ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book uncovers a vibrant and successful Italian female culture industry existing at the turn of the twentieth century – one which was both national and international, and which extended to the French- and English-speaking worlds. It was a transnational female culture industry through which an “affective alliance” of middle-class women spectators learned about sex, love, and relationships via the theatre auditorium and silent screen far more than via the written word. The civil and social freedoms that came with being an internationally renowned female performer in the public eye were in stark contrast to the everyday lives of middle-class women in Italy until 1919, when the maritalis auctoritas was finally abolished. The multipolar female gazes at the stage and screen in late nineteenth-century Italy and beyond were far removed from the masculine stereotypes circulating in the collective imagination.
