Representing Violence against Women

Europa Periodica

Edited by Patrizia Delpiano, Fabio Forner, Giovanni Lamartino, Viola Corrado, Sabine Schwarze

Vol. 5

Sara Delmedico

Representing Violence against Women

A Case Study from Early Twentieth-Century Italy

Contents

1. List of images

2. Acknowledgement

3. Note to the reader

4. Introduction

5. Part 1

   1. 1. Women in the Theories of Scientists

   2. 2. Women and the Law

      1. a. Women and Civil Law

      2. b. Women and Crimes

   3. 3. Scientists Entering Tribunals. Explaining Violence against Women

6. Part 2

   1. 4. The Case and the Press

   2. 5. The Trial and the Account of the Murder

   3. 6. The Defence and the Verdict

7. Part 3

   1. 7. After the First Trial’s Verdict

   2. 8. The Second Trial

   3. 9. ‘Science’

   4. Conclusion

8. Appendix

9. Bibliography

10. Index of Names

List of images

1. Figure 1: I grandi processi illustrati, 6 (1904).

2. Figure 2: I grandi processi illustrati, 8 (1904).

3. Figure 3: I grandi processi illustrati, 9 (1904).

4. Figure 4: Pasquino, 19 June 1904, n. 25, p. 3.

5. Figure 5: Il Secolo XX, July 1904, p. 561.

6. Figure 6: Patrizi’s glove.

7. Figure 7: Alberto Olivo’s Plethysmogram.

8. Figure 8: Riva-Rocci sphygmomanometer.

9. Figure 9: I grandi processi illustrati, 3 (1904).

10. Figure 10: I grandi processi illustrati, 12–13 (1904).

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the Irish Research Council and to the Gerda Henkel Foundation for generously supporting my research for this study and for enabling me to write it.

My thanks also go to the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at University College Dublin for creating the supportive environment in which I had been able to work during the first stages of this research.

I am also extremely grateful to the anonymous reviewers who gave me significant suggestions to improve this book.

Sincere thanks also go to Katherine Powlesland for sharing her expertise and providing me with helpful comments, and to Giovanni Iamartino for helping me throughout the publication process.

I would also like to thank the staff of Biblioteca Braidense, Biblioteca Sormani, Biblioteca della Fondazione Anna Kuliscioff, Biblioteca del Circolo Filologico Milanese, Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea in Rome, Cambridge University Library, Biblioteca APICE and Milan State Archive for their help and support.

My warmest thanks go to my family and friends for their unwavering love and support.

Note to the reader

Primary sources have been transcribed, adopting conservative criteria and following the original as closely as possible (e.g. ‘a dirittura’ instead of ‘addirittura’). Any apparent incongruities in spelling and morphology that have been preserved are part of the original text. The original spelling of titles in the body of the text and the bibliography has been preserved as far as possible.

Some changes have been made, however, for ease of reading. They are as follows:

• some abbreviations have been expanded;
• accents follow modern usage;
• some minor changes have been introduced in terms of punctuation;
• uppercase is left as in the original text.

Translations are the author’s own, unless otherwise indicated.

Translations of texts included both in the body and in the appendix of the book have been made adopting conservative criteria.

Quotations in American English have been left as such.

Introduction

‘Siamo nel secolo della emancipazione della donna’ [we are in the century of female emancipation].¹ With this comment, Alberto Olivo explained to the court why he could not force his wife, Ernesta Beccaro, to obey him and added that they saw what had happened in the end.² Taking as its subject the representation in the Italian printed press of the case of the murder of Ernesta Beccaro by Alberto Olivo in 1903, and by examining the works of scientists and jurists across centuries, this book seeks to explore how the society of early-twentieth-century Italy envisioned the relationship between men and women and how reputation, honour and their understanding intertwined to mould the values by which people lived. Specifically, it investigates how scientific and juridic literature, together with newspapers, magazines and journals, had an oblique power to manipulate and reinforce stereotypes and prejudices – thereby distorting perceptions and rendering acceptable inequalities, discrimination and violence – at a time in which new ideas and new sciences, and new approaches, challenged certainties and redefined the sense of self.

Historically, women have been treated and represented differently from men. Leveraging a centuries-old construction of female inferiority, societal behaviours towards women continued to rely on a habitus, ‘internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions’, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms.³ This habitus, for Bourdieu both ‘a structuring structure’ and ‘a structured structure’, is ‘an infinite capacity for generating products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions – whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production’.⁴ In this lies the masculine order he so clearly exposed: a habitus that perpetuates hierarchies of the dominant and the dominated by investing the order of ‘the objectivity of a common sense’ and of neutrality.⁵ It also continually perpetrates a symbolic violence that manifests itself in the bulk of societal norms shared by the dominant and by the dominated, who ‘apprehend all reality, and in particular the power relations in which they are held, through schemes of thought that are the product of embodiment of those power relations and which are expressed in the founding oppositions of the symbolic order’.⁶

However, this order, together with its norms, could not be regarded as natural. Instead, it entailed a detailed social and cultural construction of identities in opposition – the masculine and the feminine – each with specifically prescribed features that validate themselves, and each with a range of potential sub-identities. In his The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, historian George Mosse defined masculinity as ‘the way men assert what they believe to be their manhood’, its ideal being ‘invoked on all sides as a symbol of personal and national regeneration, but also as basic to the self-definition of modern society’.⁷ Linking this image to the symbolic also meant envisioning attitudinal patterns that would frame this symbol within the boundaries of normativity, thus designating acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. This process of standardisation and of ‘stereotyping meant that men and women were homogenized, considered not as individuals but as types’.⁸

But this process is not immutable and eternal. Historian Angus McLaren, for example, in The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930, contended that ‘new boundaries of normal male and female behavior were freshly established’ by experts in the late nineteenth century, not creating but selecting and exploiting ‘the stereotype of a virile, heterosexual, and aggressive masculinity’ and declaring ‘preeminent one particular model of masculinity from an existing range of male gender roles’.⁹ The notion of ‘one preeminent model’ implies that, within this model of masculinity, there are other less eminent sub-models, suggesting hierarchies and hegemonies not only in relation to femininity but also to other masculinities.¹⁰ Such a categorisation of identities at the time was tightly connected to the codification of sexual behaviour, which created and enforced further strata of power, transcending the individual and existing ‘in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up’; and thereby devising a society in tension between ‘discipline and punishment’.¹¹