{"id":1178,"date":"2018-10-30T08:00:25","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/undergrad-students-publishing\/?p=1178"},"modified":"2018-10-30T08:00:25","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T13:00:25","slug":"stricken-ill-with-ferrante-fever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/2018\/10\/30\/stricken-ill-with-ferrante-fever\/","title":{"rendered":"Stricken Ill with Ferrante Fever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyle Labe\/\/Blog Writer<\/p>\n

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Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay<\/em> by Elena Ferrante<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay<\/em>, the third installment in Elena Ferrante\u2019s triumphant Neapolitan Novels<\/em>, the narrator lists for a page everything she wants to do away with, everything on which she\u2019d like to \u201cspit\u201d: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Freud, historical materialism, Nazism, Stalinism, terrorism, war, the class structure, socialism, Communism, and, as the narrator states, \u201call<\/em> the manifestations of patriarchal culture\u2026[and] all<\/em> its institutional forms.\u201d It reads with a seething, boiling rage. She\u2019s pissed off, and she has every right to be.<\/p>\n

The Neapolitan Novels<\/em> chronicle the friendship and lives of Elena \u201cLenu\u201d Greco and Raffaella \u201cLila\u201d Cerullo, two women who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Naples, Italy. The first book, My Brilliant Friend<\/em>, opens with the news that Lila has, without any trace, gone missing. Believing this to be a willful decision\u2014as Lila, in her later years, revealed a desire to disappear\u2014Lenu takes on the challenge to write and publish their life stories.<\/p>\n

This action of Lenu\u2019s, like any great friendship, possesses both love and spite. Lenu, from a place of admiration, forces herself to write with candor and complexity about her friend, assigning herself the daunting task to produce multiple volumes devoted, and seemingly dedicated, to their relationship. But there\u2019s an irritation, too, and that\u2019s where the best parts of the Neapolitan Quartet emerge. Lenu knows <\/em>that Lila wishes to vanish, rootless, to die in anonymity and to leave the planet as she entered it; yet she immortalizes Lila in words. It\u2019s a competition between them, a game that manifested from their earliest days as schoolchildren in Naples.<\/p>\n

These books Lenu writes represent something much larger in the Neapolitan Novels<\/em>. It\u2019s a microcosm of rage and love, asking the question if one can exist without the other, and it transcends both setting and characters to symbolize the world as a whole. These are not simply individual Italian women unhappy and bored with their lives; they are to constitute every woman on the planet, and Ferrante feels they\u2019re justified to be enraged at how society treats them, how the world ousts them, how everything we do or say is tinged with misogyny.<\/p>\n

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My Brilliant Friend<\/em> by Elena Ferrante<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Very rarely have I, personally, read a female character portrayed so mad<\/em>. And not \u201cmad\u201d as in, for example, Bertha \u201cMadwoman in the Attic\u201d Mason from Jane Eyre<\/em>, but \u201cmad\u201d as in angry, irate, explosive<\/em>, the latter describing this series to perfection. One of the blurbs on the second installation, The Story of a New Name<\/em>, reads, \u201cImagine if Jane Austen was angry, and you\u2019ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the series spans across decades until the new millennia, following computerization, social movements, cultural development, economy, gender relations, and more. The setting of Naples breathes with life, and each character bleeds off the page and into reality. Ferrante\u2019s writing\u2014translated into the English by the masterful Ann Goldstein\u2014flows with modernistic rhythm, breaking convention, rules, and standards. Yet it\u2019s not hard to read. Even with countless characters (there\u2019s pages, before each story starts, outlining family trees and character names) each is vividly described, so individually unique and important that, even when they disappear for 200 pages, when they return it\u2019s as if they never left at all.<\/p>\n

With so much to consume\u2014Ferrante covers feminism, Communism, Fascism, factory strikes, religion, poverty, literature, sexuality, women\u2019s friendship, motherhood, marriage, technology, and more\u2014my interests kept returning to its depiction of anger. You can turn to any page of any book in the literary canon and find its male characters are permitted anger: 1984<\/em>, The Outsiders<\/em>, The Godfather<\/em>, The Great Gatsby<\/em>, One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em>. The list goes on and on. But when, if ever, are female characters afforded the same liberty to feel<\/em>? Are women ever truly allowed\u2014in literature, in life\u2014to fully express the entire<\/em> range of their emotions?<\/p>\n

Especially within storytelling, and in all forms of it, female characters are reduced to feeling one<\/em> thing. They can be sad, or happy, or jaded, or afraid; but they can never feel all that, and more, at once. Female characters rarely express dissatisfaction in more ways than one. Ferrante flips the script on this, and it\u2019s refreshing. She achieves this in such a means that, rather than gawking at the freshness of Ferrante\u2019s works, the reader is left questioning why so many authors have not caught up to her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kyle Labe\/\/Blog Writer In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third installment in Elena Ferrante\u2019s triumphant Neapolitan Novels, the narrator lists for a page everything she wants to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}