Italy and American Female Imagination

“Ambitious and compelling, Italy and American Female Imagination brings a new perspective to transatlantic studies and women’s studies. Bernardi effectively traces how American women used Italy as a ‘liminal space’ where they could escape the sexual and patriarchal restrictions of the US.” —Brigitte Bailey, author of American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–62

“Bernardi’s exploration of contemporary pop culture (like the Amanda Knox trial) and Hollywood films, alongside traditional works of literature, is innovative and compelling, as are her interviews with contemporary women. Moving beyond text and into lived experience is a powerful way to get out of the ivory tower.” —Annamaria Formichella, author of Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing

Italy and American Female Imagination is the first study to trace the significance of Italy—both the physical place and imagined idea—to the identities of middle-class US women from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Debra Bernardi takes a transnational and feminist approach to texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary McCarthy, Andrea Lee, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others, as well as to film, television, magazine articles, and interviews with expats, all to illuminate not only Italy’s influence on American identity but also how gender, race, and class inflect that influence. Encounters with Italy, Bernardi shows, have profoundly shifted American women’s ways of thinking about sex and romance, families and homes, and rules and regulations. While women of color do not experience Italy as an entirely liberatory space, and attitudes toward Italy have shifted over time, the women writers discussed here consistently find expanded possibilities for female selfhood on Italian soil. Bridging feminist literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Italy and American Female Imagination captures and complicates Italy’s allure and casts new light on the process of transnational identity formation.

Debra Bernardi is Professor Emerita in English and Gender Studies at Carroll College and coeditor of Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction     Italy and American Female Imagination
Chapter 1     Precursors: Legitimizing Female Desire in Margaret Fuller’s and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Italian Writings, 1847–1862
Chapter 2     Turn-of-the-Century Expats: Emerging Expatriate Consciousness in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s and Edith Wharton’s Italian Stories, 1890–1920
Chapter 3     Modern Rebels: Breaking the Rules of US Patriarchy in Mid-Century American-Women-in-Italy Films, 1953–1962
Chapter 4     Feminine Thinkers: Resisting Categorical Thinking in Elizabeth Spencer’s and Mary McCarthy’s Italy-Centered Texts, 1948–1965
Chapter 5     Post-Romance Italy: Breaking the Heterosexual Romance Dyad in Elizabeth Gilbert’s and Andrea Lee’s Italy Tales, 2002–2018
Epilogue     Romantics/Post-Romantics: Actual Women Encounter Twenty-First-Century Italy

Works Cited
Index