Women and Religion in Italian-Canadian Narratives

Like most immigrants, Italian-Canadians brought their religious traditions and customs to Canada with them. Since the early days, traditional Roman Catholic rituals have been widespread in Italian-Canadian communities, where religious festivities like Christmas or Easter and celebrations like baptisms, communions, weddings and funerals have always been important moments of family and social life. Churches, too, have been both places of worship and of social gathering where immigrants can preserve and share their traditions, language and culture. At the same time, however, socially inscribed, and often fossilized, religious teachings and the observance of a strict moral code have profoundly shaped the lives of the community members, and in particular of Italian-Canadian women who, more than their male counterparts, have been expected to lead a dutiful, pious and chaste life within the sacredness of matrimony and the patriarchal family. Maintaining one’s virginity until marriage and avoiding lascivious sexual behavior are, for instance, more or less tacit sociocultural requirements. Such deep-rooted religious teachings and moral codes have contributed to create stereotypical preconceptions about the “typical” Italian-Canadian woman, who often appears in narratives as a stock character with exaggerated traditional mannerisms and antiquated beliefs, like Assunta, the Black Madonna in Frank Paci’s famous novel. In an attempt to challenge traditional patriarchal inscriptions of womanhood upheld by Catholic beliefs, various Italian-Canadian feminist writers, however, ironically subvert hagiographic representations of women as saints and Madonnas, which paralyze them within the saint/devil or angel/demon binary. Indeed, as this essay will attempt to show, they engage in a parodic dialogue with the religious culture of the old country which keeps Italian-Canadian women bound in conventional female roles (the immaculate virgin, the nurturing, selfless and hardworking mother, the mourning and devout widow) that perpetrate both patriarchy and ethnic stereotypes of Italians in Canada. In so doing they join writers from other socio-cultural backgrounds in a feminist effort to subvert the tenets of the Christian religion which have favoured the patriarchal submission of women within domestic roles so as to posit new possibilities of emancipation from the stronghold of stifling religious traditions.