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movement and polarity of the journey, in which the female subject assumes a new
relation to space through travel. This movement between Self and Other gradually
becomes blurred to the point of a recognition of Self as Other. The active immersion
of the female body in the spaces which typically define her as Other are transformed
into a sensual contact between the female subject and those spaces. The author pushes
this surrender to the intoxicating power of the female stereotype to the point of
rupture and madness. Her relation to female space, as passion, as nature, as theatre for
male desire becomes so essentialist as to force the reader and subject to reject this
essentialism. Rossana Ombres' work takes a very different path towards the exit from
that fantastic enclosure of the male plot to that of the other authors studied here.
Developing a poetics of excess, she immerses the female subject in all its
stereotypical spaces: those of the body, of hysteria, of passionate sentiment, ofpagan
sensuality, of mystic communion. Her preoccupation with the potential of female
Otherness as a passage towards understanding aligns her writing with the work of
philosophers like Luce Irigaray and some works by AIda Merini and Elisabetta Rasy
which explore female Otherness as the first-hand experience of the female subject.
For Ombres this is both a celebration of the taboo areas of female experience,
plunging her protagonists into the heart of fantasy about female power and also a
radical break with that excess. The abrupt and unexpected endings of her novels
constitute the blowing of a symbolic fuse. The female figure overloaded with
significance cuts out and withdraws into a new and puzzling interior space. In her
dizzying rush through the theatrical wardrobe of fantastic females Ombres beats the
male-authored text and the closed space of fantasy at its own game. Refusing to be
pinned down to any particular literary influences she fences with classical mythology,
fairytale, folklore, figurative art and, in particular, biblical references. Eventually she
allows none ofthese textual origins to stick, creating, in keeping with her own literary
roots as a poet, elusive female subjects, whose final movement towards interiority
promises a new dialogue with the external.
Mancinelli's place at the conclusion of the thesis is governed by the
coincidence of the themes of dialogue and exchange, of movement and stasis in a
space that transcends the tensions of home and away to become one of reconciliation
and mutual recognition. The literary interests of Laura Mancinelli, as a former
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