Responding to Injury: On the Shadow Economy of Female Resentment

• Autores: Susanna Ferlito
• Localización: On Resentment.: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on The History of Emotions, 26,27, 28 October, 2011 The Louis-Jeantet Auditorium, Geneva / coord. por Dolores Martín Moruno, Javier Moscoso Sarabia, Bernardino Fantini, 2011, pág. 8
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • Given the idealization of nineteenth century women as passive, docile, compassionate, and emotional beings how did they experience and express the emotion of resentment without being dismissed as being overly emotional and/or bitter? What, if anything, enabled the expression or representation of female resentment to be taken seriously and therefore to have consequences -emotional, political or social? While male resentment has been recently examined as the emotional precursor to righteous acts of revolt on the part of victims' whether as individuals or as societies (Ferro, 2009, Tomelleri 2004) female resentment, historically, seems to be acknowledged mostly in the singular. Much has been written on the problematic uptake and expression of anger for women, particularly from a feminist perspective (Frye, Campbell,) but we have yet to examine why resentment has failed to be expressed by women and perceived by others as a righteous emotional response to a perceived injury and injustice. In my essay, I examine how the expression of female resentment functions as a shadow economy to normative nineteenth-century expectations that women be the compassionate and moral regenerators of society. Seen as the emotion of unforgiveness (Brudholm, Amery) in women it comes to represent their failure to act according to their "natural" desire to be compassionate and forgive. While focused on understanding expressions of gendered resentment in a specific historical context, my theoretical framework is informed by contemporary debates on emotions as "contested terms negotiated in a public sphere where power is distributed unevenly (Guss 2009, Nussbaum, Ahmed, Butler). From this perspective emotions are not seen just as universal and biological responses but as expressions embedded in and productive of a particular social and political context. In other words, I propose to examine the presence or absence of resentment in nineteenthcentury texts as a political and social problematic and not just as an existential expression of the injured (ill, mad, bitter, aged, etc) self. More specifically, my paper will explore the question of female gendered resentment as expressed in the writings and autobiographical photographs of two of Italy�s most devoted Risorgimento patriots: Cristina di Belgiojoso (1807-1871) and Virginia Verasis di Castiglione (1837-1899). Both women participated actively in the process of Italian nation-building known as the Risorgimento but expressed their resentment at being dismissed and exiled from political influence in very different ways. Belgiojoso's essay Della presente condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire (On the Present Condition of Women and of their Future) published in 1866 provides an example of how female resentment against the "immobility of women's condition" is channeled away from anger, bitterness and demands for freedom, into imagining a righteous and radical revolution in the social edifice without a single "brick" of the edifice touching the ground. What might seem as her overly moderate and cautious call for social reform constitutes instead a profoundly tactical response to the social dismissal of female resentment. Her foundational metaphor for a new social edifice takes as its point of departure, as I will argue, the need to make female resentment work positively for women as opposed to bolster male arguments for their dismissal in the political arena. Castiglione's case offers a different, profoundly personal, view of how female resentment at being first used by and then dismissed from the political arena of Risorgimento politics finds self-expression through the new (to her time) medium of photography. Castiglione's "obsession" with photography offers her a means for aesthetically engaging with feelings of resentment, humiliation and a desire for revenge. Her clinical-minded photographic evaluation and fetishization of her aged body-parts (legs, arms, face, feet) mirror's resentment's "twisted sense of time" (Amery) and its obsession with a past it cannot forget or forgive. These two cases of female theorizing and aesthetic channeling of resentment address the question of how women, in the nineteenth-century, strove to be heard in their expression of strong feelings of social/sexual injustice without being dismissed as overly emotional women.