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

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point, in particular by highlighting the societal and physical restrictions they experienced vis-à-vis the body of Naples.

As this volume shows, Ferrante’s name has been previously associated with that of writer Anna Maria Ortese. The reasons for this comparison, however, are at once obvious and elusive. On the one hand, the two writers share a lovehate relationship with Naples, which provoked them to write pungent, nostalgic, and disconcertingly blunt urban narratives. On the other hand, Ortese’s early experience of death (both her older brother and her twin died at sea) inspired her construction of a visionary lens through which to escape reality, well before she parted ways with the city and its hostile cultural circles. By contrast, Ferrante’s escape strategy has seemed inevitably to pass through alltoo-real sexual encounters, corporeal violence, and physical displacement. Thus, whereas Ortese is the representative of social pariahs whose invisibility has threatened to erase them from history altogether, Ferrante speaks for a generation of postwar women whose bodies have been tainted by capitalistic commodification. In this regard, Curzio Malaparte and Domenico Rea are closer to Ferrante than Ortese, though they are generally forgotten by Ferrante’s critics. By delving into the contextual and philological reality in which Ferrante’s stories take place, the essays in this volume connect Ferrante to her predecessors, open up new trajectories for research, and also emphasize her narrative specificity.

This volume also has the potential to address the presence in Ferrante of a “genius loci”, as symbolically represented by Elena and Lila’s dolls in the Neapolitan Novels, who function as contemporary penates. For the same reason, one would be remiss not to mention that this Napoletanità does not simply exist in novels portraying Naples’ relatively recent history—as in Ortese, Rea, or Malaparte—but is also a feature (or narrative colouring) shaped by the rehashing of the seventeenth-century myth of Naples as “city of devils”, and more specifically as the city of female devils. For instance, when reading Giambattista Basile as the father of Neapolitan literature—and the local equivalent of Dante or Petrarch—one is confronted with feminine muses that are quite far from the Tuscan and idyllic phantasy embodied by Beatrice or Laura. Rather, what we see in Basile are highly sexualized women and pitiless mothers who raise their children with equal doses of resentment, grit, and ferocity. It is this ancestral and bestial femininity that has pervaded Ferrante’s imagery since her first book; it appears in the secret nature of Amalia in Troubling Love, with the Mother as primal occurrence; in the “poverella” of Days of Abandonment; in Nina, deuteragonist of Lost Daughter; in Lila’s multiple instantiations in the Neapolitan Novels; and, most recently, in aunt Vittoria in The Lying Life of Adults. Through repetition and polysemic declination Ferrante wages a war against both this folkloric background and her inner drives. And yet at the same time, she draws on their power. There is a caveat, however, for it is only by harnessing these ancestral forces and by gauging the Dio-

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nysian impulses inside her that the author, as a voice for Neapolitan women and women around the world, acquires narrative agency.

It is for all these reasons and many more that, in my view, this collection of essays makes a fundamental contribution to Ferrante Studies, and more broadly to the critical study of women’s literature. In fact, what Cauchi-Santoro, Barchiesi, and their contributors demonstrate is that the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” only acquire meaning in opposition to one another, and they are always in an imperfect balance. From Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and Basile and now to Ferrante, this has been a lesson passed down throughout the great works of the European literary canon. When we acknowledge such fluidity, Ferrante, unframed, can enter.

Alessandro Giardino St. Lawrence University, N.Y.