Trick Mirror
Page 14
Olga, the protagonist of The Days of Abandonment (2002), is afraid of becoming the poverella, a decrepit figure from her childhood who was spurned by her husband and subsequently lost her mind. Olga has found herself in a similar marital situation. “What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life,” she thinks, lamenting her forgotten writing career. She remembers, years ago, scoffing at stories of educated women who “broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men….I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts.” But though the abandoned-wife plot was the one that Olga was handed, it is not exactly the one she partakes in. In a phenomenal n+1 essay on Ferrante, Dayna Tortorici writes that The Days of Abandonment “captures the double consciousness of a destroyed woman who doesn’t want to be ‘a woman destroyed.’ ” Olga passes through the story of the poverella “like a crucible: become the poverella, and then become Olga again.” In Ferrante’s work, a controllable self emerges through communion with an uncontrollable one.
The Neapolitan novels, which begin with My Brilliant Friend (2011), trace the story of two friends, Elena (called Lenu) and Lila, from childhood into their sixties. On this expansive timeline, Ferrante’s concern with identity formation through women’s narratives plays out at extraordinary depth and length. Lenu and Lila define themselves through and against each other, each like a book that the other is reading, each representing an alternate story of what life might be. My Brilliant Friend begins with half of this structure suddenly vanishing: Lenu, now an old woman, finds out that Lila has disappeared. She turns on her computer and starts writing down their lives from the beginning. “We’ll see who wins this time,” she thinks.
As children in a poor, rough neighborhood in Naples, Lenu and Lila were doubles and opposites. They were the smartest in their class, with different types of intelligence—Lenu diligent and tentative, Lila brilliant and cruel. When Lila can’t pay for the entrance exam to middle school, their stories start to diverge: Lila, who tutors Lenu as she continues her education, marries the grocer’s son at sixteen. On her wedding day, Lila asks Lenu to promise she’ll continue studying. She’ll pay for it, she says. “You’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls,” Lila says.
Lila becomes alienated by Lenu’s life at university, mocking her for hanging around pretentious socialist writers. Lenu publishes her first novel, and then discovers that she unconsciously plagiarized an old story of Lila’s from elementary school. When Lenu hears that Lila has organized a strike at her workplace, she imagines Lila “triumphant, admired for her achievements, in the guise of a revolutionary leader, [telling] me: You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.” The struggle and correspondence between the two friends—the mirroring, the deviation, the contradiction, the cleaving, all enacted simultaneously—reflects, more precisely than anything I have ever encountered, the negotiations between various forms of female authority, which themselves negotiate a structure of male authority. Lenu and Lila enact the endlessly interweaving relationship between the heroines we read about, the heroines we might have been, the heroines we are.
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In 2015, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Ferrante cited as inspiration the “old book” Relating Narratives, by Adriana Cavarero: a dense and brilliant tract, translated into English in 2000, that argues for identity as “totally expositive and relational.” Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others. She writes about a scene in The Odyssey where Ulysses sits incognito in the court of the Phaeacians, listening to a blind man sing about the Trojan War. Having never heard his own life articulated by another person, Ulysses starts to weep. Hannah Arendt called this moment, “poetically speaking,” the beginning of history: Ulysses “has never wept before, and certainly not when what he is now hearing actually happened. Only when he hears the story does he become fully aware of his significance.” Cavarero writes, “The story told by an ‘other’ finally revealed his own identity. And he, dressed in his magnificent purple tunic, breaks down and cries.”
Cavarero then expands the Ulysses story into a third dimension, in which the hero suddenly becomes aware not just of his own story but also of his own need to be narrated. “Between identity and narration…there is a tenacious relation of desire,” she writes. Later in the book, she provides the real-life example of Emilia and Amalia, two members of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, a group that also powerfully influenced Ferrante. As part of the consciousness-raising process, Emilia and Amalia told each other their life stories, but Emilia could not make hers sound coherent. So Amalia wrote her friend’s story down on paper. By that point, she’d memorized it, having heard it so many times. Emilia carried around the story in her handbag, reading it over and over—“overcome by emotion” at the fact of understanding her life in story form.
The anecdote is different from the one in The Odyssey, Cavarero notes, because, where the blind man and Ulysses were strangers to each other, Amalia and Emilia were friends. Amalia’s narrative was a direct response to Emilia’s need to be narrated. The two women were acting within the framework of affidamento, or “entrustment,” that the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective developed in the seventies. When two women “entrusted” themselves to each other, they prioritized not their similarities but their differences. They recognized that the differences between their stories were central to their identities, and in doing this, they also created these identities and affirmed this difference as strength. (Audre Lorde had made this argument in 1979, framing difference as something not just to be “merely tolerated,” but a “fund of necessary polarities, between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”) In the 1990 book Sexual Difference, the Milan women wrote, “Attributing authority and value to another woman with regard to the world was the means of giving authority and value to oneself.” Entrustment was a framework that not only allowed them to understand themselves as both woman and human, but consciously predicated the second identity on the first. It was “the form of female gendered mediation in a society which does not contemplate gendered mediations, but only male mediation endowed with universal validity.” Given the reality of a world, a language, a literary tradition shaped by male power, these women attempted to remake all three things simultaneously by passing their stories through one another—just as Emilia was able to use Amalia’s narrative consciousness to access and create her own.
As part of the work of entrustment, the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective read books by women, whom they called the “mothers (of us all).” They imagined themselves in the place of the novelists, in the place of their heroines, attempting to see what they could learn by this exchange of roles. The result, they wrote, was “to wipe out boundaries between life and literature.” The hope was that, somewhere in the midst of all these characters, somewhere within this grand experiment of identification, they might access an original source of authority. They might find a female language that could “speak starting from itself.”
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You’ll have noticed—surely you’ll have noticed, although I don’t want to be too generous—that all the characters in this essay are white and straight. (Harriet the Spy, resplendent in her baggy jeans and tool belt, may be an exception.) This, perhaps, is the heroine’s subtext: the presumed universality of her own straight whiteness is the literary heroine’s shallow revenge. There is another tradition, one of deprivation and resistance and beauty, that connects Walk Two Moons (1994) and Julie of the Wolves (1972) to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (1978) and Esperanza from The House on Mango Street (1984) to Jani
e Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Sethe from Beloved (1987) and Celie from The Color Purple (1982) and The Woman Warrior (1976) and Love Medicine’s Fleur (1984). There is a conversation between Nightwood (1936) and The Price of Salt (1952) and Stone Butch Blues (1993). But these stories are, in every case, animated by very particular modes of socially imposed difference. They do not cohere into an ur-narrative. Just as the heroine’s text is constrained by cultural inequities that the unmarked male experience can never speak to, nonwhite and nonstraight literary women are constrained in a way that the heroine’s text can never account for or reach.
Here, once again, I feel the numbing sense of asymmetry that has lurked inside me since the day that Power Rangers roleplay taught me about the phenomenological Other. The unspoken flip side of my friend Allison’s argument that I couldn’t play the Pink Ranger was worse, in part because she would likely never be conscious of it: it wasn’t that she couldn’t play the Yellow Ranger but that, more precisely, she wouldn’t ever think to. My hesitation, as an adult, to find myself within the heroine universe has been rooted in a suspicion that that identification would never be truly reciprocal: I would see myself in Jo March, but the world’s Jo Marches would rarely, if ever, be expected or able to see themselves in me. Over lazy dinner conversations, my white friends would be able to fantasy-cast their own biopic from an endless cereal aisle of nearly identical celebrities, hundreds of manifestations of blonde or brunette or redhead selfhood represented with Pantone subtlety and variation—if, of course, hardly any variation in ability or body type—while I would have no one to choose from except about three actresses who’d probably all had minor roles in some movie five years back. In most contemporary novels, women who looked like me would pop up only occasionally, as a piece of set decoration on the subway or at a dinner party, as a character whose Asian ethnicity would be noted by the white author as diligently as the whiteness of his or her unmarked protagonist was not. If women were not allowed to be seen as emblematic of the human condition, I wouldn’t even get to be seen as emblematic of the female condition. Even worse was the fact that the female condition in literature—one of whiteness and confinement—remains so unsatisfying. I was shut out of a realm that I didn’t even really want to enter. The heroine’s text tells us that, at best, under a minimum of structural constrictions, women are still mostly pulverized by their own lives.
But if this text exists to demonstrate that reality, then both things can always still be rewritten. The heroine’s journey, or her lack of one, serves as a reminder that whatever is dictated is not eternal, not predestined, not necessarily true. The trajectory of literary women from brave to blank to bitter is a product of material social conditions. The fact that the heroine’s journey is framed as a default one for women is proof of our failure to see, for so long, that other paths were possible, and that many other ones exist.
In writing this I’ve started to wonder if, through refusing to identify with the heroine, I have actually entrusted myself to her—if, by prioritizing the differences between us, as the Milan women did with one another, I have been able to affirm my own identity, and perhaps hers, too. In Sexual Difference, the Milan women write about a disagreement they had while discussing Jane Austen, during which one woman said, flatly, “We are not all equal here.” The statement “had a horrible sound, in the literal sense of the term: sour, hard, stinging,” the women wrote. But “it did not take long to accept what for years we had never registered….We were not equal, we had never been equal, and we immediately discovered that we had no reason to think we were.” Difference was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution. That realization, they decided, would be the foundation of their sense that they were free.
I cling to the Milan women’s understanding of these literary heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way years ago—with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.
Ecstasy
The church I grew up in was so big we called it the Repentagon. It was not a single structure but a $34 million campus, built in the 1980s and spread across forty-two acres in a leafy white neighborhood ten miles west of downtown Houston. A circular drive with a fountain in the middle led up to a bone-white sanctuary that sat eight hundred; next to it was a small chapel, modest and humble, with pale-blue walls. There was also a school, a restaurant, a bookstore, three basketball courts, an exercise center, and a cavernous mirrored atrium. There was a dried-out field with bleachers and, next to it, a sprawling playground; during the school year, the rutting rhythm of football practice bled into the cacophony of recess through a porous border of mossy oaks. Mall-size parking lots circled the campus; on Sundays, it looked like a car dealership, and during the week it looked like a fortress, surrounded by an asphalt moat. At the middle of everything was an eight-sided, six-story corporate cathedral called the Worship Center, which sat six thousand people. Inside were two huge balconies, a jumbotron, an organ with nearly two hundred stops and more than ten thousand pipes, and a glowing baptismal font. My mom sometimes worked as a cameraperson for church services, filming every backward dip into the water as though it were a major-league pitch. There was tiered seating for a Baby Boomer choir that sang at the 9:30 service, a performance area for the Gen X house band at eleven, and sky-high stained-glass windows depicting the beginning and end of the world. You could spend your whole life inside the Repentagon, starting in nursery school, continuing through twelfth grade, getting married in the chapel, attending adult Bible study every weekend, baptizing your children in the Worship Center, and meeting your fellow retirees for racquetball and a chicken-salad sandwich, secure in the knowledge that your loved ones would gather in the sanctuary to honor you after your death.
The church was founded in 1927, and the school was formed two decades later. By the time I got there, in the mid-nineties, Houston was emerging into an era of glossy, self-satisfied power—the dominance of Southern evangelicals and extractive Texan empires, Halliburton and Enron and Exxon and Bush. Through fundraising campaigns flogged by associate pastors during church services, the considerable wealth of the church’s tithing population was regularly converted into ostentatious new displays. The church imported piles of fake snow at Christmas. When I was in high school, they built a fifth floor for children with a life-size train you could play inside of, and a teen youth group space called the Hangar, featuring the nose of a big plane half crashed through one wall.
My parents hadn’t always been evangelical, nor had they favored this tendency toward excess. They had defected from Catholicism at some point, growing up in the Philippines, and then had begun attending a small Baptist church in Toronto before I was born. But then they moved to Houston, an unfamiliar expanse of looping highway and prairie, and this one pastor’s face was everywhere, smiling at commuters from the billboards that studded I-10. My parents took to his kind, civilized, compelling style of preaching—he was classier than your average televangelist, and much less greasy than Joel Osteen, the better-known Houston pastor, famous for his cheap airport books about the prosperity gospel and his chilling marionette smile. Osteen’s children attended my school, which my parents persuaded to accept me within a few months of us moving to Texas—and to place me in first grade, even though I was four years old.
I would regret this situation when I was twelve and in high school. But as a kid, I was eager and easy. I made friends, pointed my toes in dance class, did all of my homework. In our daily Bible classes I made salvation bracelets on tiny leather cords—a black bead for my sin, a red bead for the blood of Jesus, a white bead for purity, a blue bead for baptism, a green bead for spiritual growth, a gold bead for the streets of heaven that awaited me. During the holidays,
I acted in our church’s Christian musicals: one, I remember, was set at CNN, the “Celestial News Network,” where we played reporters covering the birth of Jesus Christ. On Wednesday nights, at choir practice, I memorized hymns for prizes. In elementary school, my family moved farther west on I-10, to a place in the new suburbs where model homes rose out of bare farmland. On Sundays, I sat quietly in the back seat next to my cherubic little brother, creeping through gridlock as we drove east into the city, ready to sit in the dark and think about my soul. Spiritual matters felt simple and absolute. I didn’t want to be bad, or doomed (the two were interchangeable). I wanted to be saved, and good.
Back then, believing in God felt mostly unremarkable, sometimes interesting, and occasionally like a private, perfect thrill. Good and evil is organized so neatly for you in both childhood and Christianity. In a Christian childhood, with all those parables and psalms and war stories, it’s exponentially more so. In the Bible, angels came to your doorstep. Fathers offered their children up to be sacrificed. Fishes multiplied; cities burned. The horror-movie progression of the plagues in Exodus riveted me: the blood, the frogs, the boils, the locusts, the darkness. The violence of Christianity came with great safety: under a pleasing shroud of aesthetic mystery, there were clear prescriptions about who you should be. I prayed every night, thanking God for the wonderful life I had been given. I felt blessed all the time, instinctively. On weekends I would pedal my bike across a big stretch of pasture in the gold late-afternoon light and feel holy. I would spin in circles at the skating rink and know that someone was looking down on me.