Tag Archives: body

Synchronizing Boundaries

After multiple pregnancies and much physical and emotional separation, Lila and Elena begin to experience a synchronization in their bodies that allow them to endure new life together. Elena recounts this tumultuous period, “But our bodies, although undergoing the same process of reproducing life, continued to experience the phases in different ways, mine with active collaboration, hers with dull resignation,” (Ferrante 154). Although their delight and excitement become evident in their ability to reinforce their friendship, Lila’s fear of dissolving boundaries and misshapen people and objects begins extending to the rest of her body. Lila’s desire to constantly be in control of the flow of events and the people around her is no different for this pregnancy. She plans for it and yet her mental state of constant turmoil sends signals to her body as if it’s struggling to comprehend and to give in to the physical changes taking place on the inside and outside. Her body, just like her mind, has no desire for unpredictability that could potentially have disastrous results. This is also a reflection of Lila’s unwillingness to leave her neighborhood, let alone Naples, itself, a fear of leaving the mental boundaries that she has created for herself. On the other hand, Elena’s body is very welcoming to the new life growing inside of her, a reflection of her willingness to expand her world beyond the neighborhood, Naples and Italy, as a whole. Each time that Elena travels abroad, her heart swells with pride at her broadening horizons. She is striving to not limit herself to the expectations of her inner circle, the neighborhood and her motherly responsibilities, slowly beginning to understand that she is capable of doing a multitude of things outside of the small yet complexly dangerous world of her origins that keep pulling her back into its abyss. Unlike Lila, she has an ability to control herself, regardless of the disastrous situations she finds herself in, working through the obstacle course with steady determination. While Lila has determination, as well, her’s is an obsessive desire to maintain control without giving much thought to her well being, her thoughts or her own body, knowing that her mind will distort everything around her, regardless of her efforts, if she stops for even a moment.

The Porosity of the Female Body

A woman reading a book in the Mergellina area at the foot of Posillipo hill. Naples, 1963.
Mondadori Portfolio—Getty Images

In “Naples,” Benjamin writes of the porosity of private life there: “Similarly dispersed, porous, and commingled is private life” (174). For Benjamin, an upper class Jew from Berlin, the lack of boundaries between the public and the private in Naples must have been stark. Ferrante writes about the porosity of the private and public existence of the families of the neighborhood but goes a step further, writing from the inside–unlike Benjamin, who writes as an observer–about the porosity of the girls’ lives and bodies:

​”I looked at her from the window, and I felt that her earlier shape had broken, and I thought again of that wonderful passage of the letter, of the cracked and crumpled copper [229]. It was an image that I used all the time, whenever I noticed a fracture in her or in me. I knew–perhaps I hoped–that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again” (Ferrante, 265-6).

Containment and porosity run through the book: Lenù watches Lila from an interior, through the window; the copper pot inexplicably explodes; Lila is a young woman who cannot be contained (though we will see just who tries to do so); women’s lives and bodies are by nature fragmented; their efforts to hold themselves together by controlling and directing outside events, through consulting, scheming, strategizing with each other, are futile. Lenù struggles to simultaneously contain herself and control events by holding in her emotions (joy, moroseness, depression, disappointment) and by ordering and directing events with Lila. Lenù is constrained from acting true to herself, whereas Lila shows her violent emotions. Both are trying to survive but use opposite tactics.

A little later in his observations regarding private life, Benjamin claims, “each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life,” (174) which contrasts starkly with the Northern European custom of dividing public and private. I’ve been thinking that, as a product of an ordered and rigid society, he is idealizing the Neapolitan porosity of the domestic and the street: “Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought” (175), but when I did a little research, I found that he is on the side of experiential knowledge, so he is writing a kind of love letter to Naples (as Paul writes in his Post 3), so now I think he’s willingly giving himself up to his direct experience of Naples and sees the Neapolitans as able to live something that is “radiant,” something he cannot do. Ferrante’s view, on the other hand, is pretty tarnished.
There is some research on the history of privacy in Northern Europe, but I have found nothing on the subject re Southern Europe. Privacy is a way of controlling others’ access to you. Privacy was and is a privilege of the wealthy, the middle class. Working class and poor people, who inhabit smaller spaces and typically live close to their neighbors, have it to a much lesser extent. In the Naples of Ferrante, neither Lenù nor hardly anyone she knows has the luxury of privacy; perhaps Maestra Oliviera is the exception. The whole neighborhood knows when a family explodes into a quarrel. Arguments, beatings, and worse happen in public spaces. And to take it further, to the body: a body cannot be separate from the state of things, and certainly not a female body, which by its nature is open to penetration.