Carmen Covito’s La Bruttina Stagionata: Bridging Feminist and Post-Feminist Literature

Abstract

Carmen Covito’s 1992 novel La bruttina stagionata serves as a connective text between two significant moments in Italian women’s writing: the feminist works of the 1970s and those published in the 1990s. Covito’s text adopts the sensibilities of a feminist work in its description of the female protagonist’s  trajectory from a state of victimization to one of confident self-awareness. But, like many of the novels written decades after the apogee of the women’s movement, La bruttina stagionata incorporates this poetics without the accompaniment of identifiable feminist practices, such as affidamento or autocoscienza, or the optimism and expectancy found in many works of the 1970s.