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Laura Benedetti. The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. 165 pages.
Femininity is a troublesome subject in the field of Italian literature: plagued by stereotypical assumptions and faced with a dearth of historically relevant analysis, the topic is often misinterpreted. Thus motherhood, as one defining aspect of the feminine subject, suffers from the same lack of constructive critical attention. In her book, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy, winner of the 2008 Ennio Flaiano Book Prize, Laura Benedetti offers a superb introduction to works of fiction that have received insufficient critical attention. Benedetti's title, from Elsa Morante's novel, La storia, is haunting for those familiar with the work, in which a tigress tears pieces of her own flesh while trapped in a frozen hell in order to feed to her starving cubs. This powerful and disturbing image, rife with a grief often misinterpreted in discussions of Italian motherhood, confers a painful shade to Benedetti's work. Motherhood, as a sacrifice, is a difficult subject to broach even in modern society, and was far more so when the authors Benedetti examines were writing. The author enables us to see that though stereotypes about the topic may be alive and well, Italian motherhood is no easier to categorize than any other familial institution in any other country, and a historically viable approach is necessary in order to reach...