Muses, Heroines, and Virtuous Wives in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Erminia Fuà Fusinato’s and Matilde Serao’s Literary Portrayals of the New Italian Woman

ABSTRACT The nineteenth-century revival of Dante brought renewed fame to his characters Beatrice and Francesca, who became the inspiration for a multitude of poems, tragedies, paintings, drawings, and musical compositions. The poet Erminia Fuà Fusinato (1834–1876) and novelist Matilde Serao (1856–1927) rejected the idealized characterization of Dante’s muses and proposed instead the concreteness of everyday women’s life, considered more relevant to their times and to their poetics, which were infused with civil commitment and social engagement. The female figures developed by Fuà Fusinato and Serao were portrayed as the heroines and antiheroines of modern Italy, defying any abstract or symbolic personification of womanhood and providing female readers with characters, such as the virtuous wife, which they could easily relate to their life and identify with experiences. Partly idealistic, and partly realistic, these literary portrayals sought to define new social and gender identities, in line with the national project of cultural formation, and to respond in narrative terms to the reforms (such as the Pisanelli Family Law) enacted by Italy in the aftermath of its political unification.