Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults, Adolescent
Sexuality, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Literature
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?
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Great analysis!
ReplyDeleteThanks!
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