Mothers
Page 12
The paternity of Lila’s first child, Rino (named after her brother), is initially attributed to her lover, then finally and reluctantly to her former husband, to the distress of the two men who might have fathered him. But Ferrante also lets us inside this quandary from the other side, giving the Greek vision of the mother as passive receptacle of the male seed a Gothic, feminist twist. Men ‘show up inside us and withdraw’, Lenù muses, ‘leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object’.22 She is contemplating the various offspring of Nino, whom she first loved in childhood, one of the possible fathers of Lila’s child, and by whom she too will become pregnant (he has had at least one other child along the way and will have two more by the woman he eventually marries). As so often, Lila is characteristically more blunt: ‘Men insert their thingy inside you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside.’23
Dolls are central. The Quartet begins with Lila and Lenù hurling their cherished dolls into the basement of the house of the dreaded Don Achille Caracci, characterised in the cast list provided for each volume as ‘the ogre of fairy tales’. It ends with the two dolls magically reappearing in a parcel received by Lenù, one assumes posted by Lila, who has disappeared (Tina, the name of Lenù’s doll, is also the name of Lila’s lost child). This in itself can be read as another caution. Ferrante’s dolls live on another planet from the maternal instinct they are most commonly assumed to personify. On this, Ferrante finds herself in harmony with Freud, who was criticised for daring to suggest that a little girl playing with her doll, far from anticipating some maternal idyll, was engaged in an act of mastery as she exerted on the hapless creature the control she suffered at the hands of her mother. ‘A mother is only a daughter who plays,’ Leda thinks to herself as she enacts various hideous rituals on the doll she has stolen. ‘I was playing now.’24
The first pregnancy in the Neapolitan Novels is that of Pinuccia, who marries Lila’s brother Rino, and who turns against her own baby the moment he is born: ‘He’s ugly, he’s uglier than Rino, that whole family is ugly’; ‘It’s my fault, I made a bad choice of a husband, but when you’re a girl, you don’t think about it, and now look at what a child I’ve had.’25 Lenù had gone to visit her, thinking she would find her ‘in bed, happy, with the baby at her breast’.26 In Naples, girls, like Pinuccia and also Lila, are married as young as sixteen. Ferrante passes no judgement – on this she is scrupulous. Pinuccia is not an inadequate mother. It is the world around her that has failed.
In Ferrante’s writing, it is a cruel society that is indicted on behalf of mothers. Pinuccia’s rage – again like Lila, who does everything to thwart pregnancy in the first years of a wretched marriage – spreads from a brutal male-dominated community that stifles its women and girls in their hearts and the deepest recesses of their bodies: ‘I looked at her stomach,’ Lenù ponders about Lila when her failure to become pregnant is making her husband’s masculinity a joke, ‘and imagined that truly inside it, every day, every night, she was fighting a battle to destroy the life that Stefano wanted to insert there by force.’27 The community is less charitable – like a Greek chorus, it spreads the rumour that Lila is suffocating the foetus in her womb. The old belief that women smothered their unborn child is thus neatly cast by Ferrante, either as an act of desperate agency and defiance on behalf of oppressed women, or as the vicious assault on mothers it always was.
In Ferrante’s world, it is not only men who invade the bodies and souls of women. Like Sylvia Plath before her, she has the ability – on the same page or in what can feel like a hair’s breadth from each other – to indict patriarchy and ask what, in the daughter’s relation to her mother, women might be no less up against (‘Sometimes I think I haven’t written about anything else’). For once you ask the question of who or what is germinating, taking up residence inside the body of the mother – whether in a gesture of openness or dread – then there is no telling, at least not for any of Ferrante’s women, what you might find. She thus takes the idea of the stranger inside the mother a further, disconcerting step. A mother’s body is a crowded space, like the community of Naples, where everybody is jostling, impinging on and invading everybody else.
As Leda watches Elena on the beach she sees the extended family close in on the little girl, like all the relations from whom she as a young woman had, or thought she had, fled: ‘I had them all inside me.’28 She feels revulsion at the ‘ancestors compressed into the child’s flesh’, and anger when mother and child project their fake-adult and fake-child voices into the doll as if it were speaking with one and the same voice.29 In flight from such cloying osmosis and from her unwelcome inner guests, Leda had dreamed of her pregnancy as a brave new world: ‘I was not my grandmother (seven children), I was not my mother (four daughters), I was not my aunts, my cousins.’30 One of Lenù’s strongest desires is to escape her mother, whose bitter, limping frame trails across all four books: ‘I have to eliminate her.’31
Such control is of course an illusion. You can leave, grow away from, forge your own path, but you cannot eliminate the tie to the mother. From the relative safety of Milan, where she has escaped as a young student, Lenù trembles at the thought of her potential future as a mother: ‘And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I am safe?’32 Like a contrary, or even perverse, fairy godmother – I mean that as the greatest compliment – Ferrante grants the mothers of her fiction the strongest impulse to freedom and closes in on that very impulse more or less in the same breath. After her third pregnancy Lenù starts limping. Like all daughters, she has been gifted by her mother in all the painful ambiguity of the term. On her deathbed, when they are partly reconciled, her mother confesses to her that, for all her tirades against her, she was her favourite – in some ways her one and only – child, a fact to which those very tirades bore witness, while also expressing her resentment that her daughter has left her to make another world and name for herself. ‘The only good thing in her life,’ Lenù reports their conversation, ‘was the moment I came out of her belly, I, her first child.’33 To that day, her mother had experienced all her other children as a punishment (a feeling she saw as her greatest sin). The reconciliation is a mixed blessing: ‘When she embraced me before I left, it was as if she meant to slip inside me and stay there, as once I had been inside her.’34 Lenù tells Lila that she has started limping as a way of keeping her mother alive.
Ferrante’s writing begins here, following in the paths of writers like Sylvia Plath and Edith Wharton, or in tune with Ariel Leve, on the perils of a mother’s proximity to her child. Or at least her first published writing begins here, since by her own account, until Troubling Love she ‘abandoned’ many stories, as if her own career, like her novels, were littered with the debris of children lost or discarded along the way. In Troubling Love, the dead mother, Amalia, who committed suicide, steadily invades her daughter Delia, ‘like a hot liquid that had been injected into me at some unknown time’.35 Like Lenù, she ‘had wanted to eliminate every root I had in her, even the deepest’, especially – like a deranged lover – every inch of her mother that she could not know, control or even reach. She fails. Slowly she recrafts herself in her mother’s image, down to the smallest gesture and item of her clothing, until finally she takes down Amalia’s suitcase, the one she was carrying the night she died, and puts on her clothes: ‘I felt that the old garment was the final narrative that my mother had left me, and that now, with all the necessary adjustments, it fit me like a glove.’ Then she adjusts her hair – a curl over the right eye, two broad bands meeting in a wave over her forehead – to ‘that old-fashioned hairstyle, popular in the forties but already rare at the end of the fifties’: ‘[It] suited me. Amalia had been. I was Amalia’ (the last lines of the book).36 The intense focus of these short early novels will not be repeated. Unfettered by the longue durée of the Neapolitan Quartet still to come, they each take a single acute moment of crisis in the life of a mother and/or daughter and stretch
it to breaking point.
In Ferrante’s vision, ‘troubling love’ is, therefore, the love between mother and daughter, the template for every subsequent emotional attachment, for the agony and ecstasy of a life, for every love affair. Which means that whatever the trials and traumas and pleasures of women’s relationships with men, they can only be its pale shadow. Freud suggested that all eros starts at the mother’s breast and, even more tellingly, that a woman always – at least first time round – marries a man who is the stand-in for the lost mother (a student once came to see me, disturbed by the implication of this insight that, deep inside the heart, only mothers were therefore to be found). Note, too, the ambiguity of Ferrante’s titles – The Lost Daughter, The Story of the Lost Child – which can be parsed from the viewpoint either of the daughter or the mother: a child feeling lost in the world (perhaps redeemable), a child who vanishes without trace.
Ferrante has stated that she is at once drawn to and ambivalent about psychoanalysis – she calls it the ‘lexicon of the precipice’ – and about Freud, but on this much she is happy to give him credit. Every love relationship, good or bad, she explains, is a reactivation of this primitive bond; for women, no marriage can expel that first troubling love ‘the only love-conflict that in every case lasts forever’; Olga in The Days of Abandonment was only ever faithful to the husband before he left her because he became for her ‘the cocoon of fantasies tied to the mother’ (which is why the abandonment is so devastating).37 As I read interviews with Ferrante, it seems to me that she is more assertive about this – or to put it another way, more confident in her terror at this mother–daughter reality – than about almost anything else.
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If the story of mothers stopped there it would already be troubling enough. But Ferrante’s portrayal of these mothers takes another pivotal step. The mother–daughter relationship, the pregnancy that contains the mother and all her forebears – ‘And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I am safe?’ – is where the world loses its bearings and all boundaries dissolve (giving the lie to the idea that any mother can hold everything in place). As we have touched on in earlier chapters, allowing borders to open, recognising the radical fragility of the boundaries we create, can also be seen, in relation to mothers, as the foundation for a different ethics and, perhaps, a different world. For me, Ferrante is the writer who pushes this possibility as far as it can go, notably in a world in which the myth of self-containment and self-control is being promoted harder than ever.
To this myth, motherhood in its most troubling guise can be understood as a kind of angry, exasperated riposte. It has always struck me that what needs explaining is, not the moments where our most cherished individuality fails, but the extraordinary fact that, emerging from the first morass of being, we ever buy into the illusion that we are self-sufficient, radically distinguishable individuals to begin with: our bodies our property, our minds subordinate to our will, the whole world – this is the most dangerous version – at our command. Ferrante is having none of it. The story begins, she states, ‘when, one after another, our borders collapse’.38 ‘Borders make us feel stable’ – she is making a feminist point:
At the first hint of conflict, at the least threat, we close them … The history of women in the past hundred years is based on the very dangerous ‘crossing of the boundary’ imposed by patriarchal cultures. The results have been extraordinary in all fields. But the force with which they want to carry us back inside the old borders is no less extraordinary. It is manifested as pure crude, bloody violence.39
Lila’s husband beats her, and on at least one occasion rapes her in front of their child. Women like her and Amalia who ‘refuse to be subjugated’ find themselves up against the ultimatum: ‘“Either you’ll be the way I say or I’ll change you by beating you till I kill you.”’40 To this all too familiar ultimatum for women, Ferrante adds her own unique dimension. The battle of the sexes does not just pit one will and force against another – although it surely does that too. Rather, a woman who refuses to respect the existing boundaries of a patriarchal world evokes a whole other, terrifying psychic space. Shattering the carapace of selfhood, she brings to the surface the physical and mental fragments, the bits and pieces that, at the deepest level, we truly are, though we mostly resist such knowledge with all our might. ‘What corrupts us,’ she observes, ‘is the passion for ourselves, the urgent need for our own primacy.’41 Such proud, corrupt self-affirmation is not something that she herself has escaped: ‘It’s blindingly obvious that I alone authorized myself …What is this if not pride?’42
Ferrante’s writing career to date might be read as a plea for us to reconsider: we truly would be better off starting – recognising that as humans of ‘woman born’ we all start – from somewhere quite else. ‘It seemed to me,’ she states, ‘that feeling literally in pieces could be traced back to that sort of original fragmentation that is bringing into the world-coming into the world.’43 She knows she is walking on the wild side: ‘I remain convinced that it’s also essential to describe the dark side of the pregnant body, which is omitted in order to bring out the luminous side, the Mother of God.’44 Divine perfection, moral purity is not what she is talking about. Rather, the pregnant body brings us close to the animal component of our nature, frightening in so far as it reminds us ‘of the instability of the forms assumed by life’.45 The task is to recognise this, rather than aiming for some transcendence, or even hatred, of pregnancy into a refined world of rules and etiquette, as if leaving the swamp of pregnancy behind – we have been here before – were the world’s only saving grace.
Ferrante’s mothers are not themselves innocent of the impulse to salvage pregnancy from itself (they are not innocent of anything). They are, after all, in it up to their necks. When she was expecting her second child, Leda tells us, she was distraught at the prospect of ‘giving up of any sublimation of my pregnancy’: ‘My body became a bloody liquid; suspended in it was a mushy sediment which grew a violent polyp, so far from anything human that it reduced me, even though it fed and grew, to rotting matter without life’; whereas her first baby was right away ‘a being at its best, purified of humours and blood, humanized, intellectualized, with nothing that could evoke the blind cruelty of living matter as it expands’.46 I have never come across writing on the topic of pregnancy quite like this.
Needless to say, and as any mother who has given birth will tell you, the baby most often turns out to be the exact opposite in character from what the experience of pregnancy might lead a mother to expect, as if to remind the mother that her body, finally, is – but also is not – what it is all about. Furthermore, the experience of pregnancy is rarely a reliable guide to how a woman will mother her baby. Lenù’s pregnancies are a source of expansiveness and joy, Lila’s mainly of displeasure bordering on horror. When Lenù tries to reassure her, she reproaches her that she has simply learned to use the ‘sentimental voice of our mothers’.47 ‘She seemed ready,’ Lenù writes when they later find themselves pregnant together, ‘to find any joy I found in motherhood a betrayal.’48 And yet, it is Lila who, after the birth of her son, turns out to be the ‘best mother in the whole neighbourhood’.49 Pinuccia brings her baby to her to look after, in the hope that her gifts as a mother will benefit her son. Whereas, as soon as they get home from the hospital, Lenù’s first baby sucks for a few moments, then ‘shrieks like a furious little animal’, and writhes and screams for hours: ‘What was wrong with me? What poison had polluted my milk?’50
Anyone looking for a counter-narrative on the joys of breastfeeding could do worse than read Ferrante, where they will also find another of those rare testimonies to its scandalous, incestuous sensuality (the erotic pleasure and the pain, two intensities mostly absent from the conventional narrative, are again surely linked). Here, too, Ferrante is pushing the boat out. In a letter to the editors of the Italian literary magazine L’Indice, she describes a childhood memory of her and her
sister watching their mother feeding a new arrival, until, once the baby unwillingly slid into sleep, ‘our mother smiled at us with her dark eyes and let white drops from her breasts drip into our mouths, a warm, sweet taste that stunned us.’51 This long letter at the heart of her collection, Frantumaglia, is one of the rare occasions where Ferrante states that she is responding to her interlocutors’ questions with pleasure.52
During her first pregnancy, Lila’s greatest fear was that the thing she most dreaded would happen and that she would break apart, overflow. Remember Sylvia Plath: ‘I am breaking apart like the world’ (likewise Ferrante: ‘I know what it means to break apart’).53 They are not alone. Compare Lucy Jones writing today against the guidebook vision of pregnancy as ‘pastel-hued dream’: ‘surely I am dying or at least splitting in half. Cut her out, cut her out, cut her out. I am birthing a hurricane. A spiked mace. A heap of barbed wire. A bladed melon. An inflated pufferfish.’54 But Ferrante gives to this experience an additional twist. It is through Lila’s very fear – her being so much more in touch with blind matter and the fragmentation of the world – that she finds herself capable of loving ‘that absurd modality of life, that expanding module’ inside her.55 Stuffed inside the stolen doll of The Lost Daughter, Leda finds a worm put there by Elena to pretend to make it pregnant. ‘I have a horror of crawling things,’ she observes, ‘but for that clot of humours I felt a naked pity.’56 She is, literally, scraping the depths.
And yet out of such matter Ferrante re-creates the seeds of ethical life. ‘I would like to narrate in a meaningful way how a woman approaches, through the requirements of caring for someone, through love, the repulsiveness of the flesh, those areas where the mediation of the world becomes weak.’57 Repulsiveness of the flesh, the world’s mediations faltering – this is not how love, or motherhood, are normally thought about. We are light years from the terms mostly used to prescribe, purify, sanitise the task of mothering. We might also be getting closer to understanding the dangers faced by a mother, by anyone, when they welcome a stranger in their midst. Which is perhaps why alien mothers landing on our shores to give birth find themselves the objects of such visceral revulsion.