Ferrante and What It Means to Speak

Throughout the course of 2015, I made my way through the entire Neapolitan series, by Elena Ferrante. It was fairly life-changing, which is not a descriptor I deploy lightly. The novels, which cover the entire lifespan of two women from Naples, were the subject of a lot of literary buzz last year, and rightly so. The author is anonymous, which has added to the mystique surrounding the books.

When I say that the books were life-changing, what I mean is that I felt something major shift in my understanding of things as I read them. I am thankful that I arrived at the books at this point in my life, I think, because I feel as though huge portions of them may have been lost on me had I read them as a freewheeling 20-year-old, rather than as a newly married woman entering my 30s. To briefly summarize the many, many thoughts I had as I made my way through the four novels, I essentially felt as though I were reading a woman for the very first time.

The complexity of thought and the depth of feminine concerns that were captured felt like something I had never seen before — not in fiction, anyway. We’ve all read women, of course, but most of us have spent the majority of our literary lives reading women written by men. Most of these are flat — they are primarily plot devices, poorly constructed and two-dimensional, which makes them very difficult to connect to, when you know, as a woman yourself, that is not really how women work. Even the best female characters written by men don’t really go there — and how can they? While I categorically reject biological essentialism, we’re not talking about understanding the nature of humanity, although a good novel does that — we’re talking about how experience is conveyed, and experience is gendered on an almost guttural level. It is not biological, but it is primal.

This is where someone usually mentions Austen. I’ve read Jane Austen. We’ve all read Jane Austen. And maybe I need to go back — I’ve had good friends and mentors whose opinions I trust tell me as much, that I must have missed something in Austen the first time around. Maybe that’s true. But I also think that Austen just doesn’t fit. And why in the name of god do I have to try to make her? Why is it Austen or the Brontes, or tough shit? Landed gentry, over 200 years ago? Really? This is the most prominent model of womanly writing, even now?

I put part of the blame for what happened there. But I realized that it was time to shoulder my own portion of it.

The Neapolitan Novels are raw, unprocessed by the established rules of how women characters should read. Which is to say that Ferrante clearly worked very hard to write outside of the establishment — to shuck off expectations and muster the most potent form of female humanity she could. When I read them, I felt as though I was reading a woman for the first time, because I was reading a woman written as women really are, first and foremost, but also because I was able to see reflections of myself there — of my experiences, my friendships and my relationships. Lenu and Lila, the two main characters, are girls from a working class Italian neighborhood. They’re backed into corner after corner, regarding their gender and their future, their independence and what they will have to sacrifice, as women, to experience love. When you’re working class, you don’t have your family’s fortune to fall back on. There is no such thing as a woman of leisure. You have to sell your skill set in one form or another, be it as an employee or as a wife and mother. And when you become a wife or a lover or a mother, there are risks, and there are costs.

We’ve seen these risks and costs depicted over and over again, but the Neapolitan Novels are not a morality tale. They are human, and the humanity that Ferrante has brought to her novels has had an interesting result in the media — due to her anonymity, she has been accused time and again of being a man.

Her response is essentially what I thought when I first saw these discussions surfacing:

“Have you heard anyone say recently about any book written by a man, ‘It’s really a woman who wrote it, or maybe a group of women?’ Due to its exorbitant might, the male gender can mimic the female gender, incorporating it in the process. The female gender, on the other hand, cannot mimic anything, for it is betrayed immediately by its ‘weakness’; what it produces could not possibly fake male potency,” she wrote to Vanity Fair.

“The truth is that even the publishing industry and the media are convinced of this commonplace; both tend to shut women who write away in a literary gynaeceum. There are good women writers, not-so-good ones, and some great ones, but they all exist within the area reserved for the female sex, they must only address certain themes and in certain tones that the male tradition considers suitable for the female gender.”

Of course, these accusations are interesting enough on their own, but they struck yet another chord of identification with me, because back when I was writing my other blog, I was mystified to find myself explaining time and time again to confused readers that I was not actually a man.

I don’t even want to try to get into why that was, but will say that my gut feeling is that it was due more to what was absent from my blog rather than what was present, which is to say, I don’t feel like it was because I was sending out signals that I was male — I think it was because I wasn’t sending out signals that I was female. Which is very odd, considering how often I discussed gender and feminist issues. The male, as we all know, is the default, and I was somehow failing to remind readers often enough that I belonged to a subcategory.

It’s strange to me, in the same way, that anyone could read the Neapolitan Novels and feel as though they were written by a man. To me, they are female to their core. But I suppose it goes back to that default setting — the female characters in the novels are fully human, in the way that we see male characters written all the time. My guess is that this three-dimensionality is  being transposed onto the author.

What the whole experience made me realize was that I needed to try harder. The more I thought about it, the more I began to understand that I had fallen into a trap. I had been lazy in a way that astounded me as soon as I saw it. Yes, the high school curriculum that drummed up the same old irrelevant token novels year after year had an impact, but with the vast amount of feminist studies, reading and writing I had engaged in since high school, you would’ve thought at some point I’d have woken up to it.

But I realized that I hadn’t. And so now I’m trying to fix it. For the past couple of months, I’ve been restricting (?) myself to novels written by women. Other kinds of texts, I have to keep open — there’s no way to continue doing the kind of studying I’m doing, unfortunately, and read only female writers across the board (the fields of research, theory and philosophy are even more restrictive — to an exponential degree, in fact).

I don’t know if it’s a matter of my personal taste skewing things, or if it’s a genuine reflection of what women’s writing is, but nearly all of the novels I’m working my way through are either semi-autobiographical or thinly veiled memoirs, which is interesting, because it puts the woman writer under her own microscope, and there are recurring themes that I find myself connecting to on a level I never have before, such as a paralyzing, morbid fear of marriage, for one (particularly poignant for me, given I’ve just crossed the one-year mark of marriage to B, which … I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this in the future). The fear comes not from the generalized and vague fear of commitment we see attributed to men, but from a deeply rooted terror of losing their independence and being encompassed by a man.

It took me a minute of sorting through various themes and readings to realize what I was trying to learn, and for a while I went down a side road about sight — what it means to be a woman and to see, rather than be seen. But what it has continued to lead me back to is the profound effect Ferrante’s work had on me toward the middle of last year — what does it mean for a woman to speak, rather than be spoken of? After all, what is seeing without speaking of what one has seen?

But before I can figure that out, I need to learn, possibly for the first time in my life, what a woman’s voice sounds like.

In trying to find that Guardian article to link to today, by the way, I came across this one in the Paris Review, and, reading over it, I had to laugh:

As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me. That phase ended after a couple of years. At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained—indeed, it grew stronger—that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them. I devoured books at that age, and there’s no getting around it, my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of ­experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great ­novels written by men. I didn’t want to write like Madame de La Fayette or Jane Austen or the Brontës—at the time I knew very little about contemporary literature—but like Defoe or Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Hugo. While the models offered by women novelists were few and seemed to me for the most part thin, those of male novelists were numerous and almost always dazzling. That phase lasted a long time, until I was in my early twenties, and it left profound effects.

I’m talking about my adolescent anxieties. For obvious historical reasons, women’s writing has a less dense and varied tradition than male writing, but it has extremely high points and also an extraordinary foundational value—just think of Jane Austen. The twentieth century, besides, was a century of radical change for women. Feminist thought and practice set in motion the deepest, most radical of the many transformations that took place in the last century. I wouldn’t recognize myself without women’s struggles, women’s nonfiction, women’s literature—they made me an adult. My experience as a novelist, both published and unpublished, culminated, after twenty years, in the attempt to relate, in a writing that was appropriate, my sex and its difference. But if we have to cultivate our narrative tradition, as women, that doesn’t mean we should renounce the entire stock of techniques we have behind us. We have to show that we can construct worlds that are not only as wide and powerful and rich as those constructed by men but more so. We have to be well equipped, we have to dig deep into our difference, using advanced tools. Above all, we have to insist on the greatest freedom. Writers should be concerned only with narrating what they know and feel—beautiful, ugly, or contradictory—without succumbing to ideological conformity or blind adherence to a canon. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.

So here’s to becoming an adult, and a programmatically disobedient one, at that.