© American Association for Italian Studies 2013 DOI 10.1179/0161462213Z.00000000017 italian culture, Vol. xxxi No. 2, September 2013, 91–109 Mothers, Daughters, Dolls: On Disgust in Elena Ferrante’s La figlia oscura Stiliana Milkova Oberlin College, Ohio, USA 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. keywords Elena Ferrante, frantumaglia, La figlia oscura, disgust, motherhood, pregnancy, feminine experience, Italian women’s writing Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of a contemporary Italian writer who has kept her identity a secret over the past twenty years. Her novels have caused a stir on the Italian literary scene because they explore bad or unnatural mother–daughter gene- alogies: daughters disgusted by their mothers to the point of celibacy, mothers who abandon their daughters, or who nurse inanimate objects. In Ferrante’s world, these women seek to escape their prescribed feminine roles but, inevitably, succumb to the injunctions of a male-dominated order. Paradoxically, their only escape is through the disgust evoked by motherhood, by the pregnant female body, and by the Neapolitan dialect of their mothers. This strong emotion breaks down established