Introduzione

"La madre", one of Grazia Deledda most concise novels, is a work which widely reveals the skill of the author both in composing narrative devices and in arranging in the text symbols and other equivocal signs, and is probably the most significant and mature proof of the difficulty in labeling the writer into a specific literary movement. In the novel, special attention is deserved by the interferences with the Holy Scriptures, contaminated with elements of a pagan origin, so that the plot can be read as a disturbing and ambiguous parable. The voice of the people multiplies the perspectives and interweaves the tales, each one an apocryphal gospel. The reasons of good and the necessity of evil, the conflict between instinct and ethic, are the real narrative engine: no redemption is possible without expiation, and expiation necessarily leaves a legacy of solitudes – a canonical scheme in Deledda's works. More than the clash of the characters, the representation of the intimate contraddictions that agitate figures otherwise motionless.