Women’s Bodies in Natalia Ginzburg’s Fiction

Though Natalia Ginzburg never recognized herself as a feminist, her positioning herself explicitly as a mother and an intellectual can be understood as a form of resistance against facile binaries, including the mind-body divide inherited from the Enlightenment tradition. This chapter reads Ginzburg’s narrative fiction in relation to feminist concerns about the body and embodiment as the foundation for new epistemologies that challenge existing cultural hierarchies. Ginzburg’s female characters are often described through male eyes, as in the short story “The Mother” (“La madre”), where the mother of the title is seen through the eyes of her sons; or in her first novel, The Road to the City (La strada che va in città, 1947), where the female protagonist is keenly aware of her body’s inadequacy in her husband’s gaze. Here, as in other works, the relationships between characters, and between characters and the spaces they inhabit (the city and the house, as in the title of her 1984 novel), are by necessity mediated by their (gendered) bodies. Ginzburg’s focus on her female characters’ bodies foregrounds them as potential sites of contestation and resistance against the sexual and reproductive expectations of patriarchal family and social structures.