The Inquietude of Otherness. An ecofeminist interpretation of Anna Maria Ortese's The Iguana

The subject of my presentation is an ecocritical interpretation of The Iguana, a very unconventional novel, written in 1965 by Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998). Ortese is one of the most significant Italian writers of the 20th century and her work, mostly concerned about the representation of the relationship of human and non-human, is utterly interesting for ecocritical interpretations. The Iguana, a piece of magical realism, is the story of a surreal Cinderella: on an imaginary Portuguese island, a young female iguana is discovered by an Italian traveller. She is a servant in the house of her former friend and mentor, now apparently disgusted with her. In her, Ortese elicited all the constructs of oppression: she is a woman, an animal, a servant; she lives in a world split into colonized and colonizers; her language is primitive, her behavior is passionate and irrational. The character of the iguana, which seems to anticipate Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood’s list of dualisms, fits perfectly a “conventional” ecofeminist interpretation. But, on closer examination, Ortese built her “ecological” idea of feminine in a more complex way: as a symbol of difference, feminine is not represented as a fixed category, but as a dialectical one, which brings in itself fractures and transformations. Feminine is thus a mixture of care and unfamiliarity, of motherhood and inquietude (comparable to that “dark” female principle embodied by the “Mothers” in Goethe’s Faust), a “warning” about reassuring visions of world and values. Moreover, as a figure of care, feminine is broader than gender itself, since Ortese understood in it also male characters (e.g.: Daddo, the traveller, that wants to rescue the iguana, and dies for her at last). All that suggests the idea of feminine as a “transversal” category, in itself a dialectical framework, an inclusive “meta-gender” open to different narratives and characters.