Pier Paolo Pasolini: "le madri vili generano la società borghese"

La ballata delle madri is one of the most provocative poems in the anthology Poesía in
forma de rosa. Through the language of rage as well as the use of devastating metaphors, the “idyllic”
representation of family is utterly destroyed: the fathers are absent, the brothers are fratricide and the
mothers, “vile, mediocre, servile, ferocious”, are blamed for the origin of bourgeois society and all its
evils. Pasolini moves between two opposing scenarios, one mythic and matriarchal, the other modern
and patriarchal, which are embodied by the poet’s mother and the vile mothers of his coetaneous. The
relentless contrast between the “I” of the poet and the “we” of his interlocutors-detractors-enemies is
deciphered in the myth of diversity, related to its sacred origin. Pasolini feels heir to Mother Earth,
still not domesticated by bourgeois society, who also incarnates the bare instinct, the spirit, and the
archaic force, charged with “a desperate vitality”. The feminine is represented by a double prism:
social and anti-social, subordinated and subversive, frenzied and idealized, and as a the foundation of
difference and dissidence. Thus, the feminine becomes a sign of its personal and cultural identity
while, at the same time, it is degraded and demonized as a symbol of compliance and submission to
the bourgeois capital system.