The Poetic and Symbolic Function of Fable in Erica

Erica e i suoi fratelli, the externally conventional story of a little girl who turns prostitute in order to save herself and her brother and sister from starvation, has been called a Marxist fairy tale with a Hansel and Gretel theme.' It is actually a modern fable built around a traditional fairy tale 2 and is remarkable not only for the newness and beauty of its language,3 but even more for the way in which fable is used both symbolically and stylistically as the axis around which both the meaning and the poetic language revolve in an utterly organic way. This did not happen by chance: Vittorini spent most of his life seeking a new and truly effective way in which to present his messages and is perhaps the Italian writer in his generation whose style most closely arises from and reflects his ideology. In his 1948 Preface to 11 garofano rosso,4 the only fairly lengthy theoretical document on his own work that Vittorini has left, he wrote

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