Corporeal Bonds: The Daughter-Mother Relationship in Twentieth-Century Italian Women’s Writing
© 2012
The mother-daughter relationship is a popular theme in contemporary Italian writing but has never before been analysed in a comprehensive book-length study. In Corporeal Bonds, Patrizia Sambuco analyses novels by authors such as Elsa Morante, Francesca Sanvitale, Mariateresa Di Lascia, and Elena Ferrante, each of which is narrated from the daughter’s point of view and depicts the daughter’s bond with the mother.
Highlighting the recurrent images throughout these works, Sambuco traces these back to alternative forms of communication between mother and daughter, as well as to the female body. Sambuco also explores the attempts of the daughter-narrators to define a female self that is outside the constrictions of patriarchal society. Through these investigations, Corporeal Bonds identifies a strong connection between the ideas of post-Lacanian critical theorists, Italian feminist thinkers, and the stories within the novels.
Product Details
- Series: Toronto Italian Studies
- World Rights
- Page Count: 256 pages
- Dimensions: 6.3in x 0.9in x 9.3in
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Reviews
‘Corporeal Bonds makes a significant contribution to the field of women’s studies by positioning itself within a vibrant and longstanding debate on the importance of the mother in Italian feminist thought and in Italian women’s writing. Using a combination of literary analysis, psychoanalytic and feminist maternal theory, and comments by the authors, Patrizia Sambuco offers a reading of five well-known and important novels that re-evaluates and re-vindicates the importance of the mother, and in particular, a communication with her that is corporeal. Highly readable, easy to follow, and remarkably jargon free, her theorizations of corporeality within the framework of a daughter-mother bond will offer scholars much food for thought.’
Tommasina Gabriele, Department of Italian Studies, Wheaton College -
Author Information
Patrizia Sambuco is a lecturer in Italian Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at Monash University. -
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Psychoanalytic Accounts of Sexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and Italian Feminism
The Denial of the Mother
The Mother Figure and the Maternal
Irigaray: Subjectivity and the Mother-Daughter Corporeal Bond
From Mothers to Daughters: The Italian Scene
Diotima and Luisa Muraro
Adriana Cavarero
2 Elsa Morante’s Menzogna e sortilegio: The Incorporeal Bond
Menzogna e sortilegio and the Critics
Motherhood and the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Cesira and Anna
Maternal Love: Rosaria and Alessandra
Elisa
3 Francesca Sanvitale’s Madre e figlia: Bodies of Pain and Imagination
Body as Object of Desire
The Male Hero
Medical Establishment: The Attack on the Body
Critique and Re-imagining
Writing, Imagination, and Language
Narrator, Character, and Author in Search of Identity
4 Mariateresa Di Lascia’s Passaggio in ombra: The Maternal as Expression of Desire and Corporeality
Desire
Chiara
The Daughter within the Heterosexual Economy
Body and Knowledge
5 Elena Ferrante’s L’amore molesto: The Renegotiation of the Mother’s Body
Delia: The Love and Hatred of a Selfless Subject
Reconstructing the Past
The Language of Dresses
6 Elena Stancanelli’s Benzina: The Surreal Mother-Daughter Relationship and New Possibilities
Elena Stancanelli and the Literary Scene, 1995–2000
Benzina 154
Mother and Daughter: Different Bodies, Different Personalities
A Relationship of Fusion and Independence
Oppressed Bodies in the Family Home
Looking, and Looking at Each Other
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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