Abstract

This study investigates the novels of Grazia Deledda, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926, in relation to international human rights law, paying specific attention to the juridical invisibility of rural women and girls in early twentieth-century Sardinia. Based on the provisions of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the article argues that in Deledda’s fictional world, the harms that such human rights treaties would later address only in retrospect have been rendered narratively. The protagonists in Deledda’s novels are oppressed by silence, sacrifice, and immobility, as a consequence of patriarchal customs, religious morality, and geographic marginalization. Applying the work of Catharine MacKinnon, Martha Fineman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, the paper shows how Deledda’s novels reveal the harms related to the public/private dichotomy, the devaluation of women’s knowledge, and the lack of juridical visibility of rural and maternal identities. The conclusion discusses Deledda’s work as a case of what Robert Cover called jurisgenesis: a description of the normative life of women who have been invisible to contemporary law.