Elena
Ferrante has written her story twice: once in a group of intense,
highly modeled short novels whose action unfolds over a brief time span;
and again in the four sprawling, rambunctious, decades-spanning works
that compose her Neapolitan saga. That these two modes of storytelling —
the compact and the commodious; the modern and the historical; the
distilling of life into metaphor and its picaresque, riotous expansion —
are so obviously the obverse of each other constitutes yet another
narrative, the story of how an individual (more specifically, a woman)
arrives, after the vicissitudes of living, at a definition of self. “Do
you want the long answer or the short?” is the customary divide between
explanations versus outcomes in the retelling of events. Ferrante gives
us both the long answer and the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.
Ferrante
is the by now famously anonymous Italian novelist whose works started
appearing in 1992, though their setting is the Naples of the 1950s
onward. By the time we reach “The Story of the Lost Child,” the fourth
and final installment of the Neapolitan series, we have arrived at the
21st century and Elena, its narrator, is growing old. One can call
Ferrante’s novels “her story” for the reason that they are openly
autobiographical in form: Against the telling and retelling of the life
of a single Neapolitan mother of two — frequently called Elena — who
rises from impoverished beginnings to become a successful author,
publisher and academic, her anonymity is a sort of beau geste
as well as a precaution. These facts are as consistent in the short
novels as in the long, but in the Neapolitan saga Ferrante’s writ runs
much wider, into detailed accounts of state corruption, murder and
political scandals whose participants are presumably recognizable to the
modern Italian reader.
Ferrante’s
preoccupations — set out with great clarity in her short books “The
Days of Abandonment” and “The Lost Daughter,” and discernible in a
different way amid the clamor of the Neapolitan novels — are with the
inherent radicalism of modern female identity; the struggles of the
female artist or intellectual with her biological and social destiny as a
woman; and, perhaps most strikingly, with motherhood as it is lived by
that woman in all her striving, transitional, divided newness. “The Days
of Abandonment,” Ferrante’s finest short work, describes the awakening
of its narrator into a Medea-like emotional frenzy when her husband
coolly leaves her for a young and beautiful woman. Left alone in their
apartment with the care of their two young children, she undergoes a
complete dismantling of her traditional, passive female identity and
reassembles herself as a raging, active and ultimately autonomous being.
What is sacrificed is her relationship with her children; or so, at
least, she fears. In this novel as well as others, the narrator views
that sacrifice ambivalently, sometimes experiencing it as loss and
sometimes glimpsing in it possibilities for a new, more complex
maternal identity. The power and prestige of the conventional mother is
something from which Ferrante’s narrators — as daughters — have
struggled to free themselves: What Ferrante describes so brilliantly is
the double loss that entails for the modern woman, who finds herself
neither mothered nor able to mother in turn.
“The
Story of the Lost Child” picks up these themes, as Elena and Lila, the
girlhood friends and rivals whose relationship spans and forms the
backbone of the Neapolitan novels, enter the middle terrain of marriage
and motherhood. In Elena and Lila, Ferrante’s modern woman is bisected
and given two faces; where in her other works the divided woman speaks
to and wrestles with herself, the Neapolitan series externalizes and
literalizes those politics to show their almost insurmountable
complexity. Elena is the woman who fears that her achievements and
successes, while having the appearance of feminist autonomy, are in fact
the fruits of a continuing, covert slavery to patriarchal values. Lila
is the unwritten, unexpressed female potentiality, a more obstinate
version of Virginia Woolf’s concept of Shakespeare’s sister. Elena’s
lifelong fear — that Lila, while having made no mark on the world, is
in fact more brilliant than she is — bites more deeply, as the two women
age, into the very roots of female identity: continuity, stability, the
capacity to nurture.
By
now Elena has two daughters. Separated from their father, compelled by
her effortful ascent into the literary world, she inhabits the rackety
motherhood of the compartmentalized woman, by turns abandoning,
remorseful, selfish, valiant and plagued with guilt. Lila has a single
son, the unprepossessing Rino. Unlike Elena, who has moved to Florence
and to a life of middle-class values, Lila has remained in the Naples
area in all its untransfigurable squalor. Like everything else she does,
Elena’s version of marriage and family life bears an aspirational taint
— an accusation she imagines coming from Lila, and frequently turns
against herself. In order to disprove it, she decides in the wake of her
marriage’s collapse to return to Naples with her two daughters to live.
She takes up residence first in a neighborhood overlooking Lila’s, then
in the apartment directly above hers, and there, in the pure gothicism
of this spatial arrangement, the two women resume their relationship,
Lila acting as mother to Elena’s daughters — and almost, therefore, to
Elena herself — so that Elena can pursue her career.
With
this shift into a psychological paradigm, Ferrante implies much about
the stubbornly cyclical nature of female evolution. This atmosphere
intensifies when both women, well into their 30s, conceive and give
birth to daughters: Lila’s quicksilver bright, Elena’s slow to learn and
— after she is summarily abandoned by her philandering father, whom she
adores in the abstract — secretly worshipful of male power. What
Ferrante illustrates here is the externalizing of an inner supposition
whose contradictions lie deep within the female character in both its
realized and unrealized state: The woman who has not proved herself
through traditional measures of accomplishment suspects she has
brilliance hidden inside her; while the realized woman, the woman who
can point to her own successes, is afraid she has none. “She possessed
intelligence,” Elena writes of Lila, “and didn’t put it to use but,
rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the
world are merely a sign of vulgarity.” Elena’s own use of her talents
has been, she increasingly sees, a form of submission too common among
women, “and that submission had — through trials, failures, successes —
reduced us.”
The
fate of the women’s two daughters — their mothers’ imagos, the
re-enactors of their symbiosis — is, predictably perhaps, entirely
symbolic. Lila’s child, in her moment of greatest potential, when her
rare intelligence is visible but not yet practicable, vanishes one
afternoon from a Naples street corner. Elena lives on to make her
plodding progress from vulnerability to education to self-realization.
She becomes, in short, normal — and this, Ferrante suggests, is where
the female drive toward autonomy, with all its racking, successive
waves, will ultimately deliver us: into a reality that is, if not
transformed, at least better adjusted. Elena and Lila may both suspect
that Lila possesses the greater, more radical brilliance. But the
achievement of these novels belongs solely to Elena. “I’ve finished
this story that I thought would never end,” she writes, finally. “I
finished it and patiently reread it not so much to improve the quality
of the writing as to find out if there are even a few lines where it’s
possible to trace the evidence that Lila entered my text and decided to
contribute to writing it. But I have had to acknowledge that all these
pages are mine alone.”
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