The Handmaid’s Liberation: Bewitched Worlds, Underground Stories, Dystopian Narratives in Elsa Morante, Elena Ferrante and Margaret Atwood

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper will examine three novels by three different women writers: Lies and Sorcery (1948) by Elsa Morante; the Neapolitan Quartet (2011–2014) by Elena Ferrante; and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985, but revived on a global scale in 2017 thanks to the homonymous TV series). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that these novels share four common aspects: the metanarrative frame, the polyphony, the traumatic realism and the allegorical form of time. In each case, writing and history are defined through the identification of physical/symbolic places that enable and/or stimulate forms of resistance and survival in the three protagonists and narrating voices. The physical architecture of these spaces shares another constant element: they are all subverted spaces that have been freed by the practice of survival of the three protagonists. The subversion precisely resides in their being initially featured as cloistered, painful, realistically and/or metaphorically sunken spaces. The underground realism coincides with the assumption of perspective from below. Within this hallucinated realism arises a given temporal quality, each time characterized in a different manner: bewitched in Lies and Sorcery; historical and generational in Ferrante’s quadrilogy; dystopian in The Handmaid’s Tale.