SOURCE: Anderlini, Serena. “The Advertisement: Homoeroticism and Gender in Natalia Ginzburg's Drama.” Esperienze Letterarie 15, no. 2 (April 1990): 67-82.

In the following essay, Anderlini asserts that the relationship between the two female characters in The Advertisement provides insight into the Italian feminist movement of the 1960s.

The Advertisement is a pre-new feminist Italian drama by Natalia Ginzburg, a part-Jewish female writer prominent in the national, post world war two literary scene; the play premiered in London in 1968 and is symbolic of the writer's concern with the new feminism and the intersubjective rapports among women that it brought about. The play occupies a central position in Ginzburg's dramaturgy: the homoerotic complicity of the two female characters reflects Ginzburg's effort to refocus her attention from the women of her own generation to those of the following one, who, born during the ‘baby-boom’, in the seventies became the rank and file of Italian...