The Handmaid’s Liberation: Bewitched Worlds, Underground Stories, Dystopian Narratives in Elsa Morante, Elena Ferrante and Margaret Atwood

ABSTRACT

This paper will examine three novels by three different women writers: Lies and Sorcery (1948) by Elsa Morante; the Neapolitan Quartet (2011–2014) by Elena Ferrante; and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985, but revived on a global scale in 2017 thanks to the homonymous TV series). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that these novels share four common aspects: the metanarrative frame, the polyphony, the traumatic realism and the allegorical form of time. In each case, writing and history are defined through the identification of physical/symbolic places that enable and/or stimulate forms of resistance and survival in the three protagonists and narrating voices. The physical architecture of these spaces shares another constant element: they are all subverted spaces that have been freed by the practice of survival of the three protagonists. The subversion precisely resides in their being initially featured as cloistered, painful, realistically and/or metaphorically sunken spaces. The underground realism coincides with the assumption of perspective from below. Within this hallucinated realism arises a given temporal quality, each time characterized in a different manner: bewitched in Lies and Sorcery; historical and generational in Ferrante’s quadrilogy; dystopian in The Handmaid’s Tale.

KEYWORDS:

• Polyphony
• traumatic realism
• symbolic places
• heterotopias
• metanarrative architecture
• underground realism
• trauma
• allegories of time

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the light of the only existing (yet partial and obsolete) English version of Menzogna e sortilegio [translated under the title of House of Liars by Adrienne Foulke and Andrew Chiappe, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1951], in this article I have used the title Lies and Sorcery, adopted by Jenny McPhee who is working on a new translation, due to be published by New York Review Books Classics. I would like to offer my sincere thanks to McPhee, who has generously shared with me the translated title and all the translated excerpts here quoted, thus providing a precious and unique preview of the imminent publication. The choice of using an English translation will help me carry out a cross-cultural comparison and read Italian texts alongside Atwood’s. The cross-cultural comparison becomes foundational in the context of the Global Novel, which I will here connect with the three novels and especially refer to in my conclusion.

Morante’s novel will be referred to throughout the entire article with the following acronyms, immediately followed by the page numbers from the Italian edition: Menzogna e sortilegio/Lies and Sorcery = ms/ls.

2. Ferrante’s texts will be quoted throughout with the following acronyms, followed by relevant page numbers: My Brilliant Friend = mbf; The Story of a New Name = snn; Frantumaglia. A Writer’s Journey = fr.

3. The novel will be quoted throughout with the following acronym, followed by relevant page numbers: The Handmaid’s Tale = tht.

4. Immediately honoured with a series of prestigious awards and transmedial translations, in 2017 Atwood’s novel was adapted into the homonymous TV series (10 episodes, directed by Bruce Miller), available through on demand platforms and currently in its fourth season.

5. ‘Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces’ (Foucault [1967] 1984, 3).

6. Along with ‘frantumaglia’, ‘smarginatura’ is a neologism (in this case, a semantic one) that defines the way in which female subjectivities plunge and re-emerge (de Rogatis 2019a, 86–88, 101–107). Over the course of time, Ann Goldstein — who translated Ferrante for the English-speaking world — has rendered ‘smarginatura’ as ‘dissolving margins experience’.

7. As shown in the Diary of Morante, as well as in other sources, the hallucinatory realism of Kafka is a decisive reference during her early years (Andreini 2015, 19). On the notion of ‘bewitched realism’, see de Rogatis 2019b.

8. These two metaphors originate from Morante herself: ‘The reciting self of Lies and Sorcery sets off on a journey to the necropolis of her own family mythology: similar to an archaeologist who sets out to reach a legendary city, yet ultimately exhumes only miserable ruins’ (Morante 1975 [1999], 694).

9. On the category of primordialism see Appadurai (1996).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tiziana de Rogatis

Tiziana de Rogatis is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University for Foreigners of Siena. She is the editor of the journal for literary theory and criticism Allegoria. Her publications include numerous articles, edited volumes, and monographs on Eugenio Montale and T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, Kym Ragusa, Jhumpa Lahiri, Elena Ferrante and Elsa Morante. She has presented her research on Ferrante around the world, from China to Sweden. She has worked on figurations of female identity, ancient myth and ceremonial rites in modern and contemporary Italian and world literature. Her most recent research focuses on the connection between trauma and narrative structures in modern and contemporary Italian literature and in World Literature, with specific attention to women writers and the Global Novel.