Learning by Hart: Gender, Image, and Ideology in Vittorio de Sica's Maddalena zero in condotta

Ramsey McGlazer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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’.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)187-213
JournalThe Italianist
Volume36
Issue number2
Early online date5 Aug 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016

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