“Ti–nesciu” (“I Take You Out”), aptly titled in Sicilian for its pointed portrayal of provincial life, reaffirms Borgese’s critique and sheds light on Messina’s conflicted views about her traditional society. The author leaves little doubt that the reckless behavior of the widowed Scialabba has compromised his daughter’s future and thrown the pair’s financial situation into uncertainty. But Messina also goes to great lengths to paint the aging lawyer not as a domineering patriarch, but as an unwitting victim of his own slavishness to propriety. “With his frayed but sparkling white collar” and desire to be perceived as a gentleman (as in his habit “of always speaking Italian with his daughter and the peasants”), the mild-mannered Scialabba cuts a decorous and benevolent figure. Messina would almost have us forget that he is a man so wholly consumed by personal honor that he has been blinded to his daughter’s suffering.

The evening walks of father and daughter underscore the relentless monotony of provincial existence; the silence the two share, a tacit recognition of the emptiness that defines their lives. The author’s empathy for the tormented Liboria is barely concealable in the secretly commissioned sale of her corredo. Yet, the anguish of the scene is surpassed in the wrenching, quasi-grotesque depictions of father and daughter who respond instinctively to the demands of class. Stoic in the face of ridicule, Scialabba and Liboria faithfully don their Pirandellian masks each evening to participate in the ritual Sicilian promenade: “It was necessary to be seen.”

As Messina moves in the direction of psychological narratives that explore the oppressive nature of women’s lives (a reality with which she was intimately familiar), she increasingly lends her own consciousness to her characters. Turning her artistic lens onto the penury of her own class and into respectable houses where young women languish behind closed doors, the author exposes the implications of Sicily’s unshakable economic laws on those “too polite to speak out; too weak to rebel.” Messina understood well the economic forces that fostered the control of women in her society and the mechanisms designed to enforce them. Her own parents’ unhappy marriage was the result of such interference (A. Messina 1988, 12). The frequency with which arranged marriage, spinsterhood, and similar themes appear in the collections Le briciole del destino (The Crumbs of Destiny [1918]), Il guinzaglio (The Leash [1921]), and Ragazze siciliane (Sicilian Girls [1921]) testifies that there was still ample room on the canvas of Italian verismo for additional paint long after it had exhausted itself as a literary movement (Baldini 1918).