Elena can’t or will not ignore all signs that the relationship with Nino is not a healthy one. It reminds me of the line in film The Leopoard spoken by Tancredi “For things to remain the same, things will have to change.” Which for an Italian prince in 1860 Sicily met a modified monachy was better than a republic. For Elena a life with Nino is better than a life with out him. She has dreamt about him since she was a child and now that she has him she will not let go. So who is doing the changing in this relationship? In each step of their relationship it is Elena. She changes her marriage, she changes her relations with her mother, her mother in law, with Lila, she changes locations where to live, she changes her role as a mother to her children by letting her mother in law take care of them, she even goes as far as to accept Nino as her lover even though he’s a notorious liar with a 8 month pregnant wife. But as an intelligent woman she is ready to ignore everything and she justifies it to herself when she says about their relationship “everything is changing, we are inventing new forms of living together’ (pg. 114) Just so that “things remain the same”. If I was a fortune teller I would bet that Elena is due for more emotional pain.
Category Archives: Post 9
Lila’s Clone
We spoke in class about the complicated, yet unique relationship between Lenu and Lila, which is a form of give and take; Lenu is able to improve because of Lila and vice versa. It is possible that over the course of their friendship Lila’s influence managed to subvert Lenu’s identity. It is by this notion that I am beginning to notice that Lenu is becoming Lila, for she is exhibiting familiar acts that we have seen from Lila.
In the third volume, Lila leaves her son to Elena so she can pursue her career. We see this again in the fourth volume, but this time from Lenu, in which she leaves her children in the care of Adelle so she can pursue her needs (Ferrante 37),both of which expressed the same level of selfishness to put their needs above everyone else. In addition, Lenu puts Pietro and her children in an uncomfortable position when she leaves them (30). This is familiar, for Lila puts Lenu in the same uncomfortable position in the second volume when she leaves her to be the “lookout” while she is with Nino. Finally, Lenu thinks blindly about her needs, in which she foolishly claims her devotion towards Nino (35). Furthermore, Lenu is indifferent to the consequences, for she believes everything will work out in the end. Again, we have seen this before in the second volume when Lila begins her affair with Nino, despite Lenu ‘s many warnings. There Lila truly believes that no one will find out about her affair, for she believes that situations eventually works itself out.
Motherhood in Reverse
Although I did not get a chance to write a post this week since I was behind on reading, I would still like to contribute to the posts. I find it appalling that at the beginning of The Story of the Lost Child, Elena makes a comparison between her and Lila’s style of parenting. She goes on to criticize, “Had Lila worried about Gennaro when she left Stefano, when she abandoned the child to the neighbor because of her work in the factory, when she sent him to me as if to get him out of the way? Ah, I had my faults, but I was certainly more a mother than she was.” (Ferrante 24) Although Elena goes on to explain herself, revealing that such sentiments were the result of bitterness and confusion, seeing as how Lila paid little attention to Elena’s children before, it seems as though Elena is attempting to lessen her own feelings of guilt. She knows perfectly well that the circumstances in which Lila committed each of those actions were done out of necessity and desperation rather than in carelessness and neglectfulness towards Gennaro. The abuse, rape and violence that Gennaro witnessed at home with Stefano towards his mother, the necessity to provide for her child and the desire to keep him out of harm’s way due to Naples’ political catastrophes were all motherly and shrewd decisions on Lila’s part. Although Elena should be given the benefit of the doubt in the sense that she’s aware of these facts, it seems as though Elena lacks any pride on her part knowing that her children do not have to fear the same things that Gennaro does. This, in itself, is definitely one of her successes as a mother and grants her the ability to escape the neighborhood, at least physically. However, having known Lila all her life in the context of the neighborhood, she should have realized that what constitutes a “good mother” in Naples is a spark contrast to this concept in Florence. Even so, Elena is in denial, choosing to put off the idea that her children will be harmed mentally by her running off with Nino, and that, in doing so, she is inevitably bringing herself back to the neighborhood where, until that point, she had managed to avoid almost wholly. She is reversing her life by giving in to old desires and forgetting that the future demands her moving on from her past insecurities and pettiness towards Lila.
Superficial Feminism
Lenù’s feminism appears very superficial. She is able write “feminist” literature, and discuss feminist topics with other academics around her, but when it comes to her own life and her own actions, she does not put much of it to use. For example, the ways she treats and perceives Lila. When Lila criticises Lenù’s actions, Lenù immediately proclaims it as Lila being ‘jealous’: “Only now – out of jealousy, surely, because I had taken Nino – did she remember the girls, and wanted to emphasize that I was a terrible mother, that although I was happy, I was causing them unhappiness” (page 23). Instead of seeing Lila as a rational person, she diminishes her. Instead of using her power or status to help other women, she looks down on them, such as with Lila in this example.
Lenu’s lack of concrete real world feminism could be explained in part by her mother-in-law, Adele. Being in a way, a role model for Lenù for many years now, Lenù must have at least in some way absorbed how Adele interacts with others. While Adele seems to be a supporter of women writers, such as by encouraging Lenù in her career, it seems this is just as superficial as with Lenù. Instead of continuing to support her Lenù as a writer, Adele attempts to derail her career when she is no longer with Pietro, being behind a number of bad reviews of her book. She also does not respect Lenù as her own autonomous being, and the work Lenù has done to achieve what she has: ”I’ll take away everything I’ve given you” (page 25). When this is one of her few ‘feminist’ idols, it would be hard for Lenù to know any other way of being a feminist.
Elena’s Struggle between Love, Children, and Career
In “The Story of The Lost Child”, Elena’s fame widens as a lecturer during the feminist movement but she faces a struggle between choosing her strongest loyalties. I really like how Ferrante genuinely highlights the conflict women must endure between professional life, romance, and family.
Elena spends time away from her children and feels guilty, while simultaneously feeling happiness thinking of her time with Nino. She states, “I soon discovered I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life” (76).
Elena also struggles with her romantic life. She displays an inconsistency between her feminist rhetoric and her actions towards Nino. She states, “Although I now wrote about women’s autonomy and discussed it everywhere, I didn’t know how to live without his body, his voice, his intelligence. It was terrible to confess it but I still wanted him, I loved him more than my own daughters….the free and educated woman lost her petals, separated from the woman-mother and the woman-mother was disconnected from the woman-lover from the furious whore, and we all seemed on the point of flying off in different directions” (100). I find this quote incredibly compelling. It perfectly showcases the conflict inside of Elena between her professional, romantic, and family life. She is angered with herself because of the natural desires she has for Nino, while she preaches about women’s independence. She categorizes herself into varying types of women – woman lover, woman mother, and furious whore – and she finds it hard to exist in harmony as all three of those women.
Identity
Elena continues to form her ideas on feminism into her years of “maturity,” as this section of book four is titled. An idea that Elena expresses on her book tour that struck me was when she states:
“I talked about how, to assert myself, I had always sought to be male in intelligence—I started off every evening saying I felt that I had been invented by men, colonized by their imagination—and I told how I had recently seen a male childhood friend of mine make every effort possible to subvert himself, extracting from himself a female”(TSLC, 57).
Elena talks about her relationship to men and how she realizes the impact men have on her identity as a woman. This idea that Elena strives to be “male in intelligence” makes a lot of sense since many of the intellectuals she looks up to throughout life are male such as Nino, Franco, and Pietro. Elena starts with an intellectual model as a woman, Lila, but that image of Lila fades with time and is replaced by the men in her life. The most puzzling part of this quote must be when Elena refers to the encounter with her male childhood friend, Alfonso, and how he is “extracting from himself a female.” I see how this is relevant to the idea of male and female identities influencing one another but I’m not entirely sure why in the previous chapter Lila is mentioned in relation to Alfonso’s new appearance. Elena states, “Now, mysteriously, with that long hair in a ponytail, he resembled Lila” (TSLC, 55). Elena describes Alfonso’s look as more female but not just any female, female like Lila. What does this comparison mean?
Lenu begins to question her decisions
Lenu’s decision to be with Nino was shocking considering the fact that she had no problem voicing her distaste of when Lila did the same thing. In the third novel of the series, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”, we see Lenu struggle with the balance of being a Mother and Writer. Eventually she decides to devote her time to being a Mother but we can see that she is not being fulfilled as she is writer. In the final novel of the series, “The Story of the Lost Child” we see that she has decided to devote her time to Nino, being let down when he decides to spend the holidays with his family.
“I vented on the telephone while Mariarosa listened to me in silence. I asked: Am I wrong about everything, do I deserve what is happening to me? She took a serious tone, but she was encouraging. She said that I had the right to have my life and the duty to continue to study and write. Her words soothed me, yet I couldn’t sleep. I turned things over and over in my breast; anguish, rage, desire for Nino, unhappiness because he would spend the holiday with his family, with Albertino, and I was reduced to a woman alone, without affection, in an empty house.” (The Story of the Lost Child, 60)
It seems that Lenu has invested so much into Nino, studying, and writing that she is feeling guilt over not prioritizing her role as a Mother. This is emphasized when Pietro shows up to Lenu’s door stating that because of her lover she does not have time for her children (61). This offers insight into how her feelings of guilt have come forth as her actions not only affect her but those around her as well.
Elena Lets Go
Lila has the capacity to code-switch as much as Elena, but they do so for vastly different reasons. In her daily life Lila has no need for Italian; her vernacular is dialect, and only in polite company does she use standard Italian to show she has a grasp of an elevated subject, using elevated language. But she doesn’t use it fluidly – her Italian can be somewhat fusty or too literary.
Elena, on the other hand, by the time she is thirty or so, resorts to dialect when she is under duress or attack. She’s lived among the intellectual class since Pisa, where she diligently applied herself to blending in. Yet there she first discovers the power of her dialect. When a female acquaintance at the Scuola Normale accuses her of stealing, she slaps and insults her in dialect, and the girl backs down.
Elena refers to other occasions in her marriage when she insults Pietro, but she uses reported speech and does not specify that she has mixed dialect words in with Italian (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, chapter 121). Also, when Lila and Elena talk on the phone, Elena never says if they switch back and forth or not.
Elena telephones Nino and speaks to Eleonora (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, chapter 118), who cries that she will smash her face if she calls again. In her mental diatribe against Eleonora, Elena finds herself using insults in dialect (chapter 119). She is beside herself, ready to do worse damage than what Eleonora threatened. She refers to “another” self “buried under a crust of meekness” who mixes dialect and Italian.
I can’t help but think of the screaming fights of the mothers in the street that she witnessed as a girl. Her carefully built, assiduous habits of study, her discipline, her pitiless self-assimilation, splinter under the force of the violence of desire and rebellion that simmered and were repressed for so long.
Dear All, for your post 9 please consider reflecting on:
1) structural elements of vol. 4;
2) the pace of the narration;
3) Lenù’s feminism (or careers vs motherhood);
4) code-switching and emotions
As always, you are free to comment on any other aspect that might have escaped me.
I look forward to reading your posts.
