Elena Ferrante as World Literature

Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2)

“…The first is the pizza shop incident, in which a “professorial” man in his fifties declares, in front of his own wife and children, that “you have here a girl who will become more beautiful than a Botticelli Venus” (I, 146). His inability to keep this appraisal to himself leads to a violent confrontation with Rino, which further inscribes the scene's “patriarchal optics” (Milkova 2021, 109). The second event is Gigliola's name-day party, which is ruined when “four males, of various ages, each convinced in a different way of his own absolute power, reached out toward the figure of a fourteen-year-old girl” (I, 149–50).…”

“…2Several scholars writing about the Quartet discuss Cavarero's work. See especially de Rogatis 2019, 43; Zarour Zarzar 2019; Di Martino 2021; Milkova 2021, 127; and Ricciardi 2021, 103.…”

“…I mean feeling oneself a mother at the price of getting rid of a living fragment of one's own body; I mean feeling oneself a daughter as a fragment of a whole and incomparable body” (Ferrante 2016, 224). For more on translating (or not translating) the word frantumaglia , see Milkova 2021, 18.…”

“…See note 27 for a word about Ann Goldstein's translation of smarginatura . Stiliana Milkova notes that the neologism is Lila's (Milkova 2021, 38)—“The term isn't mine, she [Lila] always used it” (Ferrante 2012–2015, I, 89)—and that Goldstein omits the rest of this sentence—“forzando il significato comune della parola” (forcing or breaking open the common meaning of the word). For especially important discussions, see de Rogatis 2019, ch.…”

“…Emilia's blockage prefigures that of Elena Greco, and of many other women in the narrative, who in their own ways exhibit the condition that sparked the Collective's theorizing 3 . But it just as clearly evokes the notion of frantumaglia that Ferrante claims to have inherited from her mother (indeed, from her mother's dialect 4 )—a notion she repeatedly uses to characterize women's predicament, and which is widely understood to be the central plank in her work's system of metaphors (Milkova 2021, ch. 2).…”