Yesterday evening Drusilla Foer joined Amadeus at the Sanremo festival with great success, with the usual corollary of gossip to whet the viewers' appetite. Gianluca Gori, the talented actor who gives life to Drusilla, she is neither trans, nor non-binary, nor a drag queen, but perpetuates the tradition of shows en travesti of which Paolo Poli has been a school leader.
The character seems to live a life of its own in relation to the actor playing it, has its own biography to tell (birth, youth, love, marriage) and uhis vision of the world.
Drusilla is therefore really a "character' in the Pirandellian sense, a little bit Franca Valeri and a little bit, as we said, Paolo Poli, and has many young fans. Even if Drusilla is not young at all. Even her name betrays an ancient coat of arms, a Roman name, 'daughter of Drusus', the furthest thing from a young girl's cultural horizon; an algid, compassionate beauty, old-style, bourgeois manners and tailored clothes, the thinness and class of a 1950s mannequin, all very bon-ton.
Yet they like it, and very young girls, judging by social media; teenage girls seem to trust her, ask her for advice on how to be in the world and how to be chicin times when such words sound so outdated. They talk to Drusilla as they would talk to a snobbish old aunt. Maybe not the mother, but the aunt who has no children and knows a lot about life can be an excellent advisor.
But Drusilla does not exist, the biography itself is a script, there is nothing true.
Why do the girls follow you?
Why Drusilla is not a woman, she is a man. Better, she is not a woman 'by birth' - the ultimate in banality and undesirability- but she is a 'woman by choice'., how much more glamour there is. And so we play along, we believe in the pretense of her style advice, she too appears to be wrapped in an air of "fabulousness"She is not the bigoted relative, she has experience and strong shoulders, she can even afford white hair.
How to talk to an imaginary friend, how to write to Father Christmas, we know he doesn't exist but we like him for that very reason. Because reality is boring. It is made of real womenof mothers and old aunts who are real, complaining, trivial, outdated; women who appear depressing and not at all glamorous to uswith low self-esteem, whom their daughters would never choose as role models. Because those women have not chosen to be. So they can only be sloppy and frustrated housewives, wives and mothers who are grey and colourless, banal and bigoted, nn spite of the fact that today's mothers do not correspond to certain stereotypes, which survive in the minds of their daughters.
In feminist world, very similar dynamics can be observed.: often the cut between generations is sharp, young women, not just teenagers, seem to feel a dull resentment towards political and symbolic 'mothers' whom they blame
any error or oversight, animated by a strong compensation syndrome which is a bottomless pit.
Women with more experience of life and activism who sometimes really didn't want or know how to 'become mothers' of younger women, perhaps themselves in a similar dynamic with their own mothers. Difficult to create the circle of trust, establish links, recognise genealogies. Walls of misunderstandings and unspoken words resist.
Better then to look elsewhere. Lhe same things said by a man seem more authoritative and credible, you can trust them, they love us and understand us.
They, if they are women, it is because they have chosen it, and not suffered it as a bitter and undesirable fate.
Anna Perenna
DRUSILLA/2 (THE DAY AFTER)
