Mothers, Daughters, Dolls: On Disgust in Elena Ferrante’s La figlia oscura

Abstract This article suggests disgust as a framework for approaching the novels of contemporary Italian writer Elena Ferrante. More specifically, it proposes disgust as the operative trope of Ferrante’s figurations of daughterhood, motherhood, and the (pregnant) female body. Ferrante’s novel, La figlia oscura (2006) narrates the experiences of motherhood and femininity through its middle-aged protagonist’s obsession with a young mother, her daughter, and the daughter’s pregnant doll. Images of rotting fruit, insects, oozing wounds, dark gaping mouths, vomit, wombs, worms, snot, sweat, and slime permeate and enliven the text in key narrative moments which always revolve around the doll. Thus, the doll provides us with a case study for examining the workings of disgust in the novel. Read against the backdrop of Ferrante’s own theoretical apparatus, la frantumaglia, and in the context of Western thought on disgust, La figlia oscura can be said to employ the disgusting to problematize motherhood and daughterhood as normative, transparent categories. The article argues that, ultimately, disgust in Ferrante’s texts opens up space for transgression and liberation so that feminine identity becomes slippery and hence can be negotiated across the ‘threshold of repugnance’ that disgust establishes and maintains.