Honor Thy Father: Gino's Story and the Italian Diaspora on the Lower East Side

Abstract In his book The Dark Legend, the eminent psychiatrist Frederic Wertham published his study of a seventeen-year-old Italian American boy from New York's Lower East Side who killed his mother in order to redeem his family's honor. Based on a pattern Wertham found in Aeschylus's trilogy The Oresteia and Shakespeare's Hamlet, he diagnosed the boy's mental condition as the Orestes complex. But the story of the boy, Gino, is more than a psychoanalytic case study. At the core of the book, Wertham includes Gino's autobiographical confession, which throws light on the larger symbolic significance of his deed: Its diasporic context in agrarian southern Italy and that of Italian American fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. This article explores the confession's socio-anthropological dimensions that reveal the deeply rooted honor code written into Southern Italian culture and its presence in Italian American period fiction.