Playing with the Maternal Body: Violence, Mutilation, and the Emergence of the Female Subject in Ferrante’s Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elena Ferrante’s texts explore new notions of feminine identity and rethink fundamental aspects of gender relations and social constructs, most prominently of motherhood. However, whilst her narrative depicts specifically female-centered experiences, her protagonists remain profoundly affected by the patriarchal structures and spaces that they set out to expose and subvert. A particularly productive way of approaching this tension in Ferrante’s works is through an analysis of her complex depictions of maternity, which stand at the center of the author’s textual negotiation of the troubled and discontinuous emergence of the female subject. In a close reading of L’amore molesto (1992), La figlia oscura (2006) and the Neapolitan quartet (2011-2014), I will argue that Ferrante’s texts often filter the conflicts that afflict their female protagonists through the maternal body. My analysis will show that the latter is often affected by forms of dislocation or mutilation that synechdochically mirror the characters’ sense of existential unease. Ultimately, I will argue that Ferrante’s narrative does not simply reproduce the formlessness or subsumption that has dominated patriarchal appropriations of the female body, but it reframes and renegotiates the position of the feminine subject in patriarchal society from the perspective of a newly gained agency and creative power.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".