Still Life

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapter 9

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Background

Literary Context: Italy and the British Expatriate Experience

Still Life features characters who are British expatriates in Italy. The term “expatriate” refers to people who reside outside of their home country. What differentiates an expatriate from an immigrant is the balance between two cultures and nationalities. For example, as much as Ulysses Temper adapts to Italian life and culture, he is still well-connected to his English life and personhood: He is very much an Englishman in Italy. Expatriate literature is an important subgenre because expatriates occupy a unique cultural position, which provides an opportunity to see both (and all) the cultures to which they belong from a new perspective.

Expatriate literature was popularized by great authors like Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night), and James Baldwin (Another Country, Go Tell It on the Mountain), who spent years living in Paris, where they developed their distinct authorial voices. The distance between these authors and their home country allowed them to write about America with the experience and influence of other cultures and the identity of a stranger to a new place. A common theme in expatriate literature is how new environments challenge and free the authorial interpretation of home.

Italy is an important setting for expatriate literature. In 1908, E. M. Forster published his novel A Room with a View, which explores the experiences of young English people living in Italy. In A Room with a View, Italy is a setting in which the Victorian conservativism of England recedes, freeing the characters to explore romance, sexuality, and new identities. Similarly, Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms centers an American protagonist in Italy and explores the cultural experiences of expatriate life. In A Farewell to Arms, Italy represents both masculinity and beauty. Winman alludes to Forster to place her work in the British expatriate literary tradition. Her novel emphasizes the beauty and depths of Italian culture and pays homage to Forster by bringing to life Forster’s orientation as a gay man that he had to repress in his own literature.

Historical Context: Italian History 1940s-1970s

Italian civilization dates back to around 800 BC. Originally a region of city-states, Italy’s center has always been Rome, which has been variously controlled by different cultures and peoples. The Roman Empire, founded in 27 BC, was an expansive empire that brought together disparate cultures and made a lasting impact on Italian identity, culture, and art. Winman highlights the post-war poverty of Italians by comparing it with Ulysses’s inherited wealth. His house has modern amenities like a refrigerator, which cause envy and resentment from his neighbors.

Winman’s novel depicts Italy in the decades between the end of World War II and the 1970s. In 1940, Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, joined World War II on the side of the Axis powers, which Germany led. An estimated 500,000 Italian lives were lost in World War II, and the destruction caused by the war obliterated Italy’s economy, which turned the people against Mussolini. Mussolini was assassinated by his own people in northern Italy in the final days of World War II in 1945.

In 1946, Italians voted on a referendum that turned Italy into a republic and elected their first president, Enrico De Nicola. The Marshall Plan of 1948 allocated funds from the United States to help rebuild Italy’s infrastructure. Though this brought hope to many Italians, as Winman depicts in her novel, the decades after World War II were nonetheless challenging. Though standards of living increased in the 1960s, Italy was immersed in political turmoil that extended into the 1970s. Changes such as a 1970 law that legalized divorce kept Italy on pace with other modern nations. Clashes between conservativism and liberalism, Marxism and capitalism escalated into bombings and assassinations. Still Life includes this historical background as the backdrop of new developments in the lives of her characters. Alys in particular is affected by these new political movements because she is young and embodies the future of Italy.

Another important historical allusion is the 1966 flood of the Arno, which is highlighted in Chapter 7, “Mud Angels.” The losses caused by the flood deeply traumatized Florence; the characters in Winman’s novel compare this devastation to the destruction of World War II and agree that the flooding of the Arno had worse ramifications than the war itself. The flooding of the Arno also brought people together, as hundreds of people, mostly young university students, poured into Florence to help. They scraped mud off the streets and tried their best to salvage priceless books and artistic masterpieces. The communal spirit in Florence was heightened at this time, developing a patriotism and unity that didn’t exist even during the war.

Cultural Context: Anti-Gay Legislation in Mid-20th-Century England

Winman’s novel spans the 1940s through 1970s and shows how her characters’ relationships and sexual identities evolve during a period in which Great Britain struggled to accept LGBTQ+ individuals.

In the early to mid-20th century, gay male relationships were decreed illegal in the United Kingdom. Early laws such as the Buggery Act of 1533, the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, made such relations punishable by law. A law in 1921 proposed that sexual relations between women be banned, but it was never passed. Pervasive anti-gay bias meant that conservative English society found gay male relationships much more threatening than lesbian relationships. Still, it was dangerous for women to conduct lesbian relationships openly.

Attitudes about criminality shifted in 1954, when the Wolfenden Report determined that attraction between members of the same sex could not be seen as a disease. However, only in the 1980s were laws criminalizing gay sex repealed in England. Winman evokes the struggles of LGBTQ+ individuals in mid-20th century English society by placing them in an environment—Italy—that allows them to express themselves more freely. Her characters experience sexuality as a spectrum, which is a progressive idea for this time period. Multiple allusions to English author E. M. Forster are tied to Winman’s celebration of diverse expressions of sexuality; Forster was gay, but like Winman’s character Evelyn Skinner, kept it a secret from the public. The closest Forster came to revealing his sexual orientation was in his novel Maurice (1913), which explores a romantic relationship between two men, one of whom believes his sexuality is a phase. Forster only showed the novel to several of his closest friends during his lifetime; due to England’s anti-gay legislation, Forster believed that publishing the novel would have legal repercussions. He chose not to publish Maurice, and it was only published posthumously in 1971.

By contrast, in 1890, Italy decreed that relationships between members of the same sex were legal, providing more freedom and security to LGBTQ+ people in an otherwise conservative Catholic culture. The dichotomy between sexual acceptance in England and Italy reinforces the allusion to A Room with a View because, like the Victorian English characters discover in Forster’s novel, Italy is a place of awakening, not repression.