From Closet to Absence: Queering Family Roles and Gender Norms in Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino and Happiness, As Such

This chapter aims to compare Ginzburg’s approach to gender from her first careful depiction of “closeted” characters such as Valentino, Kit, and Maddalena in the novelette Valentino (1951) to the invention of the “absent” queer character, linguistically performed through epistolary dialogue in Happiness, As Such (1973). Written twenty years apart, the two books respond to diverse historical context and social climate, revealing, in both cases, the adoption of a forward-thinking stance on matters of gendered identity. In Valentino, Ginzburg comes to grips with the disturbing legacy of fascist essentialist politics that had banned all homosexual behaviour as deviant, illustrating her concept of a gender-fluid identity going against the grain of the strictly heteronormative mindset that dominated society in post-war Italy. In Happiness, As Such, the protagonist’s sudden departure from his home town, his potential association with dangerous subversive groups linked to the Italian terrorism of the Years of Lead, as well as his final assassination during a students’ protest, allow us, again, to highlight Ginzburg’s choice of problematizing queer subjectivities along political lines. As homosexuality can only exist as “absence,” the only affirmative way to narrate it is to enact it as nomadic subjectivity and via an epistolary exchange which enables performance of identity as dialogic discourse.