionally considered
00:08:03.760	effeminate characteristics? Yeah there are obviously cultural codes across
00:08:08.720	history that allow for different behaviors along the
00:08:12.400	different lines of the gender binary, but the one that starts to influence
00:08:16.640	or that starts to influence my research in particular was thinking about
00:08:19.920	shell shock and thinking about people coming back from experiences with warfare
00:08:23.840	combat in the first world war particularly in the great war yeah, and the
00:08:28.320	overwhelming evidence that there was something going on here, and it being
00:08:34.960	buried very actively in a way trying to cure it through
00:08:40.160	more combat putting people back on the lines back in contact with these
00:08:45.520	hyper masculine considered activities, and then really not wanting to face
00:08:51.520	the aftermath of the psychological damage that was going on, so
00:08:56.080	what we get much much much later in the 20th century
00:08:59.440	with the Vietnam War really is a reckoning with people coming back from
00:09:03.760	combat and saying my mind is still there, and it happened to be a
00:09:08.640	cultural moment in which society was ready to to confront
00:09:12.640	something such as PTSD, and so retrospectively we've been able to do a lot of
00:09:17.520	considering of what firmer generations were seeing and calling by something
00:09:21.760	some other name, but definitely gender and madness in terms of battle
00:09:27.600	and hand-to-hand comment and violent altercation, it's a very thorny and
00:09:32.080	deeply culturally rooted topic.
00:09:35.200	There was outright condemnation of people who suffered shell shock after the
00:09:40.560	first world war or during the first world war, and they were considered cowards
00:09:45.040	and or effeminate, and not word emasculated indeed, but the phenomenon was so
00:09:51.520	undeniable and widespread that I think it caused at least some
00:09:57.520	psychologists Freud included to begin to investigate
00:10:01.840	you know what kind of disorder, what kind of wounds trauma
00:10:05.760	cannot actually inflict on a subject.
00:10:08.000	Absolutely, I think that's really the turning point that my research hit upon,
00:10:13.040	which was it turned from a project on madness into a project on
00:10:16.720	woundedness by way of research into trauma, and it was an undeniable move
00:10:22.320	because when I read a work by Judith Hermann, trauma and recovery,
00:10:27.760	in which she really points out the fact that there are forms of trauma
00:10:31.840	in the world that are publicly accepted as traumatic,
00:10:36.080	and war is one of them, you know, and so Freud, as you mentioned,
00:10:41.280	witnessing this widespread experience that's an undeniable thing that these
00:10:45.520	people are going through, and then also witnessing
00:10:48.800	the personal aftermath of this more collective experience
00:10:54.240	was able to connect the dots, but Freud witnessed another
00:10:57.760	instance of widespread psychological aftermath,
00:11:02.240	and in Judith Hermann's analysis of what Freud does when confronted with
00:11:06.800	claims of child abuse and incest and molestation,
00:11:12.880	Hermann points out that he did not make the same
00:11:16.240	strong courageous connection between a collective social experience,
00:11:21.040	an interpersonal experience of trauma, and the validation of the claims of these
00:11:25.360	people who are experiencing PTSD, and that takes
00:11:30.000	decades, it takes decades and it takes feminist movements way later in the
00:11:34.720	20th century in order to validate, and that's why I became so fascinated with the
00:11:38.720	hysteric.
00:11:39.600	Well, you're pointing there to something, maybe I can clarify a little bit for
00:11:42.880	our listeners about this rather controversial move that Freud decided
00:11:48.720	to commit himself to from his early analysis of female hysteria,
00:11:53.600	as having its roots in real sexual abuse in childhood
00:12:00.160	by older father figures, if not the father, uncles, older brothers, one way or another,
00:12:06.400	a real social event, as opposed to his shift by putting all the
00:12:12.160	etiology of female hysteria in the psyche and in the realm of the fantasy
00:12:17.680	of the false memory of women, and I remember when I was a graduate student,
00:12:21.680	they're in the 80s of this book by, I think I don't remember his name, even
00:12:25.120	Mason or Masan, who wrote a book called The Suppression of the Seduction
00:12:29.760	Theory in Freud, in which he took Freud to task for displacing the etiology from the real world
00:12:37.520	of real trauma into a merely fantasy life.
00:12:41.680	And as a result, I think that you were suggesting that Freud did not want to
00:12:46.240	accord the same sort of reality to trauma in the case of
00:12:51.440	women who had been perhaps indeed sexually abused in their youth, as he
00:12:56.960	was willing to do so in the case of soldiers suffering shelter.
00:13:00.800	Yeah, I wouldn't put all the onus on Freud honestly, because
00:13:04.400	if you think of the scope of what he was encountering in terms of claims and what he
00:13:09.520	would have had to put forth and support, of course,
00:13:13.600	he did have the potential he did have the studies, the interactions with the
00:13:17.040	patients, and also perhaps most importantly, especially according to
00:13:20.400	contemporary day, workers in psychology, he had the
00:13:23.760	responsibility and the trust of these women who were sharing their stories and
00:13:28.240	believing that he would believe them. But to make that claim and to support
00:13:33.680	that explanation would have been as it is today, world-rending.
00:13:38.160	In fact, that's the thesis of that book about The Suppression is that he
00:13:41.440	realized that if psychoanalysis was going to be accepted in the Vienna
00:13:45.040	of his day and age, it was not going to be accepted if you were
00:13:48.400	exposing a scandal, actual widespread prevalent sexual abuse in the bourgeois
00:13:54.400	families of Europe, and therefore it was the way of domesticating the whole
00:13:59.920	phenomenon by putting into the psyche. And how ironic, right, that someone who had
00:14:06.160	the capacity to really open up that world and in the heyday of
00:14:11.040	hysteria ends up reenacting the exact same diagnosis which we're getting
00:14:17.520	all the way from the Greeks, which is there's a wandering uterus here
00:14:22.640	in raging this woman and driving her completely out of control of her
00:14:27.280	husband of her community, of her family and of herself,
00:14:30.400	and what's our solution? heterosexual sex and pregnancy.
00:14:34.880	We need to root that uterus back where it belongs, and we're getting diagnoses
00:14:39.040	such as these passed along from Western culture to Western culture
00:14:42.720	across the centuries, and there it is yet again in Freud's Vienna.
00:14:46.640	I find that to be really telling. So we go from there's three words in play
00:14:52.560	madness, then trauma, as you said, you started investigating trauma, and then
00:14:57.920	you realize that maybe trauma is not specific enough, and the word that you
00:15:01.920	have in the title of your dissertation is woundedness. It might not be as
00:15:06.160	elegant as madness or trauma, but the word itself is wounded as
00:15:12.240	woundedness. Would you say just to conclude on the Freud that Freud was
00:15:18.080	he lighting the woundedness, namely the real wounds that provoked hysteria among
00:15:24.400	the women's ass? That's exactly what I was hoping to say with that word choice,
00:15:27.520	yeah, and the word itself as you say it lacks all elegance,
00:15:31.840	it lacks the same sense of category in a way, and that's what I wanted. I wanted
00:15:37.440	a word that would point a finger at the fact that there's something really
00:15:40.640	urgent and physically present about each of the stories I was going to look into.
00:15:46.080	Right, in which way did your work follow in the line of the feminist
00:15:50.800	scholarship that was investigating these phenomena and
00:15:55.840	directions that you felt needed correction somewhat, right? Yeah, it's kind of
00:16:01.760	an interesting two arrow pointing towards the second wave feminists in the one
00:16:09.040	hand from the beginning of the 20th century pointing towards these feminist
00:16:12.960	scholars in the 80s mostly who are going to go back and re-examine the texts
00:16:18.560	from the early 20th century from the late 19th and the early 20th century and say
00:16:22.640	look at how symptomatic these texts are of their cultural media,
00:16:26.400	look at how much the historical woman is actually constituting
00:16:30.480	the center of signification. Which texts are you referring to here? So I'm
00:16:35.680	speaking of things like Madame Boverer, you know, the classics with this crazy
00:16:40.080	women at the center.
00:16:41.520	Train there. Exactly, exactly. And also a bunch of the
00:16:45.440	decadence really looking at someone like Barbara Spackman who takes a really
00:16:49.120	good hard look at these decadent writers and
00:16:51.760	took a look at didn't see all and says these texts have nothing at their
00:16:57.440	center without the sense of malady attached to femininity. And by
00:17:02.480	looking at the way these feminist scholars were doing a somewhat
00:17:05.520	cycle analytical but also a social critical
00:17:08.240	re-reading of these early texts I was very inspired.
00:17:11.760	On the other hand, I was inspired by the fact that these
00:17:15.200	feminist literary scholars were doing something that today's
00:17:18.720	psychologists and critical literary scholars were not as much doing, which is
00:17:22.400	being activists. They were really interested in saying
00:17:26.160	"No, I'm not at all a neutral reader. I am very much a part of a consciousness
00:17:30.240	raising circle. I'm very much a part of a movement to improve the justice of the
00:17:36.640	sexual order that we have around us in terms of employment, just as they
00:17:40.320	talk in all of their introductions to their books and their conclusions and
00:17:43.600	their acknowledgements about how important their own personal experiences
00:17:47.280	were in reading books in a certain way. And I found that to be exactly where I
00:17:51.520	wanted to go with my investigation. It's not neutral. And
00:17:55.200	and yet at the same time it was a very, very careful look at what the
00:17:58.800	texts were saying both about their own economy and about the way these
00:18:05.280	figures were being inherited and then passed along to a new generation of
00:18:08.800	literature that would be the post World War One era that I was looking at.
00:18:13.840	At the same time, Maria, there's this sense that we're still stuck in the
00:18:17.600	world of literature, namely the world of the imagination and
00:18:20.640	characters who don't have measure of reality.
00:18:24.480	As opposed to a woundedness which is not a literary phenomenon
00:18:30.400	only, it's represented in literature but that there is still to this day
00:18:36.880	perhaps even more today than ever when I read the newspapers on a daily basis,
00:18:42.080	not only in the US but also in Europe and Italy a lot,
00:18:45.680	the systematic abuse and wounds that women of all ages are subjected to in
00:18:50.880	which was society. It's not just literary characters who are susceptible
00:18:56.720	to this phenomenon of...
00:18:58.720	You mean patriarchy? Well I think the patriarchy is the
00:19:03.360	framework within which all this abuse takes place. So I'm just curious where
00:19:09.840	it stands in your mind this distinction between
00:19:15.360	literary history and the role of women in literary history
00:19:19.520	we're talking about fictional characters and then you were referring to the
00:19:23.200	activism of these feminist scholars. We're still committed to trying to
00:19:27.600	change structures within the real world that would either improve
00:19:31.840	the conditions that led to neurosis or involved with something else.
00:19:36.080	I'm just not sure how you understand that relationship between the real
00:19:40.880	and fictional. I want to keep all my my parts in order here but
00:19:46.320	the primary statement in response to that is that as a literary scholar
00:19:50.400	following in the footsteps or attempting to learn from the work of these
00:19:54.240	other feminist literary scholars, I think there's an underlying belief
00:19:58.000	that stories and representations of experiences
00:20:01.840	have concrete impacts on the lives of real people
00:20:05.600	and especially when we consider the strength with which we've inherited certain
00:20:10.720	stories and figures, the strength with which they permeate
00:20:15.040	our cultural understanding of the world we live in and the difficulty of
00:20:20.320	either uprooting them or adjusting them in some way.
00:20:24.240	I'm still debating with myself whether we ever really can,
00:20:27.440	even modify the stories that we inherit, let alone get rid of them.
00:20:32.160	There was something in approaching these representations that I thought
00:20:36.960	it was in direct, let's say direct attack on that kind of relationship.
00:20:42.880	The fact that the stories that we tell about our world
00:20:48.080	do impact our world on the other hand.
00:20:50.800	But what advice the verse is too, no?
00:20:52.800	Absolutely, the world we live in breeds and the
00:20:55.840	the stories we tell emerge from the world we live in. Yes, it's definitely a
00:20:59.680	two-way street but the other side of the coin is that
00:21:04.400	these instances that literature is so capable of
00:21:09.440	recounting. These, let's say, close studies or case studies, this
00:21:13.920	intentional deep dive into the intricacies and the details and the
00:21:18.960	circumstances of singular lives is exactly what we need
00:21:23.600	in order to push back against the generalizing gesture of
00:21:28.400	attaching madness to femininity and just letting the story end there.
00:21:32.800	But would these stories have to be written by women?
00:21:36.000	Authors. No, absolutely not. So my understanding is that you read my
00:21:41.600	number of aheen, you say, well, this is a male's
00:21:44.880	representation of a woman who might have inclinations towards this madness
00:21:48.800	and therefore it has to be rewritten and
00:21:51.120	reconceived and recast because it's not an author who is speaking from
00:21:56.160	within the experience of it. So let me clarify one of the things I found so
00:22:00.400	inspirational about these literary critics, those Naomi Shor or Janet
00:22:04.400	Bizer or also Christina Matsoni is among them that are working with French
00:22:08.080	Natalyan texts is that they weren't actually out to
00:22:11.840	denigrate or denounce these male writers as doing something
00:22:15.680	wrong or being simple misogynists who we never needed to pay attention to again.
00:22:19.920	They were pointing out the features of the literature that we love
00:22:23.600	that were also helpful in unearthing the aspects of our society that we don't
00:22:28.560	love. So it's not that the men are doing it wrong,
00:22:32.400	it's that there's a whole discourse on who has access to literary
00:22:36.400	prominence and that's a separate discourse, right? That
00:22:39.440	is an entirely separate can of worms of patriarchy and
00:22:43.840	the economy of literary markets. But what they're looking at instead is
00:22:48.560	these are great books, they're doing certain things. The stories are also
00:22:52.960	telling us certain things about how women are in the world and then if we
00:22:58.000	also start to pry open the specificities of their conclusions, they're either
00:23:03.520	going to end up dead, pregnant and married happily that way that way they're
00:23:08.320	tucked away or in extreme cases of subversion
00:23:12.320	mad and they found that to be fascinating, right? They thought that these male
00:23:16.320	authors were actually showing us something about trends in the world
00:23:20.560	and about what we find fascinating in literature as readers across centuries.
00:23:26.000	I wanted to ask a question about opera. I've said it and people get annoyed when I
00:23:30.400	say that I'm opera phobic precisely because I find that so much of
00:23:35.600	opera is at the pitch of hysteria, whether it's a male voice or a female
00:23:41.120	voice. It's always this operatic drama where you're at the edge of
00:23:45.120	madness. How much of your experience in your training as an opera singer
00:23:49.680	nourished your fascination with that kind of edge at which sanity is
00:23:53.920	threatened to plunge into insanity. So much, so so much. And maybe it's not the
00:23:59.920	reason you would assume but behind the scenes of the experience of singing opera
00:24:05.600	is the pleasure of walking the line of the crack. And I mean perhaps the most
00:24:13.760	commonly recognizable manifestation of this is Paparazzi who cracked on his
00:24:18.640	high notes almost as frequently as he nailed them and held them for eternity,
00:24:22.240	right? And that quivering between total downfall and disaster and just nailing
00:24:29.920	something absolutely divine is the generative force of live opera. But for the
00:24:35.360	one who's doing it, it's the sensation of being in front of a crowd
00:24:41.360	equally ready to do something that no one else in the room can do and
00:24:46.080	wants to see you do and something that will absolutely tarnish your image
00:24:52.880	as a divinity of song. So that's the one side of it. The other side is that
00:24:58.080	mad scenes have been the center of stage art for centuries, especially when you go
00:25:03.360	back to the origin of the female diva, who the mad scenes had almost nothing to do
00:25:08.160	with the plot. But they were written in there for the express purpose of being
00:25:11.200	able to tear at one's clothes and sing really high and do a lot of movement
00:25:15.680	with the voice. And so that kind of eccentricity, the idea that opera makes space for
00:25:21.360	at the center of its spectacle, the wildness and the exactly the hysterical
00:25:27.600	pitch of the portrayal of madness has always been really captivating to me
00:25:33.840	by think because as one who performs it, you have the sense of control.
00:25:39.440	Instead of the sense of that wildness, opera is putting on for its public
00:25:45.040	absolutely controlled, uncontrolled. And this makes me think of I've written about rituals of
00:25:52.480	mourning and grieving. I know that you're familiar with some of that work of at the voice of grief.
00:25:58.560	We're talking about trauma. The loss of a loved one, a very important loved one. It could be
00:26:04.640	the father of the husband where traditionally there was a complete loss of emotional control and
00:26:10.720	a risk of descending into at least momentary madness with grief, pulling of one's hair. My sort of
00:26:17.520	thinking about it, let me conclude that a lot of the highly ritualized protocols for grief,
00:26:24.400	which enact the scene of uncontrolled emotion, the beating of the rest, the pulling of the hair,
00:26:33.200	the scratching of the face, all these behaviors that you find as far back as Homer and his
00:26:39.200	characters, Achilles, and when he loses botropolis and so forth, and that you have still today in professional
00:26:45.760	limitations in Southern Italy, for example, that that is a highly choreographed enactment
00:26:52.880	of grief in order to protect oneself somewhat from the crazy spontaneity of despair and threat of
00:27:02.320	madness. Yes, I mean, I couldn't agree more with the idea that the simple understanding of the fact
00:27:08.960	that something is staged does not negate the power of its enactment. And I think that that
00:27:15.440	we see that in a Farontin novel with the figure of La Pouverreit, who is this woman who is left by her
00:27:22.400	husband, and then she's just known for the rest of her existence, literally, as the woman who ends
00:27:28.880	up killing herself out of despair for the fact that she's been completely abandoned and her entire
00:27:35.920	sense of self-worth and really purpose is taken away from her along with the fact that her husband leaves.
00:27:42.960	But the way that that figure is employed in a novelistic setting is ritual. It's a point of
00:27:50.080	reference. It's a point of reflection of one's own experiences and feelings. And so I think
00:27:55.440	there's something in our discussion about opera as well about, and yet, even if we know that this
00:28:01.040	is all being put on, you know, at the pitch of hysteria, we are still in the space with sound vibrations
00:28:06.800	that are far higher and far faster and far more intense than what you experience in your daily life.
00:28:12.320	Well, hopefully you're not experiencing that level of screaming in your daily life. But
00:28:16.240	and it does something to you physically. It does something to you orally. I think that that
00:28:22.080	has a place in our world. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, in fact, being abandoned by a husband, there's
00:28:28.640	different ways of being abandoned. He can either leave you or he can die and vice versa. He throws
00:28:34.480	you into a crisis. So that's very good. In your dissertation, his titled "Woundedness and Reintegration"
00:28:41.520	and then the phenomenology and transmission of women's trauma in modern and contemporary Italy.
00:28:47.280	So first question, reintegration. What do you mean by that?
00:28:51.680	Question. So reintegration kind of comes from a youngie and sense of getting back in touch
00:28:58.560	in some way with these archetypical forces that can root or center a person's sense of wellness.
00:29:07.360	But I don't really go too deep into that in the space of the dissertation. Really, what I'm
00:29:12.480	mirroring in that title is due to the sermon. Again, the work, trauma and recovery. And Herman,
00:29:18.560	in the '92 is the first one who lays out a step-by-step process based on really extensive
00:29:27.440	qualitative studies of people's experience in therapy and in therapeutic settings that they can
00:29:34.480	actually move towards a world in which their trauma is no longer determining their physical
00:29:39.200	circumstances. And so what I wanted to do with the final portion of my project was focus on what
00:29:45.120	are Italian artists doing today that no one's done before in terms of depicting madness in women
00:29:52.720	and characters, but then also using the tools of their art form to propose some manner of
00:30:00.160	togetherness, some manner of betterment or process towards health. And then that was a really fun
00:30:07.440	portion of the investigation. How do they go about doing that? Because you mentioned therapy,
00:30:12.240	I tend to be skeptical about how much the talking cure can really do. And when you're talking about
00:30:20.800	profound wounds and trauma and just sitting on it, but it sounds like what you get in literature
00:30:29.200	is a different kind of therapy that reaches much deeper into the soul and somehow perhaps if I
00:30:36.560	understand you correctly makes you feel that you're not alone in your own election. Yeah, the first step
00:30:43.360	in writing about this and thinking about it was to recognize that stories that simply offer
00:30:49.920	the ophilia-style ending are not really making you feel like your story has a scope of transcendence
00:30:58.800	or recovery. And it really encourages in a way, it depends on the reader that you are, I think, but
00:31:03.760	a certain way it encourages the centering of the experience of death and hopelessness as the story's
00:31:10.640	end. So that becomes kind of a cyclical experience of despair. The novels that I wanted to focus on
00:31:16.800	were ones that addressed a particular interest of mine, which is what do we do about matricide?
00:31:21.680	In the context of women and madness, there is such a contentious debate about the importance of
00:31:28.080	having negated for so long the goddess, having negated for so long the importance of the mother,
00:31:33.600	and having foregrounded for so much of the 20th century things like penis envy or things like
00:31:39.360	the fact that all ailments that women are complaining about are rooted in their own femininity,
00:31:45.440	and therefore there is no way of finding solace or connection in the mother, and actually it's
00:31:50.240	the killing off of the mother that allows the young woman to step into the role of being a man's new
00:31:54.800	partner, all of the damage that those complex standards are setting out needs in some way to be
00:32:02.400	rectified. And the way I wanted to go about looking at that rectification is by looking for stories that
00:32:08.240	did something else. And so I studied stories in which daughters are narrating and they're looking at
00:32:14.880	the wounded bodies of their mothers, taking over and this connects directly to what you were
00:32:20.080	talking about earlier about rituals of mourning. It's not about the mother not dying, it's about
00:32:26.080	realizing the physicality and the particular woundedness of the mother in proximity, physical proximity
00:32:33.760	to the daughter, having no one else in that space. And there are an impressive number of 20th
00:32:39.600	century novels that do just that. They stage an encounter between the maturing daughter and the
00:32:45.440	wounded body of her mother. And there's something incredibly therapeutic about those scenes. It's
00:32:50.160	not denying in any way the experience of suffering of any of the characters. It's actually four
00:32:55.680	grounding it. And then making a literary space in which nothing about a woman and man relationship
00:33:03.200	matters in any way. And the thing that is centered is the recuperative dignified acknowledgement
00:33:11.280	of the bodily similarity between the two women in the room. And that was really an amazing
00:33:18.000	these kind of confrontations are frequent in Italian literature. I don't know about frequent. I mean,
00:33:23.760	I have a unique canon. But I think what's interesting about them is that they are present in the
00:33:32.560	most prominent novels by women from the Italian 20th century. And that is worth noticing, right?
00:33:38.720	These aren't obscure novels. Are these confrontations between daughter and mother benign? Because
00:33:44.320	I know. Here's another question they're not because why is the mother-daughter relationship so
00:33:50.800	difficult, so filled with sometimes self-destructive mutual accusation?
00:33:56.000	That's a huge question. I mean, part of it is what I was just referencing earlier in the
00:34:02.160	in terms of the way patriarchy really punishes bonds between women that are not existing in a more
00:34:09.680	submissive way either solely for the purpose of assisting each other and maintaining the domestic
00:34:15.040	space or passing from the role of innocent, virginal daughter directly into the role of pregnant wife.
00:34:23.520	And there's really no socially sanctioned safe space for the mother-daughter relationship to develop
00:34:29.840	outside of those dynamics. These are generalizations, obviously. But what novels start to explore
00:34:36.400	or even perhaps just narrate more of, especially Italian novels in the 20th century,
00:34:41.280	because of the unique way that Italy goes through the post-World War II years is the multitude of
00:34:48.320	ways in which young women are living things like companionship, things like work, things like sexuality,
00:34:55.280	things like relationships with their mothers. And so the Italian feminists of the 70s and 80s
00:35:00.400	and into the 90s are really acutely aware of the need to reshape or at least re-theorize
00:35:07.360	this relationship with the mother away from all of that negative history that it's accumulated.
00:35:13.600	And that's where they're very inspirational to me. That negative history also takes the form
00:35:18.080	not only in literature, Italian literature, but also in relations within the family where
00:35:23.920	the daughter does not want to become what the mother has become out by virtue of her having been
00:35:31.360	the victim of a patriarchy that has in a sense led her into an impasse and a condition of
00:35:38.320	impotence and this desperate desire to avoid the fate of the mother, I think, creates a lot of
00:35:44.800	antagonism in that relation sometimes. Yeah, there's the saying legato la proprécatina,
00:35:51.280	so tying the daughter to the mother's own chain, which I think breeds resentment on both sides,
00:35:56.960	obviously. So if listeners are intrigued enough to want to read a few of these novels that you
00:36:02.160	have in mind, are there any titles that you would be able to offer that be available in English?
00:36:08.560	Yeah, actually, it's very exciting. The central novel that I explore in kind of the second phase of
00:36:14.960	my research is called "Mensonie sortilejo," which is by Elsa Morante and previously I would not have
00:36:22.080	recommended it to English reading listeners, but we have been treated to a brand new translation
00:36:30.000	in English this summer. And so it's now out as lies and sorcery. It's quite a volume,
00:36:36.720	it's a big one, but it is one of the most remarkable novels of the 20th century bar none,
00:36:42.960	and I highly recommend that Morante is also cited as being the grandmother, let's say, of
00:36:50.080	Italian contemporary literature, and she's a huge influence on the globally popular Elena Ferrante,
00:36:56.480	who is also one of the figures that I study in this project. I also would recommend the
00:37:02.640	novels of Goliarda Sapiense, she's difficult to categorize, but she has an incredibly distinct
00:37:10.880	voice, and a lot of her writing is semi autobiographical. You can't go wrong with Sapiense, for sure.
00:37:16.560	Sapiense is a translated English. Most of it. As Sapiense.
00:37:21.120	No, that's the author's name, Goliarda Sapiense. The primary novel would be the art of joy.
00:37:26.960	The art of joy was completely ignored in Italy when it came out, and then the French picked it up
00:37:32.560	several decades later, and since then it's had a real boom. So she's writing in the 60s and 70s,
00:37:37.920	and then it's not until the early 2000s that she really comes into prominence, but the art of joy
00:37:43.840	is another spectacular novel. And then the final section of my study of recovery is more about cinema,
00:37:50.480	believe it or not. I take a look at contemporary Italian film building off of this idea that
00:37:55.360	motherhood needs a good look. It needs a whole new set of depictions. Great. Yeah, lies in
00:38:01.520	sorcery, the art of joy, and then probably the days of abandonment by Elena Ferrante is when I go into
00:38:08.400	a lot in my studies. In addition to other books of first, right? Of course, yeah. Fantastic. We've been
00:38:14.880	speaking with Maria Masuko, who is a PhD graduate from our own department of Italian studies here
00:38:20.960	at Stanford, and who is now teaching literature at Sacred Heart and Menlo Park,
00:38:25.520	Atherton. So we're delighted you're still in the area and part of our ongoing community here.
00:38:32.880	I began by making some comments about Ophelia, so I think I'm going to end with a song called Ophelia,
00:38:41.360	that reprises many of the things we've been talking about, Maria. So thanks again for coming on to
00:38:45.920	entitled opinions. Thanks so much for having me, Robert. It's been a joy. Take care.
00:39:02.720	Good night, sweet ladies, good night. I trust you enjoy the fight.
00:39:30.560	My father's got a mission and the boy I've been kissing is the one who put out his legs.
00:39:49.280	They told me that you were unkind, let you thought the whole world was blind.
00:40:00.800	There was all that chatter that your man has had. Now it's me who's losing my mind.
00:40:15.600	I'm not a kid, you deserve it. When she wrote a thing, you're hungry. I'm still in the stars. I'm not killing you.
00:40:44.560	(somber music)
00:40:47.220	(somber music)
00:40:49.800	(somber music)
00:40:52.380	(somber music)
00:40:54.960	(somber music)
00:40:57.540	(somber music)
00:41:00.120	(somber music)
00:41:03.120	(somber music)
00:41:08.120	[Music]
00:41:25.120	[Music]
00:41:52.120	[Music]
00:42:02.120	You put this hand, which he wrote to me.
00:42:12.120	You hold your hand, now still this hand.
00:42:23.120	I'm kidding.
00:42:28.120	[Music]