Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Truth is Ugly to See On Stage - and on the Screen

 

Psychoanalytic/Psychological understanding of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Psychoanalysis of Film, Psychoanalysis of Theater

 

One of the most remarkable things about the famous doll studies of Mamie and Kenneth Clark – the studies that were instrumental in the Supreme Court’s decision to integrate schools in the United States – is that the data suggests that the African American kids taught in the segregated South had a greater sense of being lesser than whites than African American kids taught in integrated Northern schools, but they were more comfortable with this state of affairs.  The African American kids in northern integrated schools were more distressed about their status as second class citizens than those in Southern segregated schools.  And yet the data from this study – which suggested both that African Americans felt themselves to be lesser than whites and that this was exacerbated by being in contact with them in school, was used as pivotal data as the basis for the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court Case that led to laws requiring desegregation of schools.

August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, especially as it is depicted in the recently released film starring Viola Davis as Ma Rainey and with Chadwick Boseman’s final performance as Levee Green dramatizes this split.  Ma Rainey is a successful Black Musician living the high life in the 1920s.  She has established herself in the South through word of mouth as a tremendous performer, moving from town to town and performing in tents.  Levee Green is a northern trumpet player, a performer in Ma Rainey’s band, who is tremendously talented as both a player and a songwriter.  He wants to rise above his station as a simple band member, and he trusts that his talent will allow him to do that.  His band mate’s are not so certain that his talent will sustain him.

We watched the filmed version of this play when it first came out in December on Netflix and, though I started to write on it then, I didn’t really have a sense of how to articulate what was presented on the screen.  But as I began to read a book called Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction, it became clearer to me how I was thinking about what is being depicted in this play/movie.  That said, a lot of time has elapsed, and some of the power of having been immersed in the film has faded – as well as my memory for particular details in the film.

The film opens with a scene of two black men running.  My experience and expectation was that they should be running from something, but, in fact, they were running to a performance of Ma Rainey’s – a performance that was taking place in the middle of a forest, in a tent, at a private, secret place.  The ticket takers, the audience members, the performers, and Ma Rainey herself were all Black – and there was a ritualistic/mystical quality to the space – a space where people who were subjugated outside were free to articulate what they thought and felt and lived and experienced through song and dance – and appreciating the mastery of the performance of Ma Rainey.

Her appearance was shocking.  She was deeply made up.  She was a large woman – and incredibly sensual – and she radiated.  I suppose she radiated all sorts of things – sensuality, self-possession, joy.  If I said she used the stage as a pulpit it would be a metaphor or an analogy – because she was performing something that felt like a religious service.  But it was not service worshiping a God.  It was profane and holy all at the same time, it was, on some level, worshipping Ma Rainey (and her Black Bottom), but it was also the worship of being together and being free to revel in what it means to be one of us, in all the ways that we are members of this shared celebration.

This force of nature is next seen in Chicago, where she arrived late for a recording session.  Her band arrived on time; well, the cornetist, Levee Green, was a little late, but he imagines that he will break out of the band and be the next star.  The rest of the band members, who are deeply engaged with each other and engage in comfortable banter, even with Levee, are doubtful that he will make it.

Ma is seen leaving her segregated hotel with her female lover, Dussie Mae, on one arm and her nephew on the other.  She is dressed in furs and finery and is parading those in front of the other Black folk at this very prestigious and very Black establishment.  She is seems to be both disdainful of the people who look at her, apparently judging her – to openly parade a female lover front of good church going folks is pure folly – and appreciating that she is, despite their disdain for her, a star.  Not the kind of star amongst the people that she was in the south, but a star who shines above these judging northern folk.

When she arrives at the recording studio, she lives up to the recording engineer’s prediction that she will be difficult.  Not only is she late, she insists that her stuttering nephew intone the opening words to the piece.  She also picks a fight with Levee who wants to change the instrumentation to her signature song to be more contemporary.  She finally brings the whole thing to a halt when, after the nephew finally uttered the necessary words stutter free and the band recorded the song, it turned out that the recording machine was not working.  They will have to do the take again, but not until she gets the Coca Cola that was specified in her contract.

It becomes apparent that Ma believes that she needs to NOT play by the rules in order to make the system work for her.  If she plays by the rules – the white man’s rules – she will be eaten by the system and not be given the due that her talent deserves. 

Meanwhile Levee, who is breaking the rules by having sex during the break with Dussie Mae, believes in the system.  He knows that he has talent and he knows that his talent has value.  In a free market, he will profit.  Why does he believe this?  He relates how his family had their property ruthlessly stolen while his mother was ruthlessly attacked by white men in the south.  Is it that he is in the north?  Is it that his talent is different than land – that it is so viscerally attached to him that it can’t be taken from him? 

Whatever his delusion, he is rudely disabused of it when he the recording executive buys his song for next to nothing, but refuses to let him perform it.  We then see his tragic enactment of his prediction that God does not look out for blacks as Levee takes out his anger on the White boss on his lovable bandmate, sealing his own fate.

The rules of the game are different for Blacks than they are for Whites.  The deck has been so badly stacked against African Americans for so long, it is hard to believe that they are still standing, much less working to engage as members of our culture.  That they had faith that the Supreme Court would finally rule in their favor – which, because the rules are different, would cause them even more pain – is hard to imagine.  Levee is acting on this kind of faith.  One that expects the rules of the game to apply to those who bring assets to a capitalist based system.

The insight that I gleaned from the Social Theory book that traces the development of theories during the 20^th Century (and that I am not yet done with) is that the rules are rigged against everyone – especially artists – especially those who have something deeply human to express.  The deal is (and here I am doing violence to the book) a kind of game of distraction.  Society/ culture will impose limits on us all.  Freud traced this to the oedipal deal – I will give up my attraction to my opposite gendered parent in exchange for immediate safety and the promise that I can find a similar model later.  But there are, in fact, a million and one deals that are struck.

One of the deals that is directly related to race is that I will feel better, even if I feel awful, knowing that I am not one of them.  In order for this deal to work, They have to be treated badly.  And I have to squeeze out what little joy I can from lording it over someone who is not as good as me.  Ma can lord it over the ladies at the black hotel because she is Ma Rainey, in all her finery.  They, meanwhile, can take the moral high ground.  Levee, meanwhile, can lord it over his band mates whose talent does not equal his.  And they can know that he will not be able to break out of the traces, because that simply isn’t done.

Ma Rainey knows the rules of this game and she knows how to play it.  She gives nothing away until she is paid for it.  She commands her due from those who would demean her because she knows her value.  The irony is that her value is not just based on her talent, but on much more than that – it is based on being able to create the kind of steamy, hot, intermingled communion that took place in that forest – or was it a swamp? – at the beginning of the film.  She knows that there is a value that trumps the capitalist value – we would call it a feeling and we would not be wrong.  But we could also call it the sense of feeling loved by feeling understood and connected with – with all the power that music brings to that feeling.

In the South, Ma is free to ply her trade out of the reach of the white man and an oppressive system because that system so completely devalues the black experience that it neglects to police it.  It doesn’t care about what happens within the borders of a land that has no value.  In the north, where the capital is now being increasingly generated, all need to play in the system.  And those with the least power will be exploited by that system. 

This rumination may seem to be feeling communist at this point, and that would make sense.  Many of those who are written about in the book that I am drawing from are proposing that a communist economic system (not the communist political systems that are in fact fascist systems) should supersede a capitalist one.  But the argument that I am making is not essentially economic.  It has economic implications, but it is closer to the world of the individual – a psychoanalytic argument.  The argument I am making is that we enter into a social contract at the peril of being torn away from essential aspects of our humanity.  We trade concern and connection for well-being.  And this may be an underlying tragedy that August Wilson is pointing to.  That this is both the plight of the African American, but also our shared plight.  That we have to become who we are to assert our right to be who we are even thought that is no longer who it as that we are because we have distorted ourselves in order to defend ourselves.  This is what Ma Rainey so successfully does.  Failing that, we can make a case for who it is that we would like to be, but we cannot become that, as Levee discovers.

I was struck throughout watching this how the fidelity of the film to the form of the play felt forced.  I wanted Levee to break free from the stage set.  I wanted to see the action across weeks and across miles – not essentially (the opening scene in the tent is the gratifying exception that I was longing for) trapped within the four walls of the theater.  The dialogue felt forced by the format – we didn’t learn about Levee’s family in flashback, but from his words.  But as I am writing about the underlying message of the play and the film, I think that the constriction of the play mirrors the constriction of society.  The story of Levee’s family’s misery becomes a story that he is trying desperately to force us to realize – not something that we resonate with because we can see it and know it.  This filmed play allows for the strain of the characters trying to articulate themselves to shine through, as uncomfortable as seeing that necessarily is.  Bravo!      

     

  

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Starting The Second Complete Semester of COVID – Much Like the First: COVID Chronicles XVI

 

COVID-19, Lived Experience of the Pandemic, Teaching during the Pandemic, COVID Hopes and Fears, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

 

I have waited to write this missive because nothing seems to change.  Of course that is an illusion, but there is a certain dreariness that continues to hang on – and that I reported on in the last missive – and that will almost certainly be present in the next.  I went to a virtual conference on “Difficult Conversations” – conversations about race – on Campus (via Zoom, of course...).  The facilitator of the conference – who is clearly very committed to talking about race – seemed almost bored as she presented.  Was it that this is what she does all the time?  Was it that she was stuck, again, in her zoom room – wherever that is – with her zoom background that betrays little about her while she tells of her own experience of race as a means of inviting others to talk about theirs?

In the first breakout exercise, we were told to talk briefly about three things – our place, our name, and something else that now escapes me.  When I talked about my place – I talked about currently feeling dislocated.  This was ironic in some ways.  During the pandemic, we have been focused on nesting.  We have worked on remodeling the “public” sector of our home.  This has been fun and engaging.  As I write this, I am babysitting our new puppy who arrived two days ago.  Unlike our last foray into caring for a dog, this has been well planned and we have been reading about and watching videos of puppy parenting for a couple of months.

I am on campus for two days a week.  On each of those days I am teaching three one and a quarter hour classes.  For the first time in twenty years, I am teaching an introductory course, so many of my students are First Year Students and they are bombarding me with email questions, many of which involve my directing them to the syllabus where the answers to their questions are neatly laid out (thanks more to my borrowing and editing someone else’s syllabus than to my organizational skills).  These students seem to be more intent on coming to class in person on a regular basis than the cohort last fall – perhaps because they are younger – but perhaps the students in general are learning that being in the classroom, rather than coming by Zoom, is a better way to learn, even if there is a risk of infection.

I had an opportunity to get a vaccine a month or so ago.  As a mental health professional, I was considered a front line worker.  I went online to get a time, but when it came up, I balked.  I am not seeing any patients in person and don’t see any urgency to do that.  My risk comes primarily from my job as a teacher.  I had heard that teachers were going to be in the next wave, so I decided to wait.  What I didn’t realize was that when they said teachers, in our state, unlike others, post-secondary teachers are not included.  My ethical decision, which had included what turned out to be a false hedge, was not reversible!  I have tried to sign up on the medical worker site again, but now they say they will call me…  So far no ring.

In my worst moments, I wonder whether our school’s administration, which has not apparently advocated effectively for us, if at all, and who insist that we go into the classroom while other schools are not doing that, are in league with our Republican legislature in wanting to eliminate a wisdom culture – something like a mini version of the cultural revolution in China (Oh, the scale is way different and remember this is at my worst and most paranoid/hysterical moments).  When I utter some variation on this theme, the Reluctant Wife wonders, “Why haven’t you retired?” 

Similarly, my patients wonder why I didn’t take the vaccine when it was available.  Though we would not be able to meet in person immediately, they would like to do that as soon as it is possible.  Perhaps I want to stave off meeting in person?  Perhaps, as an introvert who grew up believing himself to be an extravert, I am luxuriating, the way a pig luxuriates in slop, in glorious isolation?

I think, in fact, I am dislocated.  I don’t like being isolated, but I don’t want to return to being in contact.  I am overwhelmed with work, and I think that would just get worse (though I’m not quite sure how) if there were things to do and go see?  More fundamentally, I am concerned with the state of the nation, I am concerned with the state of the world – when we have figured out how to address the pandemic – how will we address climate change?

As I mentioned above, we have joined millions of others in acquiring a pet in part as a reaction to the pandemic.  Kimba, named after the hero of a cartoon series that the Reluctant Wife watched as an adolescent, is a lovely little ball of fluff that we are enjoying connecting with.  The girls have come home from their socially isolated bubbles at their respective schools to welcome her in (Kimba, it turns out, is a chick magnet).  The Reluctant Son is already here as his school is still not having students on campus.  Kimba is very social and happy and already feels – after just a few days with the family - to be a member of it.

The process of training a dog, and watching it develop, will, perhaps, help restore – as will the reopening of the world – a sense of hope.  Springtime is just around the corner.  Assuming we can make it from here to summer and an inoculation without exposing ourselves to the disease we should, at some point, be in the clear.  OK, my gloomy self imagines, we might, like John Laurens in Hamilton!, become casualties after the war is won).  The Reluctant Wife and my Mother and Mother in Law have all received their second shots.  We will achieve herd immunity.  Currently, our nation doesn't have enough people willing to take the shots when they become available to do that, but many of them are waiting to see what the results will be for the millions who will take them before they have an opportunity.   I trust we will get there.

I trust that we will work towards herd immunity both here and in the world more broadly.  The local newspaper recently reminded us that a local hero who discovered one of the polio vaccines decided to donate the vaccines to the children of the world rather than profit from them.  The current vaccines are the result of corporate efforts – and the corporations will surely profit – but hopefully we will figure out how to equitably distribute them (though I have heard of isolated profiteering already going on in some countries). 

During this time, I have been reading a text about Contemporary Social Theories.  I will likely report on it in more detail once I have completed it.  It is describing the work theorists have engaged in during the last century or so to understand the dilemmas of the modern world.  Reading about how Adorno and others worked to understand Fascism in the middle of the last century feels very contemporary – and helpful.  We have struggled with the issues we are currently facing in different forms.  We do, in fact, have wisdom that has been achieved across time.  We need to re-access it and apply it to a world that is evolving and, as they cautioned us, realize that the individual ways that something as monolithic seeming as fascism can be experienced needs to be understood as well.

In the book, I am poised to read the chapter on Lacan and Derrida, two theorists who have always confused me.  The book promises to explain how they dislocated first the French Intellectuals, who, in turn, dislocated the rest of us.  The author claims that our burgeoning sense of, for instance, gender proliferation and confusion is traceable in large part to them.  Perhaps better understanding them will help me understand the experience of being dislocated - or perhaps it will plunge me deeper into what may become a deeper state of disorientation, dislocation and, perhaps, despair.  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

 For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

 

The Lying Life of Adults: How do we avoid the traps our families have set for us?

 

Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults, Adolescent Sexuality, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Literature

  

A friend recommended this book.  I had not read Elena Ferrante’s work before.  This novel is compelling – I continually felt I had to return to it, but it is far from a page turner.  It feels like reading a diary – there is something unvarnished – raw – about the writing that reflects the unvarnished – raw- edges of twelve year old Giovanna’s perspective as she develops and matures – if that is what you would call it – until she is sixteen and ready to cut the apron strings. 

Don’t get me wrong – we know we are in the hands of a master writer and story teller from the opening moments of this novel when Giovanna states, “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.”  We know that a lot will be unpacked from that sentence, and it is.

This is a story of triangles – some are love triangle and some are triangles of hate.  Perhaps the most important, but also the most remote, is one that requires a lot of discovery to emerge.  I will start with this primal triangle because it is every bit the source of Giovanna’s story as that pregnant first sentence.

The first triangle is, then, between Enzo, a policeman in Naples, his wife, and his mother-in-law.  His mother-in-law has a beautiful bracelet, one that will become the central symbol in the story and that will be passed among the central players throughout.  Enzo steals it from his mother-in-law to give it to his lover, Vittoria.   

Vittoria is Giovanna’s aunt; her father Andrea’s sister.  In that pregnant first sentence, her father is comparing his only child, Giovanna, to his sister – suggesting that Giovanna is as ugly as Vittoria - the woman who had an affair with a policemen and the woman whom Andrea never wants to see again.  Giovanna spends much of the rest of the book puzzling over what it means to be compared to Vittoria.  She seeks out Vittoria to size up her physical and spiritual beauty and ugliness and compare it to her own while Giovanna struggles to determine how she is seen through her father’s eyes; how it is that he has placed her at one of the vertices of the triangle of hate that exists, through her, between her father and her aunt.  She will also see her father through new eyes - those of Vittoria, but increasingly her own eyes, as she puzzles out how to join (or not) the complicated world of lying adults.

The book unfolds as a book about class.  Giovanna’s father, through his intellect, has escaped the waterside industrial wasteland of Naples where he and Vittoria were raised.  He has risen to the beautiful heights of the city – where the sea shimmers in the distance and the smell of blossoms is in the air.  While the family is not wealthy – he and his wife both work at teachers in local high schools - he has married into a good family and has intellectual friends with whom he spends time arguing about politics and eating good food and drinking good wine.

The family they are closest to has two daughters.  Angela is Giovanna’s age, and Ida is a couple of years younger and feels left out of the close, unconsciously sexually charged relationship between Giovanna and Angela – another triangle.  Angela and Ida’s mother, Costanza, is wearing the bracelet mentioned at the beginning of this post.  We haven’t yet discovered the source of the bracelet, but this surely indicates another triangle, between Andrea and Costanza.

But Giovanna discovers a different triangle – the one between her mother and Mariano, Angela and Ida’s father.  Though her mother presents it as a relationship where Mariano is forcing himself upon her, when Andrea leaves her mother for Costanza, she eventually accepts Mariano into her life, making a considerable mess of things for all three children, though we see the impact on Giovanna most closely.

But the funny thing is, Giovanna does not experience this as the kind of train wreck that from the outside it appears to be.  Part of this is because she is exploring the relationship with Vittoria and discovering that the roots of her father’s hatred for his sister are complex and deeply felt.  Vittoria likes to pit people against each other – and she has a very different story of Andrea’s rise out of their family.  Vittoria also warmly embraces Giovanna, tells her the story of her passion for her dead lover Enzo and; surprise, surprise, introduces Giovanna to Enzo’s wife Margherita and Enzo and Margherita's three children, Tonino, Guiliana and Corrado. 

If you have lost track of the number of triangles at this point, no worries, there are plenty more to come.  Vittoria is connected through Margherita with the children and serves as a kind of aunt/paternal figure to them (she is Guiliana's godmother), offering refuge in her home when they are on the outs with their mother, and settling various disputes.  The earliest dispute is about the relationship that Tonino and Guiliana have with Roberto – a figure much like Guovanna’s father – someone from the hardscrabble port area of Naples who has risen in the academic ranks and is studying in Milan.  He is Guiliana’s fiancé, but Corrado does not approve of him.

Giovanna pairs up with Corrado and they have a very adolescent relationship where neither is fluent in romance or sex, and they fumble along, as Angela, Giovanna’s friend from the other family, gets paired with Tonino.  Meanwhile, somewhat predictably, Giovanna falls for Roberto, and we see the ways in which the lying ways of the father’s generation will be played out for Giovanna.

Triangles between people are breakfast, lunch and dinner for psychoanalysts.  The Oedipal triangle, and the ways Freud believed it was played out within every family, was bedrock for him in his understanding of the interpersonal, but also the intrapsychic functioning of people.  The complications of identifying with our same sex parent and inhibiting our desire for the opposite sex parent, while also retaining a denied identification with them so that we can retrieve that part of ourselves through a romantic connection to someone like them has been a central script to describe the development of heterosexual development for the last 150 years.  More recently it has been reworked – relying on Freud’s position that we are born bisexual, to describe the developmental arc of homosexuality as well. 

Others, Melanie Klein the first among them, have noted that the Oedipal triangle is an achievement that lies on top of the more primal dyadic relationship that we have with the original maternal caregiver (maternal in the sense that mothering is the first kind of parenting that we generally encounter – and a gendered term that can be carried out by both men and women as we are able to identify with and work from the various identifications that we have made – and sometimes denied – from infancy onward).

Many of the apparent triangles in this book are more dyadic in nature than triadic.  Andrea, for instance, seems to have wanted to possess Costanza – to put the bracelet on her as his own – while retaining the relationship with Giovanna’s mother.  He essentially denies that there is a triangle - maintaining two separate relationships as long as he is able.  Vittoria – who epitomizes “pre-Oedipal” or dyadic relational functioning – imagines the bracelet as belonging to her and she imagines that she gave it to Andrea to give to Giovanna – before Andrea removed Vittoria from his life. 

Costanza, apparently feeling guilty about her relationship with Andrea, gifts the bracelet to Giovanna.  Meanwhile, Giovanna has become estranged from Vittoria and, in a complicated reunion during which she spends at least as much time lying as telling the truth, she returns the bracelet to Vittoria as its rightful owner, believing that it was gifted to her by her mother, Giovanna’s grandmother, at her death.   Vittoria, in turn, gifts the bracelet to Guiliana. 

We have now returned to the part of the story where Giovanna falls deeply in love with Roberto, Guiliana’s fiancé.  When Giovanna chaperones Guiliana on a visit to Roberto in Milan and Guiliana's carelessly leaving the bracelet behind causes Giovanna to go back to retrieve it for her, we are ready for Giovanna to steal Roberto from Guiliana – and that is, in fact her intent.  And she will, by doing this, engage in the lying relationship, the affair, that has been modelled for her throughout the book.

So one of the questions that this book seems to be asking is whether we can feel, intensely and directly, the passions that are part of human life (especially during adolescence): passions that have various objects – objects of desire that can be hated one moment and loved the next – objects that can be of one gender or another – and objects that also have relationships with other objects.  And then it asks whether we can recognize and respect the triangles that exist between us and the object that we are desiring – and other objects – absent ones.  Can we hold those other relationships in mind while feeling what we feel immediately?  Will those other relationships contain our passions – and serve as a spring board for redirecting them to new objects – sometimes objects not yet known to us?

Freud, with Klein's help, would suggest that we need to learn to respect triangles early in life.  If we don't do that, we will careen through life as so many characters in this book do.  Giovanna, even while she is careening, maintains and lets us in on her sense of control.  Even as the she takes the corner on two wheels, she is driving and searching for some sort of balance.

She is thrown off balance by the book's opening line, coming from her father.  She is thrown off balance again when, serving Roberto and Guilianna breakfast in bed after their night of lovemaking when Guilianna is creating a protective ring around her relationship with Roberto, Roberto says to Giovanna, "You're very beautiful".

We have come full circle.  Giovanna hears the siren call of a man defining her based on her beauty - and like Odysseus, she is drawn to that call.  When she returns to Naples, ostensibly to retrieve the bracelet, we (and she) don't trust that Guilianna's outlining the importance of her own bond to Roberto will keep the triangle in tact.  The bonds will not hold Odysseus to the mast.  What holds her appears to be the realization that acting on the wish to be physically loved by the man who calls her beautiful will destroy that beauty, and she will become, indeed, as ugly as Vittoria.  

Giovanna chooses a different route - she wants to betray Guilianna much more viciously than by attracting Roberto's eye - she wants to, I think, attract his mind.  She wants to create herself not as the object of men's physical desire; not of desire for what they have denied within themselves, but as the object of what they have tried to pursue within themselves - to connect and perhaps compete with how it is that they define themselves.  

This book ends with Giovanna taking off with Ida – the younger sister of Angela – the one who was left out of the sexually charged but unacknowledged love between Giovanna and Angela.  Ida is a minor character.  She is a budding writer.  Might she be the author?  Might she have been writing about the interior life of an adored and unavailable object?  Might she be imagining that this other – this shining one – might be a model for escaping from a world where acting on one’s impulses, as gratifying as that might be, lays waste to the relationships that should be supporting and nurturing the people that we love?  Shouldn’t there be a different, less destructive (but perhaps much more deeply transgressive) path – one that involves living a life with enough integrity that it doesn’t have to be built on a foundation of lies?  Would this involve our being our whole selves - recognizing our power as both a woman and a man - regardless of our gender?  And doesn't it make sense that this movement would spring from the mind of a woman?

 To view a post on the movie made from this book, click here.

    

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