ABSTRACT
In her 1986 paper, “Taking Liberties, Writing from the Margins, and Doing it with a Difference,” Barbara Babcock urged feminist folklorists to attend “not only to women’s folklore and women folk but to examine and redefine disciplinary paradigms and discursive practices of folklore scholarship.” Approached in such far-reaching and diversified ways, the ongoing project of feminist folkloristics is one of simultaneous cultural reconstruction and deconstruction, and has indeed counted “many and sometimes conflicting voices” (1986:391). Unfortunately, in the broad arena of American feminist theory today, the affirmation of women’s experience and knowledge is often cast in outright opposition to, if not as separate from, French feminism which has learned much from deconstruction. I believe this binary opposition has further divided women and ignores the material and cultural conditions dynamically linking the two projects together. Thus, it is within the framework suggested by Babcock—and more recently by Beverly Stoeltje in her introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research, “Feminist Revisions in Folklore Studies” (1988:141–153)—that I want to read a recent Italian novel in order to examine two paradigms—“writing” and “voice”—which have, consciously and unconsciously, been relevant to both patriarchal and feminist understandings of folklore and literature.
