The Days of Abandonment

In the land of virgins and mothers and women who are both . . . Many have found this aspect of the book particularly disturbing, yet this depiction of a mother whose own suffering consumes everything, even her commitment to her children, questions the cherished figure of the unconditionally devoted mother: this figure is, after all, another restrictive and at times oppressive female archetype that women are forced to measure themselves against. In an Italy that English journalist Tobias Jones has called “the land that feminism forgot” this challenge to the stereotype of the inviolable, sexless, selfsacrificing, stalwart mother may be seen as radically feminist. Ferrante gives Olga, mother and woman, flesh and blood, and all the suffering, mistakes and desires that flesh and blood bring with them. In doing so, does she also create a character who challenges society’s ideas about what mothers are and what their suffering is like? Is this novel, then, a feminist novel? And can we possibly consider a woman on the verge of abandoning her own children a feminist icon? Now, more than thirty years after the flowering of the modern feminist movement, do we even have a workable definition of what a feminist novel is?

Who’s abandoning who? In the first paragraph of this book, Olga’s husband announces that he plans to leave her: the story unfolds from there and understandably the reader is likely to feel that the novel’s title refers to this initial abandonment. But this is not the only desertion (or near desertion) in the book, and Ferrante may well be examining a much weightier and controversial kind of abandonment. Indeed, as Olga’s crisis deepens, she sometimes seems capable of abandoning and/or injuring her own children. Is Ferrante’s depiction of a woman abandoned who in turn threatens to abandon, plausible? Isn’t the bond between mother and child stronger than any circumstances?

Adding and subtracting. Ferrante has said that what she was attempting to investigate in her novel is the “subtraction of love” and its consequences. Many of her readers will also have had similar experiences in which love has either been denied them or suddenly withdrawn. How accurately does she describe the journey of a woman from whom love “has been subtracted”? Does Olga’s acceptance of Carrano represent an acceptance, once more, of the male world, or more precisely the world of males? If so, how has this acceptance come about after all her suffering, anger and refusal? Does it mean she has recovered; filled the empty space that her husband’s desertion left behind? What is it that brings these two people - Carrano and Olga - together?

The Three Fates. Olga repeatedly mentions three different “archetypes” of womanhood and specifically of women abandoned: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, and the poverella, the woman from her childhood neighborhood who, having been abandoned by her husband, kills herself. She returns to these figures often; do they serve as warnings of what she must not become, or beacons towards which she moves? Has Olga, by the end of the book become one of them, or does she represent something different: an alternative fate for the abandoned woman?

Septimus and Otto. One learns in the letters of Virginia Woolf that in the author’s original plan for the book, Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway was to die at the end of the story. However, this idea changed and evolved during the writing, and in the published version of Mrs. Dalloway the figure of Septimus Warren Smith has appeared; a character who in some way serves as Clarissa Dalloway’s double, his death “substituting” hers. Is there something similar to this in the story of Olga and the family dog, Otto? And might the impulse behind both writer’s decisions have something in common: that is, the desire to create in their writing alternative destinies for women?

Faceless, nameless, shameless. “I want to be able to believe that even if my book becomes a product to be bought and sold, there is nothing that obliges me to become the same.” (Elena Ferrante). Ferrante has willingly and willfully chosen to remain anonymous despite (or perhaps partially because of) her enormous success. She has given very few interviews and has never appeared in public (as Elena Ferrante, that is). Elsewhere, she writes: “To make life bearable we lie, and above all we lie to ourselves . . . Lies protect us, they attenuate the pain, the allow us to avoid the frightening possibility of serious reflection, they dilute the horror of our times. But when one writes, one must never lie. In literary invention, unless one wants to risk producing pages and pages of meaningless vacuity, it is necessary to be sincere to the point of breaking […] Perhaps neatly separating what we are in life from what we are when we write helps keep selfcensorship at bay.” A simple question: can anonymity help a writer? In what ways? Are writers who do not opt for anonymity (obviously, the vast majority) somehow less sincere?

The silver screen so like a mirror. “I am afraid of discovering that I know so little about my own book. I fear seeing in the writing of another . . . the truth about my own book and finding this truth repulsive. I am afraid of discovering its weaknesses, its lacunae. I am afraid of confronting what I should have written but didn’t because of inability, or cowardliness, or self- censoring literary choices, or superficiality in the way I see things.” This is Ferrante speaking with her publisher about the screenplay adapted from her novel. Can a film ever do justice to a book? Are some books improved when they become films? If the answer to both of these questions is yes, does the ability of a film to better a book reflect the book’s literary value? How faithfully do film adaptations usually re-present novels?