«Once upon a time, there was a lady who did not have a baby»… Once upon a time there was a plastic baby… Motherhood and childhood in the stories of Donatella Ziliotto

Abstract

Maternity is the term that the human being invented to define she who with her body, is able to generate life and that we call mother for this reason, emphasizing the creative dimension of an act that, as Martin Heidegger tells us in his fable of care, is closely linked to the humus, the earth, or to the substance of all things, because it is from it that care has molded it, and strongly moved by desire (for what one does not have, but could have), which is vulnerability. Reasoning about motherhood by linking it to this creative and generative dimension also means inevitably, expanding the concept to include, in addition to natural motherhood, ‘other’ forms of motherhood. Children’s literature, among other literature, especially that written by women, offers itself as a metaphorical place where the traces of this reflection sediment, stratified and latent. The object of analysis in this contribution will be Il Bambino di  Plastica, by Donatella Ziliotto, a collection of short stories in which the writer explores, among others, precisely this dimension of the maternal, between autobiography and literary fictio.