Spectacular Women: Recovering the Feminine in Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to explore the models for female existence depicted in Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono (2002), specifically those which bypass conceptualisation according to patriarchal prescriptions for female behaviour. I examine the ways in which Ferrante presents female existence as controlled by patriarchal narratives, before shifting to an exploration of the processes that allow a transcendence of such narratives. This article suggests that I giorni dell’abbandono presents a framework through which women are able to conceptualise the world and their existence through relation to each other, undoing the alienating and limiting forces of patriarchal oppression.

KEYWORDS:

• Elena Ferrante
• disgust
• the grotesque
• surveillance
• affidamento
• I giorni dell’abbandono

‘Spectacular’ Women

In The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo recalls a phrase heard in childhood: ‘she is making a spectacle out of herself’.¹ This utterance, directed towards the behaviour of another woman, was a ‘harsh matronizing phrase’, originating from the mother – not her own mother, but an aunt, an older sister, or the mother of a friend. It seemed to Russo that this ‘spectacular’ woman, possibly the possessor of ‘large, aging and dimpled thighs […] overly rouged cheeks, of a voice shrill in laughter, or of a sliding bra-strap’, had ‘done something wrong’.² A society in which a woman becomes a ‘spectacle’ or ‘does something wrong’, is one in which, by definition, her actions transgress accepted codes of behaviour. This is the patriarchal society which Adrienne Rich defines as a system in which men ‘determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male’.³ Alison Stone further states that to be a subject, to have true agency, a person must be the ‘author’ of their experiences in order to depart from ‘given horizons of meaning to regenerate new meanings adapted to one’s own situation and history’.⁴ If, according to Luce Irigaray’s theory of Woman as the Other of the Same, women are only definable in relation to men, i.e., as not men, then women cannot be the authors of their own experience.⁵ Teresa de Lauretis quotes Adriana Cavarero when she states that:

woman is not the subject of her language. Her language is not hers. She therefore speaks and represents herself in a language not her own, that is, through the categories of the language of the other […] Discourse carries in itself the sign of its subject, the speaking subject who in discourse speaks himself and speaks the world starting from himself.⁶

If a framework is lacking for women’s existence as subjects independent from a relation to men, and if it is from a position of subjecthood that a person can speak herself into the world, then it becomes impossible for Woman to exist in the world as a fully actualised and legitimised being.⁷ If men determine what role women play, in order to avoid such marginalisation women need to play by male rules, performing what Elena Ferrante calls in La frantumaglia a form of ‘autocontrollo’.⁸ This society consequently forms women who are ‘addestrat[e] a reazioni canoniche’.⁹ In this light, the ‘matronizing’ woman of Russo’s childhood can now be seen herself as a pawn in this patriarchal world, extending the learnt control of her own subdued voice to the behaviour of her fellow women. In other words, she speaks in the language of the male other.

In her contribution to discussions of trauma, feminist psychologist Laura Brown cites Root’s concept of insidious trauma to denote the repetitive stressors to which women are subject. Insidious trauma she says is the ‘traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment, but which do violence to the soul and spirit’.¹⁰ In this light, the ‘reazioni canoniche’ and ‘autocontrollo’ of women under patriarchy, which they extend to the behaviour of other women, may now be understood as shared symptoms of the trauma of oppression. Indeed, if such reactions to patriarchy are ‘canoniche’, we can imply they are experienced, but also perpetuated, by generations of women. Rebecca Walker analyses the workings of insidious trauma in Ferrante’s most recent work of fiction, La vita bugiarda degli adulti (2019). Commenting on the ‘banal cruelties’ to which traumatised individuals are subject, the words and actions of others, she notes, ‘not simply extremes of violence, have a tangible, traumatic impact on how we view ourselves and our bodies, reshaping the relationship between the individual and her world’.¹¹ Furthermore, the use of the word ‘spectacle’ implies a separation: an onlooker, and a performer. In labelling this woman a spectacle, this ‘mother’ of Russo’s childhood thus also places a distance between herself and this woman, negating any chance of a female collaboration that could enable a transcendence of this constricted existence under patriarchy.

The ‘grotesque’, to use Russo’s formulation, can thus be understood as those traits and behaviours that transgress the controlled mores of accepted femininity under patriarchy, but also those which defy definition according to a patriarchal framework.¹² Stiliana Milkova suggests that the behaviours which transgress social norms are established and regulated by an ‘affect of disgust’.¹³ Disgust for Freud, she states, ‘denotes the passage into culture and the repression of libidinal impulses’.¹⁴ For Winfried Menninghaus, the effect of disgust erects ‘civilizing barriers’.¹⁵ Disgust, then, represents ‘the dominant, prescriptive voice of society’.¹⁶ Disgust and the grotesque can thus be said to be intimately linked in society: that which is disgusting is deemed transgressive (i.e., grotesque), and that which is transgressive is deemed disgusting.

Ferrante’s heroines are embroiled in both the grotesque and disgust, displaying behaviours considered transgressive or even unnatural according to patriarchal norms. Writing about the prevalence of the effect of disgust in Ferrante’s works, Milkova notes that ‘Ferrante’s female protagonists are constantly rent by repulsion, repugnance, and revulsion, while her texts teem with scenes that prompt the reader to recoil in disgust. Bodily fluids and bodily orifices, insects, and reptiles, ugly or slimy surfaces take centre stage in her narratives. Disgust, in other words, pervades Ferrante’s rhetoric and provides a framework through which we can examine her novels’.¹⁷

Disgust is particularly prevalent in Ferrante’s depictions of mother-daughter relationships, which are often troubled.¹⁸ According to Julia Kristeva, disgust correlates ‘with the primal repression of the abject maternal body’.¹⁹ Milkova analyses disgust in relation to Ferrante’s later novel La figlia oscura (2006) in which the mother-daughter entanglement is represented through the figure of a doll conflating the roles of both mother and daughter. The novel, she notes, ‘combines the perspectives of daughter, mother, and wife to portray a woman tormented by repugnance for each of these roles and, thus, offers perhaps the most intricate model of the workings of disgust in Ferrante’s novels’.²⁰ However, she also proposes disgust as a productive framework for approaching Ferrante’s preceding novels. This article will demonstrate the value of disgust as a framework for the analysis of the earlier work I giorni. Kristeva sees this process of abject detachment from the maternal body as both necessary to ego-formation through the emergence of a separate identity, but also a threat to its stability, as this now external object confuses the distinction between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’.²¹ When faced with this confusion between the self and the non-self, the subject recoils in disgust from the ‘pure carnality’ of the body, this rupture of the ‘I’ threatening to strip things from ‘their layer of culture that envelops them’.²² It is this confusion, Alison Stone states, which mirrors the ambivalence felt by the mother towards her own mother in her past maternal relationship.²³ Irigaray gives voice to this mother-daughter entanglement: ‘You look at yourself in the mirror, and already you see your own mother there. And soon your daughter, a mother. Between the two what are you? What space is yours alone? In what frame must you contain yourself? And how to let your face show through, beyond all the masks?’ The mother, Irigaray states, ‘is without figure or face or proper form […] her function requires that she herself have no definition’.²⁴ Patrizia Sambuco suggests Irigaray’s sexual difference feminism responds to some of the matricidal elements of the traditional psychoanalytical approaches of Freud and Lacan, which had failed to acknowledge the importance of the woman’s relationship with the mother in the process of subject formation. She states that in contrast, Irigaray:

focusses on the revaluation of the woman’s body and on the possibility of creating a viable position for the female subject – that is, not a position of rejection and negation in function of the male subject. The mother-daughter relationship is crucial to her thinking in the development of a new, positive sense of subjectivity.²⁵

Sambuco goes on to suggest that the theories proposed by Irigaray are ‘particularly suited to the analysis of novels that give prominence to the daughter’s sense of self in relation to a rediscovered bond with the mother, which takes shape through images and stories connected to evocations of the female body’.²⁶ This failure to acknowledge the importance of the relationship with the mother also affects the daughter’s sense of self. Nancy Chodorow suggests that ‘because a woman sees her daughter as a narcissistic extension of herself, she closely identifies with her in ways that hinder the daughter’s ability to establish ego boundaries and express an autonomous self’. As a consequence of this bond, the daughter’s primary sense of self is ‘established as a “self-in-relation”’.²⁷ Indeed, Alberica Bazzoni suggests that for Olga, the protagonist of I giorni dell’abbandono, her husband Mario’s abandonment is so devastating because it ‘triggers a previous sense of affective abandonment, which Olga felt primarily in relation to her mother’.²⁸

To be afflicted with such a problematic and unstable sense of self can be read as a symptom of what Ferrante terms ‘la frantumaglia’. Frantumaglia, Ferrante states, is a word her mother would use to describe how she felt when she was struck by ‘impressioni contraddittorie che la laceravano’.²⁹ Frantumaglia denotes ‘un paesaggio instabile, una massa aerea o acquatica di rottami all’infinito’ and the feeling ‘quando si ha la certezza che tutto ciò che ci sembra stabile, duraturo, un ancoraggio per la nostra vita, andrà a unirsi presto a quel passaggio di detriti che ci pare di vedere’.³⁰ This was the only way she could describe the fear that the capacity to express herself would get stuck, and that everything she had learnt to control through determined mastery of the body would start fluctuating on its own, dripping or hissing out of this body which had become a thing, no longer compliant with mental governance.

Frantumaglia then is intimately linked with disgust; it is both the feeling that Ferrante’s female characters experience when faced with disgust, but also the fear of disgust itself. Frantumaglia denotes the realisation that beneath the controlled mores of society there is a seething mass barely kept at bay by regulated behaviour. It is the perception of a breakdown in established categories and societal boundaries, i.e., that the societal codes that give definition and form to their existence as women under patriarchy are nothing more than a veneer of sense. Indeed, frantumaglia, Ferrante notes, is ‘l’effetto del senso di perdita’, to perceive ‘con dolorosissima angoscia da quale folla di eterogenei leviamo, vivendo, la nostra voce e in quale folla di eterogenei essa è destinata a perdersi’.³¹ In this way, Milkova suggests that frantumaglia, ‘appears as the imposition of primaeval chaos over the ordered world of the (feminine) psyche, a return to a timeless, borderless existence. It ‘seems to suggest a certain fear of the undifferentiated self’.³² If the patriarchal society is one in which men determine women’s roles, and there is consequently a framework lacking according to which women can express their own subjectivity independent from the hegemony of the male subjectivity, then frantumaglia is an affliction particular to women.³³ To be afflicted with frantumaglia, Milkova suggests ‘is to acknowledge – and submit to – the protocols of a universal patriarchy’ and can thus also be characterised as the perception of the unstable foundations on which subjectivity is built.³⁴

However, as Milkova argues, in Ferrante’s work, while disgust reveals the unsettling formlessness seething beneath societal codes, disgust consequently also ‘breaks down established categories and expels Ferrante’s heroines outside social and gender expectations’, becoming ‘an instrument for feminine introspection, and for resistance to normative paradigms of motherhood and daughterhood’.³⁵ Disgust ‘opens space for transgression and liberation so that feminine identity becomes slippery’, the loss of form clearing the way for new conceptions of subjectivity.³⁶ Crucially, form in Ferrante, Sarah Chihaya suggests, should be thought of as a verb rather than a noun, as the active practice of ‘forming and being formed […] To form is action, or being acted on, a dynamic process to which everyone and everything is subject’.³⁷ The formlessness revealed by disgust is thus redemptive: it is through an embrace of the volatile and shifting nature of subjectivity revealed by disgust that Ferrante’s female protagonists can transcend negative and ‘matronizing’ models for their existence.³⁸ Similarly, Walker notes that Ferrante’s most recent novel, La vita bugiarda degli adulti, is ‘the story of [the protagonist’s] wilful deformation in the face of various false, ready-made forms presented to her’.³⁹ In this article I seek to trace this emphasis on deformity in Ferrante’s earlier work, demonstrating that this theme has long been a pervasive element within her writing. This article examines the alternative frameworks for female subjectivity within Ferrante’s second novel I giorni dell’abbandono (2002).⁴⁰ It will explore how women in this novel are presented as suppressed under patriarchy, but also how they unravel the forms of femininity imposed upon them under this system, eventually forming subjectivities which bypass patriarchal prescriptions for female behaviour and embracing identities which are shaped through female collaboration. This conception of female subjectivity within Ferrante’s works has been suggested and explored by Stiliana Milkova, Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, and Tiziana De Rogatis among others.⁴¹ In this article I aim to expand this discussion within the context of I giorni dell’abbandono. I will analyse the way in which the protagonist Olga succeeds in creating a framework of female resistance to patriarchy through an acceptance of ‘the grotesque’, arguing that Olga departs from ‘given horizons of meaning’ and creates an identity which can be characterised by its ‘deformity’.⁴²

Telling Tales

In I giorni dell’abbandono, Ferrante presents a feminine experience which is highly controlled. We follow Olga, a Neapolitan stay-at-home mother living in Turin, through the aftermath of her husband’s abandonment of her and their two children for a younger woman named Carla. The narrative begins with Olga’s reflections on her fifteen-year marriage as she tries to figure out what triggered his departure. She experiences a flashback to her Neapolitan childhood, specifically to the memory of ‘una figura nera, una donna grossa, energetica’ who lived in her neighbourhood.⁴³ We learn that this woman was also abandoned by her husband, and that afterwards her cries and sobs pierced the night, breaking through Olga’s walls like a battering ram and leaving the abandoned woman ‘di pelle trasparente sulle ossa’.⁴⁴ Olga’s seamstress mother and her colleagues discuss the matter, saying that this is what happens when ‘colme d’amore si resta non più amate’.⁴⁵ Olga remembers how her mother would talk for hours about these women without love who ‘dissipavano la luce degli occhi’, who ‘morivano da vive’.⁴⁶ Maria Morelli suggests that ‘[t]he self-effacement and loss of self shared by the poverella, Melina in the Neapolitan novel series, and Olga in the name of their men is the product of a distorted value system’ based on the belief that women without love wither away, ‘with “love” always referring to the love of a male Other’.⁴⁷ According to the narrative perpetuated by the women of Olga’s childhood, this abandoned woman ‘diventò per tutti “la poverella”’, and everyone began to refer to her in this way.⁴⁸ The poverella ‘piangeva’, ‘gridava’, ‘soffriva’, the list of active verbs in the imperfect tense indicating the projections of her grief attached to this new designation and the continued totality of her transformation into the character of the poor forsaken woman.⁴⁹ In weaving this narrative then, these sewing women place the poverella in the canon of tales of abandoned women. Reducing her to the character of the ‘poverella’ thus also reduces her to a ‘spectacle’. Indeed, as little Olga listens under the table, imbibing these tales on what it is to become an abandoned woman, the pain expressed by this woman begins to disgust her and she explains that ‘un dolore così appariscente cominciò a disgustarmi. Avevo otto anni ma mi vergognavo per lei’.⁵⁰ The women of Olga’s childhood thus place a distance between themselves and this woman, a distance which negates empathy and identification. If she is denied empathy, then her pain is devalued, reducing her cries to the meaningless utterances of a mad woman. A society in which female emotion renders her a spectacle is thus one in which women’s distress is pathologized as a disorder, and thus one in which women are denied a true subjective perspective.⁵¹

Boundaries

It is partly due to her memories of the poverella that as an adult, Olga tries to distance herself from such grotesque displays of emotion and continues to treat her husband with ‘un’affettuosa riflessività’.⁵² She remembers a period five years previously when she had witnessed a kiss between her husband and Carla, the 15-year-old daughter of one of his colleagues. This was followed by a series of discussions between Olga and her husband as they tried to work through this crisis in their marriage. Unlike the piercing cries of the poverella faced with her fleeing husband, these discussions were carried out in hushed tones because Olga hated ‘i toni di alti voce, i movimenti troppo bruschi’.⁵³ We see that for Olga’s existence, certain movements are too vigorous; the adverbial ‘troppo’ indicates a quantifying and weighing up of the suitability of her actions. Olga, Ferrante states in La frantumaglia, is a woman who exercises over herself a ‘masculine’ surveillance and who is ‘addestrata a reazioni canoniche’, submitting herself, as Elizabeth Alsop highlights, to ‘the same sort of hostile scrutiny to which women […] had historically been subject’ from parents, brothers, husbands and their community.⁵⁴

This training in ‘hostile scrutiny’ which manifests for Olga in an awareness of and respect for [prepositions need correcting] an equilibrium necessitating maintenance began during her Neapolitan childhood, where she had the impression that ‘ogni cosa si dovesse di colpo squadernare a causa di una frase troppo lancinante, un movimento poco sereno del corpo’.⁵⁵ She feared a phrase which was too ‘stabbing’, a movement which lacked serenity and which thus risked breaking everything apart, the juxtaposition between this breakage, this spreading open and the sudden strike indicated by ‘di colpo’ suggesting a tension between a breach of boundaries and the loss of boundaries all together. Thus, we see that Olga experiences the world as a series of fragments, which she perceives as held together by her own bodily ‘serenity’.⁵⁶

In order to combat this perception of the tenuous links binding the world, Olga had thus learnt ‘a parlare poco e in modo mediato, a non avere mai fretta […] ad allungare il più possibile i miei tempi di reazione’, this list of verbs indicating the choreographed and thus unnatural nature of Olga’s existence in the world, ‘allungare’ suggesting a start and an end point, and thus the regulated nature of her interactions with others.⁵⁷ But she does not simply wait in the lengthened span of time between reactions, she fills this space with ‘sguardi perplessi’ and ‘sorrisi incerti’, the adjectives here describing her own facial expressions and denoting Olga’s evaluation of her own actions and thus the role she plays in her own bodily control.⁵⁸ In these time-gaps, Olga became used to waiting until ‘ogni emozione implodesse’, taking the ‘via della voce pacata’, her placid, quiet voice ‘custodita in gola per non dare spettacolo’.⁵⁹

Later, Olga notes that from the moment she had fallen in love with Mario, she had been struck with a fear that he would be disgusted by her. She posits the site of this disgust once more in bodily terms, and explained that she avoided this fate through a series of imperatives which compelled her to ‘lavare il corpo, deodorarlo, cancellare tutte le tracce sgradevoli della fisiologia’.⁶⁰ She thought of beauty as this ‘sforzo di cancellazione della corporalità’, this effort and exertion deemed worth it to ensure that Mario loved her body ‘dimenticandosi di quello che si sa dei corpi’.⁶¹ Olga wanted her husband to love her body, while simultaneously forgetting what it is to exist as a body. Olga thus views her own body as key to her being the object of her husband’s love while also positing its corporeality as threatening the loss of this love. Thus, we see that Olga posits her body as both the entity that risks making a spectacle, but also that which keeps her from this state, the container for imploded emotions and restricted physiology, which, if projected, would break apart the borders governing her existence and turn everything into an ‘aquatic mass of debris’.⁶² But crucially, she does not blame Mario for this need for forgetfulness: it was Olga herself who believed that Mario’s love needed this obsessive constriction of her physicality, a belief for which she blames her own mother who she says had educated her in the ‘cure ossessive di femmina’.⁶³ Just as Olga’s mother wove tales of what it is to be an abandoned woman, here we see that she also provided instruction on how to avoid this fate, weaving a narrative of feminine corporeality as necessitating strict regulation in order to control male perception, this perception key to determining whether or not male disgust, and thus the fate of the abandoned woman, is to be avoided. In Ferrante, as Walker comments, ‘women feel they must not be too expansive’.⁶⁴

Women here are thus posited as agents in the denial of their own subjectivity free from dependence on men, the codes of feminine behaviour under patriarchy transmitted from mother to daughter in a cycle of self-perpetuated male perception.⁶⁵ Indeed, Morelli notes that women’s self-perpetuated effacement embodies what feminist activist Carla Lonzi terms ‘the “vaginal woman”, that is, the woman who, through her socially acceptable sexuality, would be complicit with the rules of patriarchy to the point of turning into the sexual embodiment of phallocentric culture itself’. In assimilating to the ‘heterosexual model of perfect womanhood’, Olga, Morelli states ‘dangerously mimics the very same power structures that tie the notion of “woman” to idealised and unattainable standards, thereby perpetrating that form of “invisible” patriarchal violence that […] is all the more insidious as it acts not through overt repression but through assimilation and subsequent interiorisation’.⁶⁶ Consequently, we see that Olga carries a sense of a mandatory bodily tension and restraint, her life defined by its borders in order to keep the planes of her existence intact. Faced with the memory of the spectacular poverella and the tales of abandonment woven by her mother, Olga has thus trained herself in the ‘reazioni canoniche’, avoiding this inadvertent ‘loss of boundaries’ in order to exist in a patriarchal world.⁶⁷ Her finely tuned practice of this set of behaviours thus constitutes both an inheritance from her mother and her storytelling, but also the institutionalisation of such female narratives under patriarchy.

The Stench of Motherhood

A few months into her abandonment, Olga’s son Gianni falls ill. As Olga cleans up the vomit on his bedroom floor, the acidic stench triggers memories of the resentment the poverella harboured towards her children and how she blamed them for having ‘lasciato l’odore di mamma addosso’, this lingering stench the cause of her husband’s departure.⁶⁸ She complained that the children ‘ti gonfiano la pancia, sì, prima ti appesantiscono le mammelle, e poi non hanno pazienza’.⁶⁹ Again, Olga recalls the voice of her mother, hushed to prevent little Olga from hearing as she played with sequins under the sewing table, repeating these illicit words and agreeing with them. Olga heard them nonetheless, and, in another episode of frantumaglia, which Ferrante further posits as ‘il deposito del tempo senza l’ordine di un racconto, di una storia’, she experiences a temporal confusion whereby she hears her mother’s words in the present in ‘una sorta di doppio – udito’. She is simultaneously ‘la bambina di allora che giocava sotto il tavolo’ and the ‘adulta di quella mattina’; she is the child who ‘giocava’ in the imperfect tense under her mother’s table, whilst simultaneously existing as the adult of ‘questa mattina’ mothering her child.⁷⁰ Trauma, Alberica Bazzoni notes, ‘impacts deeply on the sense of time, affecting the cognitive level, interrupting the plot of personal narrative, and repeating itself on a collective and intergenerational level’. Olga, she continues ‘loses her grasp on reality and the ability to differentiate between distinct times and spaces’.⁷¹

In this act of mothering her own child, Olga thus re-enters what Stone terms the ‘maternal past’, a ‘field of maternal body relationships that [the woman] had formerly left behind’.⁷² The mother replays her maternal past, Stone argues, ‘through re-enacting patterns of behaviour and affective response that once circulated between herself and her own mother. These modes of maternal remembering generate a particular form of lived time – maternal time – that is cyclical, centring on the regular reappearance of an archaic past that cuts across time as a linear succession of moments’.⁷³ With the poverella and her mother’s words on the destructive forces of motherhood ringing in her ears, Olga begins to ruminate on her own early days as a new mother and the changes that motherhood wrought on her body which she saw as having become ‘un grumo di cibo’ upon which her children chewed continuously, ‘un bolo fatto di materia viva che amalgava e ammorbidiva continuamente la sua sostanza vivente per permettere a due sanguisughe voraci di nutrirsi’.⁷⁴ Her body continually amalgamates and softens, but it is not Olga here who controls this process, it is the ‘materia viva’ of her body that undertakes this process of continual alteration, the agency implied in these verbs not attached to Olga herself, rather, the body performs these actions precisely to allow her two children to nourish themselves upon it.⁷⁵

As Milkova suggests, Irigaray argues that ‘the mother is the daughter’s “feeder” and “food” at the same time’.⁷⁶ If the mother is both feeder and the food, this places her subjecthood on unstable ground, the agential action of feeding is undermined by the fact that she is also the food, and thus an object which only has definition in its relation to the feeding children. Ferrara suggests that if representational realism is grounded on the idea that a ‘true’ perception of the world is impossible due to the fact that knowledge of it is acquired by each human subject ‘through means of perception that, while producing representations or ideas of the external world, ultimately function as a barrier between the knower and the object of their knowledge’, then the passive matter that forms the external world cannot be known as it requires ‘representation by a conscious being’.⁷⁷ Here then, Olga’s body is detached from her own agency and subjectivity and awaits representation by the conscious beings who are her children, denying her knowledge of her own body, or any sense of active participation in her role as a mother. But importantly, her body is not posited as ‘passive matter’, rather, it is the ‘materia viva’ of her body upon which her children enact agency. In this way, reality in Ferrante, Ferrara suggests, is positioned rather as a ‘doing’ or ‘becoming’ in which subject and object are radically enmeshed and entangled with one another. At this juncture, this lack of subjective stability unsettles Olga as she struggles to ‘assign meaning to her world’.

It is thus Olga’s children who enact this change and thus agency upon her body which now exists solely in relation to them. In mothering her own children then, Olga re-invokes examples of archaic maternal relations which here saw her learning what it is to be a mother, what it is to have one’s body exist for one’s children, through the overheard words of her own mother. If, as Stone formulates, ‘the subject is one who actively gives meaning to his or her experience […], and who can do so only because at some level he or she identifies as the single agent performing this activity’, in becoming the child of her own mother once more hearing her mother’s acknowledgement of the destructive forces of motherhood, Olga continues the self-in-relation which originated with the relationship with her own mother and which is now enacted through her existence which takes shape only in relation to her own children. In this way Olga ceases to be a unified agent shaping her own experiences. By depicting the state of motherhood as inseparable from the realm of the past maternal relationship, the states of motherhood and autonomous subjecthood are thus presented as mutually exclusive.⁷⁸

Olga notes how at one time she had believed that this state of motherhood was something from which she could recover, as though motherhood were an illness. While she looked after her small children, she waited for a time that never arrived, a time she says ‘in cui avrei ricominciato a essere come ero stata prima delle gravidanze’.⁷⁹ Olga waited for a moment in the future in which she would return to a version of herself from the past, a version which she characterises as ‘giovane, sottile, energica, spudoratamente convinta di poter fare di me chissà quale persona memorabile’.⁸⁰ Olga remembers her past self as a woman who actively gave meaning to her experience as a subjective agent. But instead of searching her own body and mind for signs of recovery of this agential version of herself, crucially she looked to her husband for an indication of whether she had returned to this autonomous state. Dichotomously, Olga’s perception of herself and her subjectivity are thus presented here as dependent on Mario’s perception of her; Olga’s ‘recovery’ from motherhood is dependent on whether or not Mario sees her as he remembers her before motherhood, whether or not he still detects or has forgotten the ‘odore di mamma’ on her body.

Latently Grotesque

Later, after Olga’s mental state has further deteriorated, her daughter Ilaria appears before her dressed in Olga’s make-up and clothes, her face ‘una maschera dipinta, ombretto agli occhi, fard, rossetto’.⁸¹ This sight reminds Olga of the tales her own mother would tell her about the old dwarf women that she would see on the funicular in Naples as a girl. These women, who had ‘occhi pesatamente ombreggiati, i volti rugosi con le guance rosse, le labbra dipinte’, would play the mandolin, and when they had finished, instead of saying thank-you, ‘cacciavano la lingua’.⁸² As if to justify such an appearance, Ilaria says ‘siamo identiche’, indicating that her appearance is acceptable precisely because she looks just like her mother.⁸³ By dressing up as her mother, Ilaria thus blurs the boundaries between herself and the maternal body, the first-person plural of ‘siamo identiche’ suggesting a mutual state of being the same and thus a violation the subject-object divide. In dressing up as her mother, Ilaria exposes the precariousness of the boundaries to Olga’s carefully demarcated self.⁸⁴

In a re-enactment of her own mother’s gaze then, a gaze which as a child gave Olga the feeling that ‘non le piacessi, come se mi riconoscesse in faccia qualcosa di sé che detestava, un male suo segreto’, Ilaria’s appearance and statement unsettle Olga, and she experiences a wave of repulsion at the thought that she may be identical to these transgressive women who ‘step into the limelight out of turn’, the possessors of ‘overly rouged cheeks’, their tongues piercing the framework for expected feminine behaviour which here would demand a ‘ringraziamento’ to their audience on the funicular for listening to them.⁸⁵ In dressing up as her mother and labelling them as ‘identiche’, Ilaria thus threatens to strip Olga of her ‘layer of culture’: if Olga is like the mandolin-playing dwarf women, i.e., like her dressed-up daughter, then she can no longer be the carefully constructed calm quiet wife with a ‘voce pacata’, her body free from ‘le tracce sgradevoli della fisiologia’.⁸⁶ Olga wonders if maybe she had been ‘da tempo […] una di quelle vecchie suonatrici di mandolino, e Mario l’aveva scoperto e mi aveva lasciato. Mi ero trasformata senza accorgermene in una di loro’.⁸⁷

This transformation had happened without her realising, the effortlessness that this lack of awareness implies indicating its inherency to her being. Indeed, she fears that her husband had ‘discovered’ her inner mandolin player implying the latency of this transgressive quality already present within her. Olga posits this discovery as the reason Mario left her, in turn thus indicating this inner gaudiness as an undesirable, but also unacceptable trait in a woman. Thus, Ferrante presents us with a ‘form of maternal time’ here manifesting as a feminine cycle of shame. Faced with the abject vision of her dressed up daughter, Olga is taken back to the tales her own mother would tell her about garish women from her own childhood, meanwhile Ilaria has made herself up to be identical to her own mother, who in turn fears the grotesque parts of herself reflected back at her, thus repeating the gaze containing dislike with which her own mother had viewed her as a child. By presenting these grotesque characteristics as latent qualities common to each generation of women at the same time as presenting them as unacceptable to men, Ferrante presents a society in which women are denied a true place, and thus also a true subjective perspective.

Female Frame

However, in I giorni dell’abbandono, Ferrante also provides a framework according to which an embrace of the transgressive allows a transcendence of this restricted existence and a negotiation of the emergence of a new female subjectivity under patriarchy, no longer defined as a lack of maleness.⁸⁸ In order to assuage the fear that she had become one of these garish women from her past, Olga rushes to the bathroom, dragging her daughter with her. She looks at her reflection in the mirror, but instead of looking solely in the central mirror as she usually does, this time the side panels of the mirror reflect the two profiles of her face with which she is completely unfamiliar; only the frontal angle shows her a face that she recognises as ‘Olga’.⁸⁹ To Mario, Olga thought she had given ‘l’Olga dello specchio centrale’ but she now realises that she had given him a face made of shifting and unstable planes and that he had assembled ‘sulla base di quei due lati mobili, scoordinati, sfuggenti’. She does not know ‘quale montaggio di me lo aveva fatto innamorare, quale invece gli era risultato ripugnante, disamorandolo’.⁹⁰

Here then, Olga posits herself as the object of Mario’s changing emotions which alter depending on the version of her face that he himself constructs. Thus, she realises that the controlled Olga of the ‘sguardi perplessi’ and ‘sorrisi incerti’ in fact never existed, as this was her own perception and evaluation of her face and expressions. She exerted control over this face, but her identity ultimately remained at the mercy of Mario’s male opinion and agency, and thus can no longer exist without him.⁹¹ Ferrara takes this further, suggesting that at this point in her crisis, Olga comes to the realisation ‘that all representations of reality are simulacra and that no objective knowledge can be achieved, due to the subjectivity of the gaze and the relativity of each individual process of perception’.⁹² Olga affirms that if she wants to make it through this crisis, she will have to entrust herself ‘a quei due profili, alla loro estraneità, più che alle loro familiarità’.⁹³ She feels this to be true precisely because in her face, which is compartmentalised and fragmented but also externalised and spatialised though the mirror, she recognises the features of the poverella.⁹⁴ This, Ferrara argues, ‘marks Olga’s final renunciation to an epistemology grounded on the criteria of representational realism’ in favour of an embrace of ‘the diffraction conveyed by the unfamiliarity of the two uncoordinated profiles’. It is only once she has surrendered to the ‘powerlessness of her own gaze’ Ferrara suggests, that ‘Olga will then manage to progress onto the path which will lead to her final recovery, a path implying her acknowledgment that reality is indeed performative’.⁹⁵

Loredana Di Martino notes that developing forms of identity which are not clearly defined and prescribed was one of the aims of twentieth-century feminist practice in Italy.⁹⁶ Indeed, Adalgisa Giorgio situates Ferrante’s work within Italian women’s writing of the late twentieth century, which she says ‘has responded en masse to feminist practices and theories of the 1970s and 1980s’.⁹⁷ One such practice was the development of Italian women’s groups such as the Libreria delle donne di Milano collective. Such groups, De Lauretis explains, consisted exclusively of women who ‘met to talk about themselves, or about anything else, as long as it was based on their own personal experience’.⁹⁸ In providing a space for women to express their experiences, ‘a frame of reference no longer patriarchal or male-designed, but made up of perceptions, knowledges, attitudes, values, and modes of relating historically expressed by women for women’, such groups aimed at ‘building new and ‘unpredictable’ notions of female subjectivity, creating a framework, a female symbolic according to which women could exist as more than simply ‘not male’, bypassing the objective male subjectivity provided under patriarchy.⁹⁹

One way in which this was achieved was the practice of ‘affidamento’ or ‘entrustment’ which, as De Lauretis formulates, is a relationship in which ‘one woman entrusts herself symbolically to another woman, who thus becomes her guide, mentor, or point of reference’.¹⁰⁰ Both women engage in the relationship precisely because of the ‘disparity that may exist between them in class or social position, age, level of education, professional status, income etc’.¹⁰¹ This concept is not without problematic aspects. Loredana Di Martino cites Lucia Re when she comments that one of the major dilemmas associated with the practice of ‘affidamento’ was the ‘hierarchical vision inherent to its vertical model of maternally-oriented community’ which requires an acknowledgement of the concept of authority and thus prescription to function.¹⁰² It is nonetheless, De Lauretis explains, a relationship which ‘permits a mutual valorisation of the younger woman’s desire for recognition and self-affirmation in the world, and the older woman’s knowledge of female symbolic defeat in the social-symbolic world designed for men’.¹⁰³

Here in her bathroom, Olga sees her reflection as a dead woman from her childhood, undermining chronological order so that her former self is no longer narratable within the boundaries, the margins of linear historical time. Ferrante notes that in earlier versions of the novel, the poverella was ‘carica di segnali’ such as a wedding ring that had to be cut off, a broom symbolising her condition of domestic slavery, and filled with anguish that she was no longer married. She was ‘una sorta di sintesi della donna abbandonata’.¹⁰⁴ Ferrante states that she eliminated these symbolic additions as this did not seem to her ‘la via narrativa giusta’, and she describes a fear that there was ‘un taglio tra il prima-modelli e miti arcaici, appunto – e il dopo- Olga, la donna nuova – e che Olga apparisse come l’espressione delle sorti progressive del genere femminile’.¹⁰⁵

Within Ferrante’s work, Alsop notes, we can detect an interest in revising long established tropes in western literary tradition, particularly that of the ‘fallen woman’, a plot that Alsop states ‘haunts’ both I giorni dell’abbandono and Ferrante’s earlier novel L’amore molesto. In I giorni, Ferrante evokes what Alsop terms ‘a long line of tragic predecessors, from Anna Karenina to Simone de Beauvoir’s La femme rompue’.¹⁰⁶ But crucially, instead of inserting itself into this canon, this novel works against its literary forbears, placing itself in a dialogue whereby any romanticisation of such archetypes is negated in favour of an active resistance to this literary trope. Olga’s efforts to resist the fate of the fallen woman (a tale perpetuated through the tales of abandonment told by her mother) may, as Alsop comments ‘speak to an interest in revising both personal and literary intertexts’.¹⁰⁷ But equally, by drawing on de Beauvoir’s La femme rompue, which tells the story of another abandoned woman whose life had revolved around that of her husband, Alyssa M. Granacki suggests that Ferrante also explores ‘the tension between coercion and complicity, in order to foreground the tenacity of patriarchal structures and the difficulty of navigating them’.¹⁰⁸ Thus, rather than simply a literary model to work against, evoking literary tropes of the abandoned woman also allows Ferrante to explore ‘what it means to contest – and sometimes succumb to – such constraints’.¹⁰⁹

Through this breakdown of the boundaries separating the poverella and Olga, Ferrante negates the narrative distinction between before and after, and thus refuses to posit Olga as the ‘end product’ of lessons learned from the older woman.¹¹⁰ Di Martino highlights Ferrante’s evocation of Cavarero’s theory of narratable identity which ‘conceptualises the narration of a storyteller’s life as an act performed by a narrator friend through what is meant to be a gift of reciprocal recognition’.¹¹¹ By refusing to posit Olga as the sole beneficiary of this relationship, Ferrante thus also negates this hierarchical dilemma; Olga is neither the victim of a top-down power structure, nor the liberated end-product of lessons learned from the suffering of the older woman. In this way, the relationship between these two women is instead rendered as a continually actualising process of exchange that is beneficial to both. As noted above and in Ferrara’s analysis of subject identity in I giorni, this identification with the poverella, a woman who did not recover from the trauma of abandonment, ‘is initially seen by Olga as a warning as she is reminded of a fate that needs to remain different from her own’. Ferrara notes however that as the plot unfolds, ‘Olga realizes that the role played by “la poverella di via Mazzini” might be, at a certain level, symbolic and creative as it reinforces her sense of otherness, her belonging to a group of a female minority that shares similar experiences of trauma’.¹¹²

Indeed, if Olga feels that her salvation lies in her acceptance and trust in her resemblance to the poverella, then in this act of entrustment, the poverella is also saved: the poverella is not dehumanised nor reduced to a spectacle here, she is instead conflated with Olga’s body as ‘disgust succumbs to intimate acceptance and appreciation’.¹¹³ In this moment of conflation, the poverella is seen and recognised in the mirror, but simultaneously she also sees herself, this ‘double-seeing’ resituating the subjectivity that was stripped from her when she was characterised as the ‘abandoned woman’. Crucially, the relationship between Olga and the poverella is not genetic, rather it is symbolic. Precisely because of the symbolic rather than genetic nature of this connection, Ferrante presents a ritualistic framework beneficial to all interpersonal relationships between women. De Rogatis undertakes an analysis of the ritualistic nature of the mother-daughter relationship in Ferrante’s first novel L’amore molesto (1992). She suggests that temporality in this work takes on a ritualistic quality in that linear chronology is suspended, replaced by a ‘double time in which the contemporary and the ancient, the immediate present and the distant past, the living and the dead can coexist’.¹¹⁴

Although the symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter has been problematised by ‘male figures and their violent or seductive actions’, the relationship is nonetheless redemptive in that they are ‘connected by a bond freely chosen in the course of the narrative’.¹¹⁵ In proposing an understanding of this relationship which is ‘freely chosen’, de Rogatis thus also presents a redemptive framework which is not necessarily limited to genetic relations. This universality simultaneously dissolves the boundaries between the poverella and her onlookers placed there long-ago by Olga’s mother’s tales of abandonment, undoing the learnt disciplinary forms of patriarchal surveillance, and redeems the poverella’s voice which had thus been reduced to the wails of a mad woman.

Brown suggests that if we incorporate into our understanding of trauma ‘all of those every day, repetitive, interpersonal events that are so often the sources of psychic pain for women […] then our world view changes as well’.¹¹⁶ A notion of trauma as including only events which are unusual allows us, she argues, to deceive ourselves that we are ‘beyond the reach of the unusual’.¹¹⁷ For Brown, a notion of trauma which includes daily occurrences illuminates:

the realities of women’s lives, turns a spotlight on the subtle manifestations of trauma, allows us to see the hidden sharp edges and secret leg-hold traps whose scars we have borne, or might find ourselves bearing. We are forced to acknowledge that we might be next. We cannot disidentify with those who have already been the victims of a traumatic stressor when we hold in consciousness our knowledge that only an accident may have spared us thus far.¹¹⁸

In realising that the poverella’s face is her own, Olga thus acknowledges that she shares the trauma of womanhood under patriarchy with this woman. Where previously she had been disgusted by the poverella’s grief, now she realises that anyone, including herself may suffer the trauma of abandonment. Thus, we see that through acceptance and embrace of the presence in her ‘fisiognomica cangiante’ of the features of the poverella, a woman who is not genetically related to her, Olga thus embraces the ‘female imaginary’ as a whole, validating and legitimising every woman and her experience as worthy of embrace and acceptance. Olga thus succeeds in subverting and denying the role of women as pawns in the patriarchal system of female oppression, confirming a symbolic female lineage in which women’s identities are no longer definable solely according to their relation to men, but which are allowed through their mutual exchange with and relation to other women to remain ‘undefined’ and ‘unfixed’, to remain in a constant process of unforming and forming.¹¹⁹ Ferrante thus presents a framework according to which women cease to exist as a homogenous mass easily dominated by hegemonic patriarchal narratives, and under which women’s individual experiences are legitimised in a mutual process of validation and embrace. In this way, patriarchal hegemony is subverted in favour of a ‘universal female imaginary’.¹²⁰

Unravelling

In a patriarchal society, women are forced to exist in a world governed by male hegemony. In her weekly column for The Guardian, Elena Ferrante writes ‘so che non c’è donna che non faccia una fatica enorme, esasperante, per arrivare a fine giornata’.¹²¹ In I giorni dell’abbandono we witness Olga’s attempts to make it through the days of her abandonment, and her intense struggles to do so are a testament to the deep marks that Ferrante states come from ‘un modo di stare al mondo che, persino quando lo rivendichiamo come nostro, è avvelenato alla radice da millenni di dominio maschile’.¹²² As a consequence, Ferrante says, women, ‘per quieto vivere si autosoffoca[no]’.¹²³ Even today she states, ‘dopo un secolo di femminismo, non riusciamo a essere noi fino in fondo, non ci apparteniamo’. Women’s behaviours, she says ‘sono punite o lodate secondo codici’ which do not belong to women themselves and which thus wear them out.¹²⁴ The women in Ferrante’s novels are thus constrained to subjective experiences and narratives which depend on the presence of men. In I giorni, Ferrante depicts the physical and psychological effects on the women beholden to such codes, women who are afflicted with a sense that the world around them is not constructed for them, and thus that one wrong move will trigger their fall. Paradoxically, it is through an embrace of this fall that Olga moves towards recovery. In entrusting herself to her unknowable face, a face which is simultaneously unfamiliar yet recognisable as the poverella’s, Olga sheds the restrictive structures of feminine existence to which she had previously clung, embracing the forming and un-forming planes of her existence in the ultimate rejection of the imbibed parameters of performative femininity. Through this alternative framework, the women in I giorni dell’abbandono are thus able to unravel the forms of restricted femininity which make it ‘facile diventare odiose agli altri e a se stesse’.¹²⁵

Paradoxically, by the end of the book Olga posits performance as her happy ending. She makes a visit to Carrano, where her neighbour who through his subtle gestures of support throughout her months of struggle ‘si era adoperato per ricucirmi intorno un mondo affidabile’.¹²⁶ He embraces her, and Olga receives this gesture as his attempt to ‘comunicarmi in silenzio che lui sapeva, per un suo dono misterioso, irrobustire il senso, inventare un sentimento di pienezza e di gioia’.¹²⁷ Crucially, Olga accepts his meaning-making abilities with an act of pretence, saying ‘finsi di credergli e perciò ci amammo a lungo, nei giorni e nei mesi a venire, quietamente’.¹²⁸ Olga embraces this man, no longer as a woman performing the role of ‘woman’ for a man on whom her very definition depends, but rather as a woman fully aware that this man cannot truly create meaning. Olga is willing to pretend in Carrano’s ability to ‘stitch up the world’ around her, signalling her acknowledgement and embrace of reality as different than the one presented to her. Alternative interpretations of this act of performance have been suggested by Bazzoni who posits that Olga replaces one heteronormative narrative for another. Olga’s ambivalence at Carrano’s ability to make meaning, Bazzoni argues, indicates that Olga does not relinquish the fictive modes of self-definition: ‘If it is true that Olga has acquired awareness of the precariousness of her own identity and the insidious traps of the heteronormative romance plot, on the other hand she does not question the system within which that plot is inscribed, as she does not have access to any alternative for herself’.¹²⁹ Granacki similarly suggests that Olga remains unable to author her own subjectivity: ‘as a subject, she is strikingly absent in the language of the scene. Carrano acts and she becomes the grammatical object’.¹³⁰ I however argue that this ending remains a positive outcome for Olga, as, unlike her previous relationship, she enters her new relationship with the autonomy that stems from an awareness that the reality provided by this man is but a fiction, and thus with a sense of self that is no longer solely conceptualised in relation to men.¹³¹ It is this very lack of comparative conceptualisation, her embrace of un-definition, that signals her process of recovery from the poison of patriarchy. Thus, Olga departs from ‘given horizons of meaning’, embracing a female subjective existence which is, dichotomously and redemptively, undefinable.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 53.

² Russo, p. 53.

³ Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 57.

⁴ Alison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 2.

⁵ Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. by Gillian C. Gill (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985).

⁶ Teresa de Lauretis, ‘The Practice of Sexual Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy. An Introductory Essay’, in Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, ed. by Patrizia Cicogna and Teresa De Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 1–15 (p. 5).

⁷ De Lauretis, p. 8.

⁸ Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia. Nuova Edizione Ampliata (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2016), p. 99.

⁹ Ferrante, La frantumaglia, p. 88.

¹⁰ Maria P. P. Root, ‘The Second Reconstruction: A Feminist Analysis of Trauma’, in Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals, ed. by Laura S. Brown and Mary Ballou (New York: Guil, 1992), cited in Laura Brown, ‘Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma’, American Imago, 48 (1991), pp. 119–33 (p. 128).

¹¹ Rebecca Walker, ‘Mean Girls and Melancholics: Insidious Trauma in The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante and Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney’, in Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing, ed. by Tiziana de Rogatis and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice, 2022), pp. 335–58 (p. 338).

¹² Russo, p. 53.

¹³ Stiliana Milkova, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls: On Disgust in Elena Ferrante’s La figlia oscura’, Italian Culture, 31 (2013), pp. 91–109 (p. 95) <https://doi.org/10.1179/0161462213Z.00000000017>.

¹⁴ Milkova, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls’, p. 92; Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. VII (London: Hogarth Press, 1905), p. 76.

¹⁵ Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Emotion, trans. by Howard Eiland and Joel Gold (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 15.

¹⁶ Menninghaus, Disgust, pp. 9–10, cited in Milkova, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls’, p. 95.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 92.

¹⁸ Ibid. p. 91.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 95.

²⁰ Ibid., Disgust, pp. 9–10, cited in Milkova, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls’, p. 93.

²¹ Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 2.

²² Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar, ‘The Grammar of Abandonment in I giorni dell’abbandono’, Modern Language Notes, 135 (2020), pp. 327–44 (p. 330) <https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2020.0004>; Stone, p. 15.

²³ Stone, p. 8.

²⁴ Luce Irigaray, ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other’, in Signs, trans. by Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, 7, pp. 60–67; Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. by Gillian C. Gill (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 63, 307.

²⁵ Patrizia Sambuco, Corporeal Bonds, The Daughter-Mother Relationship in Twentieth-Century Italian Women’s Writing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 18.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 19.

²⁷ Christine Maksimowicz, ‘Maternal Failure and Its Bequest: Toxic Attachment in the Neapolitan Novels’, in The Works of Elena Ferrante Reconfiguring the Margins, ed. by Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie V. Love, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 207–36 (p. 210–11); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 124.

²⁸ Ferrante, La frantumaglia, p. 132, cited in Alberica Bazzoni, ‘Trauma, Sadomasochism, and the Female Body in Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono’, in Italian Studies across Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity, New Approaches, and Future Directions, ed. by Marco Ceravalo and Anna Finozzi (Rome: Aracne, 2022), pp. 165–201 (p. 171).

²⁹ Ferrante, La frantumaglia, p. 94. Emanuela Caffè, ‘Global Feminism and Trauma in Elena Ferrante’s Saga My Brilliant Friend’, MLN, 136 (2021), pp. 32–53 <https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2021.0003>.

³⁰ Ferrante, La frantumaglia, p. 95.

³¹ Ferrante, La frantumaglia, p. 95.

³² Milkova, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls’, p. 95.

³³ Rich, p. 57.

³⁴ Stiliana Milkova, Elena Ferrante as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 28.

³⁵ Milkova, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls’, p. 92.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Sarah Chihaya et al., The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), p. 130.

³⁸ Stiliana Milkova, Elena Ferrante as World Literature, p. 44.

³⁹ Rebecca Walker, ‘Picking Up the Pieces: Elena Ferrante’s Global Poetics of Fracture’, MLN, 136 (2021), pp. 75–95 (p. 93) <https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2021.0005>.

⁴⁰ There have been a number of significant critical contributions on I giorni dell’abbandono. See e.g., Stefania Porcelli, ‘Olga’s Journey to Hell and Back: Echoes of Dante’s Commedia in Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono’, Annali d’Italianistica 39 (2021), pp. 309–36; Bazzoni, ‘Trauma, Sadomasochism, and the Female Body’; Alberica Bazzoni, ‘Death-in-Life: Staging Trauma and Loss in Goliarda Sapienza’s Destino Coatto’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 43.1 (2023), pp. 149–68; Enrica Maria Ferrara, ‘Performative Realism and Post-humanism in The Days of Abandonment’, in The Works of Elena Ferrante, pp. 129–57; Natalie Edwards, ‘Gender and Generation: Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux and the Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir’, Romance Studies, 40.3–4 (2022), pp. 180–94; Alyssa M. Granacki, ‘Writing the “Woman Destroyed” in Elena Ferrante and Simone de Beauvoir’, The Italianist, 43.1 (2023), pp. 123–32; Roberta Colonna Dahlman, ‘Strategie di narrazione retrospettiva nel romanzo I giorni dell’abbandono di Elena Ferrante’, in Edito, inedito, riedito – Saggi dall’ XI Congresso degli Italianisti Scandinavi Università del Dalarna – Falun 9–11 giugno 2016, ed. by Vera Nigrisoli Wärnhjelm et al. (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2018), pp. 199–212.

⁴¹ See, e.g., Stiliana Milkova, ‘Side by Side: Female Collaboration in Ferrante’s Fiction and Ferrante Studies’, Gender/Sexuality/Italy, 7 (2020), pp. 92–102 <https://doi.org/10.15781/gcf4-cw68>; Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, ‘Playing with the Maternal Body: Violence, Mutilation, and the Emergence of the Female Subject in Ferrante’s Novels’, California Italian Studies, 7 (2017), pp. 1–15 <https://doi.org/10.5070/C371030650>; Tiziana de Rogatis, ‘Metamorphosis and Rebirth: Greek Mythology and Initiation Rites in Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love’, in The Works of Elena Ferrante, pp. 185–206.

⁴² Russo, p. 53; Chihaya et al., The Ferrante Letters, p. 130.

⁴³ Elena Ferrante, I giorni dell’abbandono (Rome, Edizioni e/o, 2002), p. 14.

⁴⁴ Ferrante, I giorni dell’abbandono, p. 15.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 56.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 47.

⁴⁷ Maria Morelli, ‘Margins, Subjectivity, and Violence in Elena Ferrante’s Cronache del mal d’amore’, Italian Studies, 76 (2021), pp. 329–41 (p. 336) <https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2021.1932054>.

⁴⁸ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 15.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 15.

⁵¹ Caffè, p. 33.

⁵² Ferrante, I giorni, p. 16.

⁵³ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 10.

⁵⁴ Elizabeth Alsop, ‘Femmes Fatales: “La fascinazione di morte” in Elena Ferrante’s L’amore molesto and I giorni dell’abbandono’, Italica, 91.3 (2014), pp. 466–85, (p. 469); Ferrante, La frantumaglia, p. 99.

⁵⁵ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 10.

⁵⁶ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 10.

⁵⁷ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 10.

⁵⁸ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 10.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 11.

⁶⁰ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 107.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 100.

⁶³ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 107.

⁶⁴ Walker, ‘Picking up the Pieces’, p. 82.

⁶⁵ Stone, p. 15.

⁶⁶ Carla Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel: la donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974), cited in Morelli, ‘Margins, Subjectivity, and Violence’, pp. 336–37.

⁶⁷ Ferrante, La frantumaglia, p.113; Russo, p. 53.

⁶⁸ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 100.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ Ferrante, La frantumaglia, p. 84; I giorni, p. 100.

⁷¹ Alberica Bazzoni, ‘The Interrupted Temporality of Trauma in Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment and Goliarda Sapienza’s Compulsory Destiny’, in Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing, ed. by Tiziana de Rogatis and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice, 2022), pp. 211–35 (p. 213).

⁷² Stone, p. 1.

⁷³ Ibid, p. 8.

⁷⁴ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 101.

⁷⁵ Irigaray, ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other’, p. 62, cited in Milkova, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls’, p. 102.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 62.

⁷⁷ Ferrara, ‘Performative Realism and Post-Humanism’, pp. 132–33.

⁷⁸ Stone, p. 15.

⁷⁹ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 102.

⁸⁰ Ibid.

⁸¹ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 134.

⁸² Ferrante, I giorni, p. 134.

⁸³ Ibid.

⁸⁴ Stone, p. 8. Kristeva, p. 2.

⁸⁵ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 56; Russo, p. 53.

⁸⁶ Ferrante, I giorni, pp. 11, 107.

⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 135.

⁸⁸ Wehling-Giorgi, p. 10.

⁸⁹ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 137.

⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 138.

⁹¹ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 138.

⁹² Ferrara, ‘Performative Realism and Post-Humanism’, p. 138.

⁹³ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 138.

⁹⁴ Milkova, Elena Ferrante as World Literature, p. 36.

⁹⁵ Ferrara, ‘Performative Realism and Post-Humanism’, p. 138.

⁹⁶ Loredana Di Martino, ‘Addressing Each Other’s Eyes Directly: From Adriana Cavarero’s “Relating Narratives” to Elena Ferrante’s Intersectional Ethics of Narrative Relations’, Gender/Sexuality/Italy, 7 (2020), pp. 49–74 (pp. 54–55), https://doi.org/10.15781/09by-pb24.

⁹⁷ Adalgisa Giorgio, ‘The Passion for the Mother: Conflicts and Idealisations in Contemporary Italian Narrative’, in Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western European Narratives by Women, ed. by Adalgisa Giorgio (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 2002), pp. 119–54, cited in Milkova ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls’, p. 94.

⁹⁸ De Lauretis, p. 6.

⁹⁹ Ibid., p. 10.

¹⁰⁰ De Lauretis, p. 9. Lucia Re, ‘Diotima’s Dilemma: Authorship, Authority, Authoritarianism’, in Italian Feminist Theory and Practice: Equality and Sexual Difference, ed. by Graziella Parati, and Rebecca West (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), pp. 50–74 (p. 44); Di Martino, p. 55.

¹⁰¹ De Lauretis, p. 8.

¹⁰² Ibid.

¹⁰³ De Lauretis, p. 11. Di Martino, pp. 49, 52, 54–55.

¹⁰⁴ Ferrante, La Frantumaglia, p. 101.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid.

¹⁰⁶ Alsop, p. 478.

¹⁰⁷ Alsop, p. 479.

¹⁰⁸ Granacki, p. 131.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid.

¹¹⁰ Lucia Re, p. 44.

¹¹¹ Di Martino, p. 55.

¹¹² Ferrara, ‘Performative Realism and Post-Humanism’, p. 149.

¹¹³ Milkova, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Dolls’, p. 71.

¹¹⁴ De Rogatis, p. 192.

¹¹⁵ Ibid.

¹¹⁶ Brown, p. 129.

¹¹⁷ Ibid.

¹¹⁸ Brown, p. 129.

¹¹⁹ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 138; Chihaya et al., The Ferrante Letters, p. 142.

¹²⁰ Milkova, Elena Ferrante as World Literature, p. 28.

¹²¹ Ferrante, L’invenzione occasionale, p. 26.

¹²² Ferrante, L’invenzione occasionale, p. 26.

¹²³ Ibid.

¹²⁴ Ibid.

¹²⁵ Ferrante, L’invenzione occasionale, p. 26.

¹²⁶ Ferrante, I giorni, p. 210.

¹²⁷ Ibid.

¹²⁸ Ibid., p. 211.

¹²⁹ Bazzoni, ‘Trauma’, pp. 190–91.

¹³⁰ Granacki, p. 130.

¹³¹ Ibid.