The Father of the Homeland and Abandoned Daughter. The Emotions in Natalia Ginzburg’s The Manzoni Family

Abstract

The biography of Alessandro Manzoni, one of the most influential writers of Italian Romanticism, is well known to his readers. This is the starting point for Natalia Ginzburg, an important 20^th-century writer, in her work La famiglia Manzoni [The Manzoni Family]. The author, known for addressing the complex relationships between family members, describes an interesting and varied perspective in the text which, although focused on Alessandro’s destiny, also sees the individual characters participating equally in the story. In doing so, Ginzburg highlights their emotions. This article aims to describe the uniqueness of the relationship between the writer and his daughter Matilde. Their original correspondence shows a lonely and sick young woman seeking the attention and love of her famous father. The analysis of the history of Alessandro and Matilde Manzoni starts from theoretical considerations on literary genres, recognisable in Ginzburg’s work, together with the concepts of trauma, memory and post-memory.