Stefania Lucamante writes in Undoing Feminism: The Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante that “A complex relationship between the emancipatory power of sisterly friendship and the desire for the individual assertion of a woman threads the sisterly relations” between Lenù and Lila. Lucamante argues however that the relationship works to improve and help Lenù but not Lila: “..the relationship is functional to her individual ascent, not a communal one”. Previously, I had seen Elena as being dependent on Lila, but after reading Lucamante’s paper, I’m beginning to think that it is less a situation of dependency, but of exploitation. As Lucamante writes, “Elena feigns submission to Lila, but she actually uses her”. It seems Lenù approaches many of her relationships this way. For example, her relationships with the other Airotas, in which she seems to benefit from all the connections and prestige that they have, but it doesn’t appear they receive anything from her in return. Most of the relationships she creates are because she can benefit them, whether it be her relationship with Donato Sarratore, once she discovers he is a writer, or with Franco, who helps her both socially, financially, and education-wise.
Tag Archives: feminism
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?
“Things Fall Apart”
“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.
