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  • Material and Trans-corporeal Identities in Ferrante's and Atwood's Narratives
  • Rossella Di Rosa (bio)

As a result of Ferrante's consistent attention to the marginalized condition of women and power structures, gender politics, identity formations, and female friendships, critics have often compared her voice to those of prominent writers, such as Virginia Woolf, Elsa Morante, Alice Munro, and Alice Sebold.1 Tiziana de Rogatis, for instance, has ascribed Ferrante's tetralogy L'amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend, 2011–2014) to the genre of the Künstlerroman, and has included Ferrante in a specific narrative tradition—as pioneered by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Doris Lessing, and Margaret Atwood—that focuses on the development of a female artist subject (de Rogatis 50). Similarly, Stiliana Milkova has observed "an uncanny similarity" between Ferrante and Atwood, specifically in their use of ekphrasis as a rhetorical tool to undermine male mechanisms of oppression and violence ("Visual Poetics" 174). In a recent interview, Margaret Atwood [End Page 143] herself has explained that her own authorial decisions often resemble Ferrante's. Even though Atwood has in fact disclosed her identity and acts as a public figure (promoting her books on frequent tours and actively interacting with 1.29 million followers on social media), she argues that she always creates a "surrogate, a facsimile version" of the real Margaret Atwood in her works to defend her privacy (Wilson, "Margaret Atwood on Elena Ferrante").

My aim in this essay is to further clarify the relationship between Elena Ferrante and Margaret Atwood by focusing on Ferrante's tetralogy My Brilliant Friend, also known as the Neapolitan Novels, and Atwood's early works, specifically The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and Cat's Eye (1988). I contend that Ferrante and Atwood, discussing individual fates and local events that are strictly rooted in the history and culture of Italy and Canada, respectively, create a universal narration that exceeds national literary boundaries and deal with trans-local issues, such as women's exploitation, violence, and inequality. In dealing with these issues, I argue that Ferrante and Atwood similarly depict fragmented bodies and unstable female subjectivities, elaborate strategic alternatives to patriarchal constrictions, and destabilize physical and cultural boundaries. Furthermore, I claim that both writers describe human and nonhuman bodies as an amalgam of porous matter that possesses an "intrinsic vitality" as well as the capacity to interact with what surrounds them (Bennett 154). Specifically, I argue that Ferrante and Atwood develop a material thought, which appears in tune with the philosophies of matter and contemporary perspectives of New Materialism. Indeed, Ferrante's and Atwood's conceptions of human and nonhuman bodies perfectly dialogue with Rosi Braidotti's view of the body as made of "intelligent matter, that is: endowed with the capacity to affect and be affected, to interrelate" with other bodies and forces ("Becoming Woman" 57). Such forces produce different phenomena of interaction that Stacy Alaimo, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari describe as "trans-corporeality" or "process of becoming," respectively, that undermine the traditional understandings of stability, fixity, and identity.

Material and Fluid Identities in Margaret Atwood's Narratives

In The Handmaid's Tale Atwood describes a tyrannical society, called the Republic of Gilead, that overthrows the American government and transforms the United States into a military dictatorship. The Republic of Gilead has a rigidly hierarchical structure, where power is in the hands of the ruling class of men known as "Commanders," followed by [End Page 144] women who are entirely subjugated to male authority, ranked according to their social status and obligated to abide by a strict dress code.2 The new regime relies on young and fertile women, the Handmaids, who are assigned to give children to the Commanders' family, as the handmaid Bilhah did for Jacob's wife Rachel in Genesis.3 Gilead's laws force handmaids into sexual servitude in order to repopulate a world threatened by environmental pollution and by the diffusion of birth control. With few exceptions (as in the case of Offred and some of her fellow handmaids) women accept this authority submissively even though it deprives them of their freedom, turns their bodies into reproductive machines, and their...

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