“Where had she walked and whither was she going?” Freud, Ferrante and feet in Jensen's Gradiva

In ‘“Where had she walked thus and whither was she going?”: Freud, Ferrante and Feet in Jensen’s Gradiva’, Shahidha Bari pursues one of Freud’s most famous forays into literary fiction, his retelling and psychoanalytic reading of Wilhelm Jensen’s novella, Gradiva: Ein Pompejanisches Phantasiestück (1903), just three years after its publication. The chapter traces some of the fictions Freud tells himself in the process, concerning the agencies of another of his impossible objects: feminine sexuality. Arguing for the resistances of Jensen’s story to Freud’s efforts to instrumentalise it for a reading of male fantasy, Bari proposes that what his use of the story betrays is in fact Freud’s anxieties concerning the ability of psychoanalysis to contain woman’s errant desire, her capacity to wander beyond the limits of its frameworks. The chapter turns to the Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, an author known for her interest in psychoanalysis, arguing that Ferrante offers us an alternative account of feminine volition.