Maternal Troubling Bodies in Slavenka Drakulić and Elena Ferrante

Ferrante's Trans-National Echoes in a Croatian Novel

As suggested by Emma Bond, the juxtaposition of terms such as "global" and "transnational" appears problematic when applied to the field of Italian literary and cultural studies. As she introduces her overview of recent Italian scholarship, Bond adds that Italy represents "a historical palimpsestic context of motion . . . which could conceivably contribute to its construction as a hyphenated 'trans-' or in-between space" (417).

A trans-national perspective on literature carries "a kinetic sense of flow and flexibility" (416), as it constructs a critical discourse in which implicit correlations among texts, places and identities allow for innovative approaches. This is undoubtedly the case with a globally contextualized author such as Elena Ferrante, whose narratives amount to a heterogeneous family of texts that are able to dialogue both with each other, as well as with other literary realities, as they overcome geographical, social, historical, and cultural differences. Especially since the worldwide success of the Neapolitan Novels, the global impact of Ferrante's writing, with its dichotomy of realism and experimentalism, as well as her authorial position "supported by a wide-ranging global feminine avatar" (de Rogatis, Key Words 282), have positively influenced the existing theoretical scenario of Italian literature within a trans-national perspective. It is by virtue of their trans-national quality that, since Ferrante's debut in 1992 with L'amore molesto, her novels have accomplished a unique cultural turn in the way literature dialogues with issues that materially affect the lives of millions of women all over the world. Gendered discrimination, male power over female bodies, or epistemic and symbolic violence: far from being mere theoretical categorizations, these issues are powerfully redefined and revitalized by the propagation of academic and non-academic debates around Ferrante's texts.

After a three-decade span, the urgency and efficacy of Ferrante's narrative repertoire continues to encourage both Italian and non-Italian scholars to rethink the terms "global" and "trans-national" in the light of a contemporary writing in which "the traumatic cry of reality gives identities a new liminal texture" (284). The fact that this phenomenon is connected with a revolutionary perspective over women's experiences is far from secondary. The mainstream success of Ferrante's versatile and original authorial voice, acting both on criticism and readership, requires a continuous meditation upon the significance of the trans-national element inherent to a literature that, at the same time, deals with a non-univocal—basically, non-male—symbolic representation of women's lives and experiences, and potently tests its immediate effects within the public arena.

If one is to compare Ferrante with other examples originating from a non-Italian and, at the same time, a non-mainstream language and culture, the very idea of a trans-national perspective may also prove particularly productive in describing a concrete possibility to narrativize given themes that, similar to bodies, are able to cross, as well as push, different cultural boundaries. Ferrante's texts have proven to do so thanks to their impact across numerous countries and languages. In this respect, the possibilities offered by both a global and a transnational reverberating effect of Ferrante abroad creates a series of productive echoes inside different imaginative textual scenarios, in spite of wide differences in the ways a text gives shape to a certain symbolic, thematic, or aesthetic configuration. Interestingly, such echoes do not always necessarily occur chronologically with regard to coeval women writers or to Ferrante's translations and/or debates centered around her reception in another country. Sometimes, as is the case with the present contribution, there may be potent inceptions of Ferrante's motifs occurring even before the same Italian author gave them a textual form.

Readers and scholars agree on the crucial role played by the representations of motherhood and daughterhood in Ferrante's works. In the light of this centrality, I will compare L'amore molesto (1992) with Mramorna Koža (translated as Marble Skin), a short novel published in 1989 and written by Croatian writer, journalist, and feminist activist Slavenka Drakulić who lives in exile...