Milli mála - 01.01.2013, Blaðsíða 167

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and their patience, they will emigrate to those countries which the father-
land will be able to conquer.45

This is the redemption of the emigrants. From then on, a new kind
of emigration opens up: not the degrading, humiliating emigration
to the Americas, where Italians had always been living like slaves,
but emigration to other countries that have to be conquered as the
promised land and by fighting a holy war. The model of a trium-
phant fatherland and the concept of war as a resurrection of nation-
al identity now became a prevalent theme in Italian literature of
emigration at least until the end of the 1930s. Corradini’s novel,
which also influenced Italian cinema and theatre of the period, was
adopted by the fascists as a propaganda vehicle, since its message of
ethnic pride and a new mystique of sacrifice and heroism were par-
ticularly useful to the regime’s imperialist policy.
4.4 Emigrant Women and Literature
If emigrants, in general, deserved blame, female emigrants were
utterly condemned. They not only refused to be economically
exploited, but also refused their own “natural” role of wives and
mothers whose destiny had to be fulfilled at home – surely not
something they would do in a foreign country where they could
support themselves with their own work and free themselves from
their reproductive obligations (Grandi 2007: 11). In the survey
Inchiesta sulla donna, by Guglielmo Gambarotta, published in 1889,
the author collected the statements of intellectuals, scientists and
cultural figures on the natural inferiority of women. Most of them
not only opposed women’s political rights but also expressed nega-
tive opinions about extra domestic employments for married
women who had children (Grandi 2007: 13–14). According to
some scholars, women earning a wage could lead to a “third sex”, a
kind of new female gender situated at an intermediate stage of evo-
lution and characterised by the joint presence of female and male
45 Ibid.: 169. “Tutte le generazioni avvenire d’Italia vi dovranno essere grate. Perché se l’Italia vince-
rà questa guerra […] quelli che verranno non avranno più bisogno di fare quello che avete dovuto
far voi, d’emigrare in terra straniera, armati soltanto delle braccia e di pazienza, ma potranno
emigrare nelle terre che la patria si sarà conquistate.”
STEFANO ROSATTI