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reflected in Italian literature, held that emigrants endangered not
only themselves but also their relatives, both if they took them to
the unknown world across the sea and if they left them at home.
And it was the case that most of the relatives left at home were
women. The risk was that they died in poverty and humiliation. In
Pirandello’s short story L’altro figlio (The Other Son, 1902)48,
Maragrazia, an old Sicilian peasant, irreparably stricken by her long
wait for her two beloved sons who had emigrated to America, rep-
resents a tragic model of a woman who lives in wait.
It is in the work of Maria Messina that one finds the most notable
examples of this kind of woman. Although Messina (1887–1944)
cannot be considered a writer of emigration49, her Nonna Lidda
(Grandmother Lidda, 1911) is one of the most moving stories on the
subject. After the death of her daughter-in-law and after being aban-
doned by her son who decides to emigrate to America, Lidda, living
a life of deprivation, raises her baby grandson. Five years later,
Lidda’s son unexpectedly sends a friend to Italy to take the child to
America. Although her heart is breaking Lidda has the strength to
walk with her grandson all the way to the end of the village and say
goodbye properly. Only then does she give in to her pain, and the
following day her dead body is found on a river bank.
For the returning emigrants, the first impact of the community
of origin was a sort of moral cleansing performed in order to ward
off the dreaded change of mind that had occurred and to re- estab-
lish the moral obligations of the social system into which individu-
als had to reintegrate. This moral cleansing consisted of sermons,
confessions and benedictions; with the community’s help, the reap-
propriation of local habits and mores was assured. Every returning
emigrant was subjected to this kind of ritual, but the moral cleans-
ing was much more scrupulous when the returned was a woman
(Grandi 2007: 67). An extreme literary case of this type can be
48 Piran dello’s play of the same name, adapted from a short story, was performed for the first time
in 1923.
49 Messina’s two collections of short stories, Piccoli gorghi (Small Whirlpools, 1911) and Il guinza-
glio (The Leash, 1921), masterly represent the condition of Sicilian women, whose social frame-
work, despite class distinctions, was restricted to the village (sometimes to the house) where they
were born and in which they were destined to spend their entire lives and forced to follow repres-
sive rules against which it was almost impossible to rebel.
STEFANO ROSATTI