Woundedness And Reintegration

This project investigates the way in which the figure of the hysterical woman has been taken up and reworked by Italian women writers in the decades following WWI. The first section identifies the importance of surgical imagery in the works of Enif Robert, Goliarda Sapienza, and Elena Ferrante, and proposes that such imagery shifts characterization away from madness towards an experience of woundedness. With the help of Adriana Cavarero's feminist narrative philosophy and in dialogue with contemporary thinking on trauma, this section complicates the simplistic tendency to equate storytelling with agency and healing. The second section focuses on envied or desired wounds and wounds that cross generations, with a focus on Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante. This analysis identifies the fervent witnessing of the wounds of others as significant for the feminist project of countering isolation; woundedness can then be understood as part of the work of a dark feminism. Taking Ferrante's call for the exploration of the dark sides of female experience as a theoretical point of departure, the third section analyzes four recent works of Italian film that explore maternity beyond the confines of traditional representation. The project identifies a strong Italian contribution to contemporary transnational feminist thought, and its connection to a long, underrecognized, pattern of carving out artistic space for darkly feminist forms of expression, particularly those that emphasize wounds as both evidence of painful experience and opportunities for deepened understanding.