Narrating the self, imagining the nation: feminine thought in Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso’s political and literary works (1844–1868)

Abstract

This article re-evaluates the intellectual legacy of Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso (1808–1871), arguing that her extensive literary and political production between 1844 and 1868 constitutes a systematic deconstruction of the nineteenth-century gendered subject. Moving beyond her established role as a Risorgimento icon, the study examines twelve of her works to trace a philosophical journey from theological inquiry and Vichian historiography to an ethnographic investigation of the ‘Other’. The analysis presented here scrutinises her exilic output—including the travelogues Souvenirs dans l'exil (1850) and La Vie intime et la vie nomade en Orient (1855), alongside her ‘Turkish scenes’ (Emina, Un prince kurde, Les deux femmes d’Ismaïl-Bey, Le pacha de l’ancien régime, Un paysan turc, and Zobeïdeh)—to reveal how she used the Eastern domestic sphere as a laboratory for diagnosing Western social imbalances. By mapping these observations onto the Italian landscape in Rachel: Histoire lombarde de 1848 (1859), the study identifies Belgiojoso's theory of the strategic concealment of female intellect as a response to patriarchal constraints. Her mature syntheses, Della presente condizione delle donne (1866) and Osservazioni sullo stato attuale dell’Italia (1868), frame the intellectual empowerment of women as the essential catalyst for a secularised and stable national identity.