In my thesis, I outline readings of Italian American gender violence literary texts through the psychoanalytical standpoint of Melanie Klein. Her insights into the workings of literature offered by her conceptual framework have not been fully investigated yet, and her dynamics of literary experience could therefore help forge a new challenging critical approach. The Kleinian theoretical framework offers the critic the possibility to scrutinize texts from a new perspective that serves to re-signify fear, sadism, death-drive, and violence against female corporeality. Klein’s empirical observations and conclusions on the patterns of aggression on gendered corporeality will contribute to illuminating the stances of Italian American patriarchy and violence, as well as investigating the onslaughts and brutalization inflicted on the female body. Concerning the usefulness of Klein’s work for the analysis of Italian American patriarchy and honour killing, there is an important point to be made: as Alison Sinclair noted, Klein’s work provides us with a deeper understanding of how a pater family reacts to his daughter betrayal. This sheds lights on how, in a regime of patriarchal power, ‘the threats associated with the feminine are translated into certain social reactions and structures.’ Despite the academic attention that Italian American literature has lately received, yet the chronicles of gender violence and the patterns of violated bodies, documented by a handful of Italian American women writers, are still broadly unrecognized and non-investigated. Through the feminist psychoanalyst’s lens, this thesis will pioneeringly attempt to provide an innovative literary interpretation of Italian American unsafe female corporeality and to investigate this as assimilable to the unconscious early frustrations in aggressive phantasies and death instinct.