Abstract
I consider here two highly successful literary texts: The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (2016), and Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk (2006). While remarkably different in style and sociocultural context, Ferrante and Cusk share a desire to vocalise the often contradictory and ambivalent feelings women experience about inhabiting an unruly postpartum maternal body. They insist on speaking from this traditionally abject (non)position in language that is ruptured and subjected to a productive dismantling. This stylistic and semantic dissolution is employed strategically to replicate the dissolving boundaries that the maternal protagonists encounter between themselves and their children. In both these texts, such dissolution is metaphorically imagined via the association of the female body with houses and domestic spaces, wherein the child (or in some instances, the masculine subject) is represented as an invading presence. Not surprisingly, within a schema that imagines subjectivity to be separate, bound and coherent, the porousness and vulnerability to invasion experienced by these maternal subjects amplifies their ambivalence in disturbing ways. I map the mothers’ efforts to shore up boundaries, before noting that, ultimately, such efforts are doomed to fail, therein exposing the Cartesian model of subjectivity to be little more than a fantasy.
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Notes
- 1.
In her essay titled ‘Shakespeare’s Daughters,’ Cusk draws from both de Beauvoir and Woolf to insist that women writers need to write about the female experience, even if it comes at the cost of their inclusion to, or success within, a traditionally male-dominated literary realm. She argues that “we are living in an era in which the female is once more devalued and the male preeminent.” She contends that this scenario causes many female writers to deny their female body and experiences and assume instead a ‘sexless’ voice. Cusk’s solution is a challenging one: she urges female writers to give up Woolf’s “room of one’s own” and other privileges of patriarchy, and accept that they will “irritate and antagonise rather than please.”
- 2.
These include the HBO series My Brilliant Friend (2018–), the Italian film I giorni dell’abbandono (Faenza 2005), the widely acclaimed film The Lost Daughter (2021) directed by Hollywood celebrity Maggie Gyllenhall, and, most recently, the Netflix series The Lying Life of Adults (2023).
- 3.
Sandra Ozzolo, co-founder and co-art director of Europa Editions, notes that the design choice was approved by Ferrante. While she acknowledges that the soft-focused dreamy images inevitably invoke signifiers of the romance genre and may consequently “reach out to a female readership more explicitly,” she describes the aesthetic choice as a deliberately subversive “game we were playing, that of, let’s say, dressing an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity” (cited in Krule 2015).
- 4.
Interestingly, while Bakopoulos’s essay (2016) is not about motherhood explicitly, she nevertheless opens with a quote from Powers of Horror on the potential of literature to invoke the abject thereby showing its applicability to Ferrante’s work.
- 5.
Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, for instance, argues that in focusing on maternity as a “corporeal undoing,” Ferrante “seizes the subversive power … to problematize conventionally accepted forms of maternity, femininity, and gender constructs, and ultimately to reconfigure their role within a society that remains to a large extent dominated by men” (2017, p. 13), while Maria Tang’s article on Arlington Park contends that Cusk offers “a new paradigm for subjectivity and for imagining human relations, one that neither obliterates the woman-as-subject by condemning her to the muteness of the Kristevan maternal, nor relies on the masterful projection of otherness outside the self” (2013, p. 13).
- 6.
Several of the essays she has published in reputable publications show a critical engagement with women’s writing and feminist theory: see, for instance, “Shakespeare’s Daughters” (2009) or “Making House” (2016). Similarly, interviews with Cusk often emphasise her literary public persona over Cusk “the unconstructed human” (Julavits 2017).
- 7.
Unlike Kristeva, however, Irigaray does not view this matricidal act as a “vital necessity” (Kristeva 1989, p. 27) instead advocating for a new linguistic economy.
- 8.
It is worth noting that this literary device also appears in other maternal texts outside the scope of this chapter: Rachel Cusk, for instance, describes her baby as “some exotic, uncaged animal” (2003 [2001], p. 64), while Rivka Galchen refers to her daughter as a puma throughout her book, Little Labors (2016). Invasion also features in Elisa Albert’s After Birth where protagonist Ari discovers first a racoon in the ceiling space, followed later by a squirrel, then a bat; similarly, the family in Jenny Offill’s fiction novel The Dept of Speculation (2015) find themselves battling a plague of bedbugs.
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Williamson, R. (2023). The Body in Extremis: Vocalising Maternal Corporeality. In: 21st-Century Narratives of Maternal Ambivalence. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39351-8_5
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