Marisa Escolar
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823284504
- eISBN:
- 9780823285945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823284504.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Military History
This chapter analyzes Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), the text that most widely perpetuated the gendered redemption paradigm traced in this book. As a British “wedding officer” in Naples, Lewis ...
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This chapter analyzes Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), the text that most widely perpetuated the gendered redemption paradigm traced in this book. As a British “wedding officer” in Naples, Lewis judges Neapolitan women, distinguishing war brides and rape victims among a sea of prostitutes. This work is not about determining the women’s status but about staging his redemption: starting as a hard-nosed officer, Lewis’s character “dies” and is reborn as the Dantean narrator, making his supposedly anti-fictional diary a conversion narrative, much like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery. As the chapter charts Officer Lewis’s conversion, it puts his diary-novel in dialog with The Gallery and Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (The Skin), whose spectacles Naples ’44 rewrites in more direct prose. Treated as anti-fictional by historians, Naples ’44 has arbitrated the sexuality of Neapolitan women and the men who love, purchase, or violate them. Lewis represents all Neapolitans as whores and all goumiers “as sexual psychopaths” and yet still emerges as the authoritative narrator. The chapter ends with a reflection on the contemporary cinematic adaption, Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno.Less
This chapter analyzes Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), the text that most widely perpetuated the gendered redemption paradigm traced in this book. As a British “wedding officer” in Naples, Lewis judges Neapolitan women, distinguishing war brides and rape victims among a sea of prostitutes. This work is not about determining the women’s status but about staging his redemption: starting as a hard-nosed officer, Lewis’s character “dies” and is reborn as the Dantean narrator, making his supposedly anti-fictional diary a conversion narrative, much like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery. As the chapter charts Officer Lewis’s conversion, it puts his diary-novel in dialog with The Gallery and Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (The Skin), whose spectacles Naples ’44 rewrites in more direct prose. Treated as anti-fictional by historians, Naples ’44 has arbitrated the sexuality of Neapolitan women and the men who love, purchase, or violate them. Lewis represents all Neapolitans as whores and all goumiers “as sexual psychopaths” and yet still emerges as the authoritative narrator. The chapter ends with a reflection on the contemporary cinematic adaption, Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno.
Marisa Escolar
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823284504
- eISBN:
- 9780823285945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823284504.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Military History
The epilogue suggests the possibility for a revision of redemption in reading Quel giorno trent’anni fa (1975; That Day Thirty Years Ago), an unknown diary by Neapolitan aristocrat Maria Luisa ...
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The epilogue suggests the possibility for a revision of redemption in reading Quel giorno trent’anni fa (1975; That Day Thirty Years Ago), an unknown diary by Neapolitan aristocrat Maria Luisa D’Aquino. The diary makes a proleptic rejoinder to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44. Published in the same years and set in the Campana countryside, Quel giorno trent’anni fa is also a wartime conversion narrative that tracks the transformation of the narrator from her descent into hell as a newly widowed mother of five into a contemporary Dante. However, whereas Lewis constructs his diary with an eye to establishing his authority over the events, D’Aquino does so in order to inscribe herself within them, making herself a gendered, sexualized symbol for the Italian nation and the author of her own redemption.Less
The epilogue suggests the possibility for a revision of redemption in reading Quel giorno trent’anni fa (1975; That Day Thirty Years Ago), an unknown diary by Neapolitan aristocrat Maria Luisa D’Aquino. The diary makes a proleptic rejoinder to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44. Published in the same years and set in the Campana countryside, Quel giorno trent’anni fa is also a wartime conversion narrative that tracks the transformation of the narrator from her descent into hell as a newly widowed mother of five into a contemporary Dante. However, whereas Lewis constructs his diary with an eye to establishing his authority over the events, D’Aquino does so in order to inscribe herself within them, making herself a gendered, sexualized symbol for the Italian nation and the author of her own redemption.
