The Handmaid's Liberation: Bewitched Worlds, Underground Stories, Dystopian Narratives in Elsa Morante, Elena Ferrante and Margaret Atwood

This paper will examine three novels by three different women writers: Lies and Sorcery (1948) by Elsa Morante; the Neapolitan Quartet (2011-2014) by Elena Ferrante; and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985, but revived on a global scale in 2017 thanks to the homonymous TV series). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that these novels share four common aspects: the metanarrative frame, the polyphony, the traumatic realism and the allegorical form of time. In each case, writing and history are defined through the identification of physical/symbolic places that enable and/or stimulate forms of resistance and survival in the three protagonists and narrating voices: Elisa’s study room/prison in Lies and Sorcery, the dolls’ cellar in Ferrante’s quadrilogy, and the cupboard in The Handmaid’s Tale. These places are endowed with a symbolic charge inasmuch as they become heterotopias: utopias situated in a concrete context, “counter-sites […] in which the real sites […] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault). Therefore, each novel’s female narrating self builds a metanarrative architecture, in which the story is contained. However, this metanarrative architecture is also shaped by the way each story gets told. As a matter of fact, all three novels are structured as polyphonies, as they feature another woman’s voice resonating within the same voice of each narrating self: Elisa’s mother Anna in Lies and Sorcery, Lila in Elena’s tale at the centre of the Neapolitan Quartet, and the first maid’s voice (Offred) grafted within the second maid’s words (again, Offred) in The Handmaid’s Tale. Furthermore, the physical architecture of these metanarrative spaces shares another constant element: they are all subverted spaces that have been freed by the practice of survival of the three protagonists. The subversion precisely resides in their being initially featured as cloistered, painful, realistically and/or metaphorically sunken spaces. Not only do the three novels share an underground world, but they also present us with a specific sentiment of reality and time, in which the three surviving female protagonists grow their self-awareness. The underground realism coincides with the assumption of perspective from below, stemming from a sunken world inhabited by dominated women (seeking liberation or not). Within this hallucinated realism arises a given temporal quality, each time characterised in a different manner: bewitched in Lies and Sorcery, historical and generational in Ferrante’s quadrilogy, dystopian in The Handmaid’s Tale. Still, these three temporal perceptions are drawing from the same fractured, and therefore traumatised, tension towards time. The trauma of violence against women and inherent to femininity, the trauma of underground, indeed holds a recurrence that is, at once, phantasmatic (as per the renowned Freudian formula on the trauma functioning as “deferred action”), as well as dislocated (“the traumatic event” – Caruth emphasizes – “is its future”). The three novels create different allegories of time, in which another epoch takes the stage (one that, at every turn, becomes magical, historical-generational and dystopian), in order to put the readers in allegorical contact with the deeply traumatic quality of our time, a time of patriarchal or neo-patriarchal violence and domination.