“I am not a bold person,” Barolini has written. “But I have Calabrian ancestry, which means I am tenacious” (Chiaroscuro 37). For once, despite my profound aversion to stereotypes, I bow respectfully to the testardaggine, the stubbornness of the Calabrians, the resilience of Umbertina—its story, its characters, and its author. Umbertina, Marguerite, and Tina are for Italian American women what Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie Woods, Alice Walker’s Celie, and Toni Morrison’s Sethe have become for African American women, and Sandra Cisneros’s Esperanza Cordero for Chicana women: not cut-out figures or models to emulate, but complicated characters who capture the conflicts, failings, and achievements of their gender and their cultures. As Italian American literature takes its place in the American canon, Italian American women writers’ stories will continue to speak to larger constituencies of readers, for these stories are rooted in the cultural history of America—a history that writers like Barolini do not merely recount, but challenge and transform.

Edvige Giunta

Jersey City, New Jersey

September 1998

NOTES

1. I have written about my symbolic and literal search for Italian American women’s books in my essay “Blending ‘Literary’ Discourses: Helen Barolini’s Italian/American Narratives.”

2. A hardcover book club edition was also published by the Literary Guild. As sources for Umbertina’s publication history and for details of Helen Barolini’s biography, I have used Barolini’s interviews with Bonetti (American Audio Prose Library) and Greenberg (MELUS), in addition to my own personal correspondence and conversations with Barolini.

3. For a further discussion of Italian American women’s exclusion from the literary canon see Giunta, “A Song from the Ghetto,” the afterword to Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish. On Italian American women’s literary history see Bona, Claiming a Tradition.

4. Among the books noted by many critics as missing from the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the one hundred “greatest” twentieth-century novels in English (chosen by a committee of nine white men and one white woman) is The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s feminist classic of a woman’s painful quest for livable life and a meaningful identity in a resolutely patriarchal world. Other feminist “quest” novels by authors such as Marilyn French and Mary Gordon have achieved popular success, but similarly been written out of the “canon” everywhere but in women’s studies courses. Also conspicuously absent from the Modern Library list is any novel by Nobel Prize winner-Toni Morrison, including the novel many consider her finest, Beloved, which traces the experiences and legacies of women over several generations of an African American family.

5. On the status and recent development of Italian American literary studies see Bona, “The State of Italian American Studies in the 1990s: Topics and Texts,” Gardaphé, “The Evolution of Italian American Literary Studies,” and Giunta, “Crossing Borders in Italian/American Women’s Studies.”