NARRATING INTENSITY: HISTORY AND EMOTIONS IN ELSA MORANTE, GOLIARDA SAPIENZA AND ELENA FERRANTE by STEFANIA PORCELLI A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2020 © 2020 STEFANIA PORCELLI All Rights Reserved ii Narrating Intensity: History and Emotions in Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante by Stefania Porcell i This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________ ______________________________ Date [Giancarlo Lombardi] Chair of Examining Committee ________ ______________________________ Date [Giancarlo Lombardi] Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Monica Calabritto Hermann Haller Nancy Miller THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Narrating Intensity: History and Emotions in Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante By Stefania Porcelli Advisor: Giancarlo Lombardi L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend) by Elena Ferrante (published in Italy in four volumes between 2011 and 2014 and translated into English between 2012 and 2015) has galvanized critics and readers worldwide to the extent that it is has been adapted for television by RAI and HBO. It has been deemed “ferocious,” “a death-defying linguistic tightrope act,” and a combination of “dark and spiky emotions” in reviews appearing in popular newspapers. Taking the considerable critical investment in the affective dimension of Ferrante’s work as a point of departure, my dissertation examines the representation of emotions in My Brilliant Friend and in two Italian novels written between the 1960s and the 1970s – La Storia (1974, History: A Novel) by Elsa Morante (1912-1985) and L’arte della gioia (The Art of Joy, 1998/2008) by Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996). However, rather than remaining centered on these works’ emotive landscapes alone, I seek instead to trace the continuities that link these two “historical” novels of the past to Ferrante’s successful and more recent tetralogy. I look at the representation of emotions and at what I call “moments of intensity” – moments of disruption in the narrative sequence, along with stylistic and linguistic rupture, used to convey the characters’ modified perception, rather than the affective reaction of the reader – in order to illuminate these works’ multi-layered view on women and history, and to show how the iv characters’ emotional responses and moments of narrative intensity are intrinsically connected to the authors’ visions of history and women. Thus, my research reflects on the sudden popularity of the contemporary Italian novel within the global literary scene while also looking beyond national borders to argue more broadly for the interconnectedness of emotional intensity, historicity and narrative form. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee for their intellectual and emotional support throughout the last years: my supervisor, Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi, always “only an email away from me,” Prof. Monica Calabritto, scholar and teacher of emotions, and Prof. Nancy K. Miller, with whom I could talk for hours. My deep gratitude also goes to Prof. Hermann Haller for helping me navigate the linguistic aspects of the texts I analyze in this dissertation. I am grateful for all the professors and friends I met at CUNY and for my friends and family around the world. Finally, I would like to thank Dave and Angelica for bringing joy in my life every day. vi CONTENTS Introduction. Narrating Intensity __________________________________________________ 1 1. Women’s Historical Writing and Emotion ______________________________________ 8 2. Intensity: Emotions and Affect ______________________________________________ 19 3. The Language of Intensity __________________________________________________ 31 Chapter One. Knowing without Knowledge: La Storia _______________________________ 38 1. Patterns of Intensity _______________________________________________________ 42 2. A Moment of Intensity: Ida’s Rape ___________________________________________ 45 3. The Horror: The Deportation of the Roman Jews ________________________________ 68 4. Interminable Murder: Useppe’s Death ________________________________________ 86 5. Knowledge, Motherhood and Animals ________________________________________ 94 6. Conclusions ____________________________________________________________ 103 Chapter Two. Becoming Active: L’arte della gioia _________________________________ 105 1. A Composite Novel ______________________________________________________ 108 2. Intensity and the Female Body _____________________________________________ 116 3. The Emotions of History __________________________________________________ 135 4. Shame and Joy: The World Upside Down ____________________________________ 149 5. Alternative Motherhood __________________________________________________ 160 6. Conclusions ____________________________________________________________ 170 Chapter Three. Chaos and Order: L’amica geniale _________________________________ 173 1. An Intense Debate _______________________________________________________ 181 2. Deep and Petty Feelings __________________________________________________ 186 3. The rione as Affective Landscape and Emotional Community ____________________ 191 4. Troubling Bonds ________________________________________________________ 225 5. The Anxiety of History ___________________________________________________ 241 6. Writing as Agency _______________________________________________________ 254 7. Conclusions ____________________________________________________________ 260 Chapter Four. Language and Intensity ___________________________________________ 263 1. Emotions and Language __________________________________________________ 268 2. Dialect as a Linguistic Intensifier ___________________________________________ 270 3. Elsa Morante: Dialect and Poetry ___________________________________________ 273 vii 4. Sapienza’s Feast of Tongues _______________________________________________ 282 5. Ferrante’s Suppressed Dialect ______________________________________________ 288 6. Syntax and Lexicon as Intensifiers __________________________________________ 294 7. Conclusions ____________________________________________________________ 301 Conclusions ________________________________________________________________ 303 Bibliography _______________________________________________________________ 312 viii ABBREVIATIONS AdG = Goliarda Sapienza, L’arte della gioia AG = Elena Ferrante, L’amica geniale F = Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia LS = Elsa Morante, La Storia PCBA = Elsa Morante, Pro e contro la bomba atomica SBP = Elena Ferrante, Storia della bambina perduta SFR = Elena Ferrante, Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta SNC = Elena Ferrante, Storia del nuovo cognome ix Introduction Narrating Intensity The focus of this study is on emotional intensity as represented and conceptualized in the historical narratives written by three Italian women authors – Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza, and Elena Ferrante. Morante and Sapienza belong to the same generation of writers active after the Second World War; Ferrante is currently the most popular Italian writer on the global stage. Her success is a “phenomenon” with huge repercussions on the production, translation and reception of literature produced by Italian women writers. As a result of the “Ferrante effect”1 a number of Italian novels have been recently translated into English. Notably, Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein has produced a new translation of Morante’s L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island, 2019). These authors have had different lives, careers and receptions, but they have something in common: each of them produced one sprawling “historical” novel with female protagonists. Morante published La Storia in 1974 directly as a paperback at a low price. The book soon became a literary case, one of the few bestsellers by a living author in the 1970s. Conversely, L’arte della gioia, written in the same years and completed in 1976, was rejected by the major publishing houses and never published during the author’s life. It was published after Sapienza’s death, first partially (Stampa Alternativa, 1994) and later entirely but in few copies (Stampa Alternativa, 1998), before a reprint by the prestigious Einaudi in 2008. L’amica geniale appeared in four volumes, published in Italy between 2011 and 2014 and translated immediately into English between 2012 and 2015. 1 See the recent article by Anna Momigliano in The New York Times, “The Ferrante Effect” (9 December 2019). Introduction These three novels have very different publishing histories, but they all emphasize emotional intensity along with the effect of the flux of history on women’s lives. By putting them in dialogue with each other – and occasionally with other novels which feature women who confront historical and political events of the twentieth century – my study explores how women writers are affected by and represent key historical events such as the rise of Fascism, the Second World War, the “economic miracle” of the post-war years and the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s. Their works focus on female characters and deploy female narrators, foregrounding issues related to motherhood, the female body, women’s agency and autonomy. These novels also depart from the model of