updated 13 November 1995
EOL: Magrini article
2. The Narrative Function of Ballads
Topics of Italian ballads
Narrative characteristics
Ballads tell
a story. "A story describes a sequence of actions and
experiences of a certain number of characters, whether real or
imaginary. These characters are represented in situations which
change or to the changes of which they react. These changes, in
turn, reveal hidden aspects of the situation and the characters,
giving rise to a new predicament which calls for thought or
action or both. The response to this predicament brings the story
to its conclusion" (Ricoeur 1981:277). Since
narrative is so essential to ballads, it deserves careful
attention, since "narrative is one of the most widespread and
powerful forms of speech in human communication" (Bruner 1992:81).
Narratives are the best means to express and communicate one's
perception of oneself, others, and external reality. Recalling
Wittgenstein's vocabulary, Ricoeur suggests that, "if narrating
is a unique 'language-game,' and if a language game 'is part of
an activity or a form of life,' then we must ask to which form
of life narrative discourse as a whole is bound" (Ricoeur 1981:
274). Ricoeur says that any narrative is endowed with an episodic
dimension, the dimension of time, which is expressed in the
succession of events; and a non-chronological dimension, which
constructs "meaningful totalities out of scattered events."
An essential aspect, "the art of narrating, as well as the
corresponding art of following a story, ... require
that we are able to extract a configuration from a succession"
(ibid:278).
Narrative may be considered as the outcome of an act of
interpretation which gives meaning to a sequence of actions.
In ballads, narrative is essential and emphasizes above all a
skeleton of events which are connected and describe patterns
of behavior related to events. These patterns help the narrator
and audience to perceive reality by describing what a
certain type of man or woman would do in certain situations.
Female ballad singers emphasize the value of patterns
assigned to ballad narratives by taking a detached view, denying
emotional involvement through verbal choices and singing style.
This impersonal performance style seems related to the
impersonality of ballad narratives. They are not dependent on
ordinary chronicles or anecdotes as in Italian broadside ballads,
for example.
Narrative ballads are emblematic rather than historical. But
fictional narratives assist us to be "in history" and emphasize
our need to cope imaginatively with reality. "By its mimetic
intention, the world of fiction leads us to the heart of the real
world of action" (Ricoeur:298).
One can examine the topics of the Italian ballads, referring to
the comprehensive and celebrated Nigra's collection, which
includes most ballads actually sung in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Unlike North-European ballads, the Italian
repertoire has no magic elements (1), or episodes from
epic literature. Nigra has only a few stories about men
and most of those men are social undesirables: a deserter,
no. 27; card-players, no. 22; violent students, no. 5;
prisoners, no. 47, for example.
Most ballads widespread in Northern Italy cited in Nigra were stories of women and usually
about the relationship between women and men.
Topics can be categorized into five main groups.
- 1. Violence done by a man to a woman
- The most narrated type of violence is abduction, e.g.,
nos. 14-16, 32, 40, 43, 44, 50, 53, often followed by suicide
of the woman to avoid rape (2). Other plots deal with men
raping (nos. 4, 51, 79) and killing women (no. 12), or with
jealous husbands or lovers murdering innocent women (nos. 6,
29, 36). In others, husbands mistreat their wives and waste
their dowry (nos. 35, 95, 96, 55) (3). In this group, we can
include also "Un'eroina" ("A heroine"), no.13, whose lyrics
resemble those of the English ballad, "Lady Isabel and the
Elf-Knight," although no supernatural being appears in the
Italian version. Unlike other narratives in this group,
"Un'eroina" has a happy ending. The woman marries a man who then
reveals his will to murder her, but succeeds in killing her
husband.
- 2. Women betrayed
- A woman is betrayed and/or abandoned by her lover (nos. 24, 93),
husband (no. 42), or by an authority, such as no. 3, the well known
and widespread "Cecilia," in which the woman tries to save her
prisoner husband. She is betrayed by the captain, who first promises
to save the husband in exchange for a night with her, but then
murders him.
- 3. Forbidden love
The family forbids love between a young man and a young woman
(nos. 7, 8, 18, 19, 20, 37, 41, 45, 46, 49, 63, 99) and the story
usually ends with death of one or both lovers. This common plot
typically describes the conflict of a young woman with authority,
generally represented by the father, because of love (4). A
happy ending of this kind of story appears, for example,
in "Il genovese" (no. 41), where the lovers succeed in getting
married by deceiving their parents (5).
- 4. Virtuous women
- Men try to seduce girls, who virtuously refuse them (nos. 69-72,
78, 90, 101), sometimes making fun of the man (nos. 52, 75, 76, 77).
Exceptionally, as an alternative ending, the girl accepts the offer
of love (nos. 66, 67).
- 5. Women who break the law
- The most widespread ballad about lawbreakers is "Donna Lombarda,"
no.1, in which a woman betrays and tries to kill her husband, is
discovered and is murdered by him. Another well-known ballad is "Il
testamento dell'avvelenato," no. 26, similar in content to "Lord
Randal." In "La parricida", no.11, a young woman
murders her father, who has forbidden love. Generally, the
women are put to death.
Narrative ballads deal with other topics, but these are the main ones.
All in all, ballads are mainly concerned with stories of women and in
particular with the representation of the dangers coming from men
(abduction, rape, murder, betrayal, mistreatment, abandonment), with the terrible
consequences coming from a conflict with family or authority for
questions of love (imprisonment, death) or from breaking the law,
and virtuous female behavior.
Italian balladry has four basic narrative features (Bruner:81-82):
- emphasizes human action
- maintains linear sequences of events
- displays sensibility about what respects and what breaks the canons of human interaction
- expresses a well-defined perspective of the narrator
The narrator's perspective in Italian balladry is the woman's
worldview in a peasant society, and seems to stress three elements:
- female weakness in the face of strength, violence and authority of men; women can only resort to cunning to cope with men
- honor as the only socially recognized value of women
- death as the likely consequence of legal and moral transgressions, especially adultery and disobedience to the family.
It seems an essentially female worldview, where men are often
dangerous and never heroes. This worldview is expressed through
the representation of women's emblematic cases of lives. Most
ballads deal with the variety of situations occurring in a relationship
between a woman and a man, depicting different characters
and different behaviors, and pointing out a wide range of possible
events. Family is often a third important element in the narrative,
but has a minor role. Female characters are above all young women,
then wives or, quite seldom, mothers, and they may be depicted
either as positive or negative characters. Ballads narrate how these
characters react to a wide range of situations mainly connected
with love (and related feelings, e.g. jealousy), sex, marriage.
In any case the relation woman-man lies generally on the background
of the narrative and is the source of the different stories: no ballad
deals with a relation among women or among men. By dealing with
this theme, ballads represent and interpret a wide range of events
which happen or may happen in the world and describe
different patterns of behavior. In this way, they express
and communicate the women's perception of themselves, men,
and the possible developments of their relations. The stories have
an emblematic character: they do not describe a particular
occurrence or a particular person, but paradigmatic sequences of
events which may stem from a relation. No interest is payed to the
psychology of the different characters: what is important is what they
do, how they behave. The way ballads are narrated tends sometimes
to stress the fantastic side of the stories, mentioning kings,
princesses and castles. But ballads represent and interpret
events which happen or may happen in the real world,
helping one in picturing to oneself their dynamics and meaning .
Italian ballads as a whole represent a sort of comprehensive survey
of the possible events originating in a relation and connected models
of behavior. From this point of view, ballads manifest different
functions. They reveal a prominent educational value, by showing
model behavior for honest women and the dangers coming from
breaking morals or the law. Actually, the values manifested in
ballads, especially the importance of honor and the condemnation
of transgression, were shared by the whole society. Moreover,
ballads had another function: singing ballads was an occasion
for women to develop imaginative activity, which has an
extremely important role at the psychological level. Finally,
singing and creating ballads meant to work out a representation
of the world and life, or better, of those aspects of the world
and life that women knew better and in which they were more
interested. We cannot omit considering that women in the countryside
lived essentially within the boundaries of the household and farm
and had limited contacts with the external world, while men travelled,
made war, dealt with the landowner and authorities, frequented taverns.
In this situation, women's creative imagination focused
necessarily on the cases of life that they could experience and
imagine and on the problem of the relation with men,
which had a paramount importance in women's life, since
it determined its course. While recognizing the fundamental
dependence of women's fate on the relation with men,
ballads helped to maintain this condition, by transmitting
this worldview. But this and the other functions of the
ballad, strictly connected to women's way of life in
the nineteenth and early twentieth century, was bound to
disappear.
JPG photo of 1880 house, 87 kB
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