Novelist, poet, journalist, and essayist, Renata Vigano` began her precocious literary career with two volumes of poetry. Her most influential work, however, remains L’Agnese va a morire (1949), a novel that tells the story of Agnese, a working-class woman who joins the partisans. Winner of the 1949 Viareggio prize, the novel is a paradigmatic neo-realist narrative that succeeds in combining an unadorned literary style with the rhythms of everyday speech.

The world L’Agnese represents is rooted in Vigano`’s own experience as a Resistance fighter and is also shaped by her engagement with Marxism.* Ag-nese’s expanding political consciousness as depicted in the novel does not result from intellectual probings—she lacks the necessary education—but comes about through her experience of life under Fascism and a (presumed) proletarian affinity with Marxist principles. While L’Agnese documents women’s roles in the Resistance, and does so much more thoroughly than books by male writers like Italo Calvino,* Cesare Pavese,* or Beppe Fenoglio, it also endorses conventional notions of virtuous femininity. Figured as an earth mother (by association with the Po valley landscape where the story is set), Agnese is not only nurturing, but loyal and self-sacrificing as well. Typical of neorealist narrative, the novel portrays immoral female characters who, in opposition to Agnese’s virtue, prostitute themselves to the Fascists.

Later texts furthered Vigano`’s investigation of women’s experience; notable in this regard are the essays of Mondine (1952) and Donne della Resistenza (1955), as well as fictional works like Una storia di ragazze (1962), which describes the efforts of female characters to become self-sufficient.

See also: Fascism; Neorealism; Novel: Realist.

Bibliography: Battistini, Andrea. Le parole in guerra. Lingua e ideologia dell’Agnese va a morire. Bologna: I. Bovolenta, 1982; Re, Lucia. Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990; Palumbo, Matteo. ‘‘La fiaba della storia: L’Agnese va a morire di R. Vigano`.’’ In Les Femmes ecrivains en Italie aux XIXe et XXe sie`cles. Ed. Marie Anne Rubat de Merac. Aix-en-Provence: Universite´ de Provence, 1993. 151–69.

JONATHAN DRUKER

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