Chapter 30 - Women

Summary

An innovator in art, a revolutionary in his philosophical ideas and his conception of narrative and drama, the 1934 Nobel Prize-winner in literature was in life a conservative from Sicily – a place with a dichotomic perception of women, who were either worshipped as Mother-Madonnas or feared as erotic females. Pirandello was, moreover, the product of the old Western tradition that since the time of Plato and Aristotle juxtaposed male spirit to female matter, viewing reason and speculation as belonging to men and instinct and procreation to women. At the same time, Pirandello was aware that a male culture created the condition of women as victims. Thus in his works we see a combination of these ideas: Sexual phobias are exorcised in short stories about the awakening of sexual feelings (especially in girls), and women are depicted as closer to life and thus artistic creation than men. In his plays, he viewed the theatre as a place of renewal and thus women become capable of breaking taboos and social norms there and of asserting their own autonomy.