cdare it happen if Madame Bovary, instead of poisoning herself, had become a writer and had he thought of a different ending for himself? He tried to imagine it Alessandra Sarchi with Lives! Stories of heroines who rebel against their tragic destiny (Harper Collins), in which various protagonists of the classics of literature, from Madame Bovary, in fact, to Didone, Francesca da Rimini, Anna Karenina, Ophelia and the Proustian Albertine, to name a few, all united by a mournful ending, they express their disappointment to the author – of course a man – and challenge the sliding door of another possibility from which to get out alive and with a say in one’s own end.
Alessandra Sarchi lives in Bologna. You began with a collection of short stories and published four novels. Lives! it’s also a podcast.
Before being a book, Lives! it had been an acclaimed podcasting project, born during the lockdown with the voice of Federica Fracassi. Now it has been collected in a volume well orchestrated by the author between documented introductory parts and monologues with unexpected results, to re-read known pages with which we grew up in a new way, without realizing that it didn’t necessarily have to end like this.
How did the whole Vive! experience come about?
During the lockdown it seemed important to me to have voices that reach people, since we were all closed. I also wondered what the embodied voices of these literary heroines were like, what they thought of how their male authors had conceived them. So I set out to review their stories from a female point of view. First a podcast was born, the project worked and there was an interest from HarperCollins to make a book out of it.
What is the difference in approach?
It’s about shifting perspective. Until the late eighteenth century literature is delivered to us from a male gaze, and it is not a neutral gaze. So giving these protagonists their point of view back was my goal.
Sentenced to death by their perpetrator, she gave them another chance. How did you create these alternatives?
All these characters were not conceived in a monolithic way, they already contained other possibilities, which then had been chosen in particular one is also due to the values and conditioning of the time. Relativizing also serves to see the contingency of these circumstances, because otherwise we risk assuming those values for absolutes. Just think of Madame Bovary.
Vive! Stories of heroines who rebel against their tragic destiny by Alessandra Sarchi, HarperCollins160 pages, €17.50
The first monologue is dedicated to her. How did she give her life back to her?
In her there is the possibility of seeing how the author has recreated his own alter ego, loving and loathing her to the point of delivering her to a terrible death. If it is true (or probable) that Flaubert said «Madame Bovary c’est moi», then there we have the key to understanding that she too is a writer in nuce, who could have exploited that desire for escapism and the wealth of imagination to to create instead of giving oneself to petty lovers. And there are so many spies of this in the novel. So I make her write a letter to her author in which she tells him that she is not dead: she has begun to write. Which metaphorically means that she has taken her destiny back into her own hands.
How did you choose the protagonists?
First of all they are united by tragic fate, then they all have many contradictions in them. Anna Karenina, for example, is sent to die because she has not found a place within society, she is an adulteress and has had a daughter who is not recognized by her lover and therefore legally belongs to her husband. Suicide for Tolstoy and for his values is the only solution, but today it would be different. Ophelia, on the other hand, is killed by Shakespeare because she is not useful to the plot, she has no real reason to die, so much so that her death is not entirely resolved.
Would we have had a different literature with a female point of view?
Following what Virginia Woolf says, there might have been less talk of war.
From the Sanremo monologues to the first female Prime Minister, the issue of genders is now in the spotlight, even linguistically. What can it improve?
The fact that the problem is addressed, even in the language, is fundamental and is already an improvement in that it is a broadening of perspective. And certainly many things are still missing from parity, from wages to numbers.
And what are the differences to protect?
More than differences between men and women, such as stronger men, more generous or sensitive women, etc., I believe there is a feminine and a masculine energy, which however are distributed differently in each individual.
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