Crossing Boundaries of Female Immobility: A Comparative Analysis of Death and Corporality in Sophocles’s Antigone and Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim

According to Alison Goeller, the Greek mythological figure of Persephone becomes a symbol for the Italian American woman (Goeller 2003, 75). Goeller resorts to myth to highlight the dichotomous identity of the Italian American woman, at “the center or heart of the family” (Johnson 1978, 237), relegated to a domestic spatial dimension and subordinated to a male figure who “dominates the instrumental and authority roles in the family” (237). Drawing from Rose De Angelis’ reading of Mario Puzo’s representation of the Italian American woman, this paper attempts to provide an alternative female character of Greek tragedy to juxtapose to the revolutionary character of Lucia Santa in Puzo’s 1965 novel The Fortunate Pilgrim: Sophocles’ Antigone. Starting from the analysis of how both Sophocles and Puzo manage to cross boundaries of female immobility through the creation of revolutionary literary figures, by deconstructing the material and spatial frontier of gender, this paper focuses on the role of death and corporality, attempting to demonstrate that, through the figure of Lucia Santa, the author of The Godfather transcends the static representation of women in Italian American literature, thus creating an innovative literary figure closer to Antigone than Persephone.