Rethinking Constructs of Maternity in the Novels of Elena Ferrante and Alice Sebold

Abstract

This article explores how Alice Sebold and Elena Ferrante place the feminine—and indeed often the maternal—body at the very centre of their narratives. The body—as a locus that filters the broader tensions and conflicts experienced by their female protagonists—in fact emerges as a key site of ‘contestation’ in their works. Through a close analysis of a selection of ekphrastic images, and photographic metatexts in particular, the author draws attention to how the two authors employ textual negotiations of the feminine body to question and problematize normative conceptions of femininity and motherhood. Ultimately, the author suggests that they not only challenge but also shift the perspective of, or indeed refocalize the dominant visual narrative of, the maternal/feminine body and the long history of objectification of the latter. In so doing, the author situates the two writers at the forefront of rethinking contemporary constructs of maternity and femininity.

Keywords:

• Elena Ferrante
• Alice Sebold
• matricide
• violence
• cityscape
• disease
• maternal body
• gaze
• fragmentation
• ekphrasis

Notes

This article is part of the collection ‘Imagining Motherhood in the Twenty-First Century’, guest edited by Valerie Heffernan and Gay Wilgus, and published as a special issue of Women: a cultural review, vol. 29, no. 1, Spring 2018.

1 Ferrante’s recent tetralogy of novels, also referred to as the ‘Neapolitan novels’, includes the following four texts, all published by Edizioni and translated by Ann Goldstein for Europa Editions: My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind (2014) and The Story of the Lost Child (2015).

2 In addition to their literary affinities, Ferrante and Sebold share a professional connection: Sebold’s translated works in Italy are under contract with Edizioni, the same publishing house that Ferrante has published with since the early 1990s.

3 While ‘postfeminism’ is, of course, a problematic term in itself, in this article I adopt what I take to be the most defining traits of this cultural development. As Whitney puts it: ‘it is a cultural mood deriving from two dubious premises: that gender equity has been achieved and that feminism is now both obsolete and undesirable’ (Whitney 2010: 352). For a detailed account of the debates surrounding ‘postfeminism’, see Gamble (2001).

4 I am here referring to ‘scopophilia’, as theorized by Mulvey in her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in which she argues that women have long been construed as the objects of the male gaze (Mulvey 1975: 11).

5 I am deliberately using the term ‘subalternity’ rather than ‘inferiority’ because of its associations with feminist theory and postcolonialism (Spivak 1988), as well as Ferrante’s explicit use of the term several times in the tetralogy (see, for example, Ferrante 2013: 204). The specific theoretical connotations of the term are lost in the translation by Goldstein, where subalternità is translated as ‘inferiority’ (Ferrante 2014: 226).

6 The Kristevan notion of abjection furthermore preserves an element of ambiguity, with the mother remaining a central point of reference and the object of desire (Kristeva 1982: 32), despite the need to separate from her. As both the other that threatens the boundaries of the self and an intrinsic yet unstable part of the self that ‘guarantees my being as subject’ (32), the abject remains a complex and often contradictory process (13) that is often reflected in Ferrante’s ambivalent portrayals of the maternal as both terrifying and desirable.

7 As Kristeva argues, bodily substances like urine, excrement, vomit or blood challenge the alleged borders of selfhood by crossing the boundary between the outside and the inside of the body, with the corpse representing the ‘utmost of abjection’ in its constituting a border that has ‘encroached upon everything’ (Kristeva 1982: 3–4). In her threshold position between symbiotic fusion (in pregnancy) and the first encounter with the other in birth, the mother assumes a similar ‘in-between’ status that both threatens and guarantees the independent notion of selfhood (32; see also note 6).

8 For a fascinating discussion of Naples as a ‘hermaphrodite’ city, see De Rogatis (2015: 291).