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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