Sense of Fracture in Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante: Fragile Selves, Fragile Others

Italian writers Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) and Elena Ferrante are increasingly celebrated for their vivid depictions of women's lives and identities in twentieth and twenty-first century society. In a detailed comparison of Sapienza's multi-volume Autobiography of Contradictions (1967-1987) and Ferrante's world-famous Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014), this study contributes new insights to the rich fields of scholarship on both writers. It shows how reading these writers in conversation reveals a sense of fracture in modern Italian women's writing which uses literary representations of fractured female bodies and identities to open up wider debates about selfhood, corporeality, and the ethics of human relationships. Defying stereotypical depictions of female fragility and irrationality, Ferrante and Sapienza's fragmented female voices make of the novel of fragmentation in the modern Italian context a robust ethical tool for uncovering oppression and violence and their effects, demonstrating how Italian women writers since the 1960s have offered challenging and nuanced depictions of human subjectivity and moral development.

Rebecca Walker is Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.