Lo spazio della trasgressione in l'Agnese va a morire

The aim of this article is to reflect over the new theories on gendered spaces in the field of spatial studies and to reflect on how the main settings in one of the most famous Resistance novels, L’Agnese va a morire, are related to the concept of transgression. The idea of a well distinguished “limit” that delimits certain places as feminine and the others as masculine, in time of war becomes blurred and destabilizes the traditional dichotomy public-private spaces studied from a gendered point of view. Focusing especially on two of the most common stereotypes on gendered spatiality, the house and kitchen as places most recurrently distributed to women and the street exclusively reserved to the strollers, the intention of the analysis of the spatial categories in Viganò’s novel is to point out that in specific historical moments, such as the Italian Resistance movement, these categories are completely reversed. Due to the fact that the participation of the women partisans was crucial, not only the dialectic public-private, masculine-feminine places was inexistent, but it was often completely reversed, putting the rebellious women as one of the main forces of the Liberation war.