I just finished reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan
quadrilogy, and I recommend it highly:
My
Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and
The Story of the Lost Child. It would
be hard for me to summarize her books adequately in this post, but the
impressions they made on me will stay with me forever. Italian men, at least at
the time when the author was young (1940s and 1950s), do not come off well at
all, at least in the non-educated part of Italian society, specifically, Naples
at that time. They beat their wives and children regularly; the women accepted
it and the children became afraid of their fathers. Men raped their
wives/forced them to have sex. Poverty was rampant, as was corruption. Many of
the married men had lovers with whom they started new families while still
married to the first wives. Homosexual men were beaten to death. Violence was a
huge part of the society at that time.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for the author of these
powerful books. Given their subject matter, given the author’s desire for
privacy, I think it is fitting that she wrote that way. Why do we need to know
who she really was? The important thing is the books, the message, the freedom
with which she wrote, not holding back about anything, really. She writes from
a gut place; sometimes I got the feeling that the books just poured out of her.
They are fiercely honest books, filled with events that are embarrassing,
cringe-worthy, frightening, and horrific (the abuse that Lila endures, for
example, at the hands of her first husband Stefano, and earlier, at the hands
of her father). Elena and Lila are lifelong friends; their friendship is an odd
one, not easily explained and not easy to read about. It is raw, honest, at
times abusive (at least Lila’s behavior toward Elena), but there is a
love there that is hard to define. They seem to need each other; Lila needs
for Elena to become a successful writer (she does); Elena needs for Lila to
break free of Naples and to reach her potential as the smart woman she is (it
is unclear if she really manages that by the end of the series). But Lila is
the person who Elena looks up to. Lila is by turns brash, aggressive, rude, mean,
non-compliant, ambitious, passive, passive-aggressive, kind,
loving, and then not—all over again. She is mercurial and beautiful—the type of
woman that all men want, at least in Elena’s eyes. She is also fiercely intelligent, which Elena talks about often--but her ambition for higher education is thwarted by her family and her circumstances. Elena is also beautiful, but
much less sure of herself, and certainly not mercurial and mean like Lila.
All of us have known a Lila in our lives. They are the women
who walk into a room, and it becomes quiet—all eyes on her. She is the woman
that many other women fear, because she does not seem to need men in her life,
even though there is always a man there. And the men fall for that type of
woman because they think she will make no demands of them like most ordinary
women, never realizing for a second that this is exactly the trap that Lila
sets for men. She is the femme fatale who lures them in, and then uses them for
all they are worth. Given her background of abuse at the hands of the men in
her early life, it is perhaps no surprise that she behaves that way and that
this is the type of woman she has become. Elena grows up differently; her
father doesn’t directly abuse her, but he shows little interest in her. Her
mother is emotionally abusive to her, and their relationship is strained for
years. Elena is smart, and as luck would have it, her intelligence as a child
is recognized by a teacher who essentially orders her parents to let her pursue
higher education. Since there is no money for that in her family, the teacher
helps her out with books and other materials, as does Lila when she first
marries Stefano, who is wealthy. Elena always wonders why the teacher never did
the same for Lila, whose parents also had no money. The difference was also that
Elena’s parents, while resenting the teacher’s intrusion into their lives,
obeyed her orders, whereas Lila’s parents would never have done so. So Lila was
not as lucky as Elena when it came to being able to pursue an education. Lila
tried for years to keep up with Elena, and Elena helps her by sharing her books
with her, but Lila realizes that it is impossible to keep up, and because she
cannot enjoy what Elena is enjoying, she rejects it utterly and begins to snipe
at Elena’s progress and success. And so it goes for many years. Most of the
Lila types in this life do not end up with happy and successful lives; rather
they crash and burn in middle age when their beauty starts to fade, and they
often end up friendless.
Elena and Lila’s friendship is a strange mixture of caring,
not caring, jealousy, envy, ambition, thwarted ambition, fear, abuse,
melancholy, bitterness, sometimes happiness, but most often confusion. Elena is
never sure where she has Lila, and by the time she stops caring about exactly
that and begins to live life on her own terms, she is in her late twenties. By
that time, she has watched the married Lila seduce Nino, her first love, run
off with him to live with him, and then watch as Nino leaves her behind and disappears.
Lila’s life descends into a chaotic mess, but as time goes on, she achieves
some sort of success; she lives in Naples with Enzo, the man who rescues her
from Stefano, and with her son Gennaro (who is Stefano’s son). They learn about
the computer world together, and start their own computer company. For a while,
they earn good money. But as always, life steps in, tragedy hits, and the
misery starts all over again.
Elena leaves Naples and marries Pietro, and they have two
daughters together. She tries to keep writing after the success of her first
novel that was published shortly before her marriage, but she struggles with
her ambition and trying to find time for it all—writing and taking care of a
husband and family. She struggles with confidence and lack of it, with
confusion, with trying to understand the society and politics around her, and
with trying to understand her relationship with Lila. She feels guilty, I think, for her success, certain that it is actually Lila's doing. She never seems to be able to accept that she is just as intelligent, if not more so, than Lila. Her intelligence includes being able to adapt to situations, to accept what she cannot change. Lila never learns that, and becomes brittle as she ages. Elena is by turns
reflective and realistic. She understands that even though Pietro is an
academic like she is, he does not support her academic endeavors, or
perhaps more correctly stated—he does not think that her academic career is as
important as his own. And then Nino reappears in her life, and her life
descends into chaos. Suffice it to say that Nino is a destructive force in the
lives of those he inserts himself into. Smart women, foolish choices. Lila and
Elena are two women who fit that bill.
Elena Ferrante grew up in the 1940s and 1950s; we grew up in
the 1960s and 1970s. By that time, roles had changed for men and women, or at
least the expectations of what men and women would have as roles when they
married. Feminism changed a lot of things, for better and for worse. Strangely
enough, it never occurred to me when I was young that anyone would want to
punish me or any other woman because we were intelligent, or try to stifle it,
or try to dominate us and force us to pretend that we were not smart or that we
would not use our intelligence. I understood later that there existed
people—men and women—who wanted to do just that, out of envy and spite. Sometimes
men were downright abusive to women who were intelligent and ambitious--the women who
wanted a marriage based on equality and mutual respect. When I have spoken to priests
and other adults about how women were often treated badly by husbands, some of
them would say that women should ‘do their duty’ and submit to their husbands. I once challenged a priest by asking him
why women should ‘obey’ a man, as in “Wives, obey your husbands as you obey the
Lord. The husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the
church people”, when so many men forgot the other saying—“Husbands, love your
wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it….” I got
no answer, and that’s because there are very few men who love their wives as
Christ loved the church. He knew that just as well as I did, but he couldn’t
admit it.
Ferrante’s novels made me reflect on so many things, and
those reflections have made me sad, as I knew they would, because they reopened
personal wounds and touched on events that happened many years ago. But my life
is so much richer for having read her books. When I look at our society now,
there is perhaps less violence (there are laws against wife-beating and child
abuse), but there is rampant use of pornography that has become increasingly
violent against women. I don’t know what to make of society anymore, and I
often ask if we really do want peace. I am looking for respect between the sexes,
and I don’t see much of it. Even in the Catholic Church, there are huge
problems when it comes to attitudes toward women. I think that the church needs
a huge overhaul and that it needs to re-evaluate where it wants to go, because
at present, it is no longer the moral force in the world that it used to be,
and that people want it to be. I also think that it needs to clearly examine
its attitudes toward women; it does defend them, yes, but it has a problem,
like most of society, with highly-intelligent women. I have seen some very good
marriages in my lifetime, but I would not define most as happy. Marriage works
well if there is love there (including sexual love), but since no one can
really define love properly, there is an element of luck in all of it. People
can and do change over time, and become better people, and that will lead to
happier marriages, but when I look at the pain caused by one party toward the
other, when I look at all the unhappiness I have seen in marriages, I am surprised
that the divorce rate isn’t higher than it is, at least in Westernized
countries. Having said that, I think that marriages where both parties work (inside
the home or outside of it) and respect each other’s abilities, where both have
similar education and value systems, also when it comes to raising children,
have a better chance of success than very traditional ones where the wife has
been forced by a man, a society, a patriarchy, or a religion, to choose that traditional
life, which often leads to frustration and unhappiness. Unfortunately, Catholic
men are also quite unenlightened about many things concerning women, their
wives/sisters/ mothers/daughters, and what women want, regardless of whether we
are talking about Naples, Italy, southern Europe, Britain, or the United
States. Ferrante’s novels work because she throws light on attitudes and
behavior that most people would prefer stay in the shadows, in the dark. She
throws open the doors and the windows and says, these are women’s lives and
they are not easy lives. Pay attention.
