CAROLINA INVERNIZIO'S “PUNISHMENT”

Carolina Invemizio (1851-1916), a successful Italian author who wrote more than one hundred novels, is nowadays no longer popular. 1 Few of her works are still in print,2 and little criticism has been published. In Italy, under the label "popular writer," Invemizio has been widely neglected by traditional male criticism as producing second-rate work, and by feminist criticism as being overly subservient to the patriarchal system. Her name is even less recognized outside ofltaly, where only about one fourth ofher novels have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese (Cantelmo 104105). To my knowledge, no English version has ever been attempted, though the author seems to have been rather popular among Italian immigrants in the United States. In line with the need to render Italian feminist thought into English, a desideratum recently highlighted by Graziella Parati and Rebecca West (14-15), my purpose in translating Invemizio's short story "Punishment" ("Punizione") is, primarily, to contribute to making the works of Italian women writers more visible and available, and, secondarily, to provide a text useful for comparative study of women writers and popular literature in generaI. 6 Translation of"Punishment" may not only help render Invemizio more evident within Italian studies, especially by introducing her typical "superwoman" through the main character Claudia Dorval, but it may also shed light on the author's position within European literature, by illustrating the influence exerted on her by the late eighteenth-century British Gothic and the nineteenth-century Frenchfeuilleton.