There was a girl interested in books and the world of ideas. A girl who spends her childhood locked in a protective trunk in her parents' house, avidly reading and reflecting on the essence of things. She lives terrified by recurring nightmares in which she sees herself wrapped in spider webs. It feeds on fantasies, bread beggars and thoughts of death.

" The family considered her no more than a piece of furniture . Every morning the maids dusted her head, swept her feet, shook her clothes."

For not having, that girl has no name. It is known simply as Housewife.

Her mother is desperate with her. And when the girl becomes a young woman, she starts to give her the rattle she has to marry, that she cannot continue, that is a shame for the family ... Several suitors begin to parade through the house They try to marry her, but no one wants to marry that fat, dusty young woman who lives in a trunk.

One day, to please her mother, the young woman agrees to leave the trunk and, after washing repeatedly with soap and hot water, becomes the beautiful and pleasant girl that everyone wanted her to be. The mother then pushes her to marry an uncle quite older than her and, overnight, the Housewife is catapulted into a mansion full of servants, in charge of taking the reins of the house.

But, in that role that is imposed on her by the family and society, she continues to remember what she was like before, she continues to feel the call of all those ideas with which she grew up. Frustrated by the lack of intelligent activity, divided between what was and what it is , between the past and the present, she joins first in solitude and then ends up accepting death as the only alternative.

That is, in summary, the argument of an extraordinary, surreal, paranoid, parodic, feminist, symbolic, caustic, irreverent book ... A book written in a sinuous and labyrinthine way that unmasks the mechanisms of society to enclose women in a precise and asphyxiating role - that of a housewife - and that hardly offers solutions but raises numerous questions. "A real surprise", in the words of Italo Calvino. "A book that does not look like any other," says the 20th century Italian literature scholar Marinella MasciaGalateria.

It is titled Birth and death of the housewife and was written in the late 30s, in the toughest years of the Mussolini dictatorship, by Paola Masino.

"More than a book, it is an act of rebellion," Marinella Mascia Galateria, author of the prologue that accompanies the edition now published in Spain of Birth and Death of the Housewife , tells La Esfera "by the publishing house Alianza.

Because, let's not forget, P aola Masino wrote that book under the fascist regime, a dictatorship that forbade women to work , relegating them to domestic life and fathering children for the nation.

Masino began to write it in the first months of 1938, shortly after the Mussolinian regime passed a decree law that imposed fierce restrictions on women to work outside the home. "But Birth and death of the housewife is also a book that has a lot of autobiography. Masino herself recognized that," says Marinella Mascia Galateria.

The experiences of the Housewife - of which the name and the time or place in which she lives are never said - are effectively intertwined with those of Paola Masino herself. The problems of the protagonist of the novel can be transposed the problems of the author: an intellectual woman who lives for the spirituality of ideas and for her works of art and who, at a certain moment, is caught in the world of housework, in the care of your home, in married life.

Paola Masino was not even 18 years old when in 1927 he met the writer Massimo Bontempelli, one of those responsible for introducing surrealism in Italy. Bontempelli was married (although he had been separated for a long time from his wife) and had a son about the same age as Paola Masino, who was 30 years old. They fell in love but, of course, there was the rigid and moral pacata of the time ...

Asphyxiated by social pressure, the couple moved in 1929 to live in Paris. There they dived into the bohemian life, rubbing shoulders with Pirandello, Picasso, Valery, Max Jacob, Marinetti, Moravia, De Chirico ... "I really like our life," Masino wrote a letter to his mother. They lived in modest hotels in the Latin Quarter of Paris but Masino was delighted: that allowed her to escape from housework, which she had always hated, and lead the same intellectual life as her husband.

But, after a few years in Paris, the couple returned in 1931 to Italy. Masino publishes a couple of years later Periferia , a novel that does not like fascist censorship . And to that are added the growing criticisms of Mussolini's regime of her husband, culminating in her expulsion from the fascist party, the withdrawal of her academic position and the requirement that she leave Rome. In 1939 Bontempelli decides to exile himself in Venice and although Paola Masino does not like the city of canals, it follows.

In Venice the couple settles first in a pension and that is where Masino begins to write Birth and death of the housewife in reaction to the Mussolinian laws dictated against women.

But later the couple moves to live in the fabulous Palazzo Contarini delle Figure, on the Grand Canal. And there, suddenly, Masino is immersed in a reality that imposes obligations and duties far from literature, his fundamental interest. She, who had always been a thoughtful and absorbed woman in the world of ideas, is suddenly caught in material concerns, in the management of domestic life.

And, almost without realizing it, she ends up becoming a neurotic housewife, obsessed with order and cleanliness. He has no time to write, not even to think.

"It is not possible for my work to progress ... I live under the nightmare of what happens in the service plant," he wrote in a letter to his parents.

Thus, parodying and exasperating aspects of his everyday life, he creates a legendary literary figure, as absurd as it is fascinating: the Housewife. That figure, which soon acquires its own life, becomes the absolute protagonist of Life and Death of the housewife , a novel that was also a victim of the relentless fascist censorship.

"A novel with which Paola Masino anticipates her contemporary Simone de Beauvoir and goes further, because with her ruthless fantasy she speaks of a journey that is nothing more than debasement, superficiality and death," Marinella Mascia Galateria emphasizes.

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