Comparing The Texts 'Engaging With The Resistance'

A comparative reading of the texts that engage with the Resistance reveals that there are certain interpretative conventions and recurring themes in the representation of this period in young people’s fiction of the 1970s. The first of these is that most of the examined texts center on children-characters that operate outside of the traditional family unit. War orphans, children whose parents have fled to the Middle East or fight the conquerors in the mountains alongside the guerrillas and street urchins take matters into their own hands and contribute to the national struggle for the liberation of their homeland. They become saltadoroi and put themselves in danger in order to help their starving compatriots, they write patriotic slogans on

To put it in numbers, of the thirty novels and short stories that comprise the corpus of the examined narratives only five texts feature children-characters as organised members of the Resistance. In all other texts, the children-protagonists who engage in subversive work against the occupiers are shown to act alone. What these texts promote, therefore, is the idealised image of the ‘heroic’ child whose uncompromising patriotism drives them to fight the conquerors in ways that are always spontaneous and self-inspired. In other words the sole preoccupation of the ‘heroic’ child is to see their homeland liberated from the hated enemies, while questions as to what is going to happen after the occupiers are gone are of no concern to them. This is another common convention which allows authors to inculcate lessons of patriotism to their young readers without raising uncomfortable questions about what happened in the post-liberation period and if indeed everyone enjoyed a peaceful life after the war was

Participation to organised Resistance is presented as an adults-only affair or –to be more precise- as a men-only affair. Taking up to the mountains and engaging in guerilla warfare or joining a resistance organisation is a right reserved for the male characters. The war effort is much more restricted in the case of the female heroines who are at best presented to undertake tasks that are consistent with their traditional gender roles, like teaching street orphans how to read for example, or sheltering members of resistance organisations and catering for their needs. In the rare occasions that the female characters do take active action it is mostly to fill in for their male relatives who are unable to continue working for the liberation of the homeland:

-Since my husband is dead and cannot join the struggle, I will fight for both said Mrs.-Rini to the leader of the organisation.
And me? What did I do? I went to work for [the liberation] of the homeland and fill in my brother’s