Taken as a complex whole, Messina’s short stories (as opposed to her novels set outside Sicily) may be read not only as complex commentaries on the lives of Sicilian women, but also as a continuous “counter history” to women’s lives in other Western cultures. Viewed in this light, Messina’s work is again curiously and characteristically Sicilian. The island’s resistance to change—its tragically missed appointment with history—is a theme that finds a consistent and efficacious vein in the larger body of Sicilian literature from Verga to Consolo (Onofri 2003). By way of parallel in Messina’s narratives, this same historic immobility and the immutability of economic laws are mirrored in the static nature of women’s lives.

Unfaltering adherence to behavioral codes inevitably seals the fates of Messina’s characters. Bobò renounces love and surrenders to the wishes of an avaricious brother; Vanna initially submits to the will of a family who forces her return to a husband she does not love; Caterina subjects herself to the humiliation of the “marriage market” in order to please her aunts and father. When the exercise of free will collides with paternal authority, Messina’s protagonists subvert their desires and bow to the interests of family, even when such interests are exposed as hypocritical and motivated by self-interest. Most disturbing, yet most predictable is that the great majority of Messina’s protagonists perceive their sacrifice as necessary for the family’s collective welfare and are thus incapable of viewing themselves as victims.

In “Casa paterna” (“Her Father’s House”), the family is no longer the nurturing refuge envisioned by Verga but rather a menacing instrument of coercion, its members more preoccupied with decorum than with the well-being of a loving daughter. Vanna’s “rash” action has undermined her husband’s undisputed authority, compromised the honor of her family, and threatened the future marital prospects of her younger sister. Through her use of irony (Vanna’s mother “had failed to inculcate in her daughter those sentiments of submission and sacrifice that are a woman’s principle virtue”), Messina condemns the lack of autonomy accorded Sicilian women and makes a powerful statement regarding male “ownership” that is reminiscent of Sibilla Alermo’s Una donna (A Woman [1906]) and Grazia Deledda’s “Battesimi” (“Baptisms” [1926]). Vanna’s presumed death by suicide constitutes a rare step for a Messina protagonist—both a silent protest against the demeaning alternatives she faces as well as a symbolic exercise of the free will denied her: “the choice of death over life when life has become little more than a deathlike existence” (Magistro 1996, 117).