The Women Characters of Carlo Emilio Gadda

Abstract

Like his predecessors in Naturalism, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) has given us women characters of remarkable vitality. By the time of his first recorded writing, during World War I, the earlier representation of female characters had changed, allowing for the inclusion of qualities verging on the irregular and the bizarre. This characteristic is a feature of many of Gadda’s women characters who display an astonishing range of physical defects. Whatever their station or narrative function, his description of them often contains elements of distortion, although this rarely has the effect of individualising them. It will be argued that the presence of such women characters in Gadda’s work has a precise function in his representation of the world.