Looking Back: The Image of Italy in Helen Barolini’s Umbertina

And I used to wonder about Puritan John Milton being the guest of a cardinal in Rome, she [Marguerite] thought. In this land where everything is accommodated. Where nothing is resolved because it's all an unfolding spiral. --Umbertina, 282(1) Representation of that which is Italian in Italian/American culture seems to be contradictory within the artistic world of Italian America.(2) Today, Italian/Americans can easily boast of the glories of Rome and be proud of the grand philosophical, literary, and artistic heritages of Naples, Florence, Turin, Milan, and Venice, to name a few of the famous intellectual centers of Italy throughout the centuries. However, a major number of their ancestors came to the United States as an escape from insufferable poverty and socio-political oppression in Italy, especially in Southern Italy. In this respect, then, Italy (specifically, Southern Italy) and the Italian/American sense of Italiannes may bring to the fore contrasting sentiments of pride and shame, attraction and repulsion, and love and resentment. These emotions often surface, at different times and with different levels of intensity, in the ethnic literature and films of Italian/American artists.(3) With regard to the image of Italy in Italian/American art, one premise that crosses generations is the general notion of cultural specificity. Namely, that literature and film, as is the case with any other artistic form, are conceived and produced in highly differentiated contexts of culturally specific ideological dusters, and that any particular work will have to be viewed against the backdrop of that specific cluster in which it was produced, as well as the viewer's intertextual cultural reservoir. Another premise that links many Italian/American art forms is the notion of ethnogenesis--namely, that ethnicity is not a fixed element, unchanging form that is passed down from one generation to the next. Rather, ethnicity is something that is continuously regenerated, through the following generation's discovery of it, and hence reinvented according to this new generation's ideological specificities.(4) Pertinent to understanding the Italian/American's relationship to Italy is the notion of the hyphenated individual. With regard to literature, critics have already spoken of the "hyphenate" writer. Sociologists have likewise spoken of the hyphenated ethnic. In both cases, the characteristics of each group overlap and the progression from one generation to the next follows a similar trajectory. The hyphen initially represented older North Americans' hesitation to accept the newcomer; it was their way to "hold him at `hyphen's length,' so to speak, from the established community" (Aaron 213).(5) It further "signifies a tentative but unmistakable withdrawal" on the user's part, so that "mere geographical proximity" denies the newly arrived "full and unqualified national membership despite ... legal qualifications and...official disclaimers to the contrary" (213). Of the different stages of the hyphenate writer, Helen Barolini represents the third-stage writer who travels from the margin to the mainstream "viewing it (i.e., mainstream = dominant culture) no less critically, perhaps, but more knowingly" than the previous first- and second-stage writer. Having appropriated the dominant group's culture and the tools necessary to succeed in that culture--the skill of manipulating, for instance, a language acceptable to the dominant group--and more strongly than his/her predecessors, this third-stage writer feels entitled to the intellectual and cultural heritage of the dominant group. As such, she can also, from a personal viewpoint, "speak out uninhibitedly as an American."(6) This writer, moreover, as Aaron reminds us, does not renounce or abandon the cultural heritage of his/her marginalized group. Instead, s/he transcends "a mere parochial allegiance" in order to transport "into the province of the [general] imagination," personal experiences which for the first-stage ("local colorist") and second-stage ("militant protester") writer "comprised the very stuff of their literary material" (215). …