By Max Kassoy
In her seminal essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous lays out two choices for women: to continue to be trapped in a patriarchal linguistic and symbolic order (the “phallogocentric” system); or to break free and forge a new path that operates entirely outside of it. Marosia Castaldi’s The Hunger of Women (La fame delle donne), translated from Italian by Jamie Richards, directly contends with Cixous’s notion of the “phallogocentric” society in which female subjecthood and specifically female pleasure, or jouissance, are unrepresentable. The novel is narrated by Rosa, a middle-aged widow from Naples who opens a restaurant in her house in northern Italy, in the fertile but foggy Po Lowlands. Along with cooking, Rosa explores her unleashed sexuality, traveling to nearby cities with her female lovers and indulging in sumptuous, and sumptuously described, meals while also recording her experiences in her diary.
It is in this context that Rosa takes up the challenge of reinventing (recentering) her writing around women—an act of creation which Cixous might refer to as écriture féminine. And while culinary themes dominate her narrative, with lists of foods and recipes often spanning several pages at a time, Rosa accomplishes this recentering using two other themes: the metaphor of the sea, which represents the abyss, the edge, a space outside the realm of the phallogocentric; and a reimagined matrilineal genealogy, which supplants the father (the phallus) with the mother and thus operates completely outside of the patriarchal symbolic order.
Narrating through repeated phrases, images, and ingredients arranged on the page without any punctuation, and with only capital letters to indicate the beginning of a new sentence, Rosa challenges the canons of written language in order to establish a radically different subject position. In one of the most frequently repeated passages of the book, she writes: “And back come the millennia and centuries past the buried and reanimated dead and dark women hunched shrunken They weave cloth by the sea They wait rip stitch add rip pierce gather They give substance to the sea” (14). In this passage, she positions “woman” on the precipice—at the edge of the land, peering into the abyss of the sea—much like Cixous locates “woman” on the fringes of the phallogocentric system.1 And in fact, Cixous specifically understands the sea as feminine: “[O]ur seas are what we make of them,” she writes. “[W]e our ourselves sea” (889).
Importantly, the “domestic” actions that these women are performing here, accomplished over “millennia” and always from this marginal positionality, evoke the burden that is placed on women to uphold the patriarchal system: women are forced to continually make and remake the patriarchy.2We can see this in Rosa’s often-repeated (and ever-changing) phrase: “All women, my God, order the bones of creation with you to support buildings churches houses and bridges and roads” (48). The objects supported here are foundational tools of the phallogocentric system.
By acknowledging this metaphoric and geographic positionality, though, Rosa also sets herself up to actively contend with it—and ultimately abandon it. After she begins her first lesbian relationship, the metaphor of Rosa as a ship begins to arise frequently, which suggests a journey out across the sea, into the abyss, away from the phallogocentric system. She writes: “Rosa was my name I gave it to myself It shone on the side of my ship that furrowed the back of the seas” (66).3We are reminded here, too, that all ships in Western societies are feminine, which furthers the association of ship and sea with womanhood and female positionality.
And later, she directly connects the ship with the love of women, writing of sex with Marina (whose name, no less, evokes the sea): “Our hands sought each other like little ships going toward their fate by the thousand” (77). In this way, though the sea is the abyss, it is also the only path to freedom given the land’s phallic nature. The sea then becomes the terrifying yet exhilarating unknown, to which Rosa must turn to forge her own path:
I lived as if always on a razor’s edge I told myself “Let it go Rosa don’t fall into the spiral of madness forget your gun give yourself over to life” And I saw myself inside a boat sailing the sea with my feet plunged into the depths All I had to do was put aside the cares the troubles the turmoil and dive with a child’s wonder-filled eyes into the waves of fate (143)
To let go of the land, to forget the gun (the phallus), to “give [her]self over to life,” is to sail the sea willingly, charting a new course through the unknown. As Cixous puts it: “It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence” (881). We might also think of this practice as a deliberate lifting of the veil—a witnessing, in all its terrible ecstasy, of what Neapolitan writer Elena Ferrante calls frantumaglia: that fractured yet fluid abyss that is filled with nothing recognizable (nothing that belongs to the phallogocentric symbolic order), and thus is filled with radical possibility.
The willingness to dive headfirst into this “aquatic mass of debris” (Ferrante 100) is reflected in the way that Rosa, like all women, “order[s] the bones of creation” (Castaldi, first use on 27, repeated frequently). While this ordering is, as mentioned earlier (see ft. 1), initially a burden that enslaves women—“every woman [is] half free from chains and torments and half bound to count and order the bones of creation” (43)—Rosa’s constant tweaking of this phrase throughout the book eventually results in a reimagination of this “burden” as the power of a god. “God is a cook Cooking is an art of God” (157), she writes; which, because she herself is a cook—and in a way, has “cooked” this novel, according to her own creative ordering of the many ingredients within it—reinscribes her positionality of “woman” as “God.” This process is supported, too, by Rosa’s constant reminder that cooking is an art passed down matrilineally, from the ancient mothers all the way down to her. Thus, when she lays out her cosmology—“Then I ordered the bones of creation in the drawers Up high bones and stardust At the very top the bones of God [etc.]” (103)—the symbology has been reversed: God is female; the father has been supplanted by the mother.
This feminine cosmology that Rosa writes into existence is the epitome of écriture féminine, because it operates outside of the patriarchal symbolic order and therefore, like jouissance, escapes definition. As Cixous puts it:
It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate. (883)
Rosa, as a narrator, certainly breaks with any semblance of “automatism.”4Cixous uses this word to mean writing that accepts without question—and thus perpetuates—the preordained structures of phallogocentric thought.
As Jamie Richards notes in her “Translator’s Afterword” to The Hunger of Women, “[t]he first thing a reader will notice is that [the book] has no periods…. It is a technique that foregrounds beginnings over endings—origin is everything, it is the known, the past, and endings, our destination, our future, where a sentence may go, where a book will take us, is open” (180). Castaldi herself describes the practice of writing without periods: “If a punctuation mark is abolished or used scarcely… it’s because you want the page to be, not to represent, what you want to say. Writing can’t circle around its object, it must forge it every time anew” (cited in Richards 181). Rosa’s narration is thus a structural and syntactical embodiment of écriture féminine, in which she writes into being a new realm: open, unbounded, and unboundable.
Returning, finally, to the image of the women “giv[ing] substance to the sea,” we see that while women have been forced to order the bones of creation in order to uphold the phallogocentric society, they have simultaneously been secretly weaving together a new landscape out of the frantumaglia of the sea. Rosa, thanking the long lineage of mothers before her, now sets sail out across this fluid feminine tapestry, away from the patriarchal land, and toward a new possibility—a land, even, of immaculate (lesbian) conception, with the phallus playing no part, and the “handicrafts” (Castaldi 52) and art of cooking, passed down by her mother (and all mothers), laying its foundation.
The Hunger of Women, the first of Castaldi’s novels to be translated in English, affords a singular, unexpected reading experience that jolts the reader into a state of freshness: unable to count on there being any “automatisms,” Castaldi ensures that we approach the novel with an openness of spirit and interpretative possibility that is often hard to come by. But, like any thought-provoking work, this kind of openness invites a variety of conflicting interpretations, of which this review essay offers only one. Richards notes that Castaldi, though prolific, has received precious little attention in both academic and literary circles in Italy to date, and cites Antonella Cilento’s obituary for Castaldi in which she writes that “the unremarked passing of so great a writer should make us reflect on the definitive victory of the market over literature” (179). In the spirit of écriture féminine—which boasts “an ‘economy’ that can no longer be put in economic terms,” that is, love (Cixous 893)—let us hope that Richards’s beautiful English translation will forge new paths toward far more productive discourse on Castaldi’s vast sea of work, just as Rosa forges her own path toward new ways of “sea-”ing.
Castaldi, Marosia. The Hunger of Women. Translated by Jamie Richards. And Other Words, 2023.
Max Kassoy studies Comparative Literature and Jazz Performance at Oberlin College and Conservatory (USA).
Works Cited
Castaldi, Marosia. 2023. The Hunger of Women. Translated by Jamie Richards. And Other Stories.
Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. In Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4. The University of Chicago Press, 875-893.
Ferrante, Elena,. 2016. Frantumaglia. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions.
Richards, Jamie. 2023. “Translator’s Note.” In The Hunger of Women, Marosia Castaldi. And Other Stories, 177-183.