Gazing women: Elena Stancanelli's Benzina.

This essay is part of a larger project in which I investigate the implications and significance of the recurrence of maternal discourse in Italian women's cultural production of the second half of the twentieth century in relation to the decreased interest for the topic in Anglo-American feminist theorizing and writing. (1) As a whole, my project shows how the Italian theorists and writers taken under consideration, far from proposing an equation of female identity with maternity, are engaging in a reappropriation of the maternal from the status of predetermined, socially controlled and necessary role for women to which patriarchal discourse has reduced it. Ultimately, my broader study aims to articulate an understanding of the maternal and of the mother-daughter bond that would alter and expand current perspectives on these topics outside of the culture specific discussion of Italian feminism. In the United States, the effacing of maternal discourse from women's fictional and theoretical writing and, more in general, in psychoanalysis, has been the object of serious scrutiny on the part of feminist critics, particularly in the second half of the 1980s. In The Mother Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, for example, Marianne Hirsch has investigated the erasure of maternal subjectivity in Anglo-American and French feminist writing centered around the mother-daughter bond. According to Hirsch, feminist writing and theorizing, by continuing to embrace "daughterly perspectives," become the accomplices of patriarchy "in placing the mother into the position of object--thereby keeping mothering outside of representation and maternal discourse a theoretical impossibility" (163; emphasis in original). (2)

Within the context of Italian women's writing, while maternal discourse has occupied a central position in theoretical works since the 1980s, fictional representations of the mother-daughter bond generally foreground daughterly perspectives, keeping the maternal voice in a subordinate position. Although in mother-daughter narratives such as Francesca Sanvitale's Madre e figlia, and Fabrizia Ramondino's Althenopis, the mother's perspective and perceptions are granted a considerable space, they remain filtered through the daughter's memory and subjectivity, and never gain the status of autonomous narrative voice. (3) Elena Stancanelli's Benzina, the novel which is the focus of this essay, seemingly reiterates the idea of the impossibility of a dialogue between mother and daughter, and the silencing of the maternal voice. More importantly, in Benzina, the hostile daughter's drives toward the mother that are present in earlier mother-daughter plots are exasperated and carried to the extreme in the staging of the matricide which opens the novel. (4) The mother is not just metaphorically killed: the elimination of the mother from the daughter's plot is literal, and precedes the narrative. Yet, as I will argue in this essay, maternal subjectivity is not erased from the novel. The maternal voice comes back to disrupt the narrative: ironic and assertive, the mother acquires agency in the plot, and gains the status of protagonist in the tale.

THE STORY

Although, at the beginning of Benzina, a matricide has already taken place, the mother is doubly present in the narrative: as an object--the corpse of which Lenni and Stella need to rid themselves--and as a subject--one of the three narrative voices. The splitting of the mother figure into narrated object and narrating subject/voice thus troubles the objectification and silencing of mothers, on the part of the daughter/ narrator, that is typical of mother-daughter plots. (5) This multivocal novel is divided into brief segments in which each of the protagonists (Stella, her lover Eleonora, nicknamed Lenni, and Lenni's mother) offers her own version and vision of the events, the mother by means of interior monologue, and Lenni and Stella through a combination of interior monologue and dialogue. Stella, a twenty-one-year-old gas station manager from Rome, and Lenni, a twenty-three-year-old woman of upper-class background from Florence, share a serene existence and a fulfilling love relationship working together at the gas station. After receiving a conciliatory letter from her estranged daughter, Lenni's mother decides to go to Rome to take her daughter back to Florence with her. Stella, witnessing Lenni's mother's aggressive attempt to persuade Lenni to return to Florence, murders her in an act of desperate folly by brutally breaking her skull with a large monkey wrench. (6) The maternal ghost does not, however, depart promptly from earth. Rather, in the form of a curious "gassosita dispettosa e pervertita" (26), as she describes her new persona, she lingers behind, observing from above, and commenting on, the young women's actions and thoughts:

   Dunque vedo. Sono morta, ma vedo. E sento. Ne farei volentieri a
   meno.... Mi chiedo dove sono i miei occhi, quelli nuovi voglio
   dire. Un paio di metri piu su, forse tre. La morte ha sistemato
   il mio punto di vista all'altezza del soffitto. Mi aspettavo di
   piu. (14)

Her viewpoint thus becomes that of a camera filming an aerial shot of the events unfolding beneath her. Further, as the action moves from the indoor "set," the gas station's snack bar, to the outdoor scenes--the gas pumps, the dump, and the highway--to eventually come back to the gas station, her "voice over" narrates past events, and offers a commentary on the present scene and action.

In highlighting the cinematic qualities of the mother's viewing position and voice in Benzina it is interesting to note that the silencing of the maternal voice characteristic of mother-daughter narratives and of psychoanalytic theory bears a certain resemblance to yet another patriarchal discourse on women: that of classic cinema. Specifically, it echoes the more general silencing of the female voice within dominant cinema. In The Acoustic Mirror. The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Kaja Silverman, departing from feminist critiques of classic cinema centered primarily on the construction of woman as spectacle, focuses instead on an analysis of the confinement of the female voice to a position of passivity within classic cinema's auditory regime. (7) According to Silverman, in dominant cinema "the sonic vraisemblable is sexually differentiated, working to identify even the embodied male voice within the attributes of the cinematic apparatus, but always situating the female voice within a hyperbolically diegetic context." In other words, argues Silverman, while the male voice is locatable at "the point of apparent textual origin," the female voice is diegetically contained (45). Not surprisingly then, according to Silverman, the voice-over in classic cinema, "to the degree that [it] preserves its integrity," that is, its rigid separation from the main diegesis, is almost exclusively male (48). I would suggest that the maternal and the female voice in, respectively, typical mother-daughter plots, and classic cinema--as described by Silverman in The Acoustic Mirror--are analogously relegated to a "passive" diegetic position--in the case of mother-daughter narratives, the mother being the object of the daughter's narrative. They are, that is, similarly banned from the site of authoritative enunciation. Contrary to this pattern, however, in Benzina the mother, far from being contained within the daughter's narrative as voiceless spectacle, occupies a privileged site not only of viewing, but also of enunciation. (8) The mother in Benzina is no longer, as in previous mother-daughter plots, the passive receiver of the textual meaning produced by the daughter's narrative. Rather she becomes, by means of her authoritative narrative voice and point of view, an active participant in the construction of the story.

Moreover, in Benzina, not only is the mother granted a privileged angle of vision and a powerful voice; a gradual movement from passivity to activity can be detected in the development of her subject position. A hostile and unwilling spectator at the beginning of the novel, she soon comes to experience voyeuristic pleasure watching Lenni and Stella having sex:

   [Q]uesto osceno divincolarsi di mia figlia e la sua benzinaia
   sembra andare per le lunghe, e il mio spirito, se non fosse tanto
   pigro e guardone, potrebbe approfittarne per allontanarsi ... La
   verita e che questa nebbia che sono diventata ci prova gusto ad
   assistere a quelle sconcezze laggiu. Sono in balia di una
   gassosita dispettosa e pervertita. (26)

The mother's voyeuristic pleasure in witnessing Lenni and Stella's "sconcezze" enables her to assume an active spectatorial role in the scene, thus inaugurating her entrance into the narrative as a subject. By rejecting passive spectatorship, she articulates her refusal to become a spectacle, to be objectified as merely the recipient of the other's gaze. First, in appropriating an active viewing role in the narrative, the mother reverses her position as object of the daughter's gaze and narration. Second, she refuses to allow her corpse to become a spectacle for the male gaze: her husband's, that of the police. (9) Throughout the novel, the mother repeatedly wishes that Lenni and Stella would throw her corpse into the water, and so withdraw it from the scrutiny and violation of an autopsy:

   Se fosse per me io sparirei ... appena saro in grado di fare a meno
   del mio vecchio corpo, e lui di me, sarei felice di vederlo
   dissolversi. Non ci tengo a farmi trasportare su un tavolo di marmo
   bianco.... Senza contare che mio marito, in quanto medico, potrebbe
   ottenere l'autorizzazione a praticare personalmente la mia
   macellazione. (52-53)

I would argue, further, that the spectacle of Lenni and Stella making love, unfolding under the mother's eyes, comes to represent a primal scene, one that inscribes the Oedipal/heterosexual paradigmatic scenario within a female, homoerotic economy of desire. This primal scene functions for the mother as a site of regeneration and sexual awakening, of rebirth as a desiring subject. First, this primal scene rewrites the one the mother might have witnessed herself, as a passive observer--or fantasized about--as a child. Although there is no direct mention of any such scene in the novel, the mother recollects quite vividly the shock she experienced in seeing her father's genitals at the age of five or six:

   Il primo uomo che ho visto nudo e stato mio padre. Usciva dal
   bagno, e lo sorpresi nella sua ignara e flaccida ciondolezza. Avro
   avuto cinque, forse sei anni. Ma ho conservato per sempre quel
   disagio, la sensazione di estraneita e il disgusto. E invece stava
   proprio li il segreto, dice la benzinaia.  Chi non apre quella
   porta, non sapra mai niente della vita. (83)

Clearly, the feelings of disgust and alienation experienced by the mother on that occasion had compromised her sexual development. Moreover, by gazing at Lenni and Stella making love, the mother is now actively looking, instead of being looked at--as the corpse present in the scene, and as a participant in the primal scene Lenni, her daughter, might have witnessed as a child. Her act of looking has thus become a fully participatory activity. The ineffable, yet "perverted" entity the mother has become, is unable to divert her gaze from the scene: her desire has been activated, and a triangular circuit of desire between the three women, in which each of them occupies the subject position, has been established.

The mother's awakened desire, for Stella, surfaces, quite explicitly, in a passage in which she describes Stella's leaning over her body to lift it:

   In quel momento anche la benzinaia si e abbassata sopra di me. E
   stato allora che ho sentito quel profumo di sapone di Marsiglia
   ... l'odore proveniva da quella ragazza china sopra il mio volto
   sfatto. Da quassu la vedevo ansimare, e le piccole ciocche dei
   capelli verdi ondeggiavano nello sforzo di alzarmi. Ho pensato
   persino che volesse baciarmi. (50; my emphasis)

Later on, with an analogous combination of fear and erotic expectation, the mother fantasizes about Stella undressing her: "Chissa se ardira mettere le mani sui miei fianchi e spogliarmi anche delle mutandine di pizzo nero, semi sgancera il reggiseno e lo fara scivolare lungo le braccia" (64). Interestingly, the mother's fantasies reiterate the (primal) love scene between Lenni and Stella at the beginning of the novel; in the mother's fantastic reenactments of the scene, however, she has taken up what was, originally, Lenni's position. Her desire, first activated by voyeuristic pleasure, has become mobilized through identification with Lenni's location in the primal scene. By means of these fantasies, the mother appropriates the role of participant in the scene of desire.

The mother's initial hostility toward Stella, stemming primarily from her scorn for the latter's inferior social condition, and from her rejection of the relationship between the two women, is soon replaced by an attitude of affectionate involvement in Stella and Lenni's vicissitudes. Gradually, she takes on the role of their guardian angel. Eventually, the maternal ghost transforms herself in a dea ex machina whose providential intervention saves Stella and Lenni from a probable rape:

   E cosi ho sganciato il freno a mano di quel furgone parcheggiato. E
   siccome non si muoveva gli ho dato anche una spinta. Non so cosa
   fosse successo, ma quando ho guardato giu ho visto Stella stretta
   nel sedile posteriore di una macchina, tra due balordi che
   ridevano.... E sono cosi contenta! Sono stata proprio accurata,
   senza esagerare. La macchina sfasciata per dare il tempo alle
   ragazze di scappare, ma senza morti. (115)

The mother's increasing closeness to Stella and Lenni reaches its climax in the joyous and spectacular aerial reunion of the three women at the end of the novel.

WOMEN'S GAZING

Throughout Benzina, albeit at different levels, great emphasis is placed on the gaze as the elected medium through which woman-to-woman relationships are established and nourished. On the one hand, Stella's passion for Lenni, and Lenni's for Stella, initially revealed by their reciprocal, desiring gazes, is nurtured by their constant "keeping in sight" of one another. On the other, the mother's past inability to "see" Lenni, and relate to her, is juxtaposed to her newly acquired, all-encompassing vision, which enables her to gaze at her daughter with new eyes.

In my analysis of the significance of the gaze in Benzina, I take as my point of departure two theoretical formulations centered around "women's gazing": Teresa de Lauretis's theorization of lesbian desire in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, (10) and Adriana Cavarero's rereading of the Demeter myth in In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. Specifically, in my reading of the novel, I draw upon, and interrogate, de Lauretis's notions of lesbian perverse desire and fetishism, and Cavarero's notion of the order of gazes between mother and daughter, and women in general.

Lenni and Stella: Disavowal and Desire

In The Practice of Love, de Lauretis offers a rereading of classical psychoanalysis with the intent of formulating a theoretical model of lesbian sexuality, which she founds on the notions of perverse desire and of lesbian fetishism. De Lauretis rejects psychoanalytic explanations of lesbianism, which are based on the masculinity complex and penis envy, because of their failure to explain non-masculine modes of lesbian desire. She also argues against feminist views of lesbianism, such as the one implied by the notion of the "lesbian continuum," which erase the specifically sexual nature of lesbianism by equating lesbian relations to non-sexual relations among women in general. According to de Lauretis, lesbian desire is neither pre-Oedipal, nor phallic or "masculine." Lesbian desire, de Lauretis argues, is perverse--not in the sense of pathological or unethical, but in the sense that it deviates from normative, reproductive sexuality. Lesbian perverse desire is neither directed toward the father nor toward the mother: it crosses and goes beyond the Oedipal complex, to address itself to other objects. It should therefore be explained outside of the Oedipal binary paradigm. Lesbian desire, according to de Lauretis, is tied to the desire of and for another woman because it is the desire of a lost, denied, and dispossessed female body. The lost, denied female body, however, is not the body of the mother, but the body-ego of the subject, the loss of which coincides with a loss/lack of being. De Lauretis explains:

   [T]he lesbian body is inscribed in a fantasy of dispossession which
   ... is an original fantasy of castration.... I cannot love myself,
   says the subject of the fantasy ...; I want another to love me, and
   to love me sexually. ... This lover must be a woman--and not a
   faulty woman, dispossessed of her body (like me), but a woman
   embodied and self-possessed as a woman, as I would want to be and
   can become only with her love. (Practice of Love 249)

De Lauretis thus reformulates the psychoanalytic notion of castration by disjoining it from the threat of the loss of the penis, and linking it to the loss, on the part of the female subject, of a narcissistically invested body image. Perverse desire is founded on the disavowal of this loss, by means of the formation of a fetish. In the desire for another woman, the lesbian subject disavows--affirms and denies at the same time--the loss of a narcissistically invested body image, thus reappropriating her own body-ego, as well as the body-ego of the other woman. (11) De Lauretis's formulation of the notion of fetishism stems from Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit's rereading of Freud's essay on fetishism. Bersani and Dutoit propose a model in which desire is no longer linked to a privileged object or signifier--the phallus--but is able to move on to other objects and images. De Lauretis paraphrases Bersani and Dutoit's reformulation of fetishism, replacing the term "fetishist" with "lesbian":

   The lesbian's desire is sustained and signified by a fetish, a
   fantasy phallus, an inappropriate object precariously attached to a
   desiring fantasy, unsupported by any perceptual memory; she knows
   that it is not a penis, and she does not want it to be a penis.
   (Practice of Love 227-28)

In other words, the realization of not having the phallus does not prevent the lesbian from signifying her desire: "the fetish is at once what signifies her desire and what her lover desires in her" (Practice of Love 228). (12)

Taking as my point of departure de Lauretis' formulation of lesbian desire, I propose that in Benzina Lenni's desire for Stella expresses her disavowal of the loss of a narcissistically invested body image. What I am suggesting is that Lenni's passion for Stella enables her to recognize her "castration," and to reappropriate, through her desire for her lover, and through her lover's desire for her, the ability to love her own body. By gazing at Stella with desire, and by way of Stella's desiring gaze, Lenni is able to re-cast a narcissistic gaze on her own body image. This, however, does not entail Lenni's regaining the heterosexual feminine position of the narcissistic woman described by Freud, nor, as I will argue later, does it imply, within the "butch-femme" couple Lenni and Stella constitute, Lenni's--the "femme's"--recasting in the position of passive receiver of Stella's--the "butch's"--"masculine" desire.

In "On Narcissism. An Introduction," Freud describes the anaclictic, or attachment type, object choice as typically male. (13) For most women, Freud explains, "the development of a true object-choice with its accompanying sexual overvaluation" is prevented by an intensification of the original narcissism, brought about, at the beginning of puberty, by the maturing of the female sexual organs. Such women, argues Freud, only love themselves, their need lying "in the direction of ... being loved," rather that in the direction of loving others. In Freud's model, only in one case are narcissistic women capable of complete object-love: "in the child which they bear, a part of their own body confronts them like an extraneous object, to which, starling out from their narcissism, they can give complete object love" (Freud 89-90). Interestingly, in Benzina, contrary to Freud's model, the mother, whom Freud would have most certainly labeled as narcissistic, is entirely incapable of any kind of love for her daughter Lenni. Furthermore, Lenni's libido is object-oriented; her love for Stella displays that "complete object-love of the attachment type" that Freud describes as characteristically male. In sum, the narcissism that I see at work in Benzina contradicts the feminine secondary narcissism described by Freud. Rather, it is akin to the narcissism implied in de Lauretis's model of perverse desire discussed earlier, which is linked to primary narcissism in that "it is the loss of a narcissistically invested body-image that threatens the ego with a loss of being" (de Lauretis, "Habit Changes" 329). (14)

Importantly, the reconstruction of Lenni's childhood and adolescence, to the time of Lenni's encounter with Stella, stresses many aspects and patterns of Lenni's behavior--the rejection of food, her preference for baggy clothes that can hide her body, her frequent, and dissatisfactory, sexual encounters with men--which bespeak Lenni's lack of a satisfactory body image. The maternal voice thus describes Lenni's condition:

   Mia figlia, che secondo il racconto della sua compagna di classe
   non si alzava neanche dal banco a ricreazione per evitare gli
   sguardi, si considerava smisuratamente brutta e grassa. Una palla
   di lardo da infagottare il piu possibile per confonderne le
   misure. (73)

As a teenager, Lenni, unable to cast a glance of acceptance upon her body, had striven to achieve invisibility, to withdraw her perceived inadequacy from the gaze of others. Conversely, her bond with Stella is founded on the necessity of reciprocal visibility. Their mutual desire is created and sustained by the act of gazing; the markers of their passion are visual signifiers. Stella never averts her gaze from Lenni. Commenting on Lenni's habit of closing her eyes during intimacy, Stella remarks: "Io invece gli occhi non li chiudo mai. Ti guardo, sempre. Anche quando ti bacio, e se facciamo l'amore" (23). Later, Stella adds:

  Sara mi ha raccontato che quando sono nata [mia madre] non ha voluto
  nemmeno vedermi, per non affezionarsi.... Anche per questo ti guardo
  sempre Lenni, per affezionarmi. Per farmi dentro la testa la
  formina di te, precisa identica a come sei. E quando mi fai
  innervosire e mi allontano, dopo un po' mi torni in mente ... e mi
  intenerisco. E a quel punto non posso piu andar via. (25)

The process of "affezionarsi," of becoming attached to the other, is made possible by reciprocal gazing; withdrawing one's gaze from the other would entail a severance of their love bond. (15)

Significantly, Stella loves precisely those features of Lenni's body--the fullness of her figure, her constant perspiring--that Lenni hates the most: "Io non penso che Lenni sia grassa. E morbida, ma questo e il suo bello" (57). The softness of Lenni's body, the sweat that makes her clothes stick to her body, evidencing her full breasts, represent the "fetishes," in the meaning proposed by de Lauretis, that is, the objects/ signifiers of Stella's desire for Lenni. Stella thus describes her first meeting with Lenni: "[Lenni] continuava a sudare per lo sforzo che aveva fatto spingendo il motorino fino a li, la maglietta nera le stava tutta appiccicata sulle poppe ed era proprio erotica. Allora ho cominciato a sudare anch'io, per l'emozione" (47). The way in which Stella gazes at her makes Lenni immediately aware of the woman's desire for her: "l'avevo capito subito, la prima volta che ti ho vista. Nessuno mi aveva mai guardato cosi" (61).

To the visibility of Stella's desire is juxtaposed Lenni's avowed inability to recognize the existence and the consistency of her own desire: "Ho sempre faticato a riconoscere i miei desideri: mi sembrava di non averne o che fossero sbagliati, cosi aridi da non potersi trasformare in nessun gesto" (146). By admitting her inability to view herself as a desiring subject, by acknowledging, that is, in de Lauretis's words, her "loss/lack," Lenni makes the first step in the direction of disavowing her "castration." Thus, Stella's desiring gaze enables Lenni to reappropriate her desire: by recognizing herself as the object of desire of another woman, Lenni comes to recognize herself, at the same time, as a subject of desire--for another woman. Importantly, both Stella and Lenni are, at once, the object of each other's desire, and the subject of their desire for the other. In this sense, to adopt Sue-Ellen Case's well-known phrase, Lenni and Stella "inhabit the subject position together" (Case 295). (16) That is, although it is the visibility of Stella's passion for her that initially mobilizes Lenni's desire, Lenni's position within the couple, as pointed out earlier, is not one of passive receiver of the other's active desire. Rather, by gazing "back" at Stella, Lenni assumes the role of active desiring agent in a dynamic exchange of mutual love and desire. (17) Indeed, some of Stella's "butch" physical features and mannerisms become the objects/signifiers of Lenni's desire: her walk, the way she smokes, her grease-stained overalls; in short, what de Lauretis has described as "the lesbian masculinity fetish" (Practice of Love 243). (18) "Com'e bella Stella con la sigaretta in equilibrio al lato della bocca," Lenni remarks, "[f]uma da dio, Stella. Uomini e donne, quando passa Stella con la sigaretta in bocca, si voltano incantati" (96). By adopting these "fetishes" as signifiers of her desire, Lenni is able to reciprocate Stella's desiring gaze. By doing so, Lenni disavows, that is, recognizes and denies at the same time, her "castration"--her loss of a narcissistically invested body image.

Mother and Daughter: Averting the Gaze

Thus far my reading of Benzina, in keeping with de Lauretis's model of lesbian desire, has suggested that what Lenni recovers, thanks to the desire of--and her desire for--another woman, is not her mother's denied and lost body, but her own body, that is, a lovable body image. Nevertheless, I propose that a clear link between Lenni's "castration" and a lack of narcissistic validation on the mother's part can also be evinced in the text. I am suggesting, in other words, that Lenni's lack of a libidinally invested body image can be traced back to her loss of a body image considered desirable by her mother. My interpretation of Lenni's lack stems from de Lauretis's analysis, in The Practice of Love, of Stephen Gordon's fantasy of castration in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Analyzing the mother-daughter dynamics in that text, de Lauretis concludes:

   [Stephen's] fantasy of castration ... is explicitly associated with
   a failure of narcissism as the lack not of the phallus as such, but
   of a (female) body the mother can love. Failing the mother's
   narcissistic validation of the daughter's body-image, castration
   means the lack or loss of a female body. (Practice of Love 242)

De Lauretis, however, does not investigate the causes of Stephen's mother's inability to validate her daughter's body-image. In my analysis of Benzina, I extend de Lauretis's claim by arguing that behind Lenni's mother's failure to validate her daughter's body image lies her own bodily dispossession. Lenni's mother, a woman whose body has been expropriated, is unable to establish a bond of mutual affection and understanding with her daughter.

Maternity had undoubtedly represented for Lenni's mother an intrusion, a further expropriation of her body, following the originary expropriation performed by her husband in his first, and in his successive, "beastly" nocturnal assaults. The mother explains:

   Mi e sempre piaciuto tanto fare il bagno nuda.... Mi piaceva il
   frescolino dell'acqua tra le gambe.... Ma ora ... la vita e passata
   ... sono diventata grande e poi morta, ... ora ... quel buchino dove
   mi facevo accarezzare dall'acqua e stato violato dalla bestialita
   di mio marito. (64)

To the fluidity of the sexually gratifying sensations experienced by the mother when, as a child, she used to swim naked, is juxtaposed the harshness of the rhythmical pain inflicted on her by her husband during intercourse:

   Il fatto e che io sentivo solo la violenza. Chiudevo gli occhi e
   l'unica sensazione che riconoscevo con chiarezza era un dolore
   ritmico, qualcosa che graffiava e diventava insopportabile man mano
   che l'amplesso andava avanti. All'amore bisogna resistere, mi
   dicevo, sopportare. (83)

Lenni's mother has experienced sexual intercourse with her husband as a repeated violation, one she needed to bear, and passively resist. Her disastrous sexual encounters with her husband, exacerbating the preexisting feelings of disgust and alienation toward the male body brought about by the shock she had experienced, as a child, in seeing her father's genitals, had compromised her ability to experience sexual pleasure.

Motherhood, then, perceived as what Anna Cotugno has described as the bearing of the "rapist's child," could have hardly been welcomed by Lenni's mother (Cotugno 49). (19) She thus recollects her feelings, and her physical sensations, during pregnancy:

   Quando ho saputo di essere incinta ho pianto. Mi sentivo come quei
   contenitori di vetro che si usano per conservare i cibi in
   frigorifero ... ogni giorno che passava mi sembrava che dovesse
   essere l'ultimo, chela pelle della mia pancia si sarebbe strappata,
   che presto non avrei avuto piu posto per lo stomaco, il fegato, il
   cuore. (140)

Hence, Lenni's mother's inability to love her daughter: "Perche avrei dovuto volerti bene, Eleonora?" she avows (114). (20) Lenni's demand for love is addressed to a woman whose body has been expropriated: violated first, and then reduced to a container. A woman who, consequently, is unable to cherish, and accept the responsibility of, a bond with someone she perceives as an intruder. Contrary to Stella's mother, who had resolutely left her daughter to the care of others upon realizing her inability to love her, Lenni's mother, in spite of her deep feelings of (self-)alienation and extraneousness towards her daughter, had passively succumbed to the maternal role prescribed for her by the script of the patriarchal family. Significantly, Lenni's mother thus describes her first "encounter" with her daughter: "Quando ho avuto nella mia mano la mano piccolissima di mia figlia, e ho sentito i suoi occhi che si incollavano ai miei per sempre, ho capito che non ce l'avrei fatta, che era troppo per me" (140). Lenni's mother's inability to respond to her daughter's demand for love is expressed by her powerlessness to sustain and reciprocate her gaze.

Faced with her mother's incapacity to cast a loving glance upon her, Lenni, in turn, avoids her mother's gaze. "Lenni dice che non si faceva guardare da te," Stella explains, addressing Lenni's mother, "perche la osservavi come una bistecca dal macellaio, per verificarne il peso" (57). As a consequence of her mother's unloving attitude toward her, Lenni becomes also unable to look at her; feeling rejected, Lenni has reproduced her mother's inability to accept, and relate to, her. Thus, by averting her own gaze from her mother, Lenni contributes to her mother's bodily dispossession. Lenni's repulsion from her nudity, in particular, duplicates her mother's failure to validate her body-image. Imagining her daughter undressing her before throwing her body in the water, Lenni's mother comments:

   Non ti piacera. Ricordo quando da bambina cercavi di avvolgere,
   senza toccarlo troppo, il mio costume bagnato dentro il tuo. Io te
   lo porgevo da dentro la cabina e tu ti inventavi questo pacchetto
   per potere andare a stenderlo quasi senza toccarlo. Nessuno al
   mondo, a parte tuo padre, ha avuto tanto orrore della mia intimita.
   (52)

Not only does Lenni, as the "rapist's child," the intruder colonizing the maternal body during her pregnancy, exacerbate the mother's feeling of self-alienation. More importantly, by withdrawing her gaze from her, Lenni fails to validate her mother's body image. As a result, both mother and daughter are instrumental in generating each other's feelings of bodily dispossession.

The Return of the Mother: Reinstating the Order of Gazes

In The Practice of Love, de Lauretis hints at a mother-daughter dynamic similar to the one I have described in Benzina in her analysis of the character of Marisa/Corky in Cherrie Moraga's Giving Up the Ghost. According to de Lauretis, Marisa's "failure of narcissism also derives from the lack or loss of a lovable female body, not only in the subject but also in the mother, for she is also dispossessed and vilified as merely a body" (Practice of Love 244). In her ensuing discussion of Moraga's play, however, de Lauretis's does not interrogate the source of Marisa's mother's dispossession; similarly, as I pointed out earlier, she had not investigated the causes of Stephen's mother's failure to validate her daughter's body image in her analysis of The Well of Loneliness. While linking, then, the daughter figures' dispossession to their mothers' inability to narcissistically validate their body-images in both The Well of Loneliness and Giving Up the Ghost, de Lauretis does not explore the causes of the mothers' attitude toward their daughters. Elizabeth Grosz, in her response essay to de Lauretis's The Practice of Love, points out the problematic implications of this aspect of de Lauretis's analysis of Stephen's dispossession in The Well of Loneliness. According to Grosz, de Lauretis's "blaming" of Stephen's mother for her daughter's bodily dispossession is problematic precisely because it fails to explain the mother's inability to validate the daughter's body-image. "Any model which 'blames' the mother," notes Grosz, "must itself explain the mother's position as well, and how it is that she is unable to narcissistically validate her daughter's embodiment" (Grosz 312n13).

De Lauretis's unwillingness to explore maternal subjectivity, however, is not surprising in a theoretical work, such as The Practice of Love, which is largely based on a critique of what de Lauretis calls the "maternal imaginary" in feminist theory. In the chapter titled "The Seductions of Lesbianism: Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory and the Maternal Imaginary," de Lauretis elaborates an in-depth critique of "the maternal imaginary":

   By maternal imaginary I mean ..., in Domna Stanton's phrase, a
   maternal metaphor, in which the mother stands for what women have
   in common as women ... the figure of individuation and collective
   female empowerment. (Practice of Love 165-66)

According to de Lauretis, the maternal imaginary is dangerous for women mainly because, regardless of its emphasis on the symbolic or the imaginary aspects of the mother-daughter bond, it inevitably reduces female sexuality to maternity, and female identity to the mother. On the one hand, de Lauretis's argues, the validation of the pre-Oedipal mother effected by some Anglo-American feminist psychoanalytical theorists has produced a romanticized notion of sisterhood or pre-Oedipal fusion exempt from contradictions and conflicts, with the exception of the ones caused by the patriarchal social system. (21) On the other, feminist discourse centered on the symbolic aspects of the mother-daughter relationship, such as the theorization of the maternal produced by the Milan sexual difference theorists, has neglected the imaginary and erotic-sexual contents of the relationship. Such neglect results, in de Lauretis's view, in the elision of female sexuality and desire, and ultimately, of lesbianism. Moreover, one of de Lauretis's goals in The Practice of Love is to combat the conflation, effected by some feminists, of lesbianism with non-sexual, homosocial forms of women's bonding, such as the mother-daughter relationship, and the association of lesbian sexual desire with women's nostalgia for the pre-Oedipal mother-child symbiosis.

Although I fully appreciate the relevance of de Lauretis's critique of the "maternal imaginary," I am convinced that to reject altogether from feminist discourse the "mother," and the maternal as patriarchal conceptualizations of feminine identity and sexuality is ultimately detrimental to women's self-understanding and empowerment, regardless of their sexual object choice. On the one hand, such a dismissal results in the elision of a fundamental structuring component of women's subjectivity, their relationship to the mother. On the other, the suppression of the "maternal metaphor" deprives women of a crucial means of creating an alternative frame of reference to the dominant patriarchal symbolic. My reading of Benzina, therefore, aims at elucidating precisely "the mother's position," in Grosz's words, and those mother-daughter relational dynamics that remain unexamined in de Lauretis's textual analyses. In order to do so, I bring into my discussion of Benzina, and interrogate, a very different theoretical articulation of maternal discourse: Cavarero's rereading of the Demeter myth in In Spite of Plato. In that work, Cavarero identifies as the central theme of the Demeter myth the power of the mother, which is inscribed in nature as the power to generate and not to generate. According to Cavarero's interpretation of the myth, reciprocal visibility of mother and daughter is necessary for maternal power to manifest itself:

   In the myth it is precisely the mother who stops generating when the
   daughter is snatched out of her sight.... Phyein becomes possible
   only in this reciprocal visibility.... When visibility is denied,
   phyein stops. (Cavarero 60-61; emphasis in the original)

In other words, Cavarero argues, the natural/natal order of gazes demands a constant exchange of gazes between mother and daughter: the interruption of this exchange, following Kore's abduction by Hades, results in a paralysis of nature. According to Cavarero the myth, although it explicitly thematizes only the gaze exchanged between mother and daughter, also implies the withdrawal of the son's gaze from the mother, and his disavowal of the maternal order of birth in favor of death. Cavarero points out that:

   In this sense the myth evokes an original matricide. It is played
   out in two stages: the masculine gaze turns away from its own birth
   to look at its death; the gaze exchanged between mother and daughter
   is interrupted by a masculine hand. (63)

What I am arguing here is that, while de Lauretis, in her analysis of The Well of Loneliness and Giving Up the Ghost, highlights, but does not to investigate, "the interruption of gazes" between mother and daughter, it is precisely on an analysis of this interruption that Cavarero founds her rereading of the Demeter myth. While both de Lauretis's and Cavarero's models underscore the importance of women's reciprocal gazing as source of mutual love and validation, the focus of de Lauretis's analysis is on the lesbian woman regaining, by means of the other woman's sexual love and desire, a lovable body image. In other words, the gaze which has been "interrupted" in de Lauretis's model, and that, therefore, needs to be reinstated, is, primarily, intrapersonal; it is the dispossessed woman's ability to gaze "narcissistically" at her own body image. Conversely, Cavarero's model of women's gazing foregrounds the interruption of, and the necessity to reinstate, interpersonal visibility between women; namely, between mothers and daughters.

In comparing Cavarero's and de Lauretis's models, it is also important to note that Cavarero's rereading of the Demeter myth is devoid of any romanticization of the maternal, and could hardly be recontained within the terms of the patriarchal discourse on motherhood. Cavarero offers, that is, a conceptualization of the maternal that does not present the problems outlined by de Lauretis in her critique of the "maternal imaginary." In fact, Cavarero stresses repeatedly the non-coincidence of the maternal power signified in the Demeter myth with the patriarchal reduction of female sexuality and identity to maternity. "In the myth ... maternal generation is just a root that welcomes that daughter within the horizon of similarity ...," Cavarero explains, "to generate is an exclusively female experience, but is not an automatic and obligatory process where women are mere vehicles" (64). According to Cavarero's model, every woman, as a daughter, and, "not necessarily," as a mother, finds her rootedness in the order of the female gaze, that is, in that exchange of gazes between women that is founded on the recognition of "being born of mother" (64). Cavarero thus describes the necessity of reciprocal visibility between mother and daughter:

   The natural/natal order of gazes requires that mother and daughter
   be visible to each other. It demands that we look at the female
   gender in relationships between mothers and children. Every woman
   belongs to this gender, and finds in this gaze the measure of her
   own appearance and being in the world. Hence we have a feminine
   stem in the meaning of theorein, the "gaze" that the male
   philosopher directs toward the eternal. This theorein does not look
   up; it does not divert its attention from the earth. It is a
   theorein that extends horizontally in relationships of
   correspondence, in the direction of birth and the arrival of humans
   into the world. (62)

In Benzina both mother and daughter had been unable to look at their gender and identify it as "a common horizon of recognition" (64). Poignantly, the mother avows: "Forse non l'ho mai saputo che cos'e l'amore. Pero avevo partorito una donna, avremmo potuto essere sorelle e amiche" (83).

Not only, however, does Benzina's mother-daughter plot corroborate Cavarero's model of the order of gazes between mother and daughter: it also complicates it. First, the matricide evoked by the myth according to Cavarero's interpretation, becomes literal in the novel; moreover, it is perpetrated "by feminine hand." I would argue, however, that the matricide does not belong to the narrative proper: it precedes it, constituting the a priori of the mother-daughter plot. The matricide, in Benzina, has occurred the moment the daughter has been generated against the mother's will. It has resulted from the usurpation of her maternal power perpetrated in the name of the Law of the Father. Cavarero thus describes the erasure of maternal power in the myth:

   Snatched away, cut off, and severed from the sovereign female
   subjectivity in which it is rooted, the power of maternity
   depreciates to mere reproductive function; a corporeal production
   of bodies. Obviously, these bodies are generated, nourished, and
   cared for. Indeed here the corporeal dimension is prevalent, almost
   absolute: the mother is the container of the unborn child.
   Therefore she is apt to be controlled and is subject to domination
   by the order that has turned her into this receptacle. Hence the
   power of maternity is transformed into its opposite. (67)

Indeed, Lenni's mother's body had functioned, in her own words, as a "glass jar" for her unborn child; violated and self-alienated, she had been defined by the reproductive role assigned to her by the patriarchal law.

Benzina also complicates Cavarero's model in that the order of gazes between Lenni and her mother has not been simply interrupted. Rather, it has never been established: sustaining and reciprocating her daughter's gaze has been impossible for the mother. Such possibility has been precluded, as I showed earlier, by her status of dispossession, by the expropriation enacted on her by the dominant order. Not only has Lenni's mother been deprived of her ability to experience sexual pleasure, and her body appropriated, she has also been dispossessed of a basic component of her maternal power, as defined in Cavarero's reading of the Demeter's myth: the power not to generate. "The myth of Demeter," states Cavarero, "reveals a sovereign figure of female subjectivity who decides, in the concrete singularity of every woman, whether to generate or not to generate" (64). I would argue, further, that Benzinds mother-daughter plot rewrites the Demeter myth: whereas in the myth we witness a periodical return of the daughter from the kingdom of death, in the novel it is the mother who returns from the dead to be reunited to her daughter. Moreover, in Benzina, the mother-daughter reunion is not a temporary one, as in the original myth: it is uncompromising, permanent, and complete. Thus, Benzina also subverts the paradigm of the daughter's "return to the mother," typical of previous Italian mother-daughter narratives which, in accordance with the mythical scheme, stage daughterly movements of return to, and recovery of, maternal figures. (22) To these narratives, Benzina counters a return of the mother, who acquires discursive agency in the text, and reinstates the "exchange of gazes" between mother and daughter.

The return of the mother staged in Benzina, and the lesbian love relationship in which it is embedded, and which renders it possible, is also significant in that it interrupts the pattern of the "return to the mother," the maternal metaphor haunting, in de Lauretis's view, feminist discourse on lesbianism. (23) Analyzing Haunani-Kay Trask's discussion of "feminist eros" in Eros and Power, for example, de Lauretis points out that Trask, while acknowledging the particular contribution of lesbian thought to feminism, includes lesbians in "a continuum of 'feminist eros' for which she uses the predominant maternal metaphor, the 'return to the mother'" (Practice of Love 194). (24) In sum, it is de Lauretis's argument in The Practice of Love that the metaphor of the "return to the mother," by constructing the feminist fantasy of inclusion, for all women, in a sisterly "community of women-identified women," elides the specifically sexual nature of lesbianism (Practice of Love 197). It is precisely this elision, I would argue, that Benzina's representation of lesbianism avoids by positing the mise en scdne of Lenni and Stella's sexual desire at the beginning of the novel as the primal scene at the origin of the mother's regeneration and sexual awakening. Thus, Benzina, by highlighting the importance of women's self-possession as desiring agents not only in the depiction of the sexual love relationship between Lenni and Stella, but also in relation to maternal subjectivity, wards off the problematic implications of the maternal metaphor as described by de Lauretis. It does so, mainly, as pointed out earlier, by reconfiguring this metaphor as a "return of the mother" as a desiring subject, a return which is made possible by the staging of the exchange of sexual desire between the daughter, Lenni, and her lover Stella. Further, Benzina also creates a conversation between Cavarero's call, in In Spite of Plato, for a gender-based identification between women--what de Lauretis critically describes as the feminist fantasy of a collectivity of "woman-identified women" (de Lauretis, Practice of Love 197) (25)--and the sexual desire among women described by de Lauretis in The Practice of Love.

Importantly, in Benzina, the mother returns to her daughter with a new capacity of looking at her; her gaze, instead of diverting itself from Lenni, as in the past, now accompanies her. In this respect, particularly relevant appears the mother's new ability to gaze lovingly at her daughter's body. As she looks upon the spectacle of Lenni and Stella having sex, for instance, the mother, admiring Lenni's breasts, observes: "Sai Eleonora, fa uno strano effetto quel tuo bel seno morbido e rotondo, cosi diverso dal resto del corpo, sembra finto. Non somiglia per niente al mio, piccolo ma armonioso" (27). The mother is now able to (re)cognize Lenni's body. Recollecting how she had rejected her daughter's bodily appearance during Lenni's adolescence--"Mi sembrava brutta, non la riconoscevo" (84), she avows--the mother comments: "E bella invece Eleonora, con il suo grande seno e quel buco piccolo piccolo nel cuore dal quale gocciola via l'amore" (84). Similarly, Lenni, who is now able to accept and cherish her own body-image, and who recognizes herself as a desiring subject, has also acquired a new ability to gaze at, and relate to, her mother's body. In contrast with her former repulsion from her mother's nudity and intimacy, Lenni is now able not only to accept, but also to cherish her body. She thus voices to Stella her admiration for her mother: "--Che belle gambe, eh? Gambe cosi ce le puo avere una di quindici anni, di vent'anni ... massimo massimo venticinque" (19). Particularly revealing in this sense is also the narrative sequence in which Lenni, as she supports her mother's body, engages in an affectionate "dance" with her:

   Non ti lascio cadere, mamma, ti abbraccio forte, cosf ti senti
   sicura.... Sento il fiatone che gonfia la mia pancia contro la
   tua; mi confondo, sembra sia tu a respirare.... Siamo belle,
   sembriamo una coppia di ballerini stanchi. Sposto il tuo peso prima
   a destra e poi a sinistra; in questo modo riesco a sollevarti i
   piedi e ad appoggiarli sopra i miei. Adesso non rischiamo pih di
   inciampare.... Ecco, adesso balliamo! (42; my emphasis)

As mother and daughter "dance" together, all physical distance between them has been annulled; as bodily boundaries between them become "confused," they become, symbiotically, one.

Another important way in which mother and daughter in Benzina reinstate the order of gazes is by gazing back at, and narrating, each other's life stories. By doing so, each woman is able to reconcile herself with the other's life story, as well as with her own. It is indeed through the act of gazing at each other and narrating their common past, and their present feelings, that mother and daughter confer a new meaning to their lives, and are able to rewrite their relationship. From this perspective, the saliency of reciprocal gazing and narration in Benzina is akin to Cavarero's emphasis on the relevance of mutual storytelling in women's lives in her study of relational selfhood and narration, Relating Narratives, Storytelling and Selfhood. In that work Cavarero, drawing from Hannah Arendt's emphasis on the individual uniqueness of all human beings, offers a theory of selfhood based on the constitutive relationality of what she terms as the "unique existent," that is, "who" someone is. Cavarero's formulation of the uniqueness of each human being, however, adds to Arendt's model the idea that "who appears to us is shown to be unique [not only] in corporal form and sound of voice," in Cavarero's words, but also in that "this who ... already comes to us perceptibly as a narratable self with a unique story [storia]" (Cavarero, Relating Narratives 34; emphasis in the original). Significantly, according to Cavarero, the "narratable self" relies on the tale of others for the narration of her/his life story. Particularly relevant to my reading of Benzina is also Cavarero's analysis, in Relating Narratives, of the importance of the narration of the individual's beginnings:

   If everyone is who is born ... then no recounting of a life story
   can in fact leave out this beginning with which the story itself
   began. The tale of her beginnings, the story of her birth,
   nevertheless can only come to the existent in the form of a
   narration told by others. The beginning of the narratable self and
   the beginning of her story are always a tale told by others. (39;
   emphasis in the original) (26)

In this sense, the return of the mother as a subject of narration staged in Benzina not only, importantly, renders maternal discourse possible; it also enables the tale of Lenni's beginnings to be told, contrary to what happens in mother-daughter stories narrated uniquely from the daughter's "autobiographical" perspective. (27) The story of Lenni's birth--a result of the mother's bodily expropriation--is all the more important in the narrative in that, as I have argued, it provides the key for understanding the mother's lack of love for Lenni, her inability to validate her daughter's body, and Lenni's ensuing bodily dispossession. Furthermore, thanks to Lenni's tale, the mother is also able to gaze back at her own life story:

   Ho pattinato sulla superficie della terra, convinta che avrei dovuto
   imparare soltanto a eseguire la piu perfetta piroetta.... Ora lo so.
   So che non ci sono circostanze favorevoli o orribili disgrazie. E
   non serve a niente guardarsi passare intorno l'universo e sperare di
   riuscire ad allungare la mano quando passa finalmente il destino che
   avremmo voluto; perche non passera. Non esistono madri generose, ne
   figlie devote. Esisti tu, e quanto prima inizierai a scavare
   sull'unico campo che avrai ..., tanto prima raggiungerai il centro.
   Per questo avrei voluto volerti bene. (114)

The mother is now able to perceive her past inability to cast on her daughter a gaze of acceptance and love--for whom Lenni was--and regrets her pursuit of a fallacious idea of what her daughter ought to have been. (28)

BENZINA: A FEMINIST MATERNAL ROMANCE

In The Mother/Daughter Plot, Hirsch analyzes texts by nineteenth-and twentieth-century French, British, and Anglo-American women writers and theorists through Freud's notion of the family romance. Departing from Freud's theorization of "a particular shape of the family romance as universal," Hirsch argues that "patterns of family romance can and do vary ... during different periods and for different cultural traditions" (10). Hirsch thus highlights, and describes, the variations undergone by family romances in French, British, and Anglo-American women's narratives and theoretical works of the last two centuries, and theorizes the "feminist family romance" as being the most recent stage of this evolution. Hirsch defines as "feminist family romances" those fictional and theoretical texts centered around the mother-daughter bond, which foreground mothers and displace male figures, but are still written from daughterly perspectives. Drawing upon, and modifying, Hirsch's formulation of "feminist family romance," I propose that in Italian women's fictional writing centered around the mother-daughter bond, despite the fact that these novels are still written from daughterly perspectives, a movement aimed at granting mothers a voice is clearly detectable. I describe these works as "feminist maternal romances." Although these narratives, which feature mothers and mother-daughter bonds prominently, do not succeed in completely displacing the heterosexual romance, male figures are increasingly marginalized from the plot. In texts such as Sanvitale's Madre e figlia and Ramondino's Althenopis, however, as I pointed out at the beginning of this essay, the mother's voice and perceptions remain mediated through the daughter's subjectivity. From this perspective then, I argue, Benzina represents a crucial step in the development of a "feminist maternal romance" in Italian women's theoretical and fictional writing foregrounding mother-daughter bonds. First, the displacement of male figures from the narrative is complete: the lesbian bond between Lenni and Stella has supplanted the heterosexual romance central in previous Italian mother-daughter narratives. Further, the tensions and conflicts, and the matricidal daughter's impulses characteristic of mother-daughter plots find their culmination, in Benzina, in the matricide that opens the narrative. More importantly, however, the story is told from the multiple perspective of the three protagonists: the mother, no longer the object of the daughter's narrative, takes on an active role in the narration.

In Benzina, as I have argued in this paper, the matricide at the beginning of the narrative--the elimination of the mother at the hands of the daughter and her lover--does not represent a point "of no return" in the mother-daughter plot. Nor does the death of the mother merely inaugurate the daughter's solipsistic journey of recovery of the maternal figure, as in previous Italian mother-daughter narratives. Rather, it results in the entrance of the mother's voice, gaze, and desire, into the story. The maternal voice here enters the narrative to contest the reliability of the daughter's univocal perspective, thus becoming instrumental to the construction of a mother-daughter narrative that, departing from traditional representations of the relationship, grants maternal subjectivity a central role. Benzina thus stages, as I have suggested earlier, a "return of the mother" into the mother-daughter plot, that is, a narrative construction of the bond which foregrounds maternal experiences and perceptions; namely, her feelings of unhappiness and self-alienation, and her ensuing inability to love her daughter. In Benzina, the splitting of the mother's presence into narrated object and narrating subject dramatizes, and rewrites her dispossession at the same time. While her violent death represents the final form of the bodily expropriation the mother had experienced throughout her life--her lost ability to experience sexual pleasure, and, more in general, her loss of control over her body--, her return into the narrative as viewing and narrating subject enables her to undo her dispossession. Not only does her new gaze enable her to witness Lenni and Stella's exchange of gazes and desire; by assuming an active voyeuristic position in the narrative, she also redefines herself as a subject of desire, and repossesses her lost capacity for pleasure. Further, the mother is able to revise the mother-daughter plot as it had been constructed by the patriarchal order. As she gazes upon Lenni's fulfilling relationship with Stella, and on her daughter's newly gained self-acceptance, the mother narrates her experiences as woman and mother--the story of Lenni's origin--, unearthing her feelings of loss and violation, and her past inability to establish a love bond with her daughter. Similarly, by narrating and reflecting upon the story of her troubled childhood, Lenni is finally able to accept and cast a loving gaze on her mother.

In the final scene of the novel, the three protagonists, happily reunited after Lenni and Stella's ascent to the mother's ethereal dimension, dance with elation laughing like sisters "di quello che e successo, degli inizi e delle fini" (152). "E ridono forte," because, the mother's voice concludes: "La rincorsa e finita, e non ci sono piu denti per azzannarsi ne tempi per crescere e invecchiare, e ora le possiamo ridere tutte le storie, e lasciarle dondolare una dietro l'altra, piano piano, fino a quando non toccano terra" (156). To be sure, the fact that, in Benzina, the 'reconciliation' between mother and daughter occurs only after the mother's death, and that it culminates with the daughter's death, might appear highly problematic to any (feminist) reader looking for a really 'happy'-ending story. (29) In my opinion, nevertheless, the merit of Benzina lies in the fact that, by allowing the maternal voice and perspective to enter the narrative, it provides a compelling exploration of the mother's position and, as a result, of the causes of the mother-daughter relationship's failure. At the same time, Benzina introduces the possibility of a different script, one in which the mother-daughter bond might thrive. Trapped within the mutilating constraints of the patriarchal family, both mother and daughter had experienced self-alienation and dispossession. Hence, they had been unable to relate to, and cherish, one another. In the alternative scenario created by Benzina, Lenni and her lover Stella, thanks to their reciprocal desire, complete each other: each, by reappropriating her own denied body, completes herself, and, in so doing, completes the other as well. Their "practice of love," in its constant affirmation of their reciprocal gazing, articulates their self-belonging. In Stella's desiring gaze, and in her own, Lenni finds, in Cavarero's words, "the measure of her own appearance and being in the world" (In Spite of Plato 62). In turn, by gazing at Lenni and Stella, Lenni's mother reappropriates her own ability to gaze at her daughter. Similarly, Lenni is now able to see her mother. By the end of the novel, the order of gazes between mother and daughter has been reinstated; mother and daughter, as woman to woman, are able to gaze at each other.

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Sprengnether, Madelon. The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Stancanelli, Elena. Benzina. Torino: Einaudi, 1998.

Stanton, Domna. "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva." The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 157-82.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. "Writing and Motherhood." Garner, Kahane, and Sprengnether, eds.

Trask, Haunani-Kay. Eros and Power: The Promise of Feminist Theory. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1986.

Weed, Elizabeth, and Naomi Schor, eds. Feminism Meets Queer Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.

Wood, Sharon. "Clytemnestra or Electra: Renegotiating Motherhood." Italian Women's Writing, 1860-1994. London: Athlone, 1995. 232-53.

CLAUDIA POMPEI KARAGOZ

Duke University

NOTES

(1) An earlier and much briefer version of this article was presented at the American Association of Italian Studies annual conference in Eugene, Oregon, in April 1999.

(2) For a critique of psychoanalysis's blind spot with regards to maternal subjectivity, see also The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Garner, Kahane, and Sprengnether. In "Writing and Motherhood," which concludes the collection, for example, Susan Rubin Suleiman takes psychoanalysis to task for its neglect of the mother not only within the context of the mother-child relationship, but also in relation to artistic creativity. Importantly, in that essay Suleiman also offers a critique of Julia Kristeva's view of motherhood (as presented in "Stabat Mater") as a privileged means of access, for women, to language and culture, and, more in general, of the notion of "ecriture feminine" elaborated by French feminists Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. According to Suleiman, these views of womanhood are dangerous in that they are liable to promote "a fetishization of the female body" (371), that is, a thematic and stylistic codification of women's writing as centering on the woman's body and blood, and inherently fluid, lyrical, and non-aggressive. In general, several US feminist theorists throughout the 1980s and 1990s have criticized both the Anglo-American psychoanalytic feminists' focus on the pre-Oedipal mother-daughter relationship, and the French feminists' notion of a women's poetics centered on the body and the mother. See, for instance, Burke, Stanton, and Kahane. In the 1990s, see especially de Lauretis, The Practice of Love.

(3) For a psychoanalytic exploration of the conflicts and the intricate dynamics characterizing the mother-daughter relationship see, for example, Lagorio, Ravasi, and Finzi; and Buzzatti et al., Verso il luogo delle origini and Il fantasma del patriarcato. See also the Milan Women's Collective, and the Diotima group's philosophical and political re-articulation of the motherdaughter bond Muraro and Buttarelli et al.

(4) Although, strictly speaking, it is Stella, the daughter's lover, and not Lenni, the daughter, who commits the murder, Lenni fails to stop Stella from killing her mother, and joins her attempts to dispose of the corpse. Further, the murder is explicitly characterized as a matricide in the novel. For instance, imagining how her well-connected husband, were Lenni and Stella to turn themselves in, would manage to obtain a minimum sentence for them, the mother's voice ironically comments: "Nella sua posizione non puo permettersi una figlia in carcere per matricidio" (Stancanelli 40).

(5) To be sure, the mother's post-mortem splitting might appear problematic in that it echoes the internal division she had experienced throughout her life, the feeling, that is, that a part of herself was in a place other than the one where her social persona materially was. "Non mi piaceva ascoltare la gente. Dondolare la testa per far finta di comprendere, accavallare e scavallare le gambe presa dai racconti ...," the mother's voice explains, "Oggi pero, prima di morire, c'e stato un momento in cui mi sono sentita diversa: completamente 1i, in una cosa che stava accadendo" (Stancanelli 82). I would argue, however, that although the mother's inner splitting is reiterated, and not eliminated, by her double position in the narrative--narrated object and narrating subject/ voice--it is as if, after her death, the mother can finally, and quite literally, transcend her unauthentic social self--the upper class, well-dressed woman lying on the floor--and recover that part of herself from which she had felt alienated during her life.

(6) In spite of the fact that the murder is described in the novel in all its brutality, Benzina should not, in my view, be labeled as belonging to the movement of "cannibalismo." That is, it should not be quickly included, and dismissed as such, in the group of works produced by young Italian narrators in the nineties which belong to a genre akin to splatter, or pulp-fiction in the Anglo-American context. The adoption of a non realistic narrative register, and the ironic, at times humorous tone of the narrative segments confided to the eyes and the voice of the mother, make of Benzina a sort of cruel and, at the same time, innocent fable. It is a fable in which are poignantly recounted the present of an all-encompassing, absolute passion between two women, in juxtaposition to the past of a difficult mother-daughter relationship, characterized by absence of love, lack of understanding, and mutual hostility.

(7) "It has somehow escaped theoretical attention," Silverman states in the "Preface" of the book, "that sexual difference is the effect of dominant cinema's sound regime as well as its visual regime, and that the female voice is as relentlessly held to normative representations and functions as is the female body" (Acoustic Mirror viii; emphasis in the original).

(8) The mother's position in Benzina seems to coincide with the enunciative agency known in film theory as "the Absent One," the authoritative "unseen enunciator" defined by, as Silverman points out, "transcendental vision, hearing, and speech" (30).

(9) For a discussion of woman as spectacle, see Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Notably, in that essay Mulvey, while identifying women as objects of the gaze, as passive spectacle for the male erotically active gaze, failed to address the issue of female spectatorship. For an explicit discussion of female spectatorship, see Mulvey, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun," and Doane, "Film and the Masquerade." In the latter, Doane argues that dominant cinema entails for the female spectator a masochistic overidentification with the image, and proposes the metaphor of the masquerade--whereas Mulvey had proposed that of transvestitism--as a way for women to resist such spectatorial overidentification. See also The Spectatrix, spec. issue of Camera Obscura 20-21 (1990), and Silverman's "Love Objects and Mistaken Subjects: A Prologue," in The Acoustic Mirror (141). In that chapter Silverman argues that classic cinema projects male lack onto women as a partial defense mechanism against the trauma of symbolic castration cinema reactivates. For a discussion of female spectatorship and lesbianism, see de Lauretis's chapter "Recasting the Primal Scene: Film and Lesbian Representation" in The Practice of Love (81-148).

(10) In adopting de Lauretis's model of lesbian desire I am fully aware of the dangers implicit in appropriating discursive practices rooted in masculinity, such as the psychoanalytical one, to theorize female and lesbian sexuality. For a lucid critique of de Lauretis's reliance on psychoanalysis to theorize lesbian subjectivity and desire, see Grosz. In my opinion, however, de Lauretis's text remains a monumental and convincingly argued endeavor to construct a theory of lesbian desire and subjectivity. It represents, in de Lauretis's own words, a "passionate fiction," built in conversation not only with the writings of the fathers of psychoanalysis, but, most importantly, with the works of other lesbian and feminist writers and theorists (de Lauretis, "Habit Changes. Response" 316).

(11) As de Lauretis explains: "In my view ..., lesbian desire in not the identification with another woman's desire, but the desire for her desire as signified in her fetish and the fantasy scenario it evokes. What one desires is her lover's perverse desire; her fetish, in which her castration or lack of being is both acknowledged and denied, also mediates the other's fantasmatic access to her originally lost body. Provided their fantasy scenarios are compatible, both subjects can find together, always for the first time, that fantasmatic body for themselves and in each other" (Practice of Love 251; emphasis in the original).

(12) Importantly' de Lauretis argues, the lesbian's fetish of masculinity--that is, for example, the lesbian's adoption of socially coded "signs" of masculinity such as masculine clothes--contrary to the masculinity complex, rather than rejecting castration, disavows it. "The fetish of masculinity," explains de Lauretis, "is what both lures and signifies her desire for the female body .. .; the threat it holds at bay is not the loss of the penis in women but the loss of the female body itself, and the prohibition to access it" (Practice of Love 243).

(13) According to Freud, this typically male anaclictic object choice presents "the marked sexual overvaluation which is doubtless derived from the child's original narcissism and thus corresponds to the transference of that narcissism to a sexual object. This sexual overvaluation is the origin of that peculiar state of being in love" (88).

(14) It should be noted here, however, that in the same essay, de Lauretis points to the relationship between fetishism and narcissism in her theorization of perverse desire as "one of the questions that remains unresolved in the book" (329). The question being, explains de Lauretis, whether the primary narcissism intrinsic in perverse desire can be related to the secondary narcissism described by Freud as typically feminine. In effect, de Lauretis points out, according to Freud, secondary narcissism is brought about, too, in women, by the castration complex "as a sort of reimbursement that femininity demands for the loss of the penis" (330). De Lauretis concludes by pointing out that in her model of perverse desire the distinction between primary and secondary narcissism is not as clear as in Freud's theorization of narcissism. Further, de Lauretis suggests, even Freud's distinction between ego-libido and object-libido is somewhat ambiguous: "at times the distinction is given as an opposition, while at other times they are said to coexist side by side. Taking the latter hypothesis ... it may be the case that so-called female narcissism is in fact coextensive or homologous to the ego-enhancing, autoerotic primary narcissism" (330).

(15) Seemingly, this model is troubled by Stella's passionate attachment to her mother, whom she has never seen, and who has chosen not to see her. I would argue, however, that in this case, the lack of an actual reciprocal gazing between Stella and her mother is compensated by Stella's imaginary construction of that bond.

(16) In response to de Lauretis's call for the creation of a "feminist subject," capable of political agency and change in contrast with postmodernist views of the subject as trapped within ideology and unable to effect change--as an "urgent goal" for feminism, Case proposes that the lesbian roles of "butch" and "femme" "offer precisely the strong subject position the movement requires" (295). According to Case, the "butch-femme" couple, "are not split subjects, suffering the torments of ideology. They are coupled ones that do not impale themselves on the poles of sexual difference or metaphysical values, but constantly seduce the sign system ... replacing the Lacanian slash with a lesbian bar" (295). Obviously, my use of Case's phrase here has more to do with the fact that in the "butch-femme" couple constituted by Lenni and Stella, both women occupy the subject position as desiring agents--and less with de Lauretis's and Case's argument against the postmodernist conception of the subject.

(17) For a discussion of the danger, in feminist discourse concerning "butch-femme," of the "femme" lesbian's recasting into the "feminine" position of object of the "butch's" desire, see Hart. According to Hart, "'femme femininity' is in danger of occupying a position parallel to that of The Woman in masculinist discourse--the sign for that which exceeds representation, the Lacanian 'not-all.' In this sense, the femme might easily slide into a position signifying yet another gendered metaphysics" (222). Curiously, in her discussion of feminist discourse centered around lesbian sexuality, Hart does not refer to de Lauretis's model of same-sex desire between women, which, as I show through my analysis of Lenni and Stella's reciprocal desire, positions both women within the "butch-femme" couple as desiring subjects.

(18) As pointed out earlier, according to de Lauretis, the lesbian fetish of masculinity diverges from the masculinity complex postulated by Freud in that the former does not reject castration as the loss of the penis but, rather, disavows it as the loss of a lovable female body.

(19) Cotugno describes the refusal to become mothers by women who have been sexually abused as children as caused by the fantasy of carrying "the rapist's child," the fear, that is, that their offspring might be marked by the violence they have been a victim of. Although Lenni's mother's violation has not occurred in her childhood years, Cotugno's definition seems to me particularly fitting to describe her attitude towards her daughter.

(20) It should be noted here that the mother, throughout most of the novel, "addresses" Lenni as Eleonora, her real name. Only once, towards the end, does she refer to her as Lenni, the nickname given to her by Stella, a sign, I would argue, of her full acceptance of her daughter's autonomous identity and sexual choice. Earlier in the novel, in fact, the mother had thus sarcastically commented on the nickname: "'Lenni.' La tua amica ti ha dato un soprannome da uomo. Sono entusiasta della sua saffica immaginazione" (14).

(21) See Chodorow; Dinnerstein; Gilligan; and Sprengnether.

(22) This is a very common pattern in Italian mother-daughter narratives. See, for instance, Aleramo's Una donna, Maraini's La lunga vita di Marianna Ucria, Cerati's La cattiva figlia, and the above mentioned Madre e figlia by Sanvitale and Althenopis by Ramondino. For a study of recent Italian novels foregrounding the mother-daughter bond, see Giorgio's "The Passion for the Mother." See also Lazzaro-Weis's "From Confession to Romance," and Wood's "Clytemnestra or Electra," which provide analyses of earlier mother-daughter narratives.

(23) See de Lauretis, Practice of Love 190-98.

(24) According to Trask, in de Lauretis's account, the symbiotic mother-child relationship, the "return to the mother," which is literal (physical) for lesbian feminists, and symbolic for women who identify with other women "as part of a family of sisters," represents the basis for all identifications between women (194).

(25) This is a phrase de Lauretis uses in pointing out the elision of the specificity of sexual desire among women effected by feminist views of female sexuality that are tied to the maternal metaphor. According to de Lauretis, when feminist psychoanalytic theory links female sexuality to the maternal "as the non-phallic par excellence ... the maternal image is diffracted and multiplied into a collectivity of woman-identified women, with the 'homosexual factor' evenly distributed across all female sexuality, which must be carefully not qualified as lesbian--because indeed it is not, nor is it meant to be" (197).

(26) In aligning the importance of women's reciprocal gazing and narration in Benzina with Cavarero's theoretical articulation of relational selfhood and storytelling in Relating Narratives, it is also important to note that the original Italian title of Cavarero's work is Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti: filosofia della narrazione (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1997).

(27) Importantly, Cavarero underscores repeatedly what she calls the "fallacy of the autobiographical impulse," that is, memory's inability to provide a complete and trustworthy account of one's life story. "The life-story that memory recounts," argues Cavarero, "is not enough for the narratable self ... because memory claims to have seen that which was instead revealed only through the gaze of another" (Relating Narratives 40).

(28) In other words, following Cavarero's notion of the "unique existent," the mother realizes her failure to see Lenni's, and her own, uniqueness, as relational, narratable selves.

(29) That is, Benzina's finale might disappoint any (feminist) reader partial to realistically happy-ending stories representing strong and empowered women. Discussing Elaine Showalter's and Marcia Holly's rejection of Virgina Woolf's writing, Moi describes this feminist critical approach as "crypto-Lukacsian" (8). "Implicit in such criticism," Moi argues, "is the assumption that good feminist fiction would present truthful images of strong women with which the reader might identify.... [T]his kind of universalizing humanistic aesthetic leads straight to a search for the representation of strong, powerful women in literature, a search reminiscent of The Soviet Writers' Congress's demand for socialist realism in 1934" (7-8). In the case of Benzina, such approach would--unjustly, in my opinion--dismiss the novel for its failure to represent empowered women, and a "realistically" successful mother-daughter relationship.