Padri incapaci nella letteratura italiana femminile (Cardella, Ginzburg)

The father figure in twentieth-century novels usually appears only as a part of the family. It is rare for a father to become the main protagonist of the book; he is frequently presented as an “addition” to the mother. Rightly or not, the father figure is, however, a symbol of authority and power in the family, hence writers have a tendency to present the parent-child relationships as difficult, bitter, and very, very complex. The situation is not much different in modern Italian literature, in which relationships with fathers during childhood are often a starting point for adult problems. In this article, I try to analyze this phenomenon on the basis of two novels written after 1950: Caro Michele by Natalia Ginzburg and Volevo i pantaloni by Lara Cardella.