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Tarsouli in her account describes in some detail Eleni’s disguise as a man, emphasizing on her
manly figure, her slim body, her energetic manners, even her decisiveness which is thought suitable
more to a man than a woman. 13 She, thus, introduces typical dichotomies of sex and gender to
explain, if not to apologize, for Eleni’s conduct. Her statement that she felt more comfortable in
men’s clothes is very similar to Saverio Altamura’s comment on Eleni in his autobiography. Tarsouli,
in general, relates in vivid colors and in a rather sentimental fashion Eleni’s love to Saverio, she
recites a spectacular unmasking of her disguise and dramatizes Saverio’s affair and Eleni’s return to
Greece with two of their children.
Tarsouli in addition repeats and follows closely the line of narrative that substantiates Eleni’s
portrayal as a martyr and this time not only of art but in life. 14 Unlike Parren, though, she leaves aside
historical conditions; she pressures towards the victimization of the painter and insists on the
mother’s insufferable pain, an agony that she knows too well. Her only daughter also died at a very
early age. In Tarsouli’s vocabulary Eleni, after reaching the shores of Italy “saw her life turned from a
proper romance, full of artistic challenges and beautiful adventures, to a true tragedy”; “Fate”, she
declares “struck her as a wicked, frenzied maenad”. 15
Eleni is thus raised to a tragic character and her life’s account almost complies with George
Steiner’s definition of modern drama in The Death of Tragedy. Eleni’s drama is taking place in a
universe where God is absent and human consciousness is ripped apart. 16 For twenty‐five years, after
losing her second child, she writes her dreams, speaks to herself, turns to spiritualism and tries to
keep a faith. Her world is deprived by a descriptive or comforting myth and her life reaches tragedy,
when she restores a mythology of death and resurrection. The woman painter, Tarsouli presented,
mourns for the loss of maternity and jails her womanhood, for she inhabits in a society where
motherhood “is conceived as a social service” and “is the basis of women’s inclusion in the political
body”. 17 The interwar Eleni then attained a place in art and literature as a devastated and negated
wife and mother and a tragic heroine while still looking for her place in history.
I will only briefly refer to Galanaki’s text, a challenging biographical novel in many respects,
stressing here only certain elements of particular interest in her drawing of Eleni’s life. Galanaki had
already written two historical novels, both related to remarkable individuals of the 19 th century,
before plunging herself into Eleni’s world. Her historical research was extensive and she discovered
crucial new evidence on her life, while she continues to fill up on Altamura’s biography.
Galanaki’s text, as even the title, Eleni, or Nobody, indicates (as well as the use of Eleni’s picture
dressed as a man on the cover page of the first edition), focuses on Eleni’s multiple identities and on
her disguise. The novel is divided in three main parts and in twenty‐four chapters, marked by the
letters of the Greek alphabet: a life from A to Z (A‐Ω). The first part is a narration of Eleni’s early life
with her family in Greece, and the third of the days after her death. In the middle section, Eleni
storms onto the main stage. Galanaki’s Eleni reclaims language and recounts her story, giving voice
to the absent face of Nobody. Narration thus alternates between first and third person while there
are whole chapters written in Italics, which, based often on her notes, disclose deeper thoughts,
insensical visions, the revisiting of the past. This second and larger part – Eleni’s part – is a trip down
to memory line, which unleashes moments of glory and days of defeat, weaving together, in the
most lyrical manner, the “red and black pattern” of her life. 18
Eleni performs and comments on her many identities, unveils the discrepancies of her unified
image as constructed in previous accounts and restructures gender roles through the binary
oppositions she engendered: male/female, orthodoxy/Catholicism, private/public, art/reality,
reason/madness. Cross‐dressing is for Galanaki’s Eleni, as Mairi Mike suggests, the way to exceed
classification, a goal that will never be fulfilled. 19 Eleni rehearses her many roles and, above all,
enacts gender to question its boundaries and norms. 20