Lost in The Art(ifice) of Male Language: Finding the Female Author in Paola Capriolo's Il doppio regno

Abstract

With its self-conscious intertextuality and thirty-year-old female narrator, Capriolo's Il doppio regno invites interpretation as a form of `fictitious autobiography'. This reading emphasizes the novel's importance as an exploration of female authorial anxiety in relation to a predominantly male-authored canon. Focusing upon Capriolo's admiration for Gottfried Benn and his privileging of art as absolute, the article shows how women's alienation from language is dramatized through the depiction of a fantastic space. The protagonist's encounter with a labyrinthine hotel is also the author's encounter with a language that claims to speak for the universal subject, but in fact excludes the female.