Margins, Subjectivity, and Violence in Elena Ferrante’s Cronache del mal d’amore

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the manifold representations of violence against women in Elena Ferrante’s earlier novels: L’amore molesto (1992), I giorni dell’abbandono (2002) and La figlia oscura (2012). Episodes of domestic violence, stalking, and sexual abuse permeate the tissue of Naples – the chronotope of all of Ferrante’s texts and, simultaneously, a synecdoche of the male violence perpetrated therein. Reading the author’s ideas about the female body against feminist approaches and, especially, against her own theoretical apparatus, this article contends that the corporeal is deployed as a counter-strategy to gender violence that, albeit not always victorious, challenges patriarchal definitions of ‘woman’ framed through the normative male gaze. By establishing a link between the pivotal, yet still contentious, concepts of smarginatura and frantumaglia and gender violence, this reading offers new interpretative insights into the author’s aesthetics and into her treatment of female agency.