Mothers, daughters, and damaged legs : mother-daughter relationships in Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk

Abstract

This article seeks to discuss the representation of the maternal body, specifically maternal suffering, and its powerful influence on the daughter through close analysis of the mother-daughter relationships depicted in Elena Ferrante’s and Deborah Levy’s works. By drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, the way through which maternal flesh is rejected by the subject-in-process and constructed as other is outlined. The troubling inheritance of the female genealogy is discussed, using Luce Irigaray’s essay ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’ as an important point of reference with regard to the transmission of bodily paralysis from mother to daughter. In the literary texts analysed, the bond between mother and daughter is forged through maternal suffering, particularly the mother’s damaged leg/s. The daughter experiences “matrophobia” since she fears that she will become her mother, especially due to the porous bodily borders between the two. This anxiety manifests itself in a phantom illness; the daughter is haunted by her mother’s abject leg. Crucially, however, this phantom illness is also felt as a physical threat. Only through the daughter’s recognition that the maternal is also her own can she redeem the mother-daughter relationship.