Choice and solidarity in Viola Ardone's Oliva Denaro

Contemporary Italian writer Viola Ardone's most recent novel, Oliva Denaro (2021), fictionalizes the story of Franca Viola, a young Sicilian woman whose refusal to marry her rapist in the 1960s was the first such situation to become highly publicized. In 1981, the law supporting so-called “reparatory marriages” was repealed in Italy, and Viola's case is widely seen as having been the impetus for the change. This article first places the novel in its historical context. It discusses afterlives of Viola’ story, which was important in the Italian public sphere in the mid-1960s and has enjoyed renewed popularity since 2012. This article argues that the running thread of choice in Ardone's novel should not be read as a liberal feminist version of one individual woman defying an entire society and becoming a fully autonomous self in the process, but as a situation that applies to every character in the text. It demonstrates that, unlike the way in which Viola's story is often framed, Ardone views feminist social justice change as a collective endeavor—a gathering of many individual choices that contribute to a collective end and require institutional backing—rather than a sole individual's trajectory.