Resumo de A Woman - Sibilla Aleramo

The story told is as tragic as it is typical for the age of the
horse between the nineteenth and early twentieth century... and
unfortunately later on. Sibilla''s family of origin is bourgeois: a
father resourceful and original but authoritarian, and a mother
submissive and dejected with fragile nerves, a pale figure beside her
exuberant husband.

The authoress as a child is bright, clever and sensitive, the eldest
daughter of four, and her parent''s favourite. She appears at first
idealized and mythicized, probably in line with the Oedipus complex
typical at her age.

When Sibilla is twelve years old, the father decides to move from
Milan to a small town in the South, where he has been encharged with
the direction of a chemical plant. Her beloved studies are interrupted;
Sibilla works as an employee in her father''s factory. She likes being
independent and as free as possible. Her sense of moral isolation grows
with regard to her family and above all with regard to the inhabitants
of the country with hypocritical, shabby, ignorant mentalities. The
young woman perceives an ever increasing lack of harmony and agreement
between her parents; the mother slips inexorably into depression ending
up trying to kill herself, the husband becomes unfaithful. Their
relationship becomes ever colder, until her mother''s mental imbalance
becomes so serious that she has to be confined to a mental hospital. In
the meanwhile Sibilla develops; at fifteen she gets to know an employee
of her father who deceives and then rapes her. When a little over
sixteen she will marry him without saying a word to anyone of the rape
and the doors will be opened for her to a sort of prison, in which she
will spend ten years of her life. She becomes a mother at seventeen,
chained - for the sake of her love for her child - to a violent and
ignorant man. Collapsed for ever the strong father-figure she could
always look to - the father continues being unfaithful to his wife and
is despotic and tyrannical with the workers. Sibilla looks in vain for
level ground and for fulfilment, for her impossible, in her only rôle,
that of wife and mother. She also attempts suicide.

The autobiography here becomes also a story of the development of
her mature adult character: little by little, with alternating phases
and not without pain, the protagonist comes, in the span of ten years,
to the definitive decision to leave the family - above all her adored
son - to follow her human and literary vocation and be, as far as
possible, a free and independent woman. The leaving of the conjugal
roof, has the legal consequence of losing the rights to her child and
thus the separation becomes as ever more tearing and dramatic, as
necessary.

The turns of events as told by Aleramo constitute a very remarkable
testimony on the condition of the woman in the only just unified Italy;
they reveal the vexations, the violence, the threats and the prejudices
to which women were subjected: granted no autonomy or independence,
expected to submit, they were forced into prearranged rôles from which
they could not escape or only with great difficulty. The text does not
however indulge in pity or pietism, but affirms and describes very
bravely the reality, searching for, where possible, solutions that
involve as much women - often responsible for their own submission and
the stagnation with which they try to live - as men, invited to open
their eyes and change their mentality.

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