“As women, workers, writers, and mothers, Ferrante’s characters seek fulfillment outside the role of mother as well as in it” (293). Would we agree, though, that the novels “revolve around the maternal figure” (294) in order to create “a new maternal signifier” (294)? I have thought of the friendship between Elena and Lila as being the central relationship of the novels. And now, exploring the novels as metafiction is kind of making my head explode, because I think I am mapping out a framework for the novels, which exists beyond (meta!) any plot or psychological or character or archetype concerns.

According to Van Ness, Ferrante “creates…an image of motherhood that is nuanced, complex, and alive with contradiction” (294). Perhaps as infants we experienced the undifferentiated Mother and always want to go back there. But women, who must face the choice of becoming mothers or not, know that, though they may be their child’s mother, they are Subject, not Other (see de Beauvoir). An individual woman lives and breathes as a mother, and an individual mother lives and breathes as a woman: she is an actual individual, not the archetype that Van Ness describes. I think this struggle on Elena and Lila’s part to be subject, not object, is what Ferrante is taking on regarding “the maternal figure” (294). Van Ness writes that the novels go against the suffering, undifferentiated Mother (294): “Ferrante…’births’ her novels as maternal ‘word flesh,'” defying the stereotype of the mother who exists only for her child (295).

The pairing of the “maternal sublime” with the “artistic sublime” (295-6) makes me think of Elena’s writing of her short novel. Afterward, she must make corrections and edits and she even submits to her boyfriend’s judgment (Pietro is going to be a problem – he doesn’t wholly accept who Elena is) that she should tone down the sex scene, but the writing of the novel is one continuous experience, a kind of trance in which she is suspended for a number of days. How often is writing actually like this?

Finally, Van Ness claims Elena is a “maternal figure” (295) because she births a books and later she’ll have a child. She has to leave her dialect, the neighborhood, her family, Naples, and Lila to become a “speaking mother” (296). She has to leave the undifferentiated Mother behind (when she throws Lila’s doll into the cellar, right after Lila threw her doll [297-8]). Thus women “birth” works of art, but men do not. We can’t get away from our biology or the archetype.

Why is this kind of story – grappling with the Mother figure, having a friendship with another girl that towers over every other subsequent relationship – still so…unusual in western literature. So noteworthy. Women play numberless roles in the domestic sphere and in public life, doing vast – vast! – amounts of unpaid work, yet these roles and this labor is unremarked upon, unappreciated, invisible. Elena will finally be recognized, differentiated from her own mother, from the rione, from her “mother tongue” (299), i.e., her dialect.