Fragmented subjects : fracture, ethics, and relationality in Elena Ferrante and Goliarda Sapienza

Abstract

This dissertation explores an overlap between fragmented female subjectivities, ethics, and relationality in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (2011-14) and Goliarda Sapienza’s ‘autobiografia delle contraddizioni’ (1967-87 and 2010). Via contemporary feminist (phenomenological) criticism, it argues that a focus on fragmentation as theme and narrative device unlocks the relational and ethical considerations which these writers situate as important to the formation of identity and the maintenance of healthy community.

In chapter one, the work of Sara Ahmed is engaged to draw out themes of orientation, relationality, wilfulness, and fragility in the ‘feminist life’ taking shape in Sapienza’s Lettera aperta (1967) and Io, Jean Gabin (2010). Chapter two then presents feminine body-world and self-other interactions in Ferrante’s L’amica geniale (2011) and Storia del nuovo cognome (2012) as typified in the metaphor of falling. This characterises both the specific environment of Naples and women’s lives and relationships in Ferrante’s work.

In chapter three, in dialogue with the work of Cressida Heyes (2020), themes of interruption and disruption are addressed as significant for reading female subjectivities in Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (2013), Il filo di mezzogiorno (1969), and L’Università di Rebibbia (1983). In chapter four, the work of Adriana Cavarero (2000) is used to discuss the reclamation of women’s relationality in Ferrante and Sapienza. Here, the positive aspects of a revised mode of relating to others and to the self in Le certezze del dubbio (1987) and Storia della bambina perduta (2014) are discussed alongside the ways in which harmful dynamics persist in the texts.

To conclude, I discuss the relational mode of becoming a subject present in Sapienza and Ferrante with reference to its potential for a complex ethical engagement. This ethics is to be found within the texts addressed and beyond their pages, with attendant consequences for readers.