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giant. His larger than life presence and musical communion with the heroine
highlights her own subjection as domestic furnishing. Female submission is also a
prerequisite for her entry into the realm ofhigh art.
The complete closure of this story, offering no exits for the heroine, is linked
to the intertextual space ofthe story. Capriolo abandons a promising female space of
the fantastic, allowing the giant, Mann, to casts his own shadow over her text. The
story reminds us ofthe dangers ofthe interior space for the female writer. Withdrawal
and solitude are essential to creation but they have negative connotations for women.
With only art as a companion one is rendered more susceptible to the male voices
dominant in that art, all the more powerful for their disembodiment and apparent
neutrality. In the realm of art women can also be channelled into reproduction, ifonly
textually.
Five years after its publication Capriolo herself acknowledges the anomalous
nature of her second novel in a discussion of gender. On the question of whether she
conceives of the sexes as equal she muses, 'Penso di si. Peri> non 10 so. Poi in fondo,
il protagonista piu importante, piu ricco dei miei libri e la protagonista de II doppio
regno, quella piu sfaccettata che in qualche modo Ii contiene tutto, ed e una
donna.'(Ania, p.324) This novel, which she also describes as her most
autobiographical, brings us to the crux of Capriolo's relation to the male-authored
text. Not only does the novel dramatize the introjective authorial anxiety but it self­
consciously thematizes that anxiety as well. This coincides with the fact that the
protagonist of Il doppio regno is the only female in Capriole's texts who creates
rather than performs.
Reading II doppio regno as a form of cultural autobiography confirms the
stifling presence of Capriolo's literary models. The fantastic provides an ideal model
with which to express this anxiety spatially - here in the form of a labyrinthine hotel
from which the protagonist cannot escape, where she is haunted by male authorial
voices. The sinister aspect ofthis hotel, which the protagonist is variously seduced by
and resistant to, proves once again the potential of the fantastic to express a
specifically female authorial anxiety. The protagonist's encounter with the hotel is
also the author's encounter with a labyrinthine text that claims to speak for and of a
universal subject. The protagonist's confusion is also the author's confusion when
faced with the fact that the universal subject is in fact male. Unable to make contact
with a mother figure, identification with whom must be abandoned in the struggle to
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