Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Psychoanalytic Accounts of Sexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and Italian Feminism

The Denial of the Mother

The Mother Figure and the Maternal

Irigaray: Subjectivity and the Mother-Daughter Corporeal Bond

From Mothers to Daughters: The Italian Scene

Diotima and Luisa Muraro

Adriana Cavarero

2 Elsa Morante’s Menzogna e sortilegio: The Incorporeal Bond

Menzogna e sortilegio and the Critics

Motherhood and the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Cesira and Anna

Maternal Love: Rosaria and Alessandra

Elisa

3 Francesca Sanvitale’s Madre e figlia: Bodies of Pain and Imagination

Body as Object of Desire

The Male Hero

Medical Establishment: The Attack on the Body

Critique and Re-imagining

Writing, Imagination, and Language

Narrator, Character, and Author in Search of Identity

4 Mariateresa Di Lascia’s Passaggio in ombra: The Maternal as Expression of Desire and Corporeality

Desire

Chiara

The Daughter within the Heterosexual Economy

Body and Knowledge

5 Elena Ferrante’s L’amore molesto: The Renegotiation of the Mother’s Body

Delia: The Love and Hatred of a Selfless Subject

Reconstructing the Past

The Language of Dresses

6 Elena Stancanelli’s Benzina: The Surreal Mother-Daughter Relationship and New Possibilities

Elena Stancanelli and the Literary Scene, 1995–2000

Benzina 154

Mother and Daughter: Different Bodies, Different Personalities

A Relationship of Fusion and Independence

Oppressed Bodies in the Family Home

Looking, and Looking at Each Other

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Promotional Information

'Corporeal Bonds makes a significant contribution to the field of women's studies by positioning itself within a vibrant and longstanding debate on the importance of the mother in Italian feminist thought and in Italian women's writing. Using a combination of literary analysis, psychoanalytic and feminist maternal theory, and comments by the authors, Patrizia Sambuco offers a reading of five well-known and important novels that re-evaluates and re-vindicates the importance of the mother, and in particular, a communication with her that is corporeal. Highly readable, easy to follow, and remarkably jargon free, her theorizations of corporeality within the framework of a daughter-mother bond will offer scholars much food for thought.' -- Tommasina Gabriele, Department of Italian Studies, Wheaton College

About the Author

Patrizia Sambuco is the editor of Transmissions of Memory and Italian Women Writers, 1800–2000 and the author of Corporeal Bonds.