Fathers, Fathering, and Fatherhood in the Italian American Narrative: An Introduction

In a 2008 essay titled “Where Are Fathers in American Literature?,” Josep Armengol-Carrera revises American literature to look for texts dealing with fatherhood. From The Scarlet Letter to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn, Armengol-Carrera asserts that fathers are absent, fugitive figures.1 According to the scholar, American writers seem to have made “a limited use . . . of fatherhood as a theme in their fictional works. Most canonical authors appear to avoid dealing with the issue” (211). Armengol-Carrera starts his analysis by returning to canonical nineteenth-century literature, where he finds the friendship between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in Leatherstocking Novels, the single motherhood of Hester Prynne, or Huck's growth into “sivilization” by means of Aunt Sally's care; these children's fathers are, in a nutshell, missing. In fact, there have been little changes in the twentieth century according to the scholar: “In The Great Gatsby (1925), for example, F. S. Fitzgerald portrays his protagonist as a self-made man who leaves both of his parents behind to make his American Dream come true” (212).2 Gatsby's defining characteristic—his relentless focus on the future and the possibility of change—becomes deeply ingrained in the American national character, overshadowing legacies inherited via male parents.If Armengol-Carrera's observation is valid for white male canonical American literature, does it apply to ethnic literature?3 Not really, at least when he considers Latinx literature. Ethnic literature, and Italian American literature in our specific case, have in fact devoted many literary efforts to the depiction of families more generally and of fathers more specifically. An abundance of father-centered texts exists in Italian American literature and cinema, so much so that we document fatherhood as a recurrent narrative pattern. Some of the earliest well-known novelistic Italian American fathers are the cruel Gennaro in Garibaldi M. Lapolla's Gran Gennaro (1935), the self-sacrificing Geremio in Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete (1939), the moving Pietro in Mari Tomasi's Like Lesser Gods (1949) and the heavy-drinking and womanizing father in John Fante's novels and short stories. In later times, one cannot forget outraged and ultraconservative fathers in Dorothy Bryant's Miss Giardino (1978) and Josephine Gattuso Hendin's The Right Thing to Do (1988), or the traumatized and traumatizing father in Louise DeSalvo's memoirs Vertigo (1996) and Chasing Ghosts: A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War (2015), alongside Kim Ragusa's dysfunctional father with his interracial relationships and heroin addiction in The Skin Between Us (2006). These narratives are but a glimpse into the omnipresence and chiaroscuro of the Italian American fatherly portrayal, a parameter that, along with the scarcity of bibliography on the discussion of the ethnic father, fathering and fatherhood, stresses the necessity of this issue of Diasporic Italy, completely dedicated to father figures in Italian American literature and film culture. Whereas representations of mothers have been sufficiently researched and discussed in scholarship (Bona 1999, 2010, 2017; Albright and Moore 2011), fathers have admittedly received significantly less attention, in stark contrast to their ample and, often, diametrically opposed depictions in fiction, television, and film.The primacy of the family unit in Italian American culture inevitably sheds light on the vital role of parenting (Ruvoli 2017). Mothers and fathers, present or absent, accessible, inaccessible, engaged or disengaged, populate Italian American cultural products, uniquely stamping their offspring's lives with their boisterous voices, overwhelming ways, and unconditional affection or even their crashing attitudes, haunting silences, and distance. Yet, one wonders, why this abundance of father figures in Italian American literature, as opposed to the scant attention to the theme in white male American literature? If an answer is found in the traditional patriarchal quality of Italian culture, which has continued to be an important underlayer in Italian American culture, other US-specific reasons may be detected. In other words, father figures emerge so explosively because of the meanings they entail specifically in the American context.Speaking generally, beyond the frame of Italian Americana, father figures support narrations dealing with the struggle between biology and culture, definitions of family and of society, and how we move into society from a familiar background. Talking about fathers means, in other words, talking about affective belonging: fathers (and mothers) are the first indication that we live in groups (Schultermandl and Rieser 2021). In this regard, they are intimate figures that have to do with our earlier self. Yet belonging is often multiple and seldom homogeneous. The relationship with the family already offers first occasions to experience difference, which is replicated later in life by the many layered contrasts between our intimate and our public personae. Writing about fathers means, then, reflecting on how we differ from original nuclei, on how life—understood as the passing of time, the movement through space, the people and institutions we meet—constantly changes us, often troubling intergenerational dynamics. Parents are, in a nutshell, the very initial instance of the impossibility of being alike and different at the same time.More specifically regarding Italian American fatherhood, ethnic fathers prompt a reasoning on the breaks between the personal and the social, fractures that become especially intense in transcultural contexts. The vastness of global history and geography percolates into the personal dynamics of ethnic families, which contain the ghostly presence of grand dimensions—of a troubled elsewhere, of oceanic histories difficult to explain in single lives. Sons and daughters have often felt the necessity to write about their own Italian American fathers as figures to interrogate the identitarian fluidity that has been such fruitful a theme in Italian American literature. The focus on the passing of generations works, in fact, as a privileged narration in order to reflect on matters of ambivalent belonging toward the nation, as well as the family, cultural hybridity, and perturbed notions of “home”—all themes that have marked ethnic literature from its first examples till more recent ones. From this perspective, engaging fatherhood as a theme means dealing with matters of genealogy, that is, thinking about the past from a present perspective and thinking about the individual in a wider social context—in the national family. As François Weil writes in Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America, talking about lineages “can say much about America's past and present” (2013, 2), for lineages have always served “to define and reinforce [Americans'] individual and collective identities, as well as to situate themselves and their families in time by inclusion and by exclusion of others” (3). This is even more so given that in the United States, fathers are usually the ones who pass their surnames on to children and are, as such, responsible for the visibility, as well as vulnerability, of ethnic belonging. As such, Italian American fathers are often described as oppositive figures who hinder their children's full (social or emotional) development in the United States.The way fathers can be conflicting figures for ethnic children is also reflected in the literary outcome of Italian American authors, as Elisa Bordin points out in her contribution dealing with one of the most prominent “father figures” of Italian American literature, John Fante. Bordin considers the literary fathers Fante created to be significant narrative material in his attempts to find a position in the American literary panorama of the 1930s. Bordin separates Fante's works into two categories: mountain novels and seaside novels. While the distinction is based on the novels’ spatial settings, the presence or absence of father figures is also under examination, as Italian American fatherhood can be understood as a rewarding narrative device, one that provided Fante some success. Bordin sees Fante's mountain writings as profiting from what Fred L. Gardaphé has termed “the cultural currency” of the Italian American family (1991, 292), with the fathers as robust and dynamic figures, as in Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) and some early short stories. These works are contrasted to seaside novels, in which Fante imitates the mainstream American literary traditions inebriated by the spirit of individualism in his attempt to be accepted in the American literary scene by “killing” the father, as in The Road to Los Angeles (1985), or by substituting him with an American mentor, as in Ask the Dust (1939). Covering the writer's long career, from the 1930s to the 1980s, Bordin highlights a change in Fante's works produced after World War II, and especially in The Brotherhood of the Grape (1978), a text that benefits from the new moment of ethnic literature in the country.If, on the one hand, ethnic fathers are figures who condense different times and spaces, addressing fatherhood, on the other hand, is a multifaceted matter because it entails diverse definitions of what being a father means or should mean. Ideas of fatherhood derive, in fact, from the combination of personal fathering styles, national and ethnic definitions of manhood (Adams and Savran 2002; Aronson and Kimmel 2004; Bederman 1996; Connell 1995; Gardaphé 2006; Kimmel 1996; Rotundo 1993), and related issues of patriarchy. Italian American fatherhood has often been depicted as patriarchal and, as a consequence, abusive and violent. In several works analyzed in this volume, patriarchy defines manhood, exciting friction and causing trouble in the relations between fathers and children. A similar occurrence of the patriarchal order is here examined by William Boelhower. In his contribution titled “Honor Thy Father: Gino's Story and the Italian Diaspora on the Lower East Side,” he considers a psychiatric case published in a 1941 medical journal that relates the matricide committed by Gino, a teenage Italian boy living in the Lower East Side, New York. Adolescent Gino restores a sense of patriarchy in his Italian American family through the homicide of his mother, in obeisance to an interiorized fatherly order after the parent is dead. The scholar probes into the case, interweaving dramas and early Italian American novels in an attempt to explicate Gino's relationship with his father, whose South Italian mentality the boy follows and tries to replicate by killing his mother. Boelhower illustrates how ideas of manhood move across the Atlantic and the extent to which fatherhood is an Italian American patriarchal value to defend in spite of the new societal values Gino lives by. Ideas of fatherhood and codes of manhood, Boelhower demonstrates, travel with toxic baggage and have legal consequences when they are transplanted into societies with different sets of values, where they can produce a sentimental and familiar schizophrenia, as is the case with Gino.The problem of transplanting styles of fatherhood from one continent to the other is also the object of Carla Francellini's and Theodora Patrona's contributions. Analyzing fatherhood in the works of a founding father of Italian American literature, Pietro di Donato, Carla Francellini's “A ‘Father’ Is a Bridge: The Case of Pietro di Donato's Three Circles of Light” brings Di Donato's first and third novels into dialogue, discussing them as testimonies of the early life in Italian American working-class New Jersey. Francellini approaches Di Donato's fatherly figures as living in a “migrant limbo”: they are suspended amid countries and cultures, embodiments of the clash between Italian and American morals and lifestyles with regard authority and patriarchy within the family nexus. Francellini's close readings of Di Donato's works and the fatherly presence reveal the paramount importance of sexuality, the human body, and genetics for first-generation male migrants as they struggle to redefine their identity and find balance between Italian and American cultures. Resorting to extensive quotations from the writer's evocative prose, the scholar studies the linguistic unorthodoxies in Three Circles of Light (1960), as well as Christ in Concrete (1937), and adds to the important bibliography on the “broken English” Di Donato's fathers employ. For Francellini, these linguistic choices aim at “portraying the process of seeking a firmer social, cultural, and spiritual foundation and the potential to fail in this endeavor.” They are a means to express and overcome the trauma of migration.Theodora Patrona's discussion of the problematic father and offspring relationship ponders over the collision, rejection, and final reconciliation that is possible in Italian American families as these are depicted in Josephine Gattuso Hendin's novel The Right Thing to Do (1988) and Carl Capotorto's memoir Twisted Head (2008). In her essay, the scholar focuses on the possibility of surviving an abusive upbringing, which may be produced, among other things, by the traumatic migratory experience. Patrona sieves through the evolving concept of fatherhood and the respective relations with the fatherland in Hendin's award-winning novel and Capotorto's lesser-studied memoir. In this analysis that brings together the ethnic bildungsroman and emerging and popular autobiographical writing, the collision between offspring and fathers should be envisaged as a “clash of the two worlds, the agony of the respective fathers and children to survive in the quicksand of the American landscape of the 1970s.” Through close readings of the two texts, Patrona ponders autocratic fathering, its violent physical and verbal practices and their roots, but also the children's revolts against both ethnic culture and fatherly figures, their attempts to flee, and the final reconciliation that comes with the loss of older generations. In spite of paternal physical and verbal violence, traceable both in Gattuso Hendin and Capotorto—and in Francellini's and Boelhower's discussions too—Patrona concludes on an optimistic note and stresses the surfacing of a more empathetic Italian American fathering.This concept anticipates the content of the final two articles of this Diasporic Italy issue, that is, Michail-Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis's “An Italian Stallion, an American Hero: (De)Constructing the Italian American Father in the Blockbuster Age of Hollywood” and Cristina Di Maio's “New Italian American Fathering in the Time of the Gig Economy: The Case of The Bear.”While fatherhood is clearly a biological matter, being a father means more than providing the biological material to produce a child. Fatherhood is a function that goes beyond the bloodline, since fathers may be chosen, as mentoring figures or caregivers, as Markodimitrakis and Di Maio's contributions maintain. Their work coincides not only in understanding fatherhood as a function that goes beyond biology but also in their focus on big- and small-screen fathers. As is the case with literature, Italian American cinema and TV present emblematic examples of positive or (more often) negative fatherhood, from the success of the different Godfather installments and their patriarchs, Vito Corleone and later Michael Corleone, to the psychologically fragile paterfamilias Tony Soprano in the multi-award-winning TV series The Sopranos (1999–2007). The crime-prone fathers are, obviously, juxtaposed to such moral characters as the law-abiding MTA bus driver Lorenzo in Robert De Niro's A Bronx Tale (1993) and the tender father Tony Micelli in the 1980s ABC sitcom Who's the Boss (1984–1992), to name just a few. The two essays by Markodimitrakis and Di Maio end hopefully, discussing more recent works produced in the twenty-first century in which supportive, rather than castrating, father figures seem possible. Markodimitrakis and Di Maio emphasize the catalytic role of the downfall of the global economy, changing social structures, and the incorporation of new ideals and mores as influencing the very core of the Italian American family and the roles of the “new” father, often beyond the shackles of genetics.4The cinematic figure of Rocky Balboa is at the heart of Markodimitrakis's essay, a rich and diachronic discussion of four Rocky films—Rocky V (1992), Rocky Balboa (2006), Creed (2015), and Creed II (2018). In his contribution to the flourishing bibliography on these popular films, Markodimitrakis focuses on the changing stereotypical projections of Italian American males in the last two decades of the twentieth century through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. While he meticulously examines Rocky's malleable fatherly profile and the concurrent sociocultural contexts of each film, Markodimitrakis regards the Italian American process of whitening “as a deciding factor of masculine performance.” Liberated from rigid gender roles and expectations, in the last installments of the series and its spin-off, Rocky's fatherly figure revamps traditionalist views on fathering and introduces family bonding beyond bloodlines and race, an important assertation also made by Di Maio in the essay that follows. Building on Gardaphé’s notion of “wisemen” (2006), Markodimitrakis sees in the last two films under discussion the emergence of a “wiseman” father. In the more recent Rocky figures, the scholar discerns a more mature, vulnerable character who “allows for more nuanced and emotionally aware portrayals of male characters, as well as empowered female characters.”As in the Rocky Balboa series, in Di Maio's essay, fathers are not just those who biologically produce children. This is the case of the surrogate fatherhood by the protagonist of the (and very The Di Maio finds that recent examples of single fatherhood in the twenty-first century reveal both a nuanced of fatherhood as less stereotypical than in and and Di Maio diverse fathering figures in the multi-award-winning TV series The and on how these stereotypical projections of Italian American fathering of the the same time, the highlights new fatherly representations that emerge in the of the and culture that the twenty-first century. 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