Giuseppina’s unwanted pregnancy

Giuseppina’s unwanted pregnancy brings the constraints of her marriage into direct conflict with her fear, religious conscience, and uncertain sense of motherhood. She considers seeking help from the midwife Mariuccia Colosimo, but before she acts on that possibility, she miscarries. The loss leaves Paolo remorseful and Giuseppina withdrawn, making the episode a turning point defined not by reconciliation but by the feelings the couple cannot share.

Discovery and conflicted response

Giuseppina recognizes she is pregnant after missing her cycle and noticing that her breasts are sore. The news comes while she already feels unwell and dislikes her life in Palermo: the house is dark, and winter weather keeps the windows shut and lamps burning. The pregnancy does not offer her an uncomplicated prospect of motherhood. She has not told Paolo, and she does not know whether she wants the child.

Her hesitation is rooted in the marriage as she experiences it. She does not trust Paolo and is sometimes afraid of him; the respect she believes a wife is expected to show can give way to hatred. The thought of another child therefore feels inseparable from her distrust and resentment. She is ashamed of considering that the child need not be born, but the shame does not erase the thought.

The midwife and the question of choice

Giuseppina leaves home with a shawl over her head and goes toward the harbor, where Mariuccia, a midwife from Bagnara, lives in a small dwelling behind the walls. She calls for her by name, but hesitates when Mariuccia appears. Giuseppina’s uncertainty is not merely practical: she believes that refusing a child is sinful and remembers her grandmother’s warning that the Blessed Virgin turns away from a woman who casts her child aside.

At home, the conflict persists. A sharp pain makes Giuseppina stop with her hand on her belly. She believes children are sent by God and that harming one would bring punishment, yet she cannot make herself feel that this child is hers. She contrasts the pregnancy with Vincenzo, who had felt connected to her even before birth; the new child feels alien. She tries to persuade herself that attachment may come with time and that she can let nature teach her to be a mother again. The scene leaves her caught between religious conviction, an unwanted pregnancy, and the hope that feeling might change.

Miscarriage and its immediate aftermath

The pregnancy ends before Giuseppina resolves that conflict. When Vittoria sees dark stains on her skirt, Giuseppina realizes that she is bleeding. Fear overtakes her; she manages to say that the midwife should be called before collapsing. Vittoria goes to find Mariuccia, while Giuseppina’s earlier uncertainty gives way to an emergency she cannot control.

Paolo later stands at the bedroom threshold and regrets that he had not noticed Giuseppina was unwell. He tells her she could have told him and asks why she did not. His response is marked by bitterness and devastation rather than reproach: he says the child might have been another boy and that it was evidently not meant to be. Giuseppina lies motionless, staring at the wall. She neither speaks of forgiveness nor offers an apology. Mariuccia leaves the room, and the couple’s silence remains the episode’s most consequential outcome.

Marriage, agency, and the episode’s significance

The pregnancy unfolds within a marriage in which Paolo’s authority has already been asserted as a command. When Giuseppina previously refused to leave Bagnara, he told her that she would go with him to Palermo because she was his wife, even if he had to drag her there. That history gives weight to her fear and distrust, while the pregnancy’s possible consequences fall most immediately on her body and her choices. Her attempt to approach Mariuccia marks a search for agency, but the evidence does not establish what she intended to ask or what the midwife would have done.

The episode does not resolve Giuseppina’s ambivalence by turning the miscarriage into relief or reconciliation. Instead, it places her religious belief that she must protect the child beside her inability to welcome it, then leaves her and Paolo separated by grief and unspoken blame. Paolo’s remorse comes after the loss; it cannot restore the opportunity for a conversation before it. Giuseppina’s silence, in turn, withholds the forgiveness he does not receive. The pregnancy thus makes visible how duty, fear, and unequal marital power can narrow a woman’s choices without making her inner conflict any less real.