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’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 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.
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.
In the Elena Ferrante interview by Nicola Lagiola Ferrante speaks of the “those freeing themselves of gravitational pull of their birthplace”. This is consistent theme in her Neapolitan novels. It’s the constant pull and push that Elena feels from her birthplace. We see her trying to liberate herself from her native language, break though cultural and social barriers from her past. But can it ever be completely done? It would be like erasing a paper written in pencil, you may remove the lead but the impression on the paper will last forever. I believe the reason Elena constantly refer back to Naples is because regardless of it’s violence, crime, regardless of the terrible events that happened to her in her youth, it is still her safe space. When ever she feels out of sorts she quickly reverts to what is visceral. “And I realized that my voice was taking on the tones of the dialect, out of nervousness, that the words were coming to me in Neapolitan of the neighborhood, that the neighborhood-from the stradone and the tunnel-was imposing its language on me, it’s mode of acting and reacting, its figures, those which in Florence seemed faded images and here were flesh and blood(twlatws pg 326)”. The past follows us through our lifetime, sometimes the good times maybe remembered as the bad times and sometimes the bad times can be interpreted as the good “The past, in its indeterminacy presents itself either through the filter of nostalgia or the filter of preliminary impressions (Ferrante). Here in America nostalgia is a big business. All around the country we have high school reunions. The four years in high school are for many the worst times in their lives, yet we celebrate and many go to them every 10 years or so, so they can see who got fat, old or ugly. Are we reliving a miserable past or has the past been filtered and become good with time? Like a high school reunion Elena will continue to return to Naples because she can’t help it.
According to Ferrante in a interview titled In Spite of Everything, the individual represents as a collection of ideas (people, ideas, and actions) that are born or transformed by others; good development (364).In the third volume, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Ferrante, Lila challenges Ferrante’s idea about the subject of others in relation to one’s transformation. She is unable to recognize the weight of the “others”, putting a value or evoking change in her transformation. For example, Lila tries to defend her progress Professor Galiani (143). Admittedly, she states that she doesn’t have “the ability”, in addition she claims that the act of studying makes a person wicked. This excuse is suppose to satisfy Professor Galiani’s inquiry, but she immediately counterpoints Lila’s assumption by mentioning Elena’s academic studies, and her missing wickedness. This prompts Lila to be indifferent, and tries to occupy her thoughts about the significance of Professor Galiani’s response by tending to her child. In addition, Lila disregards Elena’s announcement about her pregnancy. Lila informs her to be caution for a change like that brings disaster to one’s life (233). Lila goes into detail about her previous pregnancies and the burden it caused her. Like a warning, she informs Elena to expect these troubles. Here, Lila once again fails to see the positive aspects of expecting a child. These examples illustrates the challenge in Ferrante’s idea about the individual.
Adaptation from the page to the big screen was an all encompassing theme for most of the posts this week. The keen attention to detail to ensure that the emotional expressiveness of the novels are preserved is an arduous task that requires an understanding of the in-numerous threads that hold Lila and Elena’s relationship together. As Ariana describes this admirable endeavor, “The amount of detail put into creating the scene is fascinating. It makes me want to re-watch and analyze the series.” Although I was unable to attend the series, the highlights of Professor Lombardi’s lecture also sparks my curiosity to rewatch the show with shrewd attention to its parallel symbolism to the show.
On the other hand, other posts remained focused on the interview with Ferrante that gave a fascinating insight into her characters’ developments, their inability to escape the instability of the neighborhood and even the symbolism of some overlooked characters who, nevertheless, have spontaneous appearances throughout Elena and Lila’s lives. Subtle details such as Lila’s effortless ability to teach Elena a simpler way of learning Latin, as Jacqueline points out, and the use of Italian versus the Neapolitan dialect, as Paraskevi discusses, are notable because their importance may escape the readers upon first reading. Irini alludes to Ferrante’s words that particularly reflects the importance of the theme of writing: “Writing is an act of pride.” As she goes on to analyze this quote, she focuses on the advancement or lack thereof that the protagonists experience in different aspects of their lives in relation to the act of learning and engaging in active writing. Meanwhile, Julie’s post takes on the natural instability that attacks the lives of Elena and Lila. Julie points out, “And every time Elena resolves to break with Lila- and she’s done this 3-4 times so far- she can’t.” The truth of this statement ties together the other themes, reflecting the protagonists’ inability to escape one another and not just the neighborhood, itself. All these posts, although they discuss different points of the interview, have one thing in common: they highlight Ferrante’s un-accidental process of choosing details as she laid out the lives of our protagonists, knowing that there would be a precarious thread to hold it all together in a delicate yet elegant manner.
Manifestazione femminista per la depenalizzazione dell’aborto, Roma gennaio 1975. Paolo Agosti. Manifestazione davanti al tribunale per il processo ai violentatori di Claudia Caputi. Roma, 4 aprile 1977. Paola Agosti
“The long story of
Elena Greco is marked everywhere by instability…I wanted everything to take
shape and then lose its shape” (Frantumaglia, 368).
For me, there is an interweaving between the meta nature of this book; the social and political history that inserts itself into the narrative and into Elena’s life; and Ferrante’s thoughts on the instability or blurring of boundaries (personified by Lila’s experience of smarginatura) and of the past and on Elena’s futile attempt to order her life into a narrative (as with her lived life, Ferrante says that any order or structure in her narrative breaks down in the end).
In the interview with Nicola Lagioia in Frantumaglia, Ferrante says that about Elena’s life there is nothing stable. I think the instability of her life is a stand-in for anyone’s life in contemporary society, the Italian particulars aside. Ferrante speaks of the illusion of an individual alone and separate in the world; she can’t even write without remembering and feeling the presence of others (365). The times in which she lives – which are also the times in which Ferrante and all of us in the class have lived, if only partially – are marked by upheaval, change, and uncertainty. The exterior mirrors the interior, and vice versa. No one who has lived from the end of World War II to the present in Italy has escaped this instability. In life as in fiction.
When Elena’s resolve and the life she so studiously built are in the midst of breaking down, she takes her family to visit Naples with some idea of rescuing her sister Elisa from the clutches of Marcello Solara. The visit (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay 319-347) does not go as she hopes. No one (an Italian, anyway) can break the “ties to the neighborhood”; Ferrante speaks of those ties reappearing whenever the individual thinks they are gone (367), and for Elena they return with a vengeance: “I realized my voice was taking on the tones of the dialect…that the neighborhood…was imposing its language on me, its mode of acting and reacting…” (328).
And every time Elena resolves to break with Lila – and she’s done this 3-4 times so far – she can’t. After the visit, she tells herself, “I had wanted to become something…only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her” (347).
She finds her visits to Mariarosa’s both a frustration and a haven, but that is where she has some new thoughts about the way men are only interested in women to show them that they could do it better. Mariarosa’s genuine interest in her ideas sparks her desire to write again, and she writes a short book. But she cannot share her interest in new feminist ideas with Lila. They no longer understand each other, they can no longer step in and out of each other. Neither has told the truth about her life to the other for years already.
And then, the ultimate happens. Nino reappears. When she runs away with him and takes her very first flight, the book ends with her telling us that the very floor of the airplane, “the only surface I could count on – was trembling.” Nothing is solid anymore. Everything is dissolving: her resolve, her family, her carefully constructed life.
Unfortunately I was unable to attend the lecture by Professor Lombardi on Thursday night due to a medical procedure. Instead, I will write on another topic that has fascinated me, Nino Sarratore. Nino plays a significant role throughout the Neapolitan novels. Just when the reader thinks they have seen the last of him, Nino reappears. The second and third books both end on cliffhangers involving Nino. In The Story of a New Name the book ends with Elena seeing Nino at a reading of her book. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay ends with Elena and Nino on a plane together after Elena leaves her husband. Why is Nino given such importance? It seems to me that Elena finally realizes that Nino was just a “player” when she learns of the child he fathered with Silvia. Elena notes, “Nino was not fleeing his father out of fear of becoming like him: Nino already was his father and didn’t want to admit it” (88). Nino’s father is the gross, forty year old man that Elena lost her virginity to when she was a teenager. Nino’s father cheats on his wife constantly and does not care about the women he sleeps with. It is not a compliment to say that Nino is like his father. I was happy when Elena finally made this realization because I had been building a steady hatred for Nino and wanted Elena to hate him as well. Elena’s feelings change at the end of the book when she starts an affair with Nino. In the end, though, after a lifetime of Elena loving him, Nino admits his love for Elena and they start sleeping together.
There are many reasons that Elena could have started this affair with Nino, but my biggest question is whether this affair is really about Elena, or if it is secretly about Lila. Before the affair starts, but after Nino had become present in Elena’s life again, Nino says to Elena, “What I had seen in you, I then stupidly seemed to find in her [Lila]” (371). In essence Lila has become this omnipresent figure lurking above their relationship. Is Elena with Nino because she really loves him? Is it because Pietro does not pay enough attention to Elena and Nino does? Maybe it’s because Elena is finally fulfilling her childhood dream of being with Nino. I think it is much deeper than that. I think being with Nino is just part of Elena’s competition with Lila. Lila may have won Nino in the past, but now Elena has him. Especially when you look at the above quote, it seems that Lila is playing a much bigger role in the relationship between Nino and Elena than Elena even realizes. I’d be interested to hear what others think on this topic.
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