Tag Archives: naples

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.

“Things Fall Apart”

Paola Agosti - Roma, gennaio 1975
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.

“There is a poverty that makes us all cruel”

Benjamin’s essay on Naples speaks of the entrenched poverty in Naples. Benjamin writes that in Naples “Poverty and misery seem as contagious as they are pictured to be to children”. Living surrounded in poverty, it is impossible to not also fall into poverty too.

The characters in Lenù’s neighbourhood are in poverty. Lenù and Lila’s reaction to this is a desire to escape their poverty, and by extension the neighbourhood too. When they are children, they dream of writing a successful novel, inspired by reading Little Women, and to be wealthy as a result. Benjamin’s essay reflects the friends’ view of poverty. They see it all around them, have been impacted by it. Lack of money is a constant obstacle in Lenù’s education, and was one of the factors that prevented Lila from continuing her education. A desire to pull themselves out of poverty underlines many things they do. 

Lila and Lenù have many reasons why they want to escape poverty. It prevents them from doing many things ie school, but it is summed up aptly with a line from Lila to Lenù: “There is a poverty that makes us all cruel” (261). It is not just poverty they want to escape, it is the violence and depravity that it creates. Towards the end of the first novel, Lila is in a situation where she has money to spare when she becomes engaged to Stefano. However, Elena notes that during this time she realised that money itself was no longer the object for them, but the protection that money offers themselves and the ones around them. She writes that the dream of “The treasure chests full of gold pieces ..when we published a book like Little Women – riches and fame- had truly faded. Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our experience and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured…” (248). Lenù is realizing here, that they do not want money, they want the safety and the privilege that having money creates.