SOURCE: “Fear of the Mother's Tongue: Secrecy and Gossip in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi,” in MLN, Vol. 113, No. 1, January, 1998, pp. 30-51.

In the following essay, Ferlito examines the mother-daughter relationship in Manzoni's I promessi sposi and the ways in which gossip both defines and undermines female relationships.

Victoria Goddard, in her study of women's sexuality and group identity in Naples, rethinks the question of how codes of honor and shame are constructed and defended by examining the importance of women's role as “bearers,” perhaps, as “the bearers of group identity.”¹ Following in the wake of Mary Douglas's work on the body and rituals of pollution,² Goddard foregrounds the responsibility that women have in maintaining and perpetuating a group identity:

If women are seen as the boundary markers and the carriers of group identity, it follows that their ‘integrity’ should be safeguarded. The concept of the group can operate...