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Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino

Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at TempleUniversity. She received her Masters Degree in Creative Writing in English and her Ph.D.in English from Temple University. She has published many short stories and poems in literary journals as well as various articles on Italian American women's writing. Her critical study: Revisionary Identites: Strategies for Impowerment in the Writings of Italian American Women was just published by Lang in 2000 and is available at Amazon.com or on the Lang web site.

"The saying is that in the house where rosemary thrives, the women of that house are its strength."

- Helen Barolini Umbertina

"The tapes he left for his autobiography are for both of us to discover our roots, he says, the ways Jews and Blacks are doing. "It's time for us immigrant guineas to tell our story of struggle and prejudice, too. I'm so damned tired of Hollywood stereotype, the damned Mafia media blitz. Very few of us are the way Hollywood says!"

- Daniela Gioseffi One Minute to Midnight

RELATING TO OTHERS

When we look at the conflicts Italian/American women face in dealing with American society and American norms of behavior, no area of life foregrounds this battlefield more concretely than relationships. Italian peasants privilege the relationship and the family unit over the individuals who participate in it. They value connection and interdependence for all individuals. On the other hand, Western theories of psychological development, traditionally accepted as valid for all individuals by American theorists, conceive of growth and development as a movement away from connection and toward ever increasing levels of separation and personal independence. Freudian theory, built on the primacy of instinctual drives, places relationships between people in a secondary position to these drives in the formation of a self.

In 1976, Jean Baker Miller, in her book, Toward a New Psychology of Women, questioned the usefulness of attempting to understand women's growth by using male models such as Freud's. She argued that women's behavior and experiences did not seem to fit his theory.1 Because women do not separate as easily as men, and because relationships appear to be central to their personal development, when Freud's theory is used to assess women's growth, women are always judged as deficient. Because they are seen as less autonomous, they are seen as less mature.

Building on Miller's work, Carol Gilligan suggested that women's relational connection was central to a woman's sense of self, and that responsive relationships were a powerful determinant of women's psychological reality.2 Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, and Surrey explored and amplified Gilligan's thesis in a 1991 text, Women's Growth in Connection.3 In their introduction to the text, however, the authors make a surprising statement. They suggest that a relational perspective, one that shifts from the psychology of "The Self" to a psychology that recognizes that humans develop within relationships, and are really never totally independent and without a context, "does not apply to women's psychology only," but may be useful "to better understand men."4 They further suggest that this relational perspective "points to the need for a rethinking of our study of all people.

Italian American women writers differ widely in the way they envision relationships, depending on how deeply they have internalized American norms. Because these women writers have been academically successful enough to write poetry and fiction, we can assume that they are quite familiar with the assumptions of traditional psychological theories of development which are taught in American schools that equate autonomy with maturity. The more deeply American values have been internalized, the more the characters in their fiction envision successful relationships as ones that allow each member a great deal of independence. However, because they are women who had grown up in both the Italianpeasant culture and American society, these writers also bring to their task of writing about themselves and their differing worlds a strong focus on relationships that are mutual and empathetic and that allow distancing and separation needed to establish American independence. Their stories reflect a variety of negotiations to contain these contradictions. Frequently, the work reflects the internalization of conflicting ideologies and a tolerance for an ambiguous self-identity.

Several of the pieces in Mary Jo Bona's 1994 collection of recent Italian/American women's fiction, demonstrate these ambivalent strategies.5 "Planting, Amalia, April 1905," an excerpt from Mary Bush's novel in progress, presents the relationship between Serefine and his wife, Amalia; Amalia's relationship with her daughter, Isola; and various relationships among the group of Italian immigrants working on a cotton plantation at the turn of the century as envisioned by an Italian/American women writing in 1994.6

Jean Baker Miller's essay, "The Development of Women's Sense of Self," argues that "all [psychological] growth occurs within emotional connections not separate from them."7 She explains that "from the moment of birth the internal representation is of a self that is in active interchange with other selves."8 This connection, Miller argues, is to feel one's self "enhanced not threatened." Miller argues that "being in relationship, picking up the feelings of the other and attending to the `interaction between' becomes an accepted, `natural-seeming' way of being and acting."9

That Amalia and Serefine, in Bush's work, have a relationship that allows their interdependency to enhance their feelings of self is obvious in their conversation after dinner.....Amalia's relationship with her younger daughter, Isola, becomes a metaphor for the differences in relational models between Italian peasant and dominant American culture. Amalia takes Isola from the field to help prepare dinner. Isola does not want to go. She is more interested in her needs than the needs of the group. When Amalia takes her daughter's hand, Isola pulls her hand away saying, "I can walk by myself." Amalia thinks that "since they'd come here [to America]," Isola "turned wild in just a few months and was getting worse by the day." She thinks that it is the influence of "Americans" that is changing her daughter for the worse. "She was like the black ones she ran with: barefoot, refusing to work, contradictory."10

In many ways, Isola is characterized by Mary Bush to embody dominant cultural values of growth and development. Besides verbally expressing her autonomy and pulling her hand from her mother, she learns to ignore those people who would keep her bound in relationships instead of "free". Amalia thinks that "something wasn't right" with the girl because she "would keep doing whatever naughtiness she was up to even after you told her to stop. It was as if she didn't hear, or worse, as if she didn't care that she had heard."11 Isola is moving beyond the immigrant relationalsystem and into the dominant culture, where it is important to listen to an inner voice. Amalia reaches out to her in the familiar way. She continues to be puzzled by Isola's response because this distancing is not familiar to her, and is considered by her to be a direct result of the move to America: "She hadn't been like this back home."12....

Judith Jordan suggests that in order to empathize, "one must have a well-differentiated sense of self, in addition to an appreciation of and sensitivity to the differentness as well as the sameness of another person."13 Fiorenza and the others, in Bush's novel, have this strong sense of self, and are able to accept La Vecchia where she is. When the meeting is over, Fiorenza "pulls her mother away from the wine bottle she had polished to a glistening brightness," and the family leaves. On the way home, it is La Vecchia who recognizes that the object in the field, which everyone else thinks is a dangerous animal, is a plow. By relieving their tension and alleviating their fears that the "animal" may charge at them, she too, in her own way, contributes to everyone's survival. Bush has created a family structure that privileges interdependence.

In recreating Italian immigrant culture at the turn of the century from an end of the century perspective, Mary Bush has imagined different kinds of women's empowerment. Amalia and Fiorenza find their effectiveness and "power" in their ability to care for and give to others. Their self-esteem comes from their ability to empathize with others, and to develop relationships that thrive on mutuality. Isola is a strong personality also, but she is powerful in a way that models the Freudian view of maturity. She is able to separate from the group, and define her own needs separate from others. Bush, an Italian/American woman, readily recognizes both models as valid. Because both exist in her psyche, she can insert both into her novel. A problem arises when the two types of development clash in the personalities of Amalia and Isola. They do not understand each other because they value opposing qualities in a relationship.

A short story in Mary Jo Bona's collection, "Bernie Becomes a Nun," by Susan J. Leonardi, depicts a very different world from that of Mary Bush.14 Mary Bush's story is told from the perspective of Amalia, the Italian immigrant, whose feelings and thoughts can only be imagined by the Italian/American author. Susan J. Leonardi's story is told from the perspective of an Italian/American woman, the age of the author herself, whose thoughts and emotions come from a background similar to the author's. "Bernie Becomes a Nun" portrays the adolescence and mid-life crisis of a first generation Italian/American woman who grew up in mid-century. Bernadette Palermo succeeds in the American world that values education and independent choices, despite the fact that her relationships with her parents and nine brothers and sisters seem to her like obstacles in her path.

In this family, primarily because Bernie's values are heavilyinfluenced by American cultural norms that she absorbs from movies, (Hitch Your Wagon to a Star), books, (Bernie Becomes A Nun), her non-Italian best friend, Maureen O'Connor, and school, the immigrant parents and their first generation daughter are frequently pulled apart by different value systems. They often have difficulty understanding and empathizing with each other.
Leonardi uses the difficulties with her protagonist's name to symbolize the cultural differences within the family. Bernie prefers to be called Bernadette, a more formal, less familial name, but everyone in her family calls her Bernie. Her grandmother in Italy thinks her name is Benedetta because Bernadette is not an Italian name. The protagonist searches throughout the story for a "family" different from her own where she can be validated, and where she will be called Bernadette. In Mary Bush's story, the immigrant family, as a unit, stands against the exploitation of the American system; while in this story, the first generation daughter internalizes much of the dominant culture, and joins with it in rejecting the values of the immigrants. It is as though Planting were told from Isola's perspective, instead of Amalia's....

Bernie finds fulfillment in academic successes which her parents do not value. She likes to read. However, Bernie's mother does not value this pursuit and complains to Bernie that she spends "all her time with her nose in a book and should be helping out more around the house."15 Because academics are enjoyable to her, she wants to attend college and become a doctor. Her father refuses to fill out the financial aid application. She never bothers to tell her mother that she wants to be a doctor because their different perspectives on things prevent empathy. Bernie does not experience the close connections with her family that Mary Bush imagines exist between immigrants like Amalia, Fiorenza, and La Vecchia, who share a singular value system.

When Bernie graduates from high school, she becomes a nun, more by default than by active choice: "She loved God and she needed to get out of the house . . . other prospects didn't seem good. . . . She had darker than acceptable skin, a big nose . . . and twelve pounds more than the chart recommended."16 She has internalized American notions of beauty, and judges herself to be unacceptable for marriage.

After twenty-five years in the convent, Bernie comes home for a week-long visit with her family. There is no empathy between mother and daughter. Bernie's mother recognizes Bernie's mid-life crisis and tries to understand it from her own immigrant perspective. She asks her daughter if she misses having a husband and children: "Is that it? I can't blame you for that, honey. Nobody would blame you for that."17 For Mrs. Palermo, her relationships with her children and her husband are vital to her identity, and she assumes that Bernie feels similarly. Bernie immediately rejects the notion of happiness springing from family life byfocusing on the unpleasant tasks mothers do. She says, "I've changed enough diapers to last anyone a lifetime."18 Judith Jordan suggests that "the early attachment and identification between mother and daughter profoundly affects the way the self is defined in women as well as the nature of their interpersonal relatedness."19 Bernie has not been able to identify completely with her mother because she has been influenced by American culture in ways that her mother has not. Mrs. Palermo does not understand Bernie's educational goals, her rejection of motherhood, and her acceptance of American values. The daughters of Italian immigrants, growing up in America, have a more difficult task in finding a self because the culture they are growing up in is always denigrating the value system of their mothers. Jordan further suggests that "the more frequent mirroring, mutual identification, and more accurate empathy may all strengthen the girl's sense of relatedness, connection, and a feeling of being directly, emotionally understood."20 Bernie has not experienced this type of relationship with her mother, and, at the age of forty-three, she feels overwhelmed and distanced from her family....
An excerpt from Dorothy Calvetti Bryant's novel The Test, focuses on the painful relationship between a middle-aged Italian/American woman, Pat, and her recently widowed, aged, immigrant father. The story is a first person narrative, told by Pat, whose words indicate she would prefer a more supportive connection, but whose actions prevent this.
It is important to note that the immigrant father is not a southern Italian peasant, but a skilled worker from northern Italy, who was able to move across the United States, and settle in California because he "had industrial as well as farming skills . . . could work his way across the country . . . could fix cars and graft trees and build tables and make wine and tear down a motor and wire up a radio."21 These skills push Pat's father out of the peasant class, and enable him to move more easily into the American middle class. He was familiar with capitalism and the separation of the public and private sphere before he left Italy. His wife was not an immigrant, but an Italian/American woman from a southern peasant family.

When the story begins, Pat is making her weekly visit to the old man who lives alone. These weekly visits have become a ritual which Pat feels an obligation to perform but which bring neither her nor her father joy...

I want to suggest that the father and daughter in this story do not connect emotionally or psychologically because of their internalizations of the American cultural mandate, what David Bakan (1966) calls the "agentic ethic," at the expense of the "communal ethic."22 Bakan argues that American society overemphasizes self-protective, assertive, individualistic, achievement oriented personality traits anddevalues the idea of being at one with other organisms characterized by contact or union.23

In Calvetti's novel, although they discuss the same issues week after week, Pat is never influenced by her father's words. He never changes as a result of what she says to him. Their conversations are not real communications, but rather reinforcements of their own rigid positions. itself. She was just another of his possession....
Pat's values are in many ways similar to her father's, although she never recognizes this. She too prefers "doing" for him rather than "feeling" with him. When he explains how he feels in his house without his wife, she does not accept his feelings and empathize. She tries to deny his feelings. He says, "I shouldn't be alone here. It's the loneliness that kills you. Alone here all the time. Nobody."24 Pat moves away from an emotional connection toward rational facts, as though knowing the facts will change his feelings. She says, "Dad you are not alone all the time. I come every Wednesday, Flora on Mondays. Rosetta cleans Fridays, and Aunt Eva drops by on Saturday."25 She denies his feelings because Pat is not interested in changing her life to accommodate her father.

The dissonance between father and daughter stems from each individual's fear that relationships that involve emotional connection threaten autonomy.....
What Pat recognizes, but has not achieved, is the mutuality and empathy experienced between Rosetta and her mother. This relationship was possible because Rosetta and Lina spent time together, but also because they were obviously willing to be emotionally available to each other. Several factors made this connection possible. I would argue that because both women came from a peasant heritage that valued relationships, they desired that closeness, and they knew how to achieve it. Pat's father, not being a peasant, focussed on acquiring objects. Pat has internalized much of his value system. Jordan suggests that the benefits to the individuals willing to participate in a relationship of intersubjective mutuality is that they not only become more aware of others, but also more aware of themselves. 26 Pat, who does not know how to relate in this way, does not recognize how similar she is to her father. She does not know herself.

The excerpt from Daniela Gioseffi's novel Americans: One Minute to Midnight, also collected in The Voices We Carry, presents a series of parent-child relationships.27 The text is written as a journal that Dorissa, a woman of about fifty who is incarcerated for civil disobedience, is keeping for her daughter, a young woman who is helping "the suffering people of Nicaragua and El Salvador" with her skills as a computer whiz. Dorissa has not heard from her daughter, Amy,in a month and in that time Dorissa's lover Yanos has blown himself up protesting the fact that he suffered exposure to radiation when he was a soldier, her Italian immigrant father has died leaving her tapes of his life story beginning with his ocean voyage to America, and Dorissa has been arrested.

Gioseffi writes the novel in two voices. Dorissa tells her story to Amy as a first person narrative, and Dorissa's father, Donatuccio, tells his story to her in the first person also. The text alternates narratives. In chronological order the parent-child relationships begin with Lucia, the immigrant woman and her oldest son, Donatuccio; then Donatuccio's relationship with his daughter, Dorissa; and finally Dorissa's relationship to her daughter, Amy Kelly. The three women in these relationships appear to be empowered, that is, according to Jean Baker Miller's definition, "they have the capacity to move or to produce change."28 Lucia has left Italy with her two surviving children, one of whom dies and is buried at sea, Dorissa has been a social activist for well over twenty years, and Amy, a recent college graduate, has chosen to volunteer in Central America. Although these women do act in the world, and are not in dependent relationships with men who define them, they do not exist and function in isolation. They are both empowered and in relationships.
Janet Surrey defines psychological empowerment as a process that takes place in relationship.29 According to Surrey psychological empowerment is "the motivation, freedom, and capacity to act purposefully, with the mobilization of the energies, resources, strengths, or powers of each person through a mutual, relational process."30 Because of this definition, she suggests that "personal empowerment can be viewed only through . . . the establishment of mutually empathetic and mutually empowering relationships."31 Surrey notes that one of women's particular sources of strength is the power to empower others in healthy parent-child development. Surrey prefers to call this interaction mutual empowerment rather than nurturing because she does not want to think of this process as one-directional. The child and the parent engage in an interactive process from the child's birth. Surrey states that, according to research, newborns can regulate contact with the mother by averting the gaze. Surrey does not believe that the mother takes herself out of the picture to focus on the child, but rather acts in such a way as to "create, sustain, and deepen the connections that empower."32

If we look at the original parent-child relationship in this story, the relationship between Lucia and Donatuccio, we can see a mutually empowering interaction. Lucia has no "secrets" from her son who is eight years old at the time. She does not set up a hierarchical relationship in which the "protective" mother keeps unpleasant news from the child. Onthe ship to America, Donatuccio's sister contracts scarlet fever, a fatal disease at the time. While Lucia was with her daughter, Donatuccio nearly fell over the side of the ship, and had to be rescued by a sailor. When Lucia is reunited with her son, she says to him, "I told you to stay out in the fresh air so you won't catch the fever! I'm watching your sister die in the stinking hold they call a hospital! Gesu, must you drown yourself? Dio mio."33 After her words to Donatuccio, Lucia, still speaking Italian and crying "wildly," turns to thank the sailor for saving her son's life. We have evidence that the relationship between Donatuccio and his mother differs from the relationship between Pat and her father in Dorothy Bryant's story because Donatuccio immediately understands how his mother is feeling. He says, "My mother thanked the sailor as she backed away. . . . She was always too humble and polite. Maybe she mistook the sailor's leer for il mal occhio.34
Surrey suggests that mothers and daughters, within American society, are empowered as relational beings through their capacity to "see" and "respond to" the other and to engage in interaction that leaves both people more aware of self and other and therefore more energized to act. This ability to act in relationship has been described as response/ability.35 Lucia and Donatuccio, mother and son, engage in this kind of relationship. When Lucia wipes her son's face she says to him, "I'll die if anything happens to you. . . . Your sister's dying."36 Donatuccio recognizes his mother's emotional state: "My mother held back tears. She had no one aboard that ship to talk with but me. . .

She was alone among strangers. . . . I could feel how frightened she was."37 He is only eight years old, but he responds to her emotional need in a way that the characters in Bryant's novel cannot do. Donatuccio says, "I smiled to comfort her."38

For Surrey this response/ability is not limited to the momentary process of interaction, but implies an ongoing capacity "to act in relationship," to consider one's actions in light of other people's needs, feelings, and perceptions. Lucia and Donatuccio continue to develop their relationship in this way. For example, Donatuccio remembers that in Italy he was "smart at finding ways to help her with her work around the fields."39 He recognizes that on the ship both he and she are homesick for their mountain village. When Lucia is helpless to save her daughter, she expresses regret that she ever got married. Donatuccio is privileged to hear her words, that he says "she would never have dared to speak . . . to my father's face."40

As the long voyage continues, frightening rainstorms blow across the ship. Donatuccio realizes that Lucia is trying to comfort him and herself with happy stories about the mountain village they left. He says that on the voyagehe was "her obedient protector," an oxymoron in any other context, except that of a mutually empowering relationship. When his sister Rafaella was dying, his mother called out to her Bambina mia and eight-year-old Donatuccio patted his mother's head. Later, Lucia tries to cheer up her son by telling him to think back to the "warm wood fire in our cottage" and the "flowers dancing in Apulia."41
When Rafaella's body is tossed into the sea, Donatuccio says his mother "cried out as it fell," and he responding to her emotional state "tightened his grip on her hand." Immediately after this act of empathy, he thinks, "Even in my sorrow, I was glad to be alive above deck."42 Having engaged in an empowering interactive relationship with his mother, that is being able to recognize her psychological state and respond to it, Donatuccio becomes more aware of himself as a separate empowered person.

Because Donatuccio was able to engage in an empowering interactive relationship with his mother, he is able to understand and relate to his daughter in a similar way, which empowers her. Dorissa says this very thing about her father, "Grandma Lucia gave my father -- her lame Donatuccio -- the grace of empathy to live in others' skins and feel as they do."43 She writes to her daughter, that at her father's funeral "people felt they'd had the most special bond with him."44 Then she explains to her daughter the interaction between her father and herself. Unlike Pat in The Test, Dorissa's memories of her father involve time shared interacting. Because of this interaction and mutual empowerment, Dorissa believes she understands her father.

She says of him, "He was always teaching me the romance of everything, dramatizing photosynthesis, or making our kitchen table come alive with molecules or spinning electrons, explaining the components of matter. Growing glass crystals on a clothesline for my older sister. Thrilling us with all he knew of science and history. Quoting Dante, Shakespeare, Einstein. . . ."45 The way Donato went about imparting his knowledge to his daughters shows a response/ability. He "dramatized" photosynthesis. He made the kitchen table "come alive" with scientific information. He was a man whose education was shared with his children, on their level because he was aware of their feelings and "considered his actions in the light of their needs, feelings, and perceptions." He made abstraction concrete. This relationship was not one-directional. Before he died, Donato told his daughter, Dorissa, that she was "the poetry of his life -- a daughter he was proud of."46 This remark is a total acceptance of his daughter and her behavior, whether or not he agreed with her politics. Dorissa tells her daughter that her father was a man who shared what he had with his family: "He supported his whole big family on thirty-five dollars a week during the depression -- includinghis mother and father."47

Donato is a human being, and his daughter knows and accepts his humanness in a way that Pat, in The Test, can not do for her father. Dorissa admits that her Italian father and her Polish mother hurled ethnic slurs at each other when they got angry. Dorissa hated this behavior. She knows that her father loved her, but wished that he had had a son in addition to his three daughters. Dorissa recognizes, and admits to Amy, that knowing her father wanted a son hurt her. She also tells Amy that her father had a Polish girlfriend, who came to his funeral. She writes that she thinks this is the only woman he ever had an affair with in the forty-eight years he was married to her mother, but then she adds that this affair "must have hurt the hell out of Grandma Josie, because it wasn't so many years after her mastectomy."48

Janet Surrey suggests that, in empowering interactions, each individual "feels `heard' and `responded to' and is able to `hear,' `validate,' and `respond to' the other."49 Dorissa seems quite capable of validating her father. She understands his motivations and accepts his feelings and behavior. She imagines that Donato would have found his own funeral funny. Since he was an atheist, he did not belong to a parish. When they tried to find an Italian priest to say some prayers in a nondenominational chapel, none was available. They found an Irish priest who "spoke a brogue litany". Dorissa imagines that her father would have "laughed his head off at an Irish priest in a church full of dagos."50

Surrey believes that "men do not have as many opportunities for developing their relational capacities, and do not learn to develop trust in their capacity to engage in mutually empathic, mutually empowering interaction."51 Because of this, Surrey feels that men "can come to view connection as if it were associated with loss of identity, control, power, and the capacity to act on one's perception and interests."52 I think that this is not true for all men, only those men who have been raised in western cultures that are based on the liberal enlightenment tradition, and therefore value the individual as an independent agent. Unfortunately, such men have been in positions of power in this country, and have been able to regulate institutions so that the model of maturity that stresses separation is the model that holds currency. Donato did not realize that autonomy was empowering, and so he became empowered through interaction. His empowerment is passed on to his daughter through his interaction with her, and she is then enabled to empower her daughter, Amy. A wonderful side-effect of this type of empowerment is that the people so empowered are happy. The characters in Dorothy Byrant's story achieved wealth and acceptance in the world, but they were very unhappy people. Donato's relationship with Dorissa hascontinually brought joy to both their lives. Because Donato realizes that his daughter has always "heard" him, he is willing to entrust his taped autobiography to her.

While Surrey recognizes that relational competence which creates space for people to express themselves and allows for possible conflict, tension, and creative resolution, is desirable because it empowers people, she also recognizes that Western society which "highlights and encourages separation and individuation, does not emphasize the importance of ongoing connection and has not given enough support or educational experience to skillful engagement of differences, conflicts, and powerful feelings in relationships."53 Surrey believes that women are particularly injured by this cultural bias away from relationships because, in Western culture, relationships are usually the province of women. I would suggest that ethnic groups are also injured by this cultural goal of separation, which denigrates the joyous interdependencies of Italian/Americans, among others, and makes them uncomfortable with themselves....

The final parent-child relationship in Daniela Gioseffi's text is the relationship between Dorissa and her daughter, Amy. This relationship seems to be a particularly empowering one for both individuals. Dorissa writes her story in the form of a journal from her jail cell to her daughter who is working for political justice in Central America. Both mother and daughter are concerned with political issues and are willing to inconvenience themselves to follow their consciences.

The fact that Dorissa chooses to write her journal to her daughter immediately validates Amy. It also establishes Dorissa's desire to sustain and deepen the connection with her daughter, even though they are physically apart and unable to keep in touch by phone. It demonstrates that Dorissa trusts that her feelings for her lover, her feelings for her father, and her political activism will be "heard" by her daughter and accepted. In the journal, Dorissa frequently addresses Amy, personalizing the narrative and attempting to "take the other into account."54 Throughout the narrative, Dorissa never loses sight of her daughter in the telling of events and facts. On the contrary, the telling of facts seems secondary to taking care of the relationship. In talking about her dead lover, she says, "I want you, Amy, to understand why I loved Yanos so much."55 It is important to Dorissa that Amy empathize with her.

Dorissa is always imagining how Amy will feel about the information she is transmitting, and she tries to connect new information with what is already familiar to her daughter. For example, in talking about her lover, Yanos, Dorissa says, "I wish you could have known him, Amy."56 Then she compares Yanos, the lover Amy does not know, to the girl'sgrandfather, Donato. "He's the bravest man I ever knew, next to Grandpa Donato. Maybe he was even more brave than my father in some ways."57

Dorissa is able to be changed by her daughter. She is a poet, and her daughter is a computer whiz, but Dorissa validates what Amy does, even though it differs from her work. She says, "The irony of a head-in-the-clouds poet like me raising a daughter who's a computer whiz. I'm sure what you're doing is very helpful. Your last letter said it had to do with wounded Salvadorans, mostly women and children."58 Again she says, "Your old mom was hoping you'd make a nice calm career for yourself in New York, but I should've known better."59 Surrey says that "the capacity to be 'moved,' to respond, and to 'move' the other represents the fundamental core of relational empowerment."60

Frequently, Dorissa expresses her feelings, and then she tries to find connections between her experiences and her daughter's. For example, Dorissa is in jail and worried about herself (with her long record of Civil Disobedience, she wonders if she will have to stay in jail a long time). She is also worried about her daughter, from whom she has not heard in a month. At first, because she misses her daughter, she writes, "Oh, Amy, I should've raised you as a Yuppie! Maybe you wouldn't have run off to Central America."61 Further on, she writes how proud she is of Amy for what she is doing. She tells her lawyer, "If you think I have too much social conscience, you should meet my daughter."62

Dorissa is proud that her daughter questions the dominant culture. She sees this questioning as a connection between them: "We went on all the peace marches to Washington when I was first pregnant with you and didn't even know it, yet. You must have gotten your social conscience while you were still in the womb."63 It is also a connection between Dorissa and her father's father, Galileo, who drew a cartoon for her of Uncle Sam, "symbol of White Anglo Saxon American in stars and stripes, Uncle Sam pants down, squatting on a bowl."64 Dorissa tells Amy that Grandpa had "no social security or pension in his old age."65 Not being within the dominant culture connects all four generations of this family. Galileo was outside because he was a southern Italian peasant; Donato, because he was the son of a peasant, and although his education and patents benefitted the company that employed him, he did not receive a monetary reward. Dorissa and her daughter choose to question and attack the dominant culture's policies probably because they are loyal to Donato and Galileo.

Even though at the present time, Amy can't respond verbally to her mother, because the two of them have had a long sustained empathic interaction, Dorissa is empowered just by writing. She says, "Talking to you, Amy, on this keyboard keeps me from flipping out. . . ."66 Further shesays, "Someday, I hope this story reaches you. There's nothing I can do to ease the pain of missing you, but write to you and hope these computer discs reach."67
Surrey suggests that it is the motive for connection which challenges women to "remain real, vital, purposeful, and honest in relationships" which then creates a "mutually empathetic context of dialogue which is the core of relational development."68 Dorissa's journal to Amy, and Donato's tapes to Dorissa, continually keep these people in empowered and empowering relationships.

Surrey recognizes that not all human relationships develop in this way. "When an important relational context cannot enlarge to allow for mutual experience and the movement of dialogue, women feel disempowered."69 She suggests that "if the connection feels severed there can be a sense of deadness, blackness, and even terror; some have described this experience as a `black hole'."70

In the four pieces I have looked at from The Voices We Carry, relationships have run the gamut from mutually empowering ones in Daniela Gioseffi's Americans: One Minute to Midnight to the dissatisfying ones in Dorothy Bryant's The Test. I would like to suggest that relationships are not viewed by southern Italian immigrants in the same way they are viewed by dominant culture in America simply because for the immigrants from the Mezzogiorno emotional connections were the only wealth they had. Economic and emotional survival in Italy and America necessitated strong ties to family and friends.

At the time of the great migration, in America relationships took second place to economic expansion which was imagined to be accomplished best by independent men striving in isolation. This difference in values continues today. Relationships are obstacles in a capitalistic society because they endanger production (a worker may decide to attend to an important relationship by taking time off from her job; someone may choose not to move to the city where he is transferred because a relationship with parents or siblings is more important.) Emotional concerns are in second place to rational ones in this culture. Truly empowered and empowering relationships are not hierarchical which makes them highly suspect and misfits in a society that rates everything from toothpaste to women on a scale of one to ten.

I would like to suggest that Anglo-American culture denigrates relational concerns for many reasons, but that other cultures value them, in particular southern Italian peasant culture. I would like to suggest that in the four stories discussed here, the characters who have internalized Western cultural values the most are the ones who have the least satisfying emotional connections.I would also like to suggest that it is not only women who are interested in, or capable of relating, in this empowering way. Perhaps in middle-class America,the people most likely to relate in this way are women, but I think that is precisely because they are somewhat removed from the values of the dominant culture. Some people find dominant culture sterile and choose to ignore its value system; others come from cultures with more satisfying values and choose to keep these. But what about Italian/American women?

Italian/American women are in a unique position. As women, they are marginalized, and as the daughters.... Keeping the connection with an emotionally satisfying family, and at the same time achieving success, in a culture that stresses the power of the individual, presents a problem. Many Italian/American women writers have found a way of participating in American culture and at the same time valuing relationships. These woman look back to their grandmothers as a model of a woman who is empowered and self-directed, but who is relationally oriented

Notes:

1 See Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Woman 1976; rpt. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

2 See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1982).

3 See Judith V. Jordan, Alexandra G. Kaplan, Jean Baker Miller, Irene P. Stiver and Janet L. Surrey, Women's Growth in Connection (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991).

4 Jordan, p. 7.

5 Mary Jo Bona, ed., The Voices We Carry (Montreal: Guernica, 1994).

6 Mary Bush, "Planting" in The Voices We Carry ed., Mary Jo Bona (Montreal: Guernica, 1994) pp. 35-56.

7 Jean Baker Miller, "The Development of Women's Sense of Self" in Women's Growth in Connection (New York: Guilford, 1991) p. 15.

8 Miller, p. 14.

9 Miller, p. 15.

10 Bush, p. 38.

11 Bush, p. 41.

12 Bush, p. 41.

13 Judith Jordan, "Empathy and the Mother-Daughter Relationship" in Women's Growth in Connection (New York: Guilford Press, 1991) p. 29.

14 Susan J. Leonardi, "Bernie Becomes a Nun" in The Voices We Carry, ed., Mary Jo Bona (Montreal: Guernica, 1994) pp. 203-232.

15 Leonardi, p. 205.

16 Leonardi, p. 217.

17 Leonardi, p. 224.

18 Leonardi, p. 224.

19 Jordan, "Empathy and the Mother-Daughter Relationship," p. 34.

20 Jordan, p. 34.

21 Dorothy Calvetti Bryant, The Test (excerpts) in The Voices We Carry ed., Mary Jo Bona (Montreal: Guernica Press, 1994) p. 335.

22 David Bakan, The Duality of Human Existence: An Essay on Psychology and Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

23 Bakan.

24 Bryant, p. 315.

25 Bryant, p. 315.

26 Jordan, "The Meaning of Mutuality," p. 96.

27 Daniela Gioseffi, Americans: One Minute to Midnight (excerpts) in The Voices We Carry ed., Mary Jo Bona (Montreal: Guernica Press, 1994) pp. 79-108.

28 Jean Baker Miller, "Women and Power" in Women's Growth in Connection ed., Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver and Surrey (New York: Guilford Press, 1991) pp. 197-205.

29 Janet Surrey, "Relationship and Empowerment" in Women's Growth in Connection ed., Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver and Surrey (New York: Guilford Press, 1991) pp. 162-180.

30 Surrey, p. 164.

31 Surrey p. 164.

32 Surrey, p. 164.

33 Gioseffi, p. 93.

34 Gioseffi, p. 93.

35 Surrey, "Relationship and Empowerment," p. 167.

36 Gioseffi, p. 94.

37 Gioseffi, p. 94.

38 Gioseffi, p. 94.

39 Gioseffi, p. 94.

40 Gioseffi, p. 95.

41 Gioseffi, p. 98.

42 Gioseffi, p. 102.

43 Gioseffi, p. 98.

44 Gioseffi, p. 98.

45 Gioseffi, p. 99.

46 Gioseffi, p. 98.

47 Gioseffi, p. 100.

48 Gioseffi, p. 107.

49 Surrey, "Relationship and Empowerment," p. 167.

50 Gioseffi, p. 108.

51 Surrey, "Relationship and Empowerment," p. 168.

52 Surrey, p. 168.

53 Surrey, p. 169.

54 Surrey, "Relationship and Empowerment," p. 167.

55 Gioseffi, p. 91.

56 Gioseffi, p. 83.

57 Gioseffi, p. 83.

58 Gioseffi, p. 84.

59 Gioseffi, p. 85.

60 Surrey, "Relationship and Empowerment," p. 168.

61 Gioseffi, p. 81.

62 Gioseffi, p. 82.

63 Gioseffi, p. 85.

64 Gioseffi, p. 95.

65 Gioseffi, p. 96.

66 Gioseffi, p. 83.

67 Gioseffi, p. 82.

68 Surrey, "Relationship and Empowerment," p. 170.

69 Surrey, p. 172.

70 Surrey, p. 172.

Copyright © Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino

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