Telling the abuse

a feminist-psychoanalytic reading of gender violence, repressed memory, and female subjectivity in Elena Ferrante's Troubling love

Nicoletta Mandolini

pp. 271-292

in: Grace Russo Bullaro, Stéphanie V. Love (eds), The works of Elena Ferrante, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

Violence against women is one of the cornerstone themes of Elena Ferrante's first work, Troubling Love (1992). The novel takes as its subject matter the double form of domestic violence and child sexual abuse (against a female child), thus providing an example of that peculiar kind of violence that feminist theories explore. Drawing primarily on theories that consider sexual and domestic abuse as a practice which annihilates the female subject already constructed as Other and on feminist psychoanalytic theory on trauma, the author contends that precisely in the objectification resulting from violence, Ferrante's novel finds a powerful metaphor for women's silencing and, at the same time, a point of departure from which to give voice to a new subjectivity through a process of narrative reconstruction.