Anna Banti and the (Im)possibility of Love

Book excerpt: This book looks into Banti’s stance on Italian feminism, with a specific focus on her interpretation of the concept of “equality” as well as of “sexual difference”. An analysis of a novel, A Piercing Cry (1981), and two short stories, The Women Are Dying (1951) and Je vous écris d’un pays lointain (1971), explores the aforementioned issues. The book also deals to some extent with the most famous of Banti’s works, the magnum opus Artemisia (1947). Because A Piercing Cry is a source of autobiographical elements, which therefore are particularly significant, the conclusions drawn from this novel are later applied to The Women Are Dying and Je vous écris d’un pays lointain. Certainly, A Piercing Cry expresses Banti’s faith in difference as being that which can preserve woman’s identity. By declaring “I am a woman writer”, she distances herself from a feminism of equality that, not without oscillations, she had supported throughout Artemisia. In so doing, she embraces a feminism of difference by adopting this concept herself. Drawing on these considerations, the book argues that in both The Women Are Dying, and in Je vous écris d’un pays lointain, Banti intended to support a personally elaborated and ante-litteram “feminism of difference”.