Learning by Hart: Gender, Image, and Ideology in Vittorio De Sica's Maddalena zero in condotta. (3rd May 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: McGlazer, Ramsey
• Is Part Of: Italianist. Volume 36:Number 2(2016)
• Page Start: 187
• Page End: 213
• Publication Date: 2016-05-03
• Subjects: gender -- ideology -- school -- film theory and history -- comedy -- De Sica; Italian language -- Periodicals; Italian literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Italy -- Periodicals; 945.005
• DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2016.1176703
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0261-4340

Abstract

Abstract : Vittorio De Sica's early comedy Maddalena zero in condotta (1940) celebrates a female student's free-spiritedness and appears to reward her rebelliousness. This essay argues, however, that De Sica's film reconsolidates the very gender norms that it appears to relax. Maddalena does this by prompting spectators to identify with a schoolgirl whose heart's desire is for a maturità that rules out real mobility, and whose disobedience thus in fact constitutes deferred obedience. Though not as subversive as it has seemed, De Sica's film remains valuable as a record of continuities between fascist rule and the post-war regime of 'repressive tolerance'. Such tolerance, which still figures in contemporary theories of ideology, makes it difficult to distinguish capture from liberation, obligation from breathing free. Maddalena lets us see the school as a key testing ground for this kind of tolerance, at once ideological and 'counter-ideological'.