Undoing feminism: the neapolitan novels of Elsa Ferrante

Elena Ferrante belongs by age to a generation who has experienced feminism. Yet for various reasons analyzed in the present essay, her characters are modeled according to the rules constructing postfeminist women who want visibility at the cost of other values considered integral to friendship in traditional terms (Schweitzer) and feminist norms (Toffoletti and McRobbie). The construction of Elena as a character partly explains both the weaving of Ferrante’s sisterhood with her literary influences and the successful reception of the tetralogy. A complex relationship between the emancipatory power of sisterly friendship and the desire for the individual assertion of a woman threads the sisterly relations between the character of Elena and her friend Lila. In a captivating game of intersubjectivity, Elena uses her friend Lila to build her own path and her fortune. To a similar extent, and with the same goal of gaining visibility only for her writing, her author disowns the direct line that binds her work to that of other women writers to elaborate, instead, carefully-studied responses concerning the influence of distant fathers of the novel (Flaubert, Proust, and others).