Sexual identity and Fascist space in Milena Milani's Storia di Anna Drei

The female protagonist in Milena Milani's (1947) novel Storia di Anna Drei wanders the streets of Fascist Rome while pining for the pastoral environs of her childhood. The character's search for autonomy and sexual identity is conveyed in part through Milani's depiction of the ideological debate between the virtues of city and country that helped shape Fascist discourse. Tracing the heroine's journey from countryside to Rome, the author questions how women can thrive in spaces designed to promulgate the repressive ideologies of the regime. The protagonist's interactions with the urban and the rural are shaped by her gender and her sexuality—which are freely expressed in both environs—and challenge Fascist ideology while offering a new model of womanhood.

Milani (1917–2013) is perhaps best known for her 1964 novel La ragazza di nome Giulio, a text considered scandalous in its explicit portrayal of female sexuality, sexual violence, and lesbianism. Forced to go on trial for obscenity, she was sentenced along with the director of her publishing house to six months in jail and fined 100,000 lire. She won her appeal; the novel was published to great acclaim in 1966, translated into several languages, and led to an eponymous film in 1970. ¹ As a novelist, poet, essayist, and visual artist, Milani was part of a group of intellectuals, including Alberto Moravia, Emilio Cecchi, Vincenzo Cardarelli, and Giuseppe Ungaretti, who helped steer the country's cultural program away from its attachment to the traditionalist values of the 19th century and toward the more forward-looking postwar era. ² Indeed, despite the ordeal of the obscenity trial, Milani continued throughout her literary career to write about topics considered anathema for public consumption. “Io sono fedele alla mia tematica; intendo esercitare la mia funzione sociale di urto, di lotta contro i tabù che continuano a esserci, nonostante che in questi ultimi anni siamo andati avanti,” she declared in an interview in 1977 (Milani, 1977: 37).

The examination and celebration of female sexuality in her early novels places Milani in the position of proto-feminist, and is just one example of the way she often anticipated important literary themes and socio-cultural trends. ³ The depiction of female autonomy remained a constant in the author's work, linking her to the writers that would emerge from the Italian women's movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Carmen Gomez (2010: 225) situates Milani on a genealogical continuum of female authors, writing “Building on her historic feminist predecessors’ thorough examination of the private realm of female thought and experience, Milani anticipates the idea that the ‘personal is political’ and undermines the authority of patriarchal preconceptions of history, sexuality and narrative.” ⁴ Her texts often foreground the difficulties faced by Italian women as they seek to navigate and/or triumph over constricting socio-cultural expectations, especially those relating to sexual expression.

In Storia di Anna Drei, Milani looks back at the oppressive strictures imposed during Fascism and anticipates the years of emancipation still on the horizon. ⁵ The novel captures, then, a transitional moment in Italian culture and society, one in which new ways of thinking threatened to disrupt traditional expectations of female behavior. The novel portrays two young women struggling to make their way in a country shaken by war. Their troubled relationships, both romantic and sexual, with various men and women reflect a generalized ethos of despair and collapse, stemming in part from the trauma of war and the failed policies of Fascism. Indeed, Mario Apice (1982: 37) writes that with Storia di Anna Drei, “I critici, unanimi, considerano Milena Milani l’interprete più fedele delle angosce esistenziali della giovane generazione che era uscita frastornata dall’ultimo conflitto mondiale.” Certainly, Milani's depiction of the main characters in the text reveals a cohort unable or unwilling to confront the uncertainties triggered by the end of Fascism and the Second World War.

While there are no specific temporal elements in the text to pinpoint when in the ventennio it is located, the critique of the regime and of the effect of its policies is unequivocal. The novel's structure is loose, shifting between the journal entries of Anna Drei and her interactions with an un-named narrator. A brutish young man named Mario, who is involved with both women, seems to represent through his instinctive and casual violence the regime and its attitudes toward women. The relations between these three characters, along with Anna's mounting unease about her own identity, make up the sparse narrative. By keeping much unsaid, including how these characters support themselves or why they are in Rome, the author is able to focus more thoroughly on a carefully delineated exploration of how their environs shape their lives, from Anna's childhood in the countryside to their adult residence in the city. More importantly, Milani examines how the heroine's interactions with her surroundings defy traditional (and Fascist) expectations of female behavior.

In my critique of Milani's text, I draw on the approach of Doreen Massey and Giuliana Bruno for their work on place and gender. While neither of these scholars focuses specifically on the literary implications of Italian Fascism, their thoughtful inquiry into the symbiotic connection between space and gender informs my own reading of Milani's text. Bruno, who works on media (specifically cinema) studies and architecture, writes that space is subjective and meaningful. “Cartography,” she writes, “has been inextricably linked with the shaping of female intersubjectivity” (Bruno, 2002: 209). Gender, and the expression of female sexuality, are shaped by one's physical surroundings. Doreen Massey, a British geographer, has also written extensively on the intersection of space and gender. “Space and place, spaces and places, and our senses of them (and such related things as our degrees of mobility) are gendered through and through,” she writes. “Moreover they are gendered in a myriad different ways, which vary between cultures and over time. And this gendering of space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in which we live” (Massey, 1994: 186). Both Massey and Bruno argue that one's interactions with a particular place are socially constructed, just as a specific space can take on and shed meaning over time.

Their work, then, can illuminate an analysis of Storia di Anna Drei, which examines how the female characters negotiate the pastoral and the urban landscapes. Historically, artists and scholars have imbued the countryside with positive attributes, such as community, industriousness, and rectitude. Raymond Williams, whose work focuses in particular on English texts and is perhaps the definitive history of the contrast between country and city, points out the long-held conflation of the pastoral and the Edenic. Such a conflation, he argues, brings with it an assumption of “peace, innocence and simple virtue” (Williams, 1973: 1). The city, on the other hand, has a more mixed history. Burton Pike (1981), who has traced how European writers portrayed the urban environment in 19th- and 20th-century literature, describes the central myth of the city as an ideal site, but also one of corruption and isolation. Hana Wirth-Nesher finds the modern city can serve as a mirror of an interior state, whereby “in the modern urban novel cityscape is inseparable from self …” (Wirth-Nesher, 1996: 21). An investigation into urban and rural spaces, then, can act as a fertile vehicle for a study of identity, autonomy, and gender.

In Italy, urban and rural landscapes have long functioned as important markers of national identity, according to critic Robert Gordon. ⁶ His insightful analysis of the role of place, however, does not address at length the philosophical, political, and artistic questions arising from the debate surrounding city and country during the Fascist regime. I refer to strapaese and stracittà, two ideologically opposed cultural currents of the 1920s and 1930s. In brief, strapaese, as promulgated by the writers Curzio Malaparte and Mino Maccari, privileged traditional values, rooted in the countryside. Its mouthpiece, the journal Il Selvaggio, under the direction of Maccari, emphasized Italy's rural past and inveighed against the corrupting influences of foreign ideas as well as the sterility of the modern city. The proponents of stracittà, on the other hand, argued for the superiority of the urban space, seeing in it a vehicle for progress and modernity.

These cultural movements arose in part from different factions within the Fascist organization, with the strapaesani (those promulgating the pro-countryside view) emerging from the early paramilitary groups (the squadristi) that “spread a message of antiurbanism, antineoclassicism, provincialism, traditionalism, and political violence” (Binde, 1999: 767). The pastoral environment was also seen as more hospitable to the Fascist demographic policy, as party officials believed birth rates were higher in the countryside. Those championing a pro-urban ideology typically belonged to the faction that saw in Rome a conduit to the glories of Italy's imperial past. As Per Binde (1999: 763) writes, “Now the city of Rome, through a conjunction between historical destiny and the formidable will of the new Fascist man, was to become the birthplace of a Third Empire, that of Fascism.” The choice of Rome as a setting for a novel dealing with fragmentation and identity is particularly appropriate, as the city itself had recently undergone a massive transformation during the ventennio. Borden Painter has examined the role the capital city played in Benito Mussolini's campaign to promulgate Fascism. Il Duce's decades-long project to rebuild Rome included creating wide avenues to facilitate the growing use of vehicular traffic and the staging of enormous parades; clearing extensive open spaces around classical monuments, such as the Circus Maximus and the Theater of Marcellus, for easier access and to spotlight these wonders; and relocating the lower economic classes from their unsanitary, crowded homes in the city center to public housing in the periphery. ⁷ With this reconstruction and re-imagination of the city, Mussolini sought to combine “Fascism's emphasis on youth, revolution, modernity and the establishment of a new and vibrant Italy with the glories and achievements of ancient Rome” (Painter, 2005: 5). The capital city became the symbol of Fascism's potential, even as it was linked to the greatness of its past.

The story of Rome, or the modern Fascist city, was problematized, however, by a propaganda campaign that encouraged a gendered reading of the competing pro- and anti-urban currents. As Victoria De Grazia notes, women during the regime fell into one of two camps: the donna-madre, “national, rural, floridly robust, tranquil, and prolific”; and the donna-crisi, “cosmopolitan, urbane, skinny, hysterical, decadent, and sterile” (De Grazia, 1992: 73). The first stereotype is tied to the land and explicitly linked to women's function as a generator of young Fascists, while the second is the symbol of a deviant and corrupt urban space. Flora Ghezzo, who also examines the connection between urbanity, Fascism, and women, posits that the image of the decadent female figure arose from the increased presence of women in Italian cities after the First World War. “[T]his newly visible metropolitan woman was perceived as a threat, a distracting presence that confounded the traditional dichotomization of the public and private spheres, and therefore solicited a defensive and harsh response from men,” Ghezzo (2010: 204) writes. Repressive policies toward women during Fascism were aimed at removing them from public life and confining them to the domestic space. ⁸

Milani, however, does just the opposite; she frees her heroine from the domestic sphere by situating her within the urban environment. ⁹ Over the course of the novel, the author takes the reader through a tour of the capital city, paying attention to its more renowned streets and monuments. She names in particular Villa Borghese, the Colosseum, the church of Trinità dei Monti, and the obelisk at Piazza del Popolo. Her characters wander down Via Veneto, Corso Umberto, Via del Mare, and Via Flaminia, cutting across Piazza Mignarelli and Piazza di Pietra. The references to these primarily historic sites, several of which were transformed to serve the ambitions of Mussolini, serve to situate the novel in a specific setting. ¹⁰

The descriptions of the Roman environs are but one layer of a text that is as interested in the internal as the external; indeed, that the two are intertwined is evident in the first paragraphs of the novel. The narrator relates how one cold winter afternoon she stopped in front of the Cinema Barberini. As she searches in her purse for ticket money, a young woman approaches to say: “‘Se lei va al cinema, verrei anch’io, tanto sono sola.’” The text continues: “Si presentò: ‘Mi chiamo Anna Drei’” (Milani, 1947: 9). These brief lines, with their assertive declaration by the title character, immediately signal to the reader that female identity and relationships will play a significant role in the text. Anna's request to enter the cinema with a companion, rather than alone, also reflects the complicated mores of the time as women negotiated the social taboos regulating female behavior, especially as they pertained to public space. At the same time, this scene reaffirms the social bond between women and reinforces its significance in women's lives as they navigate the public sphere. After the film, the two women implicitly assert their autonomy again, this time by sharing a meal at a nearby rosticceria. By setting her novel's first scenes in such public spaces, Milani shifts the background to the forefront. She also obliquely challenges Fascist ideology concerning a woman's place; rather than locating her female protagonists within an interior space, she situates them in a modern and public site where leisure is played out.

I hesitate to say that Milani was explicitly commenting on Fascist architecture and/or ideology when she opened her novel at the Cinema Barbarini, which was designed by Marcello Piacentini, Mussolini's chief architect and city planner. ¹¹ This public edifice and symbol of modern cultural production, which opened in 1930, can stand in for the city as a whole, and points to Milani's desire to explore its role in the development of her characters. The author disrupts, however, this public space by using it as the starting point for the narrator's relationship with Anna. The budding friendship between the two women, which evolves in part through their long walks through Rome, is tinged with eroticism. They share a bed (albeit platonically) in Anna's pension when the narrator is not living with Mario. ¹² They share a lover as well, creating a sort of tacit ménage-à-trois.

Anna's fluid sexuality, and her attempts to reconcile the woman she feels pressured to become with her genuine self, become the focus of the narration. In her journal, which she shares with the narrator in an act of trust and self-revelation, Anna describes a painful, gendered socialization, a process implicitly linked to Fascist doctrines suppressing opportunities for women. In a game she would play with a stuffed animal, for example, the young Anna would create imaginary conversations with the queen who sat on a toy elephant. Anna would ask: “‘Dimmi, regina, per quale misterioso destino io pure crescerò a interrogare me stessa e mi dibatterò invano contro una legge che tutti governa’” (Milani, 1947: 21). The queen's response is telling in its utter surrender: “‘Crescere vuol dire diminuirsi’” (Milani, 1947: 21). Anna's indoctrination into womanhood is complicated by a lack of female role models, as her mother died when Anna was young. Unlike her girlfriends, she seems reluctant to grow up, perhaps afraid of “diminuirsi,” as her doll-queen predicted.

She relates in her journal:

Era quello, per me, un periodo di transizione; passata dall’infanzia all’adolescenza, m’ero come fermata in attesa, e se già le amiche parlavano di cose di donna, io me ne astraevo, mi allontanavo parendomi ancora immaturo il tempo di tali cose. (Milani, 1947: 50)

Even as a young girl Anna has set herself apart from others of her age; she clearly feels unready or reluctant to enter into the “cose di donna.”

In this pre-adult phase, taking place in the strapaese, Anna feels most secure and most happy when she is outdoors, in the pastoral setting, mirroring the simplicity and idealization of a more innocent age. Looking back on her childhood, she writes about “i bei giochi di allora, tutto quel candor delle scoperte del cielo e del mare …” (Milani, 1947: 52). ¹³ The joy and simplicity of that time are reinforced by the purity of the natural world in which she finds herself. This feeling of liberation, heightened by the lack of physical restrictions, becomes entangled with her latent sexuality. Anna writes of an encounter with a youth in a “macchia oscura dove ci sedemmo su un tronco abbattuto” (Milani, 1947: 53). Their kisses lead to fumbling with clothes and then—in a foreshadowing of the sexual violence that will end Anna's story—“le sue unghie mi punsero la carne” (Milani, 1947: 53). Anna is horrified and quickly runs away. Despite the drama of the situation, Anna chooses to describe the scenery and her response to it, rather than the trauma of the actual encounter with the boy. After running off, she wanders through the hills, “ondulate, selvagge, senza traccia di uomo” (Milani, 1947: 53). She goes on to express the almost mystical bond she feels with nature:

quel senso strano delle cose che sento in me certe volte, io appartengo alla natura ed essa m’appartiene, c’erano foglie, rami, arbusti, intere famiglie di insetti, pietre, piccoli corsi d’acqua, ed io pure unica creatura pensante lí in mezzo, con una scintilla di divino nel cuore. (Milani, 1947: 53)

Anna feels most herself, it seems, in the open air, away from social pressures and prescriptions that will mark her adulthood in the geographically delimited and purposefully designed urban landscape of the stracittà.

Milani's depiction of Anna in this setting illustrates Robert Gordon's belief, discussed above, that in Italian literature the “[l]iterary landscape was a real and a symbolic space, rich with the resonances of memory and return, of mourned lost worlds” (Gordon, 2005: 49). In this scene, Milani situates Anna at a transitional moment, looking back at her childhood but, with her sexual initiation, moving into womanhood. But this idyllic world, this rural paradise as the strapaesani would have it, is tainted by the sexual violence Anna suffers there.

Despite the brutality implied in this early sexual experience, the adult Anna embarks on—and describes in her journal—a series of romantic-sexual adventures. As she explores her sexuality, she finds herself under increasing strain, a psychic struggle that results in a fragmented identity. “Io avevo in me due creature (l’altra si prendeva spesso gioco dell’Anna e rideva), costoro mi trascinavano in cielo o all’inferno, solo che a una delle due piacesse, e cielo ed inferno erano entrambi cielo,” Anna writes (Milani, 1947: 63). ¹⁴ Despite her involvement with men, she prizes above all her solitude, rejecting social norms that insist on the importance of matrimony for women. “Sono completa in me stessa,” she writes in a letter to the narrator. “[T]roppe volte mi illusi e chiesi agli uomini quello che credevo mi mancasse. Invece essi non mi davano niente, ero io che davo qualcosa” (Milani, 1947: 79).

In describing the joy that Anna finds in her solitude, Milani employs language that evokes the landscape, a narrative move that brings us back to Anna's youth, when she took refuge in nature after sharing kisses with the boy. Here, Milani embeds Anna even more firmly into the physical world and the strapaese. “È come se braccia e gambe mettessero radici e foglie, sul mio tronco nidificassero uccelli,” Anna continues in the letter (Milani, 1947: 79). Anna's identification with the natural world is absolute, even though that space has become defiled by the incident with the boy. It is telling, however, that Anna challenges the Fascist reading of the rural, finding in it not a site for traditional female roles but for freedom and authenticity. ¹⁵

The contrast between country and city is reflected in Anna's sense of duality, which she reflects on in her journal. She describes how when she was younger, she was engaged to a respectful and kind young man, who rejected her sexual enticements, “perché c’era tempo e si doveva aspettare” until they were married (Milani, 1947: 61). Anna discovers physical satisfaction with another man, and feels she has found—for the first time—“l’equilibrio tra i due esseri nascoti nel cuore” (Milani, 1947: 63): the Anna who was obedient and docile and the other who followed her desires. She eventually breaks it off with both men but continues to be haunted by this sense of feeling split between the socialized woman she becomes and the authentic woman she longs to be.

Anna's confusion over her own needs and those dictated by socio-political ideology is compounded by a general sense of malaise afflicting her generation. As the narrator notes, “Sentivo che qualcosa rodeva nel nostro cuore, come un tormento senza ragione precisa, ma acuto, crudele” (Milani, 1947: 77). ¹⁶ While never naming the regime, Milani clearly implicates it in the unhappiness and sense of purposelessness affecting those who grew up under it.

A ripensare fatti concreti di questi anni, di questa gente che ci vive intorno, di questo luogo che ha nome “patria” … trovavo uno sfacelo, scomparsi i valori eterni che significavano purezza, bontà, amore delle creature alle creature, io, te, Mario e tutti gli altri che conoscemmo, siamo restati soli e sperduti in una terra meravigliosa, dove ancora c’è il cielo, nasce e si spegne il sole, ma in noi, giù in noi non è rimasto niente, anche le unghie ci consumiamo a vedere se grattando, scavando vien fuori qualcosa. (Milani, 1947: 113)

Milani deliberately uses this image of a “terra meravigliosa,” full of sky and sun, to create a contrast between the more carefree time before Fascism and the darkness brought on by the regime's repressive policies. She points as well to the divide between the external and internal landscapes, with a psychic void in place of this generation's hopes and aspirations.

The aimless perambulations around the city by both Anna and the narrator could serve as a metaphor for the sterility of these characters, and by extension, those of their generation. Inga Bryden, a cultural historian, sees the city street in a more positive light: as a metaphor of “collectivism—a communal space” (Bryden, 2012: 216). Milani uses the cityscape, too, as a positive site for her two female protagonists. The narrator, for example, who pointedly remarks on Mario's dislike of talking walks, discovers a sense of joy and freedom as she walks unescorted through Rome. “Com’erano belle quelle strade per me, quando me ne andavo da sola verso primavera o in autunno …” (Milani, 1947: 27), she enthuses. In her journal, Anna writes of her own ecstasy when she ambles through foreign cities:

Mi parve a volte che quando camminavo la gioia trapelasse dai miei passi, si sprigionasse da me come un fluido: questa incredibile gioia dell’esistenza … Anche … per le strade dove tutti vanno, ma fui sola, fui io sempre, con il mio viso, i miei occhi, la mia meraviglia e tutto fu creato per me. (Milani, 1947: 15–16)

Anna asserts her right to explore the urban environment, placing her in a location often thought of as inhospitable to women. Her reference to her face and eyes are especially evocative, for as Sarah Clement discusses in her work on the female flaneur, the woman who walks the streets was often the object of the male gaze. A female flaneur, however, “change[s] roles from the observed to the observer” (Clement, 2002: 290). ¹⁷ In Storia di Anna Drei, the protagonist disrupts the social order by marking a space for herself, and by vaunting the very corporality traditionally deployed by men against the female flaneur.

Tellingly, one of Anna's final journal entries—before she is killed by Mario—is a long description of a walk through Rome. Milani again creates a nuanced portrait of the city as a site of freedom; in this instance, it is seen instead as a bewildering force for Anna. The map of Rome becomes an “emotional cartography,” as Bruno (2002: 227) would have it, a visual exposition of one's interiority. In the novel, Anna's state of mind is both reflected and shaped by a melancholy afternoon spent wandering around Rome by tram, sitting on a patch of grass by the Tiber River, overwhelmed by the noise and bustle of Via Flaminia. The clamor and confusion of the jostling crowds act as a metaphor for Anna's interior anguish, and she writes that she “died” that afternoon. She continues:

Me ne accorsi quando ritornavo per Via Flaminia, a piedi, tra tutta quella gente; avevo sbagliato marciapiede, andavo in senso contrario, la gente mi veniva addosso, mi urtava, io dovevo andare a destra, lo so, e invece andavo a sinistra, non sapevo niente di via guista, io. (Milani, 1947: 110)

This impression of going “in senso contrario” surely mirrors Anna's deep-rooted feeling of not fitting in, of containing two selves. Neither of the “Annas” can survive in a world devoid of meaning, she writes in her journal: “‘[L]a vera Anna è morta da tempo indefinite, l’altra non ha piú ragione di esistere poiché qualcosa è morto in lei ….’” (Milani, 1947: 116).

Giving up on life, Anna manipulates Mario into killing her. She sees in him an unsuspecting dupe, one whose disdain for women and readiness to treat them with violence could serve her own purposes. She had initiated the sexual relationship with Mario, a show of independence he could not comprehend or tolerate. In doing so, Anna played on Mario's beliefs about female roles, and so maneuvered him into this act of violence. After strangling Anna, he rushes to the narrator's pensione and breaks down. “‘Vedi,’” he shouts at the narrator, waving his hands in front of him. “‘Le vedi. L’ho strozzata, con queste’” (Milani, 1947: 106). His confusion and subsequent action position him as the representative of a gendered (male) Fascism. Flora Ghezzo, in her examination of the masculine reaction to female autonomy during the ventennio, believes that:

[t]he only conceivable male psychological and rhetorical reply to woman's spatial mobility and social and sexual agency is an objectifying one; relegating [women] to their old traditional role as Eve, the temptress, and thus depriving them of their own subjectivity. (Ghezzo, 2010: 204) ¹⁸

Interestingly, it is through an overt expression of her sexuality that Anna can achieve her objective: death.

Anna's death reads as a condemnation of Fascism and the senseless violence it engendered. Rossella Lovascio (1990: 22) astutely notes that Anna's death can be read as an act of both “rassegnazione e ribellione.” ¹⁹ Certainly, the novel finishes on a note of despair: Anna dead, Mario in prison, the narrator achingly alone and lonely. But while our last image of Anna is on a cold slab in the mortuary, her death only highlights the autonomy she felt she lacked while alive. By engineering her own demise, Anna remains in control of her narrative, a narrative conveyed in her writings. Here, then, lies the significance of the manuscript/journal that she shares with the narrator; it allows the protagonist to shape her own story in a world that discouraged female self-expression. “Sì, è una donna che scrive,” she announces in its opening pages. “Una donna come poche, forse come nessuna. Nessuno mi toglie dalla mente che io, Anna Drei, sia una donna eccezionale. … So io quello che voglio dire” (Milani, 1947: 15). Milani hands the pen to Anna, as it were, allowing her heroine to (literally and figuratively) assert her autonomy in an environment that did not sanction female independence. But although Anna chooses how and when to end her life, she must still rely on someone else to do it for her, diminishing to some degree the agency she seeks so desperately.

In the brutal conclusion of Anna's narrative, the text seems to offer a damning indictment of the silencing of female autonomy. But Anna's own storia rejects that interpretation. I would argue that the narrator realizes this as well, commenting after the murder: “Io sapevo bene che Mario aveva fatto questo solo perché Anna non sapeva farlo, Anna si era servita di lui, l’aveva portato a quel gesto. Mario non era colpevole. Anna non era colpevole. Nessuno era colpevole” (Milani, 1947: 108). Implicated instead, according to the narrator, is the larger society, a world that offers no alternative to a ventennio of punishing ideology and politics.

Milani's depiction of Anna reveals a character who feels rooted in the countryside, and who despite the freedom she finds in her perambulations around the city, cannot find her place in a setting corrupted by ideologies that are fundamentally hostile to her desire for autonomy. Her attempts to create a life in the unwelcoming environment of Rome are contrasted with the ease and freedom she found in the more pastoral settings of her youth. But both these spaces are tainted with gendered violence, effectively removing the female protagonist from her physical environs. In this novel, then, the debate over the primacy of city or country is essentially moot, as the heroine cannot inhabit either space without the threat of erasure. Anna may have exercised some agency over the course of the novel by narrating her own life and orchestrating her own death, but in the end, that life has been irrevocably and viciously destroyed.