Writing Women's Work

A large proportion of Matilde Serao's fictional characters are women who work outside the home/family structure. The very proliferation of such characters, and the evident interest of their creator in the minute details of their work is, in itself, striking. My interest here centres both on Serao's writing of women's work, and the relationship of her fiction to the reality of working women's lives in Italy in the late nineteenth century. While wishing to avoid any simplistic correlation of women's lived experience and the manner in which Serao represents this in her fiction, I feel it is important to point out that the accuracy of her portrayal of the different experiences of both working-class and middle-class women in the work-force is remarkable. Alongside this painstaking documentation of the lives of working women, however, is to be found a considerable degree of authorial unease, which itself finds different forms of expression according to the social class with which she is dealing. Serao's ambivalence is sometimes located in her consciousness of class, as a force which constructs society, and one which sharply differentiates the experiences of women. Regardless of which class she deals with, however, Serao, as we shall see, is keen to distance herself as much as possible from the characters she creates

Ambivalence · Art · Class consciousness · Consciousness · Humanities · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Psychology