Naming the Child: Entering the Maternal Genealogy in Valeria Parrella’s Lo spazio bianco

Abstract

Naming is usually seen as the first action that inscribes the newborn in a patriarchal genealogy, assigning to the subject a role, a position, and an identity in the symbolic order. However, it is possible to find ruptures that allow for a different signification, shifting the emphasis towards a maternal genealogy. The passage from a paternal to a maternal genealogy offers a perspective for a reading of Valeria Parrella’s Lo spazio bianco (2008). Maria, the 42-year-old protagonist of this book, gives birth to a premature baby girl after only six months of pregnancy. The baby is put in an incubator in the hope that she can grow and survive. At one point in the story, Maria decides to name her baby. I suggest that Maria’s act of naming her baby girl can be seen as an event which subverts the traditional mother/daughter role assigning Maria and her daughter their new subject-positions according to a maternal genealogy. Starting with an analysis of a number of feminist theorists’ take on naming, I will then examine the process of naming in Lo spazio bianco in the light of some of the theories on maternal/feminine subjectivity. I will integrate Luce Irigaray’s theory of maternal genealogy with notions derived from objectrelations psychology such as Jessica Benjamin’s “intersubjective space”, Nancy Chodorow’s and Jane Flax’s different ideas of mother/daughter relationships, and Christopher Bollas’ “unknown thought”; Lisa Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters will provide the focus for my analysis, while Bracha L. Ettinger’s “matrixial borderlinking trans-subjectivity” will be the final key for the reading of Maria’s delayed maternal subjectivity.