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Bianca Pitzorno, book review, feminism, historical fiction, nineteenth century, patronage, pecking order, Sardinia, sartina, sexism, small-town life, social attitudes, social backstabbing, tell vs show, unsophisticated narrator, unspecified time
Review: The Seamstress of Sardinia, by Bianca Pitzorno
Translated by Brigid Maher
Harper, 2022. 287 pp. $17
Sometime in late nineteenth-century Sardinia, a five-year-old girl and her grandmother are the only members of their family to survive a cholera outbreak. But they get by, because Nonna is a capable seamstress, and she teaches her granddaughter to follow in her footsteps.
Years later, around 1900—though it’s hard to tell, because the narrative provides few clues as to time period—the granddaughter becomes a sartina herself, a seamstress, one of the best in her town. Her first important client is the only daughter of a rich landowner who has grain mills and a brewery too.
These holdings matter, for signorina Ester, as the sartina calls her, has been indulged by her father in ways few women are. She’s been educated, presumably with an eye to run these businesses and also for the sake of knowledge—unheard of, for a woman, and unusual for anyone. Our sartina can’t fathom why a woman would need to know Greek or mechanics, or why she’d even want to. And signorina Ester studies music as if it were important in itself, not just a skill to attract a husband.
But that’s not all:
My dear signorina Ester had some quite bizarre ideas about equality of the sexes, and about how men should not demand of women anything that they were not prepared to do—or refrain from doing—themselves. She would become indignant whenever she came to the last page of a novel published in instalments in the newspaper and it talked of ‘fallen women’ or ‘sinful women redeemed.’
This passage and others like it are partly, if not largely, the narrative’s point, for The Seamstress of Sardinia aims to re-create societal attitudes, at which the author succeeds brilliantly. The unnamed, first-person narrator, dependent as she is on patronage, comes across all types of employers, from the (relatively) liberated signorina Ester to an American journalist known as La Miss to the women who scurry to appease a skinflint lawyer, tyrannical head of their household.
These and others introduce the sartina to the power of literacy, notions of decent wages, fair dealings, and rudimentary feminism—the concept that a woman is actually a person with legitimate desires. Having been taught by her grandmother that desires are dangerous, our seamstress doesn’t know what to make of what she sees and hears among her patrons. And in that contrast between her thoughts and what she observes the reader sees the town.
However, the seamstress is much more conversant with the less flexible or forward-thinking types whose points of view shape the world as she knows it. The town resembles a snake pit, but that description does snakes injustice, because those creatures don’t bite each other except for good reason—certainly not out of social pretension, the typical motive here.
One example suffices: if a person of wealth or social position sees, or thinks she sees, a poor woman putting on airs, the police will soon hear that the latter works as a prostitute. The accusation has no truth to it or even evidence, nor does the accuser need to present the charge openly. Nevertheless, the poor woman will be subject to arrest, jail time, an invasive medical exam, and the loss of reputation. She’ll be lucky if law and circumstance don’t force her to work in a bordello, as if she were, in fact, a prostitute.
Consequently, the degree to which the social pecking order matters—and whether you have a just, reasonable patron—decide what your life will be like. Such is the terror of disrepute, a judgment against which no appeal exists, that blackmail is as common as mud. And it’s not just that the sartina’s less savory patrons are determined to prove with every exhalation they make that they’re her social superior. It’s that she thinks so before they feel the need to demonstrate it.
Pitzorno’s writing style is matter-of-fact, as you’d expect from a down-to-earth narrator, and the story tells more than it shows. Normally, that would wear thin with me after a while, but since the sartina isn’t sophisticated or particularly astute—and she’s telling the story directly—the approach works well enough. Also, Pitzorno takes care not to repeat the obvious, and the minor characters often reveal themselves to the reader in ways the sartina doesn’t understand.
The author’s refusal to name her or specify the time period lend the book a vagueness that I found awkward, explicable only by the apparent desire to steer clear of historical events. This is, after all, a domestic story. But the interactions are real and well grounded, making The Seamstress of Sardinia a gentle novel of meaningful moments—though some characters are hardly gentle, and the meaning can be quite sharp.
Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.