Elena Ferrante’s loud solitude: The benefits and limitations of relational anonymity

Abstract

This article examines the ethics of novelist Elena Ferrante’s anonymity through an analysis of her correspondences in Frantumaglia (2016). Prompted by Ferrante, I offer a critique of modern authorship and propose a relational understanding of creativity, an approach that emphasises the social uses of language and refutes the separation of the individual author from their social environment. I argue that Ferrante’s writing praxis enacts Judith Butler’s ethical methodology from Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) by withholding normative biographical details while providing readers with de-identified self-narration via her fiction and written correspondences. I argue that this methodology restores the primacy of language and the structure of address to the act of writing with the ancillary benefit of a conditional yet autonomous creative space in which to resist the pressure of normative morality – a space reconfigured as relational or “loud” solitude.