SOURCE: "Designing Mothers: Images of Motherhood in Novels by Aleramo, Morante, Maraini, and Fallaci," in Annali d'Italianistica, Vol. 7, 1989, pp. 325-40.

In the following excerpt, Pickering-Iazzi compares the treatment of women and motherhood in novels by Fallaci and three other Italian writers.

For its poetical suggestiveness and socio-cultural significance, motherhood has been a central interpretative image for twentieth-century women writers, designed to express female existence in its personal and social dimensions. The content and configurations of the maternal images in Una donna, La storia, Donna in guerra, and Lettera a un bambino mai nato [Letter to a Child Never Born] explain ways in which women writers conceptualize maternity, delineating the essential designs of motherhood as social institution and as personal experience. Aleramo, seeking to create an authentic rendering of female existence, articulates the protagonist's intimate drama of entrapment within the socially imposed maternal role and her escape for purposeful...