Joan Ginzburg's The Mother

As the Jewish woman who experienced the World War II and confronted the Fascism ideology in Italy, Ginzburg utilizes the understandings of her identity and experiences in her story by introducing Judaism and Fascism, and elaborately illustrating the conflicts between them. Therefore, the characters in The Mother are either typical Jews or Fascists, and their behaviors are judged by either the Judaism or Fascism moral standards. The character of the mother of the two boys in the story coincides with a traditional Jewish woman standing for anti-Fascism in Italy during the post-World War II who is young, thin, and struggling. And her character as an anti-Fascist is reinforced by other women in the story; Granny, Aunt Clementina, or the other mothers who are old, fat, and robust.
An evidence of the identity is the uses of the color yellow. Yellow is a color symbol of persecution of Jewish, and in The Mother, the color yellow appears continuously to illustrate the the family. The phrase “[The mother]
Ginzburg illustrates the mother with the bicycle, work, and makeup. The ideal woman under the Italian Fascism would be a peasant who lives in rural, and devote her life into raising her family with traditional values. However, the bicycle the mother rides implies that her freedom and modernity; her place of work is the opposite to the place she should be where is home; and makeup she everyday puts on is not a characteristic of a peasant. On the contrary, other women in the story Granny, Aunt Clementina, and the other mothers the boys at school are thoroughly adopt to the Fascist; they are old, fat, and tied to family. It seems that the author deliberately introduces the conflicting roles of women in the society in order to proposing and emphasizing the proper role of a mother to the children at the end of the