Posthumanism and Trauma: The Non-Anthropocentric World of Grief and Objects in Elena Ferrante and Catherine Dunne

Abstract

ABSTRACT A popular author in Italy since the late 1990s, Irish writer Catherine Dunne, like Elena Ferrante, has engaged with topics of female emancipation, resistance to patriarchal values, and the mother-daughter relationship, among others. The popular and critical acclaim Dunne’s narrative has received in Italy — with her debut novel predating Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002) and her subsequent work anticipating many Ferrantean themes — begs for a thorough comparative appraisal of these two authors’ oeuvres. In this article, Ferrara first shows how Dunne’s debut novel In the Beginning and her second novel A Name for Himself anticipate important themes and tropes explored by Ferrante in her narrative, including the concept of smarginatura or dissolving margins. Secondly, Ferrara identifies the central place that grief and grievability play in both authors’ non-anthropocentric, anti-patriarchal poetics and in the construction of their female subjects. Through the lens of trauma studies and posthumanist theory, the paper reveals how Dunne and Ferrante’s characters overcome abandonment and loss through a productive interconnection with nonhuman objects and entities that are signifiers of grief, such as photographs, dolls and stuffed animals. The analysis concludes with a comparative case-study of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (2011–2014) and Dunne’s The Years that Followed.