Playing with the Maternal Body: Violence, Mutilation, and the Emergence of the Female Subject in Ferrante’s Novels

Abstract

Sub-proletarian fights, domestic disputes, and camorrista-led aggression permeate and scar the suburban cityscape in Elena Ferrante's works. Violence and animosity, which dictate life in the Neapolitan rioni, are deeply entrenched in the local dialect, as well as in the writer's conflict-ridden portrayals of mothering and motherhood. This article proposes to analyze a fundamental tension that emerges in Ferrante's writings, which explore new notions of feminine identity and rethink fundamental aspects of gender relations and social constructs, most prominently of motherhood. These reflections, however, remain profoundly tinged by the patriarchal structures and spaces they set out to expose and subvert. A particularly productive way of approaching the tension that underpins Ferrante's textual negotiation of the feminine subject, is through a close reading of her complex depictions of maternity.More precisely, this article will analyze the intricate interplay between forms of desire and the imagery of violence, conflict, repulsion, and animosity that accompanies maternity in L'amore molesto (1992), La figlia oscura (2006), and the so-called Neapolitan novels (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014), with a specific focus on L'amica geniale (2011). 1 My reading will show how the maternal body-which appears as violating or violated in its inaccessibility, repulsive appearance, or crippled status-stands at the very center of the author's reflections on the troubled and discontinuous emergence of the female subject. Ultimately, I will show how Ferrante's complex female characters challenge normative conceptualizations of motherhood and femininity while exploring new forms of female-focused experience that undermine deeply engrained patriarchal power structures.Critical appraisals of Ferrante often single out her unforgiving portrayals of maternity, which routinely challenge the socially and religiously constructed stereotype of the nurturing, self-abnegating, and asexual mother, as one of the most unsettling and thought-provoking aspects of her work. Kate Chisholm's article in The Spectator, for instance, refers to the "brutal honesty with which Ferrante is prepared to expose the dark underside of female friendship and motherhood." 2 James Wood, on the other hand, draws attention to the "savagery with which the author attacks the themes of motherhood and womanhood," as her texts stand apart in how they indulge in "the psychic surplus, the outrageousness" of the familial dramas they expose. 3 However, I will argue that rather than constituting an eccentric feature of the author's works, Ferrante's "disturbing" conceptualizations of motherhoodand their recurrent link to animosity and violence-stand in critical dialogue with a longstanding literary and cultural tradition that constructs non-normative forms of motherhood as deviant or aberrant.