Preface
For many Neapolitans, and especially for those who had to flee the city for a shot at life, the protagonist of Elena Ferrante’s first novel Troubling Love was a familiar presence, a kind of mirror. We could feel her physical memory of violence and abuse; we shared with her the agonizing fear of falling back into the rabbit hole. And so, many of us were initially surprised—maybe even annoyed—by the international acclaim that was showered on that book and on Ferrante’s later novels, and also, more importantly, by the millions of readers who went on identifying with her protagonists’ struggles or emotional tribulations. How did they dare compare their experience with ours? What did they know about the bittersweet experience of surviving Naples’ often toxic dynamics, its always “troubling love”? And yet Ferrante’s success was the catalyst for an epiphany. Soon enough, in fact, we had to learn that the emotional strength required of Neapolitan women and gender nonconforming men to navigate a violent and phallocentric world was required by many others, indeed was necessary for survival in peripheral spaces all around the globe, where sexism and poverty were eroding human decency. Ferrante Unframed is a testament to interrelated strategies of emancipation, growth, and self-affirmation, which by and large are feminine in nature. The essays in this collection question the dichotomy of highbrow/lowbrow literature by unmasking its collusion with a sexist discourse, and in so doing offer a new way of entering the literary arena and viewing Italian culture more broadly. For centuries, literature has been a predominantly masculine domain. In Italy, such a prerogative has been especially hard to challenge. Indeed, over the last century the literary value of Italian writers has been constantly measured against their civic engagement or political affiliation—that is, using a parameter which mirrors gender disparities in terms of access to the public sphere. Ferrante, however, has situated herself within a long line of local writers who have chosen to participate in politics from a more personal vantage
