Elena Ferrante Is My Mother
Outing the Author: Ferrante
In an article published by the New York Review of Books last Monday, investigative journalist Claudio Gatti reveals the identity of the author writing under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. This “outing” was immediately criticized, but Ferrante’s own work — and particularly her engagement with ancient literature — can help us understand what the outing of authors means.
In subsequent attempts to explain what motivated him, Gatti suggests that the author in question was asking for it and that it was what she wanted, anyway. Critics have been quick to compare his revelations to rape. The metaphor works well: in Ferrante’s most famous quartet of novels, My Brilliant Friend, the Solara brothers, young gangsters who drive around Naples in a flashy car, often stop to molest various girls in the neighborhood. Lenù (Elena Greco) gets off lightly: a scuffle on the pavement and a broken bracelet. Her friend Ada, by contrast, is forced into the car, taken for a ride, and raped at leisure.
The difference in treatment has nothing to do with what the two girls were asking for. Elena (Greco, the character, but also Ferrante, the author) explains that Ada had no father ready to defend her honor. The woman’s position in society determines how she is treated. The same is true of the author, as Gatti himself argues, only that in this case the more exalted the social standing (according to the proxy measurements of fame and money), the likelier the risk of intrusion.
As for the question of what the woman (and the author) wants, the whole episode of Ferrante’s outing leaves us none the wiser. Again, better answers can be found in Ferrante’s own work and, specifically, in her engagement with classical and Biblical literature. Female desire and authorial intention are intertwined, obviously, but I treat them separately here in the interest of clarity. The woman as subject is a source of puzzlement at the level of common platitudes (“she does not know what she wants”; “she’s never satisfied”; “she can’t have it all” etc.) and theoretical reflection too (woman is “not a man,” according to Simone de Beauvoir; “nothing at all,” according to Julia Kristeva; “does not have a sex,” according to Luce Irigaray; “not the subject of feminism,” according to Judith Butler: all these quotations can in fact be found in the opening pages of Butler’s Gender Trouble, 1990). In My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante offers her own version, blending life and literature, essay and biography, as she does so well.
Elena Greco, in My Brilliant Friend, graduates in Classics, with a thesis on Dido, and marries a fellow Classics student. He goes on to become a professor in Florence; she follows him there and becomes a stay-at-home mother. In the little time she manages to carve out (when her girls have their afternoon naps, or when her husband works late), Elena starts writing an essay about Eve in the Bible — how she is made out of Adam’s rib. Woman, Elena argues, lacks her own essence and destiny: she is made out of spare materials, as “a companion to man.”
Tentatively, she shows her essay to an old friend from Naples, Nino, who thinks it is brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that he starts insulting her husband. (Ferrante also has a joke at the professor’s expense: while leading a highly conventional life, this classical scholar works on a definitive study of Bacchic cults — the ultimate gender-bending rituals of the ancient world.) Nino then turns to Elena and listens to her speak of creation: “Woman does not know what she is; her features change; she does not possess her own language, spirit, or logic.” He regards her in silence: “A terrible condition,” he opines at length (translations are my own; references are to the Italian edition: volume 3, 2013, 343).
Naturally, they become lovers. Elena leaves her husband and follows Nino back to Naples. This is a homecoming of sorts, but it upsets her daughters and turns her life upside down. Nino, for his part, remains married, and soon takes other lovers. He steadily builds his career as an academic, political theorist, and finally Member of Parliament: all his women turn out to be useful to him. From Elena he learns how to write. There is, then, a clear plot to his life. As for Elena’s, it demonstrates the point she makes in her essay: even while leaving her husband, she still acts as a “companion to man”. The intention, and hence the plot, is difficult to discern for her.
Outing the Author: Virgil
Dido, who recurs in Ferrante’s oeuvre, helps precisely to explore issues of intention and plot — or fate, to use Virgil’s own language. When Aeneas and Dido fall in love, the city of Carthage gets built around them. There is a sense of bustle and joyful productivity. Dido tries to persuade him to stay and enjoy this flourishing. He objects — in very vague terms, understandably, given the nature of the problem. He has a different trajectory, the gods command him otherwise. Dido offers a counterargument imbued with Epicurean philosophy: the gods don’t care about what mortals do; it is best to enjoy whatever happiness there is to be had.
It turns out that Dido is wrong. The gods do care — just not about her. And so it is that Aeneas sails away according to the will of the gods, while Dido is left behind. Work in her city stops; she commits suicide; Carthage becomes a place of bitterness. In the Aeneid, the episode explains the future enmity between Carthage and Rome. Dido is caught up in a grander plot, in the fate of whole empires.
In Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Dido suggests that “without love … the city cannot flourish” (volume 1, 2011: 156). Carthage becomes an image for the corrupted and corrupting Naples — a place of no love. Naples, in turn, becomes an image for social corruption the world over. Girls are picked off pavements and raped. Society, not the will of the girls in question, determines what is permitted. This happens, as Ferrante suggests, in the absence of love.
What is less often discussed, in her work, is the narrative of female progress she offers. This is perhaps most evident in her novel The Days of Abandonment: the husband leaves; the wife realizes that she is part of a plot she knew nothing about. Ancient narrative (Dido, various heroines of Greek tragedy, but also the ghost of an abandoned woman from her own childhood in Naples) suggests that the wife will now lose her mind and commit suicide. She comes close — except that her daughter, a girl of perhaps eight or nine, drives a knife into her mother’s thigh, and brings her back to her senses. This wife survives. In the collection of non-fiction, interviews and essays entitled Frantumaglia (roughly: “scraps”, “fragments”, “bits of leftover cloth once a dress is cut”), Ferrante insists on the differences between Dido and the abandoned wife in her novel.
Meanwhile, I ask myself about Virgil and what he intended with Dido. The question is not new, though scholars are careful to avoid framing it in terms of authorial intention, inhibited as they are by sterile structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to reading. Is the Aeneid a straightforward celebration of empire, or are there “further voices” of doubt and despair? (The phrase is taken from Lyne’s celebrated 1992 monograph Further Voices in Virgil’s Aeneid.) There is no doubt in my mind that Virgil knew what it meant to be on the wrong side of a plot, of history itself. Sunt lacrimae rerum. There are tears that have to do with facts, with “things that are” regardless. Virgil knew that.
I also suspect that Virgil knew about love that cannot flourish. In fact, various details in his work (including how he handles Dido) make me think that Virgil was gay.
I realize the foolishness of this assertion: the way it swiftly destroys any intellectual credibility. I do know that “gay” is a socially constructed category and that the modern societies with which I am familiar are very different from those known to Virgil. What I probably need, right now, to rescue myself is a cross-reference in Latin (vide infra, sub voce “humanism”).
Now, to go back to Virgil’s gayness: I also realize that an investigative journalist, equipped with a time machine, could prove me wrong. Regardless, what am I to do with this sense of the author, which is in essence an act of reading?
Outing the Author: Homer
When I started reading fiction, as a child, I hated writers who interfered with their books. I feared that the information about the author would inhibit my enjoyment, my sense of meaning. I even made up a rule for myself: I refused to read any book whose cover displayed the name of the author in bigger type than the title. That kind of thing just did not bode well. Stories needed detachment from the circumstances of their production.
I wrote my first book on the figure of Homer. I insisted that that “Homer” had been created by ancient performers of epic in collaboration with their audiences, and by literary scholars in collaboration with their readers. In short, the figure of the blind singer revealed those who imagined him, not the identity of the author. The point, for me, was not to dismiss biographical criticism, but frame what it could do (for a similar stance on Ferrante’s case, see the Los Angeles Review of Books blog’s recent post, “The Elenic Question”). It was easy, in the case of Homer, to make the case: there was, after all, no great risk that someone would prove the true identity of the poet through royalty receipts, Gatti-style.
Ferrante is a different matter, clearly, and yet let me just set out how I imagined her purely on the basis of her work: born in Naples in the early ’40s, blond, a little bit chubby, the mother of daughters. I’ve long been particularly confident that she is the mother of daughters. I do not need Gatti’s investigation to assume that some of this reveals the author and some of it me, the reader.
That she is blond and a little chubby I don’t really know, though Lenù (the narrator in My Brilliant Friend) is — and she is also eloquent about the envy and admiration she feels for Lila, who walks around their squalid Naples neighborhood looking, for all the world, like Jackie Kennedy. As it happens, my own mother was often compared to Jackie Kennedy in her youth: she belongs to the same generation as Lenù, Lila and, I always assumed, Ferrante herself. I would have liked to be as slim and dark as my mother (or Jackie Kennedy, or Lila, for that matter). I know about that kind of envy. But there is another thing that makes Elena Ferrante my true mother. The daughters in her novels (My Brilliant Friend, but also The Lost Daughter) end up leaving Italy in order to pursue academic careers abroad. My generation.
Of course, in Italy, many have long known what Gatti revealed to the rest of the world. For years, there was speculation about a husband and wife, in particular. Attempts to identify Ferrante with the husband have now been dismissed (especially abroad) as signs of Italian machismo. Can a man describe how it feels when your period arrives earlier than expected and you find yourself leaking blood as you walk? (A recurrent issue in Ferrante’s novels, especially in Troubling Love, including the film version). Perhaps embodied experience sets limits on literature’s powers of empathy.
Still, it is also true that literature enables us to feel ourselves into others — others who are not like ourselves. If there is one good thing about Gatti’s revelation, it is this reminder: Ferrante is not, and need not be, exactly like her characters in order to write authentically about them (Kirsch makes the point too, in a beautiful essay for the New York Times). That is the promise of humanism: an emphasis on our (partial, flawed, unreliable) capacity for shared experience — and, indeed, shared authorship.
Ferrante herself offers the following comments in an interview: “The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature without pointing to some writer-hero. And yet there is no work of literature that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective intelligence. We wrongfully diminish this collective intelligence when we insist on there being a single protagonist behind every work of art.”
Tell me that this has no relevance to the Homeric Question — a topic that, incidentally, she addresses explicitly in Frantumaglia. Tell me this has no relevance to the possible collaboration between husband and wife, for that matter, or mother and daughter, or writer and reader. More generally: the building of a city. Love, really, to put it with Dido.
Gatti, meanwhile, is keen to expose Ferrante’s “lies,” particularly in her non-fiction, and particularly concerning what she says about her mother. The true mother of the true woman behind the name “Ferrante” was not actually a seamstress working from home in a squalid Naples neighborhood, as Ferrante claims in Frantumaglia. That “lie,” in Gatti’s view, justifies his outing of her: she was asking for someone to set the record straight.
In response to that, I will say this. Elena Ferrante is my mother — and not just because she acknowledges, in literature, the daughters who left. I am currently working on homecoming (in literature, at least, as I’m not sure it can be managed in life). She is the mother I need in order to write.
Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics and Head of Department at Durham University. She contributes to the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and Times Higher Education. She is currently writing a book about homecoming.
