Grief and Posthuman Identity in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels: The Precarious Life of Women and the Right to Disappear

Framed within the perspective of new materialism, Elena Ferrante's global appeal may be explained as part of that sustained but inexorable opening of Western philosophies to a novel understanding of the human which we have been witnessing over the past few decades. What used to be the Vitruvian man, ruler of nature and geopolitical entities, is becoming a posthuman "transversal subject" in continuous entanglement with the human other, the natural and cultural environment, other animal species and technological artefacts (Braidotti). This epochal transformation does not just imply a change of perspective, an epistemological shift in our positioning towards reality.

By reconsidering the ontological aspect of the world from the viewpoint of quantum physics, new materialism—and more specifically Karen Barad's agential realism—invites us to see matter as the site in which meaning is produced through constant interaction between human and nonhuman entities, so that there are no fixed entities "with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation" (Meeting the Universe 46), as well as no separation between the world of phenomena and its cultural representation or discourse.

An important corollary of this new paradigm is the decentering of the human and its repositioning towards other forms of life. As Ferrante clearly argues:

Non mi piace la tronfia pochezza degli umani che si considerano creature elette, l'antropocentrismo, religioso e non, mi mette angoscia. . . . Sento che tutto ciò che abbiamo lasciato fuori preme con forza. . . . L'animale uomo deve fare autocritica, cercare nuovi equilibri. Il futuro che mi interessa è un futuro di assoluta apertura all'altro, a qualsiasi essere vivente, a tutto ciò che è attraversato dal soffio della vita.

(ioc 36)

I'm also frightened by the conceited small-mindedness of human beings when they consider themselves elect creatures; religious or non-religious anthropocentrism causes me anguish. . . . I feel that whatever we left outside is pushing vigorously to get in. . . . The animal man has to be self-critical, find a new balance. The future that interests me is a future of absolute openness to the other, to any living being, to everything endowed with the breath of life.

(ini 40; my trans. in italics)¹

This "absolute openness to the other," which reminds us of the world without margins in the Neapolitan Quartet, is precisely what makes new materialist philosophies so attractive to those seeking to tip the balance in favor of "the sexualized other (woman), the racialized other (native) and the naturalized other (animals, the environment, the earth)" (Braidotti 27) shunned and enslaved by patriarchal and colonial subjects. Embracing the idea of a nature-culture continuum, new materialism allows one to reject "the classical opposition 'materialism/idealism' in which the patriarchal capitalist system is embedded, and to move towards 'Life' as a non-essentialist brand of contemporary vitalism" (158).

As the dominant role of the rational Cartesian subject endowed with agency crumbles before an object (including the objectified human) that is no longer inert and passive but instead reclaims its position in the production of life and meaning, new posthuman identities are established through interconnectedness between the human and "everything endowed with the breath of life."

In Ferrante's narrative, this happens in The Days of Abandonment when the protagonist Olga manages to reject the place of victimhood linked to her objectified female role by seeking interaction with other nonhuman species and entities (the door, the dog Otto, the ghost of the poverella); similarly, in the Neapolitan Novels, the acceptance of an absence of boundaries between self and world—the so-called smarginatura—is the premise for the choral interconnected character of Lina and Elena, which becomes a site of resistance to patriarchal structures. A preliminary step that enables the birth of these new posthuman subjects—the resurrecting Olga after her debacle and the dual character of Lina-Elena brought to life by Elena's memoir—is the embracing of mutual interdependency and vulnerability (Braidotti) rooted in matter, that is in a shared ontology with all life, human and nonhuman.²

It is through a collision of human...