At times, her account of motherhood as the bodily and mental subjugation of women is truly loathsome (as if a newly born could be the bad fairy at its own feast). But perhaps for that very reason, and long before the many writers on the deep ambivalence of motherhood to come, she was the first to delve into that complex space and call on us, via motherhood, to accept the alien in our midst, to make room, even if it brings the walls crashing down, for the stranger who lands on our shores. These ideas have had a feminist afterlife. Bulgarian-French thinker Julia Kristeva, who has influenced a whole later generation of feminists, follows a far more psychoanalytical path than de Beauvoir, but she joins her on this. To be a mother, to give birth, is to welcome a foreigner, which makes mothering simply ‘the most intense form of contact with the strangeness of the one close to us and of ourselves’ (which is why mothers are perhaps less likely to be fazed by the psychoanalytic belief that we are all radically strangers to ourselves).40 ‘In late August a baby was born,’ Rivka Galchen writes in Little Labours, her 2016 account of new motherhood, ‘or, as it seemed to me, a puma moved into my apartment, a near-mute force.’41
At the opposite pole of self-transcendence, light years from men subordinating women to that end, motherhood is presented by de Beauvoir, almost reluctantly, as an experience that places us on the path of a new ethics. Most simply, to be a mother, something has to give. It may sound obvious, but it is anything other than sentimental. Nor in the end does it compromise her demand for freedom for women, since to experience motherhood in this way, the mother must give herself freely to her child; though it does give the lie to the belief that you can truly be free all by yourself, or at anybody else’s expense. If motherhood puts us in touch with the stranger, then we could not be further from the idea that ‘my family’ is the only one in the whole wide world that matters, the one I will fight for tooth and claw – to return to the corrupt and dementing version of mother love with which the first part of this chapter began (‘How then can we be civilised?’). Today, women on the streets are taking up this challenge. In April 2017, ahead of ‘Mother’s Day’, mothers, including the group MomsRising, marched on the Trump International Hotel in Washington with miniature statues of liberty to protest the administration’s cruel immigration and deportation policy, and to demand it act with justice and compassion.
‘The power of life,’ Elena Ferrante writes, ‘is damaged, humiliated by unjust modes of existence.’42 It is not only motherhood that is impoverished if it fails to connect to the wider world; it is not only mothers and their children who are damaged and humiliated when their world, like a deadly flytrap, shuts in on itself. Today, in all of this, we should still be grateful to de Beauvoir for showing us just how high the stakes are. The question then becomes: what happens when a mother defies the instructions ringing in her ears and ventures down this strange, other path, trailing the debris of her heart and of everything around her as she goes? Where does it lead? What are the pleasures, the risks and the price? To explore these questions for our time, we now turn to Elena Ferrante, who offers her own brilliant, disconcerting reply.
3
THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY
ELENA FERRANTE
She is one of the biggest European literary phenomena of the twenty-first century, but Elena Ferrante – by her own account – takes us back to the beginning, the world of the Greeks and Romans, one of the places where we started. ‘I have to say,’ she states in a New York Times interview in 2014, ‘that I’ve never seen the classical world as an ancient world. Instead I feel its closeness.’1 As a young girl, she would imagine the Bay of Naples peopled by sirens who spoke Greek. One of the relatively few pieces of biographical information she has volunteered is that she has a degree in classical literature, from which she learned ‘many things about how to put words together’.2 Medea and Dido are her heroines, the first for walking us into the unthinkable space of infanticide, the second for the civic and intimate generosity with which she set about building the city of Carthage: opening its doors (and her body) to a foreign exile, Aeneas, whatever tragic consequences in the end, and making sure that the temple of Juno, goddess of marriage and childbirth, should display the carnage of war, as a type of memento, on its walls.
Of these two women, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are the diminished progeny, because they have lost ‘the obscure force that pushed those heroines of the ancient world to use infanticide or suicide as rebellion or revenge or curse’.3 They have lost the public dimension of their pain. It is, Ferrante explains, the deep-rooted mistake of every city to lay claim to be a city of love without labyrinths, to believe you can give birth to a future with no Furies lying in wait. The same blinkered, anaesthetised, radically disabling vision with which most official discourse in the modern world hounds its mothers.
Behind one half of Ferrante’s pen name, Elena, is a tale from Greek mythology. According to a relatively little-known version of the story, Zeus rapes and impregnates, not Leda the swan, but Nemesis, who turns herself into a goose to escape him. She then lays an egg, found by a shepherd and handed to Leda, who nurtures it and out of which Elena is born, who is then raised by Leda, in Ferrante’s suggestive formula, as ‘her daughter-non-daughter’.4 It must be one of the earliest stories of surrogacy, as well as offering a model of motherhood without vested interest because it has embraced a stranger. It can also be read as a veiled warning on the part of Ferrante to anyone trying to track her down, or claiming – as if that settled anything – to have done so. Behind the name she has chosen as an author lies a story of gestation that cannot be traced to a single source. It is through ancient gods, animal matter, humans that her writing is born, travelling across species and time. Repeatedly, Ferrante has said that she preserved her anonymity so that her books, free of the bluster and publicity of her presence, could make their way without her, like a child leaving home.
Instead, the modern cult of the author, not to speak of the constant pressure on Ferrante to identify herself, straps the literary work to the writer, as if the only possible link between a text and its creator is that of a domineering mother – about whom Ferrante has much to say – who cannot bear to let her children go: ‘doesn’t someone who reads one of my books make space in his own vocabulary for my words, doesn’t he appropriate them, if necessary doesn’t he reuse them?’5 This is strikingly reminiscent of another central concept of D. W. Winnicott, the use of an object, which refers to the ruthlessness any infant must use in the struggle with and against the mother to survive.6 In Ferrante’s second novel, The Days of Abandonment (2002), Olga, abandoned wife and mother, reflects on the complications of her new life: ‘In this reasoning, I seemed to capture all the absurdity of the adjective “my,” “my children”’7 (the same formula that had so appalled Colonel Pargiter’s grandson in Woolf’s novel The Years). It takes time, and she almost doesn’t make it, but, bracingly and bit by bit, her agony at her loss beckons – for her, for her children – a kind of freedom.
We might also note in passing that for the journalist who, in an act of flagrant misogyny, claimed to have exposed Ferrante’s true identity, her greatest offence was to have misrepresented her own mother (as Neapolitan dressmaker in the novel rather than Holocaust survivor in her real life). As if to say: mothers must not be reinvented. Fiction is fine so long as it does not trespass on – violate – the sacred domain of mothers. He probably didn’t realise that, in his proud, vulgar gesture of exposure, he was close to imitating the brute husband of Ferrante’s first novel, Troubling Love (1999), who more or less strips his wife bare as a gypsy in a series of paintings he brazenly peddles for profit (he then beats her at the first sign of a sexuality over which he has no control). ‘How was it possible,’ their daughter asks, ‘that my father could hand over, to vulgar men, bold and seductive versions of that body which if necessary he would defend with murderous rage?’8 In Troubling Love, such behaviour is not restricted to men alone. The daughter also goes crazy at any s
ign of her mother’s independent sexual life, and indeed betrays her mother’s love affair to her father.
In Ferrante’s vision, the world conspires to conceal the bodies of mothers. Merely having one is a crime. ‘No one, starting with the mother’s dressmaker, must think that a mother has a woman’s body’ – Ferrante had wanted to make these lines by Elsa Morante, her favourite Italian woman writer, the epigraph to the novel.9 We have seen this hatred of a mother’s sexual being before: the flight from what Ferrante calls, in another memorable formula, ‘the erotic vapor’ of the mother’s body.10 The brazen exposure of Ferrante taps into this set of tired, ugly stereotypes born of possessiveness and rage. Why would anyone – a woman, a mother – hide herself unless she was guilty?
The name Elena will take up its central role as Elena Greco, the narrator of the Neapolitan Novels. But before that, Leda and Elena give their names, both sourced from the Greeks, to the main characters of Ferrante’s third novel, The Lost Daughter, published in 2006, when she was already renowned in Italy but before the Quartet made her internationally famous. Leda is a middle-aged mother who finds herself caught up in a ‘complicated, modern question of maternity’, which leads her, and not for the first time, to leave her children. Making her escape from any remaining parental responsibilities for her two grown daughters, she heads off for a beach holiday on the Ionian coast, where she finds herself obsessively watching a little girl, Elena, as she plays with her young mother, and whose lost doll she finds and then keeps (without her doll the child sickens, and her mother, whom Leda has befriended, wishes brain cancer on whoever stole it).
The story inverts the original Leda–Elena myth. Instead of generously nurturing another’s child, a mother finds herself enacting a form of cruelty towards someone else’s daughter, which she can no more prevent herself from doing, or bring to an end, than she can explain it to herself.11 As a young mother, she abandoned her own children for two years as the only way of surviving, although her motives are not entirely clear to her, and certainly to nobody else. Although the book has received relatively little attention outside Italy, Ferrante has described The Lost Daughter as her most risk-taking novel and the one to which she is most painfully bound; without the ‘great anxiety’ it cost her, she wouldn’t have written the first of the Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend.12 ‘The most difficult things to tell,’ she comments on her anguished attachment to this novel, ‘are those which we ourselves can’t understand’ (these are Leda’s own words in the text).13 ‘What I wanted of [my children],’ Leda ponders, ‘I never understood, I don’t know even now.’14 This is a mother whose deepest clarity stems from her lack of knowing, from her acceptance that to be a mother is to relinquish control of the human heart.
Ferrante is issuing another warning, this time against the idea that motherhood is a locked closet to which the best literary writing on the topic would offer the one true key – again rather like a mother who allows her child no secrets or lies, and claims fully to know her child’s mind. On the folly of such an idea, The Days of Abandonment already offered a hint, in the deranging episode when Olga struggles frantically with her daughter, Ilaria, to lock and unlock their front door (the only moment of sanity occurs when the mother admits to herself and her daughter that the whole thing makes no sense). In Ferrante’s writing, you do not solve the problem or question of motherhood. You enter, at whatever risk, into its space. ‘The literary truth of motherhood,’ she observes, ‘is yet to be explored.’ ‘The task of the woman writer today,’ is not to ‘keep talking about it in an idyllic way,’ as they do in the guidebooks, which leaves mothers feeling ‘alone and guilty,’ but ‘to delve truthfully into the darkest depth.’15 A recent study suggests that the mothers who read the most manuals on mothering report the highest level of depressive symptoms (it is not clear whether the depression is the consequence of reading so many manuals or the reason they are reading them in the first place).16
Elena Ferrante’s literary portrayal of motherhood takes you about as far from manuals and guidebooks as you could possibly hope to get. It is like nothing else I have read, which is why in this book Ferrante is the author with a chapter to herself. The Swedish publisher Bromberg, who acquired the rights to The Days of Abandonment and had the work translated, decided against publication on the grounds that the mother’s behaviour was ‘morally reprehensible’.17 One can only wonder what they thought of what came later, since in Ferrante’s world, mothers regularly walk out on their children; neglect or forget about them in favour of writing and/or sexual passion; love and hate, protect and resent, guide and thwart them in equal measure. At times, children seem to be no more than pawns in the adult sexual game – in the final volume of the Neapolitan Novels, a mother picks up her friend’s baby daughter to flirt with the father who was once her own lover, ignoring her own daughter, who, in a blink of an eye, disappears for ever. (Echoing the title of Ferrante’s third novel, The Lost Daughter, the last in the Quartet has the title The Story of the Lost Child).
‘The risk that Leda runs,’ Ferrante comments, cutting straight to the heart of the dilemma faced by so many modern mothers, ‘seems to me all in that question: can I, a woman of today, succeed in being loved by my daughters, in loving them, without having of necessity to sacrifice myself and therefore hate myself?’18 Mothers, especially mothers and daughters, are everywhere, although often overlooked by reviewers of her work. On this matter, Ferrante herself is clear. ‘Sometimes,’ she comments on the mother–daughter relationship, ‘I think I haven’t written about anything else.’19 Motherhood is the irreducible core of her fiction. And not just at the level of theme, since it trails the very act of writing mercilessly in its wake: ‘To write truly,’ Olga instructs herself in The Days of Abandonment as she tries to pick up her own neglected fiction, ‘is to speak from the depths of the maternal womb.’20
* * *
In the Neapolitan Novels, Elena Greco, who goes by the name of Lenù, is part of a dyad, the other half of which is Raffaella Cerullo (called Lila by Lenù, and Lina by everyone else). One can only assume that this confusing proximity of their names is intentional, a way of registering the often suffocating intimacy that binds them, the oscillation of the two women as they repeatedly attempt to move apart – even to reject each other – and then, with no less virulence and passion, come back together again (the Quartet has been greeted as the first in-depth literary rendering of friendship between women). The novels are written in Lenù’s voice, but even that is not obvious. Lenù takes her inspiration from a piece of writing by Lila from their childhood, when they were planning a glorious future together as writers, a future that would make them rich and famous. The Quartet ends with Lenù discovering reams of writing by Lila on the architectural and cultural history of Naples, to which she has been devoting herself as she grieves the never-explained disappearance of her youngest child several years before.
At one point, they do indeed compose a piece of journalistic writing together, when they decide to expose the violence of the men who have done their worst to control and destroy the two women’s lives and the lives of all those around them in their small, desperately inverted community in Naples. Although it is Lenù who fulfils their childhood dream by becoming a famous writer, she is for ever haunted by the feeling that it is Lila who is the true author of her work. Ferrante has said that the two women are minted from the same coin. But by placing uncertain authorship right at the heart of these novels, Ferrante is doing more than reflecting her own nuanced, fractured position as a writer. She has also opened up a space, agonising or liberating dependent on your point of view, where a woman can at least ask herself, with reference to the moment deemed by general consent to be her moment of most glorious creativity: to whom or what exactly is a woman giving birth?
It is often said that having a baby reintroduces a woman to her own mother (in its most gloating version, this is assumed to be because the experience is so difficult that she at last understands and forgives
her mother everything). In another account, when a first baby turns out to be the spitting image of the father, with features bearing no trace of the mother, she will be consoled that this is nature’s way of making the father feel secure that his progeny is his own, a fact of which no father can be easily certain. Along similar lines, the French avant-garde film-maker Jean-Luc Godard wryly observed, with reference to his 1985 film Je vous salue, Marie or Hail Mary, that Joseph’s dilemma when faced with Mary’s pregnancy and her claim to have been visited by God – a likely story, as one might say – was simply the dilemma of all men confronted with the prospect of fatherhood. French law states: ‘the child of a married woman will be presumed to be the child of the husband’ (thereby recognising that no one really has the faintest idea).21
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