For starters… there were once again a lot of characters in this novel! So I’m extremely grateful to Ferrante for including an index of characters at the very beginning. It was very much appreciated for someone like me, who struggles with remembering characters – especially side characters that are only mentioned a handful of times throughout the novel. Moving onto the actual content, I expected this to be about an actually pure and beautiful (brilliant!) friendship, but it was far messier than anticipated. I think this kind of relationship is complicated… we can clearly see their jealousy and inferiority complex, but there are also moments when we can see their bond and support for one another. I guess it’s like how you can truly appreciate someone when you see their ugly parts? Or like that one quote about how you can always love someone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you like them. I think it’s interesting how to begin with, Lenu’s aim in friendship was rooted in her envy and insecurity, constantly stating how Lila is better than her, and how she herself will always be in second place (roll the dialogue!). This page in particular made me think about how it would be extremely difficult to have a healthy friendship when this is how it began.
“What that demotion caused inside me I don’t know, I find it difficult to say, today, faithfully and clearly what I felt. Perhaps nothing at first, some jealousy, like everyone else. But surely it was then that a worry began to take shape. I thought that, although my legs functioned perfectly well, I ran the constant risk of becoming crippled. I woke with that idea in my head and I got out of bed right away to see if my legs still worked. Maybe that’s why I became focused on Lila, who had slender, agile legs, and was always moving them, kicking even when she was sitting next to the teacher, so that the teacher became irritated and soon sent her back to her desk. Something convinced me, then, that if I kept up with her, at her pace, my mother’s limp, which had entered into my brain and wouldn’t come out, would stop threatening me. I decided that I had to model myself on that girl, never let her out of my sight, even if she got annoyed and chased me away. […] Certainly I trained myself to accept readily Lila’s superiority in everything, and even her oppressions.” (pg. 46)
I wanted to talk about the latter part of their friendship, but I think I’d run out of words because the lecture video made me think about even more topics. But the way their timeline ends also brings it back to the beginning of their friendship, I think – Lila disappears and tries to erase all presence of her existence, while Lenu is left attempting to catch up, just like she did when their friendship first started. I believe it also relates to when Lenu wrote that she would “never let her out of [her] sight, even if she got annoyed and chased [her] away” (pg. 46), because in this case, Lila didn’t chase her away, but instead ran away herself! And yet Lenu is still proving her statement correct, because she’s writing down their entire history so that Lila won’t be let out of her sight. What a homoerotic #toxicyuri (let’s unpack how I was surprised but also not when the #toxicyuri was real and not just my own personal headcanon) dependent (not quite co-dependent) twisted yet realistic bond…
Anyways, the lecture video made me realize the repeated mentions and importance of the difference between the casual dialect and proper Italian. It made me wish I knew the language so I could feel the palpable difference between the two, as well as the culture, but alas I can only liken it to something like code switching (perhaps AAVE and other types of modern slang?). Of course I can read when the translation says they’re using proper Italian, but that’s different from actually knowing the vocabulary and the context in which they’re used. I wish I could know every language in the world because it truly vexes me to read something in its non-source language and think about how I must be unable to pick up cultural and linguistic nuances 🙁
6 replies on “Ferrante: Pitting two queens against each other”
Thank you for your blog post this week. Don’t forget to leave us a question for discussion 🙂
agree, it was messy! I’m interested in why you think it was dependent but not co-dependent, i’m leaning towards co-dependent as i think Lila couldn’t have got married for money and then just walked away, without a deep friendship from Elena.
Genuinely love relating to fellow classmates’ blogs like this because it’s like everything is being said that I couldn’t fit into my own post??? #toxicyuriftw I initially wasn’t expecting them to hit all the bases–I thought their frenemy-coded relationship was going to be the consistency–but here they are, collecting relationship types like Pokemon… they really are everything to each other.
Also agree that the lecture video added so much food for thought. I watched it about halfway through the book, and until then I had had the language theme sort of in my periphery because I was so invested in the central relationship. It really does make you wish that you spoke the language!
“there were once again a lot of characters in this novel!”
Indeed, and it is at times confusing… but I think the point is that Elena and Lila don’t exist in isolation, but as part of a dense web of interconnections and in a context defined by money, family, work, violence, and much else. In other words, it’s in the middle of all this that they forge their relationship… and then this is a context that is also continuously changing, as people grow up or die, or as people move in and out, and then as the broader history of postwar Italy unfolds.
Hii!! The #toxicyuri is so real LMAO. I agree with everything you brought up about their close but harmful friendship with one another, and I was also super grateful of the character index at the beginning!! As for the language thing, I also really wish I could’ve read the original piece to be able to grasp the linguistic nuances better. It sucks that English is so bad at expressing other languages (especially romance languages). Great post tho!! :))
Hi Kimberly! I so agree with your thoughts on their harmful friendship, but I like that you mentioned the language changing. I noticed it changing and it being brought up multiple times in the book, but it never really clicked on why it was important until the lecture video. I also wished I new every language in the world so that I could read it all in its original text. I think it is more similar to AAVE then modern slang, because modern slang tends to only be words that change, while AAVE also has sentence structure changes.