Unclaimed Stories: Narrating Sexual Violence and the Traumatized Self in Elena Ferrante and Alice Sebold's Writings

Addressing domestic and violent sexual abuse is all the more urgent at the time of writing as violence against women has reached new heights. The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a global surge in domestic violence, putting vulnerable women at risk and portending "calamitous" consequences for women's lives over the next decade (Ford). While there has been a paradigm shift in the global visibility of sexual violence heralded by the emergence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, the battle is far from over. As political agendas across the globe have shifted to the right in recent years, they have advocated a more stringent and totalitarian control on women's bodies and enabled a rhetoric that often legitimates violence against women.¹ If ever there was an age of "all-inclusive" trauma (Caruth, "Trauma" 4), the trope certainly powerfully resonates with our present-day experience of crisis, with women in particular severely affected by the new realities of the pandemic.

A palpable increase in violence against women and deep-seated gender inequalities are a worrying global trend and one of the central nuclei of a new "primordialism" (Appadurai 139) that has been further exposed by the current pandemic (Guterres). With gendered violence forming an intrinsic part of the global imaginary of contemporary world literature, coupled with a growing shift to "redefine experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma" (Foster 167),² Alice Sebold and Elena Ferrante's works provide a powerful gateway into the unacknowledged stories of the traumatized female subject and the global hegemonic norms that shape them. Despite their being embedded in two geopolitical locations as diverse as post-industrial (sub)urban North America and the conflict-ridden cityscape of postwar southern Italy, the present reading highlights the affinitive "constellation of aesthetic, affective and ethical forces" (Ganguly 24) that underpins the two authors' conceptualization—and articulation—of the violated, silenced subject.

In a New York Times article entitled "Speaking of the Unspeakable" (1989), Sebold laments the "wall of silence" that surrounds the experience of rape whilst underscoring the need to listen to "articulate victims." The author's violent rape in her freshman year in college was the catalyst for writing her memoir Lucky, first published in 1999, followed by the fantastic novel and bestseller The Lovely Bones (2002), posthumously narrated by the 14-year old rape and murder victim Susie. As Sebold's female protagonists navigate the aftermath of extreme violent crime, Ferrante's work is permeated by gendered violence and systemic abuse against women. In L'amore molesto (1992), in many ways the Urtext of Ferrante's entire oeuvre, sexual violence provides the impetus for aesthetic expression in the middle-aged protagonist Delia's gradual textual recuperation of unacknowledged child abuse. Patriarchal violence and abuse also substantially underlie the genesis of the complex narrative voice of the Neapolitan Novels—consisting of the two protagonists Elena and Lila—that transposes the silenced story of the traumatized subject into its new, polyphonic form (de Rogatis, Key Words 42).

This paper proposes to explore the links between sexual/domestic abuse, trauma, and untold experience in the works of Sebold and Ferrante, with the aim to shed new light on female-authored texts that resist hegemonic forms of power. Whereas I have previously highlighted the central role of the maternal figure in the two authors' disruptive constructions of selfhood (Wehling-Giorgi, "Rethinking"), the present investigation will analyze to what extent the experience of sexual abuse underlies their reflections on feminine subjectivity whilst often providing the first impetus for aesthetic expression. I will employ trauma theory—in particular van der Kolk and van der Hart's imagistic notion of dissociation, Herman's reflections on the impact of sexual violence, and recent reconsiderations of the narrative/linguistic expressibility of trauma (Balaev)—as a fruitful interpretive key to examine the female characters' textual and at times visual negotiation of the traumatized self. I argue that the two authors' narrative accounts transcend the unspeakability that classic trauma models are predicated on (Balaev 1), with the articulation...