المستخلص: |
Marina Warner’s historical novel, The Lost Father, retells and reconstructs the history of fascism in southern Italy through the pers¬pective of its women characters. The power¬ful presence and role of the Roman Catholic Church as an accomplice to fascism per¬vade the narrative and are reflected in the myriad oppressive laws, myths and symbols constructed and perpetuated against Italian women. This paper reveals the novelistic techniques adopted by Warner to expose the exclusionary and alienating practices of the Christian religion, in general, and the oppres¬sive “gender technology” of Roman Catholi¬cism in Fascist Italy, in particular. The first part of this paper aims to explore the iconography of the female body and mind constructed by the Roman Catholic Church to support fascism as reflected in history, and then in Warner’s novel. The second part will investigate the intellectual and practical strategies of resistance fictio¬nalized by Warner, namely the creation of a resilient women’s commu¬nity through mother-daughter bonding, storytelling and domestic chores. The third part will then explore the most important motives behind Warner's fictionalizing processes, especially the deconstruction of the Catholic mythology of the “feminine” and the exposure of manipulative, politically-informed religious discourses. The theories of myth-decons-truction, feminism and New Historicism will permeate the paper and sup¬port the analysis of the novel .
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