La Madre
Dedalus European Classics
General Editor: Timothy Lane
La Madre
(The Woman and the Priest)
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,
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ISBN printed book 978 1 912868 63 6
ISBN ebook 978 1 912868 64 3
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Publishing History
First published in Italy in 1920
First English translation in 1922
First published by Dedalus in 1987
New edition in 2021
Introduction & chronology copyright © Eric Lane 1987
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Italian Literature from Dedalus
Italian Language Literature in translation is an important part of the Dedalus list.
Titles currently available include:
Senso (and other stories) – Camillo Boito
L’Innocente (the Victim) – Gabriele D’Annunzio
La Madre (The Woman and the Priest) – Grazia Deledda
Cleopatra Goes to Prison – Claudia Durastanti
Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter – Margherita Giacobino
The Price of Dreams – Margherita Giacobino
God’s Dog – Diego Marani
The Interpreter – Diego Marani
The Last of the Vostyachs – Diego Marani
New Finnish Grammar – Diego Marani
Venice Noir – Isabella Panfido
The Mussolini Canal – Antonio Pennacchi
The Late Mattia Pascal – Luigi Pirandello
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio – Luigi Pirandello
I Malavoglia – Giovanni Verga
Mastro Don Gesualdo – Giovanni Verg
Short Sicilian Novels – Giovanni Verga
Sparrow, Temptation & Cavalleria Rusticana – Giovanni Verga
INTRODUCTION TO GRAZIA DELEDDA’S LA MADRE
(The Woman and the Priest) or The Mother
Sardinia, like the neighbouring island of Corsica is mainly mountainous and heavily wooded. Apart from a few flat areas on the coast, it is thinly populated. The port city of Cagliari and Sassari are its main centres, where the culture of the Italian mainland predominates. Inland, away from the luxury beach resorts of the Costa Smeralda, life is still lived in isolated communities and based on agriculture. Flocks of goats and women dressed in black are everywhere. One does not have to imagine too hard to conjure up the past. Italian is a foreign language, and is spoken with a fullness and clarity which makes it easier to understand for the visitor than on the mainland. The local language Sard is closer to Latin than Italian, so the two do not easily blend together. The cooking and the wine are excellent and distinctive. As a student I gained a taste here for horse steak, which appears frequently on the menu, and a desire to penetrate the enclosed world of the inland villages. The nearest I came to discovering this hidden world of the past was in the novels of Grazia Deledda.
Deledda wrote of a society which had hardly changed from that which the Romans found when they colonized the island. The conquering armies of the Vandals, Lombards, Arabs, Pisans, Genoese, Catalans, Spaniards and Italians had little impact on the isolated hill villages. They would occupy the coasts and leave the inland untouched. It is only the latter part of the twentieth century with its new roads, modern communications and above all the television that has started to change the remote villages of Sardinia. But like the Christianity of its conquerors, the change is often more apparent than real with the traditions and customs of two thousand years stubbornly resisting change. It is this world locked in a never changing past which is the subject matter of nearly all Grazia Deledda’s fiction, and that gives a fascination and a richness of texture which makes her writing unique.
Grazia Deledda was born in Nuoro in 1871, a hill top town not far from the North East coast. Her education consisted in going to the local primary school, and in voracious reading in her teens of the novels and poetry of the romantics. She was only fifteen when her first short story was published in a local paper. A succession of short stories and her first novel, were published in newspapers and magazines before she was twenty. In her twenties the influence of the romantics gave way to that of Verga and verism. What Verga achieved for the fishermen and peasants of Sicily, Deledda began to do for the shepherds of Sardinia. Her work started to be known outside Sardinia and attract critical acclaim, especially from Luigi Capuana.
In 1899, she left Nuoro for the first time, and settled in Cagliari, the island’s capital, where she met Palmiro Madesani, a civil servant. They were married the next year and transferred to Rome. It is now that Grazia Deledda found her voice as a novelist. Living away from Sardinia, she recreated it in her fiction for an evergrowing public. From Elias Portolu published in 1903 we are reading the work of a mature artist which culminates with the publication of La Madre in 1920, and the international acclaim of the Nobel Prize in 1927.
* * *
La Madre is a study of three taciturn individuals in an isolated and primitive society. Passion is put into the scales with social conformity and is outweighed. The instinctive desire of the young to love, even when it is not allowed, in the world of the 1980’s would carry all before it. The priest would renounce his vocation, the young woman her social position and the mother accept the unacceptable, thinking of the grandchildren which would come. Of the three people concerned, it is the mother whose arguments triumphed, as she offers the easiest path; the acceptance of the social order and the subjugation of passion and individuality to duty. There is no clear decision; no assertion of will, more the fear of the result of confronting the situation that their emotions have created for them.
During his last meeting with the woman, the priest seems constantly about to renounce his vocation and follow his passion. It is this inability to assert one’s will that gives the situation its intensity. In the dialogue between the mother and the son, the priest and the woman, the passions never explode forth or dominate. There are no D.H. Lawrence style arguments or confrontations. The dilemna confronting the major characters is acted out inside their own mind and not with each other. We are shown the situation first through the mother’s eyes: a woman who has sacrificed everything to make her son a priest and sees it all about to be lost by his rashness. To be a priest is to escape the misery of being poor, not to follow God. It is the path of the ambitious peasant mother who wants her son to succeed in life. As the book proceeds she wavers in her steadfastness, seeing in her son’s desire to have a woman nothing unreasonable and pities him in his predicament. Having renounced for herself the very things her son wants she can accept that he should have them, despite the problems this would cause. The dilemna is unresolved in her mind. She seems ready to go where the wind will blow her.
The son, whose priesthood is a mixture of ambition and vocation, reflects on his earlier sensual experiences. It is as if the past on which he closed the door with his vow of celibacy is reasserting itself. There is something of Adam enjoying the forbidden fruit in his pleasure, without the bravado to face the consequences of his actions. Although he lacks the courage to leave with Agnes, there is the feeling that if she had been able to assert herself she would have had her way and the priest would have followed her. The book ends with Agnes renouncing revenge and accepting the responsibilities of her position in society. It is her acceptance not to act which gives the story its ending. The lack of a clear decision from anyone and the passive acceptance of what is easier makes the story modern in its tone. Temptation and its rejection, in an Old Testament biblical, if not primevil way, dominates a lot of Grazia Deledda’s work. Not so here. Nothing is rejected, temptation conjures morality with only weakness leaving the characters conforming to what society sees as their duty.
The power of the book is in the emotional intensity and claustrophobia which builds up within the characters, while everything is muted in the outer world. This gives a heightened effect to the subdued dialogue and controlled exchanges of the characters with the reader sharing in their anxiety, willing them to do something and decide, rather than drifting into passivity and the acceptance not to act. We are yelling for them, putting words in their mouth which do not fit comfortably into the primitive world of Sardinia. It is here where the books fascination lies. What is fundamentally a modern tale about human relationships complicated by social values rests on a world anchored in the never changing past. The paganism of these simple people’s religion; the hunter with his strange ways; the exorcism and the overriding superstitions and the belief in the supernatural conjure up a world which has no place in the twentieth century.
Relief floods through the reader when Agnes does not denounce Paul in his own church. He has been saved, with grand emotions, like love, revenge and scandal buried in the past. Despite a feeling that he has not acted as he ought, the time for renunciation coming before and not after the consummation of love, he gains the reader’s sympathy. But the book has an unexpected twist in almost its last gasp. The mother who has willed him to be a priest and who has waited anxiously in the church during the Mass to see what Agnes will do, has died. She has redeemed her son by the ultimate sacrifice. Paul who has given up Agnes under the promptings of his mother, has been left with nothing. His mother has been taken from him, his love rejected and only his shaken vocation is left. As he puts it in his own interior monologue; a door has been shut on his life and a kind of living death awaits him. So we are left with an unsatisfactory solution from an individual’s point of view, even if it gives an acceptable one to society.
I am surprised that Grazia Deledda has not been rescued from the obscurity of being out of print in this country by one of the feminist presses. A perceptive and gifted woman writer, who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, with an individual voice should not be neglected. How good a writer is Grazia Deledda? Underrated in Italy as she does not write in the grand manner and is a regional novelist and not the exponent of any mainstream literary movement, she is still firmly established as an author of outstanding talent, if not of the highest ability. I would put her among the very best Italian writers of the twentieth century, with only the verist novelist, Giovanni Verga, and his fellow Sicilian, Luigi Pirandello, superior to her in talent and achievement.
Her reputation is long overdue for revaluation and the reappearance of La Madre in English and the recent translation of Elias Portolu (available from Quartet Books) should lead to her getting the attention she is due from the English speaking world. There really are not that many writers of this talent around for Grazia Deledda to rest in the cobwebs of obscurity. She shares the neglect that Italian Literature receives abroad, which is doubly sad, as it is praise abroad that brings Italian authors due recognition at home.
Eric Lane 1987.
CHAPTER ONE
To-night again Paul was preparing to go out, it seemed.
From her room adjoining his the mother could hear him moving about furtively, perhaps waiting to go out until she should have extinguished her light and got into bed.
She put out her light, but she did not get into bed.
Seated close against the door, she clasped her hands tightly together, those work-worn hands of a servant, pressing the thumbs one upon the other to give herself courage; but every moment her uneasiness increased and overcame her obstinate hope that her son would sit down quietly, as he used to do, and begin to read, or else go to bed. For a few minutes, indeed, the young priest’s cautious steps were silent. She felt herself all alone. Outside, the noise of the wind mingled with the murmuring of the trees which grew on the ridge of high ground behind the little presbytery; not a high wind, but incessant, monotonous, that sounded as though it were enveloping the house in some creaking, invisible band, ever closer and closer, trying to uproot it from its foundations and drag it to the ground.
The mother had already closed the house door and barricaded it with two crossed bars, in order to prevent the devil, who on windy nights roams abroad in search of souls, from penetrating into the house. As a matter of fact, however, she put little faith in such things. And now she reflected with bitterness, and a vague contempt of herself, that the evil spirit was already inside the little presbytery, that it drank from her Paul’s cup and hovered about the mirror he had hung on the wall near his window.
Just then she heard Paul moving about again. Perhaps he was actually standing in front of the mirror, although that was forbidden to priests. But what had Paul not allowed himself for some considerable time now?
The mother remembered that lately she had several times come upon him gazing at himself in the glass like any woman, cleaning and polishing his nails, or brushing his hair, which he had left to grow long and then turned back over his head, as though trying to conceal the holy mark of the tonsure. And then he made use of perfumes, he brushed his teeth with scented powder, and even combed out his eyebrows.
She seemed to see him now as plainly as though the dividing wall did not exist, a black figure against the white background of his room; a tall, thin figure, almost too tall, going to and fro with the heedless steps of a boy, often stumbling and slipping about, but always holding himself erect. His head was a little too large for the thin neck, his face pale and overshadowed by the prominent forehead that seemed to force the brows to frown and the long eyes to droop with the burden of it. But the powerful jaw, the wide, full mouth and the resolute chin seemed in their turn to revolt with scorn against this oppression, yet not be able to throw it off.
But now he halted before the mirror and his whole face lighted up, the eyelids opened to the full and the pupils of his clear brown eyes shone like diamonds.
Actually, in the depths of her maternal heart, his mother delighted to see him so handsome and strong, and then the sound of his furtive steps moving about again recalled her sharply to her anxiety.
He was going out, there could be no more doubt about that. He opened the door of his room and stood still again. Perhaps he, too, was listening to the sounds without, but there was nothing to be heard save the encircling wind beating ever against the house.
The mother made an effort to rise from her chair, to cry out ‘My son, Paul, child of God, stay here!’ but a power stronger than her own will kept her down. Her knees trembled as though trying to rebel against that infernal power; her knees trembled, but her feet refused to move, and it was as though two compelling hands were holding her down upon her seat.