by Selby Wynn Schwartz
Rina Faccio, born in 1867, was one of those girls of the late 19th century whose fate required little imagination. It was only a question of the order in which verbs and surnames would be imposed upon her.
Rina Faccio, b. 1876
As a girl, Rina Faccio lived in Porto Civitanova and did what she was told. Her father told her to work in the accounting department of his factory, and she did it. She was twelve years old, dutiful, with long dark hair. Then her mother told her something wordlessly that she never forgot. Her mother was standing at the window, looking out, in a white dress that hung off her shoulders. Then suddenly her mother went out the window. She fell like a scrap of paper. Her body landed two floors down, bent into a bad shape. That was what Rina Faccio’s mother had to say to her.
Nira and Reseda, 1892
Nira was the first time that Rina changed her name. She wanted to write for the provincial local papers, but she was afraid that her father would find out. In the early days we didn’t know how much we needed to change.
When Rina Faccio turned fifteen, she grew out of anagrams. She chose the name Reseda because it reminded her of recita, which means, she plays her role, she recites her part. When her father thundered in the drawing-room about the opinions of these hussies, whoever they were, appearing in print, Rina Faccio looked up from her needlepoint as blank as a page.
Rina Faccio, 1892
Despite having been told by her mother, Rina Faccio didn’t know it was going to happen. She was obediently adding and subtracting numbers about the factory, keeping the ledgers in straight lines. A man who worked at the factory was moving in circles around her. He had brute hands that fastened on levers, a breath that crawled up the back of her neck. She didn’t see him until the circles were very tight around her and then it was too late. Her dress was shoved up. She cried out, but only the brute palm of his hand could have heard her.
Rina Pierangeli Faccio, 1893-1895
In the winter her father forced her to marry that man and take his name.
Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gave birth to the child of that man. It was a son. Shortly thereafter she found the bottle of laudanum and wordlessly took all of it.
The laudanum didn’t kill Rina Pierangeli Faccio, but it ended her name.
The Pisanelli Code, 1865
All of the politicians hailed the Pisanelli Code as a triumph of the unification of Italy. The new state was eager to grow into its full shape, stretching the length of the entire peninsula and covering the populace with its laws. As one politician said, We made Italy; now we have to make the Italians.
Under the Pisanelli Code women gained two memorable rights: we could make wills to distribute our property after our own deaths, and our daughters could inherit things from us. Our writing before death had never seemed so important. We began to consider what things we possessed, and whether to bequeath them to our daughters was a vile shackling to the past, or rather some small gift that could be pawned for a future.
Amendment to the Pisanelli Code, 1877
The rights we didn’t have in Italy were the same rights we hadn’t had for centuries, and thus not worth enumerating, but in 1877, a modification to the Pisanelli Code allowed us to act as witnesses. Then, too, we were beginning to notice how the outlines of our doorways and dowries were matched up, so that one box could be carried through another, signifying the transfer of a bride. No one could leave a marriage, but some of us could discern the shape that it made of our lives. As one politician said at that time, In Italy, the enslavement of women is the only regime in which men may live happily. He meant that we ourselves were the small gift, pawned for the future of the fatherland.
Rina, c. 1901-1902
In those uncertain years Rina and her sister went to the theater in Milano, which was so crowded that they could barely find their seats. The play was Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the story of a woman named Nora who ceases finally to be a wife. In the last act, Nora leaves her house, her husband, and her children, clicking the latch of the door behind her with a sound like a century snapping shut. After the play, Rina’s sister went home to her husband in Rome and Rina stayed on in Milano, writing.
Nora, 1891
A Doll’s House had first come to Italy in the form of the actress Eleonora Duse. She was already famous when she swept into a theater in Milano in 1891, thirty-two years old, melancholy and determined. On the cold stage she took off her hat and furs and, bowing her head, had a chain put round her neck with heavy keys on it. The tines of the keys hung down to the tops of her thighs, so that every step she took made the sound of keys and chains, chains and keys. On opening night, tickets to see her cost twice what they should, and still the theater was creaking with bodies all the way up to the balconies. Then the curtain went up, and Eleonora Duse became Nora.
Sibilla, 1902
What Rina was writing was the beginnings of Sibilla. In 1902 Rina Faccio left her house, that man, the child, and her name. She went to live in Rome and fell in love with a distinguished novelist. When the novelist asked her name, she said it was Sibilla. Under the Pisanelli Code her conduct was inexcusable: no one could leave a marriage, but especially not a wife and a mother.
Rina disappeared. Sibilla kept writing.
Sibilla Aleramo, b. 1906
In 1906 Una donna was published. As the title indicates, it was a book that was also a woman. In fact it was the story of a woman whose mother goes out the window like a scrap of paper, whose father forces her to marry that man, whose body is broken by laudanum and stifled cries. It was the story of a woman not named Nora who ceases finally to be a wife.
Sibilla Aleramo was born in 1906 when the first copy of the book was published in Torino. She held the book in her hands. It was not like a baby. It was not like a bottle of laudanum. It was a solid object, the volume of a life. Una donna was the sustenance of Sibilla as she came into the world, unblinking, thirty years old. It was the story she told herself of herself, like a Sybil who eats her own words.
Rina Faccio, born in 1867, was one of those girls of the late 19th century whose fate required little imagination. It was only a question of the order in which verbs and surnames would be imposed upon her. But Rina Faccio, having been submitted to the worst of those verbs by 1900, decided to erase herself. She wrote herself out of the story she had been assigned, paradoxically, by writing it all down and publishing it as an autobiographical novel called Una donna [A Woman]. Her book was itself a feminist experiment in speculative nonfiction: intimate, political, prophetic, performative. Writing Una donna changed her name; publishing it made Sibilla Aleramo a founding figure of Italian feminism. In this poetic retelling of her story, I have drawn on the first-person details of her book and on queer feminist historiography. But I have also made inside her “I” a little place for a “we”—an impossible, collective witnessing of her becoming.
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Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and their Afterlives (University of Michigan Press, 2019), a current Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature (Italian/French); her articles have appeared in Women & Performance, PAJ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Her first piece of creative nonfiction was recently published in Lammergeier, and she is at work on a speculative collective biography of queer feminists in turn-of-the-century Europe.