Among Women Only by Cesare Pavese

First published:Tra donne sole, 1949 (English translation, 1953)

Type of work: Symbolic realism

Time of work: The late 1940’s

Locale: Turin, Italy

Principal Characters:

• Clelia Oitana, the narrator
• Rosetta Mola, a young girl who commits suicide
• Momina, Rosetta’s friend

The Novel

Clelia Oitana returns to Turin in the dim light of a snowy January day, a few years after the end of World War II. She registers at the best hotel, answers no telephone calls, and, in solitude, savors her return to her birthplace, a major industrial city in northwest Italy. The calm ends when she looks into the hallway to see medical attendants carrying away an unconscious young woman, who, while alone, took an overdose of Veronal. Clelia later discovers that the woman is Rosetta Mola, the daughter of an established Turin family.

Clelia, the narrator, is a successful couturiere in Rome, where she works in the establishment of “Madame,” a major Italian designer. Madame has sent Clelia to Turin to prepare to open and then manage a new fashion house. The story takes place in late winter and early spring as Clelia works with an architect and construction contractors to prepare for the opening of the firm at a location on the Via Po.

Clelia, thirty-four years old, left Turin seventeen years earlier, determined to rise from her working-class background. On the first afternoon of the return, Clelia, alone, walks through her old neighborhood, which is smaller and dirtier than she remembers, and realizes that nothing remains there for her but memories. That evening she goes to a ball with Morelli, a friend who provides entree into the fashionable world of Turin’s salons, a world inhabited by the smart set that she wistfully envied as a working girl. She finds that if she does not fit into her old quarter, neither does this frivolous and unproductive leisure class attract her.

Yet the fashion business depends on high society. Interspersed with her work in getting the new business ready, Clelia attends fashionable parties, visits artists’ studios, joins her new friends in slumming expeditions, and travels to nearby villas and casinos. The only members of the group with enough depth to interest her are Momina, a woman about her age, and Rosetta, twenty-three, who, recovering from the suicide attempt, returns to society.

Clelia moves back and forth between the construction work at the Via Po and the world of the salons, which are places of malicious gossip and restless searches for diversion. She senses that Rosetta is again irresistibly pulled toward suicide, unable to live with the pretension and hypocrisy surrounding her. Clelia knows that Rosetta is desperate but does not realize how near the crisis is. After a last-minute flurry of preparations before Madame arrives in Turin, Clelia learns that Rosetta has disappeared. Her body is found in a rented room, dead from poison. Clelia concludes that she could not have saved Rosetta: “You just can’t love someone else more than yourself. If you can’t save yourself, nobody can.”

The Characters

Cesare Pavese’s beautifully depicted characters demonstrate his belief that while people cannot change fundamentally, they can become more knowledgeable about themselves. Clelia Oitana is strong and tough—streetwise and clever enough to escape the streets. She remembers the filth and stench of her neighborhood and the blighted lives of her childhood friends. She quickly corrects Rosetta, who romanticizes the lives of working girls. Clelia prides herself on her self-sufficiency. She remembers the frustration, even hatred, she felt as her father lay dying just before a pre-Lenten carnival season: “I thought that it was probably in that distant evening that I really learned for the first time that if I wanted to do anything, to get something out of life, I should tie myself to no one, depend upon no one, as I had been tied to that tiresome father.” Her mother reinforced the lesson: Believe in nothing and nobody. Clelia broke away from the confining environment of her youth and won success and recognition in Rome. While she did not rise by ruthlessly stepping on others, she consistently shed lovers and friends as she moved onward through life.

Returning to Turin, she examines the meaning of her life and measures the cost of her achievement. Morelli tells her that she has one great vice: She is addicted to work. He asks her: Why not enjoy life along the way; why condemn people for their pleasures; why find people worthy only if they have suffered and struggled up out of a hole? Clelia understands and accepts his indictment. She also believes that Morelli has overlooked her biggest vice, her pleasure in solitude. Solitude and work have not brought her happiness, but they do, usually, bring her peace. In any case, they are an expression of an inner self that she cannot change, though they leave her isolated from other humans.

Momina is the daughter of nobles, well educated, economically and socially secure. Completely free to do what she likes, she is totally bored. Life is meaningless, nothing counts, she says. The world would be a beautiful place if people were not in it; life is zero. Ceaseless movement and an unending need for diversion characterize her life: “Seeing that nothing’s worth anything, you’ve got to have everything.” Unlike most of her frivolous companions, she realizes that something is wrong with their way of life, but she believes that she and others of her class cannot change.

Rosetta desperately seeks some purpose for her life. She considered entering a convent, and she believes that Clelia has found the secret in work, or perhaps the answer is in California, where, she has heard, people never die. Clelia respects Rosetta more than any other member of the Turin establishment. Rosetta is sincere and serious, and Clelia believes that she commits suicide to escape the empty life of her class. Contrasting the evil around her with her own need for order and decency, and unable to find acceptable compromises in the real world, Rosetta is vulnerable to the corrosive nihilism of Momina. In August, 1950, the month that he killed himself, Pavese wrote that when he was younger he had considered suicide but did not act: “Life seemed horrible to me, but I was still interested in myself. Now the opposite is true. I know that life is a tremendous thing, but that I cannot shape it to my own liking.”

Clelia escapes the fates of Rosetta and Momina because she has absorbing work and healing solitude. If she is aware that work and solitude are vices, she also knows that they allow her to live. Nevertheless, she also is in a trap that may close in on her later in life. Her livelihood and success depend on the upper class, which she despises.

There is another way of life, that of Becuccio, the foreman in charge of renovating the Via Po shop. Becuccio is a Communist. If one cannot modify one’s own character and individual destiny, one can find meaning in life by working to restructure the social conditions that will shape the characters and destinies of future generations. Clelia spends a night with Becuccio and experiences a feeling of authenticity and contentment that escapes her when she is with her fashionable friends. Yet she cannot understand his political message, for it would destroy the system within which she has achieved success. Nor can she escape her existential loneliness and submerge herself in a social movement. Becuccio and Clelia pursue their separate paths.

Critical Context

By the end of his life, Cesare Pavese had achieved critical and public recognition for his literary work. Shortly before his suicide on August 27, 1950, he received Italy’s highest literary award, the Strega Prize. His life, work, and death made him into a cult figure, and admirers combed his novels for insight into the man. Pavese was as obsessed with work and solitude as Clelia and as compelled toward suicide as Rosetta. Like Becuccio, Pavese hoped through Communism to resolve the contradictions that warped individuals and society. Along with cult worship came world recognition of Pavese as a major literary figure, because he dealt seriously and directly with the central concerns of modern times. He may not have found solutions, but few have so clearly defined the problems. Among Women Only is a mature expression of his view of life and is considered one of his best books.

Pavese’s writing style provided a firm foundation for his enduring popularity. It is lean and spare, with terse, elliptic dialogue. Each word helps to create atmosphere, character insight, and emotion. Pavese was a master of building suspense; without setting his characters in outwardly dramatic situations, he showed the agonizing and intertwined struggle of Clelia as she faces the turmoil that arises when she assesses her life after returning to the scenes of her childhood; of Momina as she wrestles with the void of nihilism; and of Rosetta, who is pulled toward suicide while frantically looking for life supports to prevent it.

Pavese’s development of symbolic realism, his tight control of his material, and his fresh, terse style make him a writer to whom one can return confident of finding new levels of meaning. His ability to explore the major themes of human existence in the modern world maintains his popularity decades after his death.

Bibliography

Biasin, Gian-Paolo. The Smile of the Gods: A Thematic Study of Cesare Pavese’s Works, 1968.

Flint, R.W. Introduction to The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese, 1968.

Lajolo, Davide. An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese, 1983.

Lucente, Gregory L. The Narrative of Realism and Myth, 1979.

Rimanelli, Giose, and K.J. Atchity, eds. Italian Literature: Roots and Branches, 1976.

Thompson, Doug. Cesare Pavese: A Study of the Major Novels and Poems, 1982.