Gaze as a Device of Estrangement in the Short Story “Il silenzio della ragione” by Anna Maria Ortese

The essay adapts Viktor Šklovskij’s (1917) concept of estrangement to the literary analysis of a short story by Anna Maria Ortese, “Il silenzio della ragione” (1953). My hypothesis is that some types of subject-directed gaze (up to voyeurism proper) in literature can work as a device of estrangement, especially when a female-subject turns into the object of the scopic drive. Three examples of visuality are analyzed to show different outsets of es-trangement in accordance with the type of the gaze that defines the relation between the “I” and the “Other” (thought of in a Lacanian sense). Descrip-tions are designed to undermine the narrative reality and to reveal it again, but in an unusual way. Reconsidered from this perspective, this short story shows not only a problematic social group, but also a patriarchal symbolic architecture in which a woman always plays the role of the Other. This is particularly striking if applied to visual dynamics in tune with feminist cri-tique. The main idea is that in texts such as Ortese’s, estrangement is an out-come of a specific type of gaze, and narration can become a way to interrupt the repetition of an automatic patriarchal architecture.