ABSTRACT
Dacia Maraini is one of Italy’s most renown contemporary writers. She is largely recognized for her poems, plays, and novels that examine women’s issues in Italy. In particular, her work explores female identity and sexual politics. Since women have been identified with food throughout time, it is apt that her writing is peppered with rich food symbolism. In Italian literature of the twentieth century, women are frequently portrayed as caregivers who toil at the hearth and passively conform to their assigned gender role. In Il treno per Helsinki (1984), set in Italy amidst strikes and student protests of the 1960s, Maraini transforms basic foods into bold metaphors. She adeptly employs food to reflect the growth of the protagonist, Armida, from a hesitant housewife who spends her days chopping and frying vegetables, afraid of her own voice, to a decisive divorcee who subsists on canned foods in the solitude of her own home. Along her tortuous path from one extreme to the other, she suffers a miscarriage and falls prey to her mysterious lover Miele/Honey, who is a touch too sweet to be true. Ultimately, Armida is left to grapple with emotional indigestion as she navigates her erratic and manifold relationship to men in a society that offers her no clear solutions.
