Abstract
In this article, I explore creative labor as undertaken by Elena Ferrante’s female protagonists as an escape from domestic drudgery. Ferrante portrays protagonists who channel their sense of self into cultural production through writing that liberates them from the phallocentric dictum. Words re-establish a connection with the pre-Symbolic—the language that evokes a corporeal dimension that reconnects to the mother. Using theories by Luce Irigaray, especially as adapted to the Italian context by Luisa Muraro in The Symbolic Order of the Mother, I argue that Delia in L’amore molesto, Leda in La figlia oscura, and Lenu in the Neapolitan Novels use strategies that are both a quest for autonomy from mothers as much as they probe the role of the mother within the macho Neapolitan setting of their girlhood.
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Notes
- 1.
Since James Wood’s famous 2013 article in The New York Times, Elena Ferrante’s success in the anglophone world has never ceased growing.
- 2.
Muraro cites Luce Irigaray on how “Freud’s theory of parricide, derived from Sophocles’s Oedipus, is not at the origin of our culture. Instead, as Euridipes’s Oresteia suggests, there is a matricide.” (Muraro, 2018, 7). Muraro, along with Adriana Cavarero, will follow Irigaray in an attempt to recuperate the lost relation to the maternal by way of exhuming obscured female genealogies.
- 3.
The reappraisal of the mother as a positive female force in the Italian philosophical landscape was probably first achieved through what is still considered as the Italian feminist manifesto—Carla Lonzi’s “Sputiamo su Hegel” (1970), a text repeatedly mentioned in the Neapolitan Novels. The Libreria delle donne di Milano and Diotima (a group of female philosophers at the University of Verona) were two feminist groups that attempted to introduce ideas around maternal authority in order to found a female symbolic order. Luisa Muraro, together with Adriana Cavarero, can be placed within this circle.
- 4.
It is pertinent to point out that Muraro’s work has been controversial, both within Italy and abroad. On the one hand, like Irigaray, Muraro has been accused of essentialism in her ideas about sexual difference and the mother-child relationship. On the other hand, she has been celebrated as a most original Italian thinker by, among others, Antonio Negri. In Negri’s “The Italian difference,” he insists on the validity of Muraro’s thinking that other critics attacked: women’s separatism as the precondition for a politics of difference; differentiation of female authority from hierarchical male power; and her metaphysical affirmation of the mother-child couple’s creativity expressed through the body and language. Negri 2009, 13–23.
- 5.
As Karen Bojar points out, Ferrante did not really obtain fame in Italy before she had become a star in the anglophone world (Bojar, 2018, 15). This in spite of the fact that her first novel won a prestigious literary award in Italy.
- 6.
Ferrante admits that her first novel, L’amore molesto (1992), stemmed from her reading about female infant sexuality and the female child’s intense attachment to her mother. The title itself was inspired by a term Freud uses in “Female Sexuality” (1931). In this essay, Freud restates his findings announced six years earlier in “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” an essay which also inspired Melanie Klein’s “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” (1928). Freud’s “Female Sexuality” lays further emphasis on the intensity and long duration of the little girl’s “pre-Oedipus” attachment to her mother and the active element in the little girl’s attitude towards her mother and femininity in general. Muraro opposes Freud’s explanation: “In reality, there is no transformation of love into hatred, but only the inability to love, so that the initial attachment goes wrong and it becomes like a wound that does not heal” (Muraro, 2018, 10).
- 7.
Muraro cites Irigaray on how schooling for the little girl is seen like a kidnapping or a rape and she makes direct reference to the rape of Kore, Demeter’s daughter (Muraro, 2018, 55). Incidentally, the relation between Amalia and Delia in L’amore molesto has been interpreted in light of the myth of Persephone, Demeter’s daughter. See de Rogatis 2019, 99–119.
- 8.
While the mother transmits language, that same language embodies patriarchal demands and denies mothers the very authority and power that they exercise in transmitting it. Elena’s mother’s uncertain Italian and frequent use of dialect corroborates this. Indeed, in psychoanalytic criticism, the pre-Symbolic refers to the pre-acculturation phase of the child, the acculturation phase being traditionally associated with the Name-of-the Father. The pre-Symbolic phase refers to a time of raw indistinct, oneness with the mother.
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Cauchi-Santoro, R. (2023). Elena Ferrante’s Women Intellectuals: Writing and the Paradoxical Relationship to the Mother. In: Hecker, S., Ramsey-Portolano, C. (eds) Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14816-3_4
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