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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Pirandello's Her Husband

Overshadowed by his more successful novels, Pirandello’s Her Husband is the one that has received least critical attention, both in Italy and abroad (it was translated into English only in 2000). First published in 1911, and read widely as a novel à clef (a satirical representation of the life of Grazia Deledda and Palmiro Madesani, and of the Roman literary milieu at the turn of the centuries), it had undergone modifications by the author, and was republished in 1941 by his son Stefano. The paper wishes to explore the novel in another key – if the clef is to be looked for, that is, it can be found in the procedure known as “sexual metathesis”, in the portrait of the main character, Silvia Roncella, as one of the possible doubles of Pirandello himself. The thesis is corroborated at least by Pirandello’s attribution of two of his plays and several reflections from his essay L’umorismo to Silvia. The novel’s geography (between North and South), and its parallel between childbirth and artistic creation (the “two accouchements”), while suggesting a feminist interpretation, provide an uncanny twist of this Doppelgänger figure.

Pirandello; Her Husband; sexual metathesis; feminist reading

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