I have loved and I love feminism because in America, in Italy, and in many other parts of the world it managed to provoke complex thinking. I grew up with the idea that if I didn't let myself be absorbed as much as possible into the world of eminently capable men, if I did not learn from their cultural excellence, if I did not pass brilliantly all the exams that world required of me, it would have been tantamount to not existing at all. Then I read books that exalted the female difference and my thinking was turned upside down. I realized that I had to do exactly the opposite: I had to start with myself and with my relationships with other women—this is another essential formula—if I really wanted to give myself a shape.
Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia
What millions of adoring Anglophone readers know as The Neapolitan Novels or The Neapolitan Quartet is in fact one long literary work.Footnote 1 Its title is, or should be, My Brilliant Friend.Footnote 2 It is a singular classic of contemporary literature. My intention here is to explore some aspects of the novel's feminist moral psychology that are interpretively central and philosophically rich, but that have so far received little sustained philosophical attention, and virtually no attention from academic philosophers.Footnote 3 Since the feminist ideology of the novel is central to its conception, this project can be seen as a work of appreciative literary criticism. I hope it will also be seen as a contribution to philosophical understanding on a number of vital topics, insofar as readers agree with me about the insightfulness of Ferrante's moral perspective, and its stimulating connections to underappreciated dialogues from the history of feminism.
The discussion has the following shape. In section I (“The Milan Women and Sexual Difference”), I take up a project of historical-philosophical reconstruction, presenting some of the central ideas of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective (Libreria delle Donne di Milano), a fascinating group agent responsible for some of the canonical texts of Italian difference feminism. These ideas are crystallized in the overarching argument of Sexual Difference, the Collective's most influential work.Footnote 4 I attempt to outline this argument, which has been more or less ignored by philosophers writing in English, especially in the analytic tradition.Footnote 5 I suggest that the Collective's provocative conceptualization of “female freedom” is independently interesting. Most important, I reconstruct the intellectual foundations of what the Milan Women took to be their principal innovation: the practice known as entrustment (affidamento), which the Collective defended as necessary for women's personal development and for feminist politics. The theoretical framework underlying the practice of entrustment deserves to be seen internationally as it is seen in Italy—as a contentious and essential landmark in the history of theorizing about women's social reality.
One of my main goals is to develop an interpretation of some important themes in The Neapolitan Novels with the aid of this context. As I will explain in a moment, it is almost impossible to believe that Elena Ferrante has not been influenced by the work of the Milan Women. But more germane for my purposes is the fact that this work provides us with a set of concepts and preoccupations that are immediately useful for interpretation. Section II of this part of the essay (“From Milan to Naples”) provides a sketch of how the narrative's basic structure dramatizes the psychological progression that was of interest to the Collective.
In Part 2, I will extend this account by defending a set of theses about the special status of Lila Cerullo, which answers several difficult questions about this memorable and enigmatic figure who constitutes the novel's heart. Particularly emblematic of Lila's special status is her lifelong condition of “dissolving margins/boundaries” (smarginatura), a condition whose meanings have puzzled readers and preoccupied critics. I argue that Lila's condition can be linked in various illuminating ways to the Collective's ideas concerning the development of women's freedom and capacities for love. The account helps to explain why smarginatura is such a pivotal piece of the overarching symbolic structure of the Quartet. As culminating illustration, I give an extended analysis of one of the most striking and perplexing episodes in the work: Lila's long speech in the aftermath of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake. The analysis of this astounding passage helps to elaborate connections between the ideology I attribute to the Milan Women and many larger themes in Ferrante's work.
The rest of this introduction frames the project and its methodology. I focus on two related clarifications. The first concerns the scope of my interpretive aims in this essay. The second concerns the sense in which Ferrante's indebtedness to feminism provides a rationale for discussing the ideas of the Milan Collective.
Interpreters of The Neapolitan Novels face special difficulties. Most obviously, the work's unusual length and sophistication make synoptic criticism difficult. Here is one simple illustration. Many readers forget that this massive novel has an epigraph—and that the epigraph is a resonant, elusive passage from Goethe's Faust. It might seem fair to assume, nonetheless, that literary critics would explore this salient fact. Yet in the (huge and rapidly expanding)Footnote 6 body of critical writing on Ferrante, one finds almost no substantive discussion of the work's epigraph.Footnote 7 I offer this observation not as an accusation, but as an attempt at humble forewarning. The achievements of this work outstrip attempts at tidy summary. That is why the novel merits sustained critical study from a number of directions. The present work contributes to a division of critical labor by approaching the novel from a distinctively philosophical perspective.
A further set of difficulties for interpreters is that notwithstanding Ferrante's visceral realism, mysteries in the Quartet abound.Footnote 8 Here is a quick inventory of just some of the most tantalizing questions. How should we understand the catalytic event of the narrative, namely Lila's self-inflicted disappearance, with its evocation of erasure, dissolution, the elimination of traces? What happens to the lost child, and how should we think about this loss?Footnote 9 How are these two framing disappearances related? How is Elena Greco's most important literary project (that is, The Neapolitan Quartet, on one natural interpretation) related to her desire to “win,” that is (on one natural interpretation), to prevent Lila from disappearing?Footnote 10 How is Elena's literary career as a whole related to Lila's inspiring intellectual and artistic gifts? In general, what are we to make of Lila? What explains her exceptional status in the world of the narrative, and how much of this is the invention of the narrator? What is the significance of her eventual nontraditional union with Enzo Scanno? In general, what are we to make of Elena Greco? Is she the work's hero, or is Lila (or both, or neither)?Footnote 11 How should we understand Nino Sarratore's mesmeric hold over Elena? Is Elena responsible for some aspects of Lila's deterioration—or is Lila's evolution not a deterioration, but rather a kind of holy protest, a beatific resignation? Does Elena regress morally? If so, is Lila responsible for some aspects of this degeneration? What is the meaning of the puzzling act of “restitution” described in the work's epilogue? Is there transcendence or redemption in any meaningful sense?Footnote 12 What are the work's moral aims? How much distance is there between the author (“Elena Ferrante”) and the narrator (Elena Greco)? Does the work have a philosophy of literature? For example, does it present a view about how literary and scholarly achievements are related to moral virtue?Footnote 13
Though my arguments touch on all of these narrative issues, the approach is indirect. I focus first on articulating some elements of a feminist perspective that plausibly inform the author's artistic vision. This is not a distraction from the task of interpretation. If a one-sentence summary of the novel were needed, this would suffice: The work explores an intense and combative friendship between two Neapolitan girls, and later women, which spans the second half of the twentieth century, and which is in many ways the most important relationship in each of their lives. In other words, it is uncontroversial that the novel is about “female friendship”—its putative distinctiveness, its relationship to other forms of love (daughter love, erotic love, maternal love, self-love), its precarity and lack of definition in patriarchal social contexts. However, familiar though they are, these platitudes about the work's content do not go very far toward probing its densely layered meanings. Sensitively engaging with some of the theoretical underpinnings of Italian difference feminism, and relating these ideas to Ferrante's ambitions, is a useful way to formulate compelling interpretive hypotheses. The interpretation that emerges begins to show how Ferrante's novelistic work makes stimulating contributions to debates about genuinely philosophical topics.Footnote 14
This observation leads naturally to a second clarification. In what sense does Ferrante's interest in feminism ground the legitimacy of discussing the Milan Women as a way into interpretation? Though she does not refer explicitly to the Collective, Ferrante does at several points acknowledge special debts to difference feminism, Italian feminism, and the work of Luisa Muraro, a central founding member of both the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective and the Diotima group in Verona.Footnote 15 Moreover, the Collective was, at least in Europe, widely understood to be among the most important champions of difference feminism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, as Ferrante was developing as an intellectual, translator, and writer of fiction (see Bono and Kemp Reference Bono, Kemp, Bono and Kemp1991, 12; Kemp and Bono Reference Kemp, Bono, Kemp and Bono1993, 8–9; Parati and West Reference Parati, West, Parati and West2002, 18–19; Pravadelli Reference Pravadelli2010, 64). Work by the Milan Women and other feminist collectives such as Diotima and Rivolta Femminile was a main topic of debate among Italian political radicals from the mid-1970s through at least the 1990s; indeed, these debates are dramatized in the novel.Footnote 16 It is thus very likely that the author is close to the Collective or its central members, overwhelmingly likely that she engaged with the Collective's work as it was appearing, and even more likely that the ideas were sufficiently in the air to be an influence on her thinking.
I should emphasize, however, that the interest of this investigation is not beholden to such causal hypotheses. Nor is the framework I present in section I supposed to be a key for unlocking all the meanings of The Neapolitan Novels. Nowhere will I endorse the silly thesis that the intellectual ambitions of this phenomenal literary work can be reduced to an attempt to dramatize the ideas of the Milan Women. On the contrary, Ferrante is, in my estimation, problematizing and modifying some of these ideas for her own purposes—an aspect of the argument that will emerge in greater detail in part 2. And she is also reflecting on the ideas of many other writers and thinkers, and pursuing a host of distinctively literary aims, as should go without saying.
In sum, the challenging views of the Milan Women are largely unknown to Anglophone philosophers, even to those broadly familiar with developments in European feminist theory, and a sympathetic presentation is worthwhile. More specifically, the Milan Women's provocative ideas about the moral psychology of female freedom merit careful philosophical attention. Finally, these ideas are sufficiently connected to the ambitions of the Quartet to make familiarity with them useful for any passionate reader of this influential work.
I. The Milan Women and Sexual Difference
The Milan Women's Bookstore Collective was founded in 1975. It was one of many influential Italian feminist collectives active in the last decades of the century.Footnote 17 These collectives were the main sites of feminist theorizing, organizing, and experimental practice within the country. Partially for this reason, Italian feminism is often said to have a distinctively anti-institutional and nonacademic history. Some contend that this separatist character has contributed to deficits of appreciation, internationally, of canonical texts in the tradition.Footnote 18
The Collective's most important work is the prodigiously titled Non credere di avere dei diritti: La generazione della libertà femminile nell'idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne (1987). A reasonably literal rendering of this title is Don't Think You Have Any Rights: The Generation of Female Freedom in the Thought and Events of a Women's Group.Footnote 19 The work appeared in English in 1990, in a translation by Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis, with the title Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990). Though now out of print, having “never found much of an audience among American feminists” (Zerilli Reference Zerilli2004, 54), it is nonetheless the most accessible of the Collective's works in English.Footnote 20 I will refer to it as Sexual Difference in keeping with tradition, though readers will do well to keep the original, more descriptive title in mind.
Scholars of Italian feminism regard Sexual Difference as a “major theoretical work” (de Lauretis Reference de Lauretis1990, 12) and “the manifesto of Italian difference theory” (West 2002, 38). Its ideas are focal points of longstanding conversations and disputes within Italian social theory and feminist practice.Footnote 21 Its emphasis on women's relationships with one another is sometimes said to epitomize a distinguishing feature of Italian feminism.Footnote 22 Something similar is often said of its emphasis on the symbolic dimension of sexual difference.Footnote 23 Both suggestions should be interpreted with care. The Milan Women venerated the work of Adrienne Rich, which treated women's relationships with great sensitivity.Footnote 24 Similarly, much of Luce Irigaray's writing on sexual difference and the reinvention of the patriarchal symbolic order preceded the work of the Collective. Indeed, Irigaray's ideological and personal influence on the Collective's development is well known, partly because Luisa Muraro is the main Italian translator of Irigaray's works.Footnote 25 Nonetheless, it seems appropriate to characterize the overarching argument of Sexual Difference as a foundational pillar of Italian feminism, and one canonical expression of the difference-feminist perspective that has been received far more sympathetically in continental Europe, and especially in Italy, than in the English-speaking world.Footnote 26
The aim of this argument is to vindicate the importance of the practice of entrustment for actualizing female freedom. In a moment I will attempt to present the progression of ideas that led the Milan Women to this conclusion. First, it is worth situating the reader by reproducing the extraordinary opening paragraph of Sexual Difference, and by emphasizing some of what it reveals about this unique and difficult text.
This book is about the need to make sense of, exalt, and represent in words and images the relationship of one woman to another. If putting a political practice into words is the same thing as theorizing, then this is a book of theory, because the relations between women are the subject matter of our politics and of this book. It is a book of theory, then, but interspersed with stories. We believe that to write theory is partly to tell about practice, since theoretical reasoning generally refers to things which already have names. Here we are dealing partly with things that had no names. (Milan Women 1990, 25)
The passage has several instructive characteristics. First, it anticipates a matter of great textual interest. The work is self-consciously genre-bending: it collects personal stories, more general narratives of the history of feminist activism in Italy, as well as direct legal, political, and moral psychological argumentation. Second, the opening paragraph frames an ambitious philosophical thesis, namely that the theory to be offered is a radically original one, and hence particularly vital (“we are dealing partly with things that had no names”).Footnote 27 Most important for our purposes, however, is the fact that from the first sentence, the Collective asserts its focal intention: to put the symbolization (“words and images”) and valorization (“exalt”) of women's relationships at the center of feminist practice.
The impetus for the Collective's central argument, and for the work as a whole, is a characterization of women's predicament that is more psychological than political. The essential problem of feminism is: how do we best pursue the liberation of women? But the chief obstacle to women's freedom, according to the Collective, must be understood as an internal matter. The obstacle is decidedly not a lack of political rights. It is not a condition of subjugation in domestic roles. It is not inadequate access to education or gainful employment. It is instead a feeling of “being blocked.”Footnote 28 I must emphasize the significance of this surprising claim.
The Milan Women never assign a single precise meaning to this metaphor of blockage. We can nonetheless say at least the following. It represents a thoroughgoing reticence in thought and desire, a lack of mental vigor, an inability to see aims and projects through to completion. It represents the instability in personality and self-conception that results from these phenomena. It represents a disposition to thought, desire, feeling, and action that is, even when reticence is overcome, overly imitative—that is, imitative of men, or of feminine roles defined by men's interests. It represents alienation from regular social intercourse, a kind of social impotence, in which women feel inauthentic as soon as they begin to express themselves. These interlocking aspects of blockage are anticipated in an early formulation that precedes Sexual Difference:
There is within us a wish to live in the grand manner, to have a secure familiarity with things, to find every now and then the gestures, the words, the behaviour, which correspond to our own feelings and are appropriate to the external situation, to follow our thoughts, our desires, our projects, through to their end. We call this “the wish to win through.” We wish to be victorious over everything which makes us insecure, unstable, dependent, imitative. And yet at the same time we do not want to betray anything of what we are. . . . (Milan Women Reference Bono and Kemp1991, 112)Footnote 29
The Collective is very clear on this first point, to the dismay of many of their critics: the condition of blockage is the most profound obstacle to women's freedom. Their phenomenological characterization of this predicament is piecemeal, highly metaphorical, often autobiographical, and interspersed throughout the narratives and analyses of a formally varied, methodologically anarchic work. I am not interested in subjecting this characterization to critical scrutiny. I assume that the Milan Women are describing their experiences as accurately as possible, and I take these descriptions to be an important kind of evidence. In part 2 of this essay, I will describe how their characterization resembles the condition referred to by Ferrante as frantumaglia. What I will now do is explicate in some detail how the Collective conceives of the genesis of this predicament. This amounts to a reconstruction of one of the main philosophical threads of Sexual Difference, namely its theory concerning the psychological constitution of female unfreedom.
I will reconstruct this analysis by focusing on three claims that seem essential to understanding the Collective's diagnosis and proposed treatment. The reader of Sexual Difference will not find these claims isolated or named. Nor will they encounter the system of relationships between them exactly as I present it. The palimpsestic text should be appreciated for its individual literary character, and not reduced to a much less energizing triad of propositions. I would be delighted if the present work contributed to greater interest in the Collective's writings among philosophers and critics, and even more delighted if it stimulated readings that emphasize different features of these writings than I emphasize. Having said that, my sense is that the reconstruction of the Milan Women's core argument I am about to provide is faithful, and that it will be helpful even for those few readers who have studied this demanding work in its English translation.
The first crucial claim is what I will call the sexual difference thesis. Put simply, the claim is that there is “originary sexual difference” (de Lauretis Reference de Lauretis1990, 10): a fundamental difference between females and malesFootnote 30 that is inscribed at the level of personal (sexed) psychology, and not merely at the level of socialization or gender. In one revealing formulation of the thesis—and such statements are frustratingly uncommon in the text—sexual difference is “the most powerful sign marking thought as corporeal” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 149).Footnote 31 Structures of thought, desire, and feeling are, in other words, mediated by embodiment, in a way that at least tends to differ with sex. One important consequence: free female psychology is not the same as free male psychology.Footnote 32
The Collective says little about how to conceive of this sexual difference thesis. I find it murky, disturbing, and intriguing. What's clear is that the thesis sits at the core of the Milan Women's difference feminism—and that a relevantly similar thesis appears to be the constitutive commitment of difference feminism generally, at least insofar as it is conceived in opposition to egalitarian or liberal feminism. In my estimation, both proponents and critics of feminisms of difference tend to present inadequately precise versions of sexual difference theses that are difficult to evaluate. Whether or not that characterization is fair—and I will say a bit more about related issues momentarily—it seems hard to deny that highly charged disputes about both the putatively dangerous essentialism of difference feminism and the putatively dangerous universalism of egalitarian feminism routinely presuppose some such thesis to be a fault line in feminist theory.Footnote 33
The Collective says even less about why we should accept the sexual difference thesis. The Milan Women appear to treat the thesis as an assumption that does not require independent argument. Many readers will find this objectionably speculative. Many will contend that the sexual difference claim is, on any plausible interpretation, problematically essentialist. My project here is not to defend the argument of Sexual Difference but to reconstruct it sympathetically. Nonetheless, these are important issues with a vexed history, and some brief remarks seem appropriate.
I've asserted that both proponents and opponents of sexual difference theses struggle to formulate them perspicuously. Some evidence for this claim can be gleaned from the puzzling dialectic surrounding the essentialism charge. The exact character of this decades-long dialogue is a matter of great contention, but the following features of the rhetorical situation appear relevant. It is (mostly) Anglophone writers who accuse continental writers like the Milan Women of essentialism; or at least this is a common perception among Italian feminists. Yet these Italian thinkers routinely dismiss the accusation as unfair and hopelessly confused.Footnote 34 Adriana Cavarero offers a representative statement:
[A]ny Italian feminist espousing the theory of sexual difference, when participating in a meeting with English-speaking feminists, knows that if she does not pronounce the magic word “multiple subjectivity,” she will probably be attacked as an across-the-board antiquated, European, essentialist, metaphysical thinker. (Cavarero Reference Cavarero, Parati and West2002, 89)
These judgments of misunderstanding should be taken seriously. In the spirit of curiosity, I will offer a tentative observation about this confusing dialectic, which I trust will not be interpreted as a defense of any particular sexual difference thesis.Footnote 35
What exactly is the essentialism charge? It is common knowledge that the charge has a “bewildering variety of strands” (Stone Reference Stone2004, 137). Still, here is one prevailing conception of essentialism in this context. Essentialism is the view that there are real essences (that is, essential properties) that distinguish the sexes. These essences might be wholly biologically constituted, or they might be constituted at least in part by social practices, assuming these practices are sufficiently universal. Either way, the belief in real sexed essences is commonly thought to have as a trivial entailment the view that there is a particular property or set of properties that is essential to females and/or women. The perennial concern is that any such necessary conditions for inclusion in the relevant classes will be problematically exclusionary (see Grosz Reference Grosz, Schor and Weed1994, 84; Stone Reference Stone2004, 137–42).
Advocates of sexual difference theses can resist the essentialism charge if it is conceptualized in this way. The claim that males are more disposed to violence than females does not commit one to a real male essence that excludes from the class any individuals who lack a sufficiently violent disposition. Nor does the more ambitious claim that this disposition is grounded in facts about male biology. Similarly, the claim that females are more prone to “blockage” than males does not commit one to a real female essence that includes a sufficiently robust disposition to blockage. The charge that proponents of sexual difference theses are committed to essences rather than sets of nonessential generalizations must, in short, be vindicated rather than assumed.Footnote 36
As a philosophical matter, it is worth considering whether the Milan Women's impressionistic assertions (for example, about the corporeality of thought) commit them to anything more than robust yet contingent generalizations about sexual difference.Footnote 37 This must be distinguished from the interpretive question of whether the Milan Women were, as a matter of psychological fact, adherents of genuinely essentialist theses. What's more, there is no reason to believe that the individual members of the Collective must have agreed about these matters. Consider the following excerpt from the highly suggestive concluding remarks of Sexual Difference: “There were long debates among us to decide if we could, if we should, present the relation of entrustment in the form of a necessary conclusion. No answer satisfied us.” One way to read the work's ambivalent conclusion is as an indication of persistent intra-Collective disputes about various essentialist theses—for example, theses about whether entrustment is a psychological necessity for all women.Footnote 38
We now return to the main thread. To add to the confusion, the Milan Women often interweave the sexual difference thesis with a second claim, one that is related but not identical. I will call this the symbolic placement thesis.
Women lack symbolic placement, according to the Collective. They lack a system for self-interpretation and the development of other autonomous capacities. In one memorable formulation:
Female experience appeared to be a mute body swathed in a cloud of fantasies: a real body in lively, perceptual contact with the real world, but almost altogether lacking the means of symbolic reproduction of itself in relation to that world; human experience given up to the interpretation of others, incapable of self-interpretation. Not knowing how to say it, she prefers to imagine what she is and what she wants. “The symbolic level is precluded to us women.” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 52)
The rich linguistic metaphor could be explored in more detail,Footnote 39 but I take the crux of the point to be something like this. Thought, desire, fantasy, and a great deal of conscious and unconscious mental life are conditioned by elemental symbolic connections. These structures are embedded in myths, in social practices, in natural language and conceptual schemes, and in a host of mental associations inherited via acculturation. Importantly, prevalent symbol systems mediate individual consciousness even as it begins to emerge in early childhood.Footnote 40 In sexist societies, dominant symbolic structures include an array of gendered associations—associations of authority and autonomy with masculinity (God, priests, the father), for example. Women are constrained in attaining freedom in mental life—relatively incapable of accurate self-interpretation, of authentic nonimitative desire, and so on—if the models of subjectivity, authority, autonomy, and excellence are models whose imitation would require them to be something they aren't, that is, male. On this analysis, feelings of blockage are all but inevitable, particularly for women with creative, cultural aspirations—that is, especially for the artists, intellectuals, lawyers, and activists whose experiences comprise the material of Sexual Difference.Footnote 41
Seen in this way, the symbolic placement thesis flows naturally from the conjunction of the sexual difference thesis and plausible historical claims about the pervasiveness of patriarchy.Footnote 42 Freedom in mental life is, by hypothesis, different for women than for men. Yet the ubiquitous governing system of symbolization and meaning-making represents subjectivity in an intrinsically masculine way, models healthy desire on virility, and associates autonomy with masculine figures and traits. Even these formulations do not quite capture the challenging contours of the symbolic placement thesis, however. Masculinity has inserted itself so thoroughly into the foundations of culture that it is presumably hopeless to attempt an encompassing catalogue of its psychic residue.Footnote 43 Lacking symbolic placement, women struggle to understand themselves, struggle to desire authentically, struggle to make their way in society without reticence, apathy, and self-loathing. “Freed from servitude to her anatomical destiny, a woman does not automatically become free, but rather superfluous” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 128). Hence the Collective's provocative contention: the central project of feminism is the construction of a distinctively female symbolic.
The symbolic placement thesis is key to the Collective's diagnosis of female unfreedom. Also crucial is a particular conceptualization of one primary source of this predicament:
The problem of the relationship with the mother assumed a central position. If the female mind remains in the power of the most elemental emotions, if there is an unsurmountable infantilism which disappears only with the intervention of masculine authority or imitating men, it means that something of the ancient relationship with the mother remains unresolved within ourselves. . . . (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 52–53)
The erasure of the mother in patriarchal societies is the primal ground of the lack of symbolic placement for women. The mother should be a young girl's original model of female authority and free female thought. But often she can't be. She is (characteristically) subjugated by men, denied education and liberty, confined within a life of self-abnegating domestic responsibilities, and reduced to her biological capacity for motherhood. The relationship with the mother consequently becomes fraught with conflict, confusion, and ambivalence.
The Collective's third claim, which I will call the symbolic mother thesis, completes its story about women's lack of symbolic placement by generating a proposed remedy. The view is that it is essential for the relation with the symbolic mother (that is, the symbolic source of female vitality) to be re-established. “Women need maternal power if they want free social existence” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 127).Footnote 44 It would be hard to overstate the significance of this lesson for the Milan Women. Luisa Muraro's most famous book, published four years after Sexual Difference, is called The Symbolic Order of the Mother, and contains the following representative observation:
Feminism has produced a profound critique of patriarchy and of the many philosophical, religious, literary, and other complicities supporting its system of dominion. But this massive and accurate labor of critique will be effaced in two or three generations if it does not find its affirmation. Only this affirmation can give back to society, and first of all to women, the symbolic power contained in the female relationship with the mother, which is neutralized by male domination. (Muraro Reference Muraro and Novello2018, 20)
The symbolic mother thesis expresses a putative insight about the practice of feminist politics, one that helps explain why the Milan Women thought entrustment was such a vital step forward. We see these connections illustrated vividly in More Women than Men:
Generally we do not admit of difference and disparity in our groups. . . . But this refusal is also and perhaps fundamentally a reaction to the obliteration of the mother in our society. The relationship between mother and daughter has no form in patriarchal society; it is therefore conflictual and mothers and daughters are both the losers. . . . To recognize that someone like us has “something extra” breaks the rule of male society according to which, once the mother is removed, all women are definitely equal. At the same time it liberates us . . . from a reactive need to feel on a par with our own kind. . . . Every woman had, in her mother, her first love and her first model. (Milan Women Reference Bono and Kemp1991, 122)
The solution to women's predicament—that is, to the feelings of blockage, reticence, inauthenticity, and deficits of self-love that are rooted in a lack of symbolic placement and particularly in a lack of contact with the symbolic mother—is the political practice of a certain kind of intimate relationship. As indicated in the passage above, this relationship cannot be the sort promoted by consciousness-raising (autocoscienza). The practice of consciousness-raising has, according to the Collective, an egalitarian ethos that encourages uncritical acceptance and a flattening of differences.Footnote 45 Although clearly necessary in some contexts, this ethos reveals the “savage” state of women's relations.Footnote 46 It gives rise to a terrible anxiety: “the feeling that every plus one gains in society is gained against or over one's fellow women, that is to say, one's own sex, and therefore oneself” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 146). The practice of entrustment is an attempt to reinvent relations among women so that diversity and disparity become sources of strength rather than threat. It is an attempt to move beyond the solidaristic and egalitarian moral psychology of earlier feminist practice, which the Milan Women experienced as stifling.Footnote 47
The explicitly hierarchical nature of the entrustment relation was the main source of the controversy surrounding Sexual Difference. But what exactly is entrustment supposed to be? Here is what we know. It is an intense relationship between two women, in which one—typically the younger, less free, less accomplished, less secure and dynamic woman—“entrusts herself” to the other. The Collective says little about the practical content of this relation, but it is significant that it never receives a more familiar name. Affidamento is more intimate than most apprenticeships or mentor relations, and less egalitarian than most friendships. We know more about the symbolic content of this relation. Entrustment is an ousting of male authority and a grateful valorization of female excellence. It is a process of reconnecting with the symbolic source of female vitality, the feminine analogue of virility. It is the recognition of a long-forgotten psychological truth: that “to become great or to grow, in every sense of the word, [a woman] needs a woman greater than she is” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 119).Footnote 48
I conclude this section by outlining the goals of the political practice of entrustment in a way that restates the psychological underpinnings of the Collective's difference feminism. First, the practice enables women to contact the symbolic origin of female thought and desire—or, to put it less cryptically, a model of female freedom that is missing in regular social intercourse, and in the formative relationship with the mother. This contact is established via immersive personal engagement with the female “plus,” those capacities whose actualization constitute the distinctively female aspects of free female being. The plus or “something extra” is embodied in a brilliant woman who surpasses expectations and functions as exemplar and guide. Second, the woman who successfully entrusts herself gratefully recognizes the gift she's received. Her gratitude “makes peace” with the symbolic mother, establishing a loving connection with a femaleness that had previously been spurned, inchoately resented, or condescendingly ignored. Gratitude comes to infuse her relations with actual women, and particularly with her actual mother. In place of resentment, confusion, disdain, and other negative emotions, the woman now responds to her mother's impotence with forgiveness, understanding, and acceptance. Third, the woman who entrusts gradually develops a more authentic and vital female symbol. In other words, engaging with and learning from an outstanding woman in a trusting intimate environment strengthens a female-coded (and thus in practice subversive) set of conscious and unconscious associative structures that condition a great deal of mental life, including the production of desire and fantasy. The emergence of a rich female symbol alleviates the anxieties of blockage, which result from a mismatch between female consciousness and a social-psychological world permeated with symbols of male origin.
It should now be clear why the Collective says that it is “more important to have authoritative female interlocutors than to have recognized rights” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 31). This famously controversial statementFootnote 49 expresses the view that the central task of feminism is the construction of productive relations among women, since such relations are an incomparably foundational condition for the propagation of female freedom and self-love. The Milan Women assert that the form of such relations has never been adequately outlined. It has not been inscribed in myths or theologies, modeled in mother–daughter relations, or even sufficiently charted in literature or feminist theory.Footnote 50 Entrustment is the Collective's contribution to this creative project. To paraphrase the representative passage from Ferrante's Frantumaglia that opens this essay: it is only by reconstructing her relationships with women, so that the female difference is exalted, that a woman can learn how to give herself a shape.
II. From Milan to Naples
Readers of The Neapolitan Novels will have already begun to see traces of the Milan Women's central ideas. A full explication of these connections would require a much longer work. This section of the essay will attempt to make explicit some general points of contact between the ideology of the Collective and the basic thematic structure of the novel.Footnote 51 This sets the stage for the more discrete tasks of part 2, where I will provide an analysis of Lila's special status, her strange condition of smarginatura, and her most significant monologue—all of whose import for these issues is easily misunderstood.
The narrative of the Quartet dramatizes the development of Elena Greco (Lenù) and Raffaella Cerullo (Lila) into women as they confront an intensely claustrophobic social environment. The narrative begins in, and revolves around, a small neighborhood of mid-century Naples characterized by poverty, misogyny, and the crony-capitalist stranglehold of the Camorra. The young girls find themselves fighting against prevailing social norms that value women primarily for their contributions to domestic life, and corresponding expectations that they will begin to work before the onset of adolescence. Scholastic excellence in early childhood establishes a special bond between them, which quickly matures into a friendship based on shared intellectual and artistic curiosity. These intellectual gifts and expressive ambitions are framed as unusual. The neighborhood is otherwise depicted as completely devoid of female freedom and exceptional female thought.Footnote 52 Predictably, the precocious girls are subject to merciless attack at the hands of boys and men.Footnote 53
Although both girls are outstanding students, precocious readers, and budding artists, the young Lenù sees Lila as special and different. She is first attracted to her, at the age of six, because Lila is “very bad”: she defies authority and doesn't even seem frightened about it (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, I, 32). Their friendship begins with an emblematic ascent, initiated by Lila in more ways than one: the girls climb the stairs up to the apartment of the villainous loan shark Don Achille (“the ogre of fairy tales”) in search of their lost dolls (I, 27).Footnote 54 Soon Elena relates Lila's defiant confidence to her exceptional abilities, and especially her intellectual power, which is incomparable in the world of the neighborhood: “Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite. . . . Her large, bright eyes could become cracks behind which, before every brilliant response, there was a gaze that appeared not very childlike and perhaps not even human” (I, 48). Elena's response to this otherworldly brilliance is a sui generis blend of appreciation, attachment, and subservient devotion: “The idea began to quietly form that without Lila I would never feel the pleasure of belonging to that exclusive group of the best” (I, 92). “I studied not so much for school as for her” (I, 112). At least from Elena's perspective, then, Lila appears a superior intelligence and a unique model of female greatness. So already their germinating relationship resembles a childhood version of entrustment.Footnote 55
This remains true in adolescence, long after Lila has been forced out of school, forced into work, and all but forced into an early marriage. While working in her father's shoe shop, Lila manages to read more books than the totality of the neighborhood library's other patrons, teach herself Latin and Greek, write works of literature, and reinvent the shoe.Footnote 56 She also advises Elena in the study of Latin and Greek, buys her books, and spurs her to educational achievement. Lila's autodidacticism is astounding, in other words; her insight is profound; her artistry is irrepressible. Elena recognizes Lila's powers and seeks to emulate them, which requires keeping Lila close: “The need for glasses intensified my mania for finding a pattern that, in good as in evil, would bind my fate and hers: I was blind, she a falcon; I had an opaque pupil, she narrowed her eyes, with darting glances that saw more; I clung to her arm, among the shadows, she guided me with a stern gaze.” (I, 257) Later, Lila's childhood novel The Blue Fairy even comes to be acknowledged as the “secret heart” of Elena's successful first novel as an adult.Footnote 57
In part 2 of this work, I will develop an account of Lila's special status for Elena, and in the world of the novel, in far greater detail. Now I turn to a related observation about Lila's magnetism, which is that Elena is attracted to Lila for qualities that make her the antithesis of Elena's mother. In a now famous formulation: “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” (I, 48).
Associated from the beginning with her characteristic limp and her crossed eye, Immacolata Greco hobbles through the narrative like a massive ghost, troubling Elena in ways that at times appear strangely overdramatized and laden with symbolic significance.Footnote 58 Immacolata represents her daughter's fear of a general condition of servitude, and the psychology of shame, repression, and resentment that this condition engenders. If her mother is the nightmare Elena strives at all costs to avoid, Lila is the starkly contrasting vision of a female creative spirit Elena imagines to be possible.
Elena's childhood aversion to Immacolata is especially intense: “I hated my mother, really hated her, profoundly” (I, 69). Significantly, and unlike Elena's father, Immacolata opposes her daughter's continued studies, viewing them as a diversion from her inevitable social role. This initial lack of support stimulates Elena's budding feminist consciousness, with its mixture of insight and confusion: “I envied Lila that brother who was so solid, and sometimes I thought that the real difference between her and me was that I had only little brothers, and so no one with the power to encourage me and support me against my mother, freeing my mind” (I, 116).Footnote 59 Even into young adulthood, Elena's overwhelming fear of mediocrity and subjugation finds expression in the terror of becoming her mother: “Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny?” (II, 48).
As she ages, however, the relationship becomes more complex and ambivalent.Footnote 60 Eventually the women appear to share a kind of affectionate reconciliation—though even that timid formulation is unhelpfully definitive. The nuanced trajectory here entrances readers and invigorates critics.Footnote 61 For now it will suffice to compare two passages. The first is a cutting public criticism of Elena by her sister-in-law Mariarosa, who lives in Milan and is the novel's most explicit representative of radical feminism: “Without asking my permission, she told the story of the fight I had had with my mother in Florence . . . she theorized that a woman without love for her origins is lost” (IV, 103–4). This remark from Mariarosa expresses a sincere word of warning from the author. Elena Greco's enthusiasm for crossing boundaries—for surpassing her mother, the neighborhood, Naples—is laudable. Her achievements are real. But the disposition to flee also reveals her most characteristic flaw, which is a deficit of gratitude. As I will argue in part 2 of this work, Lila is Elena's foil at least in this regard: her life's work is not to escape her origins, but instead to lovingly reconstruct them.
The second passage is a confession from Elena herself as Immacolata is dying: “But mostly it was in those slow hours that I truly felt I was her favorite child. When she embraced me before I left, it was as if she meant to slip inside me and stay there, as once I had been inside her. That contact with her body, which had irritated me when she was healthy, I now liked” (IV, 208). Genuine growth in the relationship, restored affection, and some forms of restitution—Lila says, “You invented that limp in order not to let your mother die completely, and now you really do limp” (IV, 369)—coexist with the continual distortions of Elena's ego. Elena's sense of superiority appears integral to the relationship's evolution (“I truly felt I was her favorite child”). The moral character of this final acceptance is thus hazy and disconcerting.Footnote 62
My larger point is that the difficulties of the mother–daughter relationship are consistently emphasized, mysteriously framed, and juxtaposed with the potentialities of the Lila–Elena relationship. The fraught maturation of Elena's bond with Immacolata recalls the Milan Women's idea that the development of female freedom via entrustment will, in the ideal case, eventuate in a grateful restoration of ties with the symbolic mother—which transforms relations with the actual mother, and indeed all women.Footnote 63
The relationship between Elena and Lila is more vexed than the entrustment relationship is supposed to be, at least according to its optimistic representation in Sexual Difference. Part of the explanation is that the girls are contemporaries and best friends.Footnote 64 Lila's fantastic character and exploits do not stimulate in Lenù an unmitigated gratitude for their relationship and concomitant autonomous development.Footnote 65 On the contrary, the friendship is an emotionally charged and fiercely competitive struggle, with ambiguous relations to Lenù's developing agency. As she moves into adolescence, her idolization of Lila prompts anxiety, self-loathing, jealousy, obsessive desires to achieve, and pathological (masculinized) fantasies of self-sufficiency:
It occurred to me that if Lila had taken out just a single book a year, on that book she would have left her imprint and the teacher would have felt it the moment she returned it, while I left no mark, I embodied only the persistence with which I added volume to volume in no particular order. (I, 187)
Of course, I said to myself, the essay on Dido is mine, the capacity to formulate beautiful sentences comes from me; but didn't I work it out with her, didn't we excite each other in turn, didn't my passion grow in the warmth of hers? And that idea of the city without love, which the teachers liked so much, hadn't it come to me from Lila . . . I began to expect new praise that would prove my autonomous virtuosity. (I, 189)
By dramatizing the special problem of entrustment—or, as we might alternatively put it, hierarchical friendship—in some of the most vulnerable periods of human development, Ferrante complicates and deepens the interest of the Collective's suggestions about the shape of liberating relations among women.Footnote 66 One main aim of this treatment appears to be an exploration of the special dangers of competitiveness in women's relations. It is in narrativizing the connections between unhealthy competition and negative emotions such as anxiety, self-loathing, jealousy, resentment, vindictiveness, reticence, isolation, and self-deception that the novel is at its most psychologically incisive. And it is in suggesting that a certain kind of competitive spirit is complicit with oppressive, instrumentalizing regimes that the novel is at its most provocative and philosophical.Footnote 67
Elena's ambiguous development as a moral agent complicates our reactions to her evident successes in adulthood and confirms the centrality of these themes in the overall conception of The Neapolitan Novels. She excels in school, leaves her neighborhood and Naples to attend university, marries the son of a distinguished and powerful intellectual, becomes a famous novelist and feminist writer, and in general succeeds in unheard of ways for a woman with her origins. Yet throughout her life she is haunted by a vision of Lila's intellectual and artistic superiority—just as she is haunted by the specter of Lila's passionate and doomed adolescent affair with Elena's other obsessive love object, the unforgettable Nino Sarratore. These anxieties cohabit with an enduring love for Lila and a sense of their connection that borders on the uncanny:
Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when I followed her and meanwhile stayed close on my heels in order to pass me by? I tried not to see her for a while, I was angry. . . . Maybe I should erase Lila from myself like a drawing from the blackboard. . . . (I, 141–42)
I was added to her, and I felt mutilated as soon as I removed myself. Not an idea, without Lila. Not a thought I trusted, without the support of her thoughts. . . . (II, 282)
Every word of Lila's diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine. . . . And yet every page ignited my thoughts . . . as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor. Those notebooks I memorized. . . . Every past effort of mine seemed without meaning. I was frightened, for months school went badly. I was alone. . . . (II, 401)
Elena's achievements are, to summarize, routinely undercut by self-doubt, paranoia, and feelings of inauthenticity that resemble the blockage the Collective viewed as symptomatic of women's agential predicament. And Lila is at the core of these feelings. As much as Elena's early development seems dependent on Lila's model and encouragement, Elena's development as a self-determining woman seems (at least to her) encumbered by their attachment. Even after achieving the fame and esteem she has dreamed of since childhood, the narrator cannot shake her sense that she is nothing but a shadow of her brilliant friend:
I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her. (III, 346–47)
This dynamic is damagingly mirrored in Elena's sexual and romantic life. Though she is less transparent with herself about Lila's imprint here, the reader is aware that her sexual psyche is dominated by a decades-long obsession with Nino—whose character she blindly and stubbornly misjudgesFootnote 68—and an eventual relationship with him that is characterized by extremes of self-deception and emotional subjugation. The power of this attachment derives from her unhealthy rivalry with Lila, and from a strange conviction that Nino can function as Lila's replacement. The climax of the Elena–Nino relationship is a passionate affair in which Nino manipulates the narrator into a state of fragility and servitude that makes a mockery of her own values and leaves her shattered:
Although I now wrote about women's autonomy and discussed it everywhere, I didn't know how to live without his body, his voice, his intelligence. It was terrible to confess it, but I still wanted him, I loved him more than my own daughters. At the idea of hurting him and of no longer seeing him I withered painfully, the free and educated woman lost her petals, separated from the woman-mother, and the woman-mother was disconnected from the woman-lover, and the woman-lover from the furious whore, and we all seemed on the point of flying off in different directions . . . with Lila set aside, I didn't know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself . . . I was a pile of debris. (IV, 99–100).Footnote 69
The complex fixation on Lila that is so integral to Elena's personality conditions her long, disappointing relationship with Nino, and hence her related (almost uniformly disappointing) relationships with other men—from Donato Sarratore to Pietro Airota.Footnote 70 It also constrains other potential sources of meaning in her life. Most obviously, her daughters suffer greatly because of their mother's complex love-myopia. After a traumatic break with her husband Pietro and a long period of familial volatility caused by the affair with Nino, Elena moves back to Naples with her girls, and eventually settles into an apartment in the old neighborhood directly above Lila's. The arrangement permits Elena to travel and devote herself to work while Lila acts as surrogate mother to her daughters—a role Lila fulfills even while running her own highly successful business. Though our narrator has in this late stage of the work ostensibly taken responsibility for her family and effected a reconciliation with her origins, she has in fact passed much of the domestic responsibility on to Lila and other women, neglected the emotional care of her children, and sunk deeper into a toxic dependence on literary fame. As her eldest child Dede says in a devastating final conversation before moving abroad: “It's impossible to have a real relationship with you, the only things that count are work and Aunt Lila; there's nothing that's not swallowed up inside them . . . ” (IV, 418).Footnote 71
Even Lenù's potential happiness as a creative artist suffers a similar fate. In her golden years, she is beset by seemingly inexplicable fantasies about Lila—about her motivations and internal states, her apparently dormant yet inevitable artistic genius, her capacity to change the world and “reduce” our narrator “to nothing.” At the conclusion of the work, we observe the highly accomplished Elena Greco sinking deeper into a pettiness and solipsism whose viciousness she fails to comprehend:
My old uncertainties gained strength. I increasingly doubted the quality of my works. Lila's hypothetical text, in parallel, assumed an unforeseen value . . . it was transformed into a completed work and so into a possible touchstone. I was surprised to ask myself: and if sooner or later a story much better than mine emerges from her files? If I have never, in fact, written a memorable novel and she, she, on the other hand, has been writing and rewriting one for years? . . . My entire life would be reduced merely to a petty battle to change my social class. (IV, 458–59)
I have already noted how the architecture of The Neapolitan Novels reinforces the centrality of this projection. The language of the prologue makes clear that Elena Greco's literary project is both an attempt to re-establish contact with Lila and an attempt to “win” in their lifelong competition (I, 23).Footnote 72
In these ways Ferrante's novel can be seen as a nuanced exploration of the kind of transformative relationships between women that are at the heart of the political project of the Milan Women's difference feminism. The Quartet suggests that such relationships are just as important as they were taken to be by the Collective. Something that at least resembles an entrustment relationship is the central interpersonal connection in the lives of Ferrante's two remarkable female protagonists. The friendship outlasts all their romantic relationships—heterosexual relationships that, apart from the special (and underexplored) case of Lila–Enzo,Footnote 73 seem largely detrimental to the women's flourishing. Its intensity overwhelms the intensity of familial relationships. It is valorized, notwithstanding its difficult periods of distance and vengefulness, as the focal point of an epic narrative—whose main acknowledged purpose is to force Lila to reappear (that is, to preserve or revive the friendship). But the work also diagnoses, in painstaking and brutally honest detail, the psychological obstacles to establishing and maintaining transformative female relationships that are grounded in an appreciation of excellence. In particular, Elena's lifelong struggle in developing as an autonomous and loving being is always to some degree a struggle to detach herself from Lila: to overcome feelings of intellectual, artistic, and sexual inferiority; to develop desires and projects that are authentically her own; to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships that are not simulacra of their friendship.Footnote 74
Conclusion of Part 1
Part 1 of this essay has had several aims. I conclude by summarizing the two most general ones. The first aim has been to introduce English-language readers of feminist theory and moral psychology to an underappreciated voice in the continental feminist tradition. The work of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective is stimulating and historically significant. Suitably excerpted, it would be a useful addition to university courses on feminist theory, and to anthologies of feminist philosophy—especially given the paucity of attention normally paid to difference feminism, and the difficulty of the works (most notably Irigaray's) normally associated with this tradition. Connections between the concerns of the Milan Women and the concerns of more familiar works in the canon of critical writing on autonomy seem particularly ripe for exploration.Footnote 75
My second aim was to begin constructing an interpretation of The Neapolitan Novels by using the ideas of the Collective as a point of departure. I have tried to pursue this project without overstating these connections. But I will add a final cautionary note. No great artwork is primarily a dramatization of someone else's philosophical ideas. Elena Ferrante's great novel is, on my reading, heavily indebted to Italian difference feminism, and to the ideas of the Milan Women. Nonetheless, it is in the first instance a work of literature, many of whose literary merits I have been discussing only indirectly. Even when we restrict our focus to its feminist ideas, the work bears a satisfyingly ambivalent relation to the work of its symbolic mothers from Milan. Indeed, I have indicated that the moral psychology of the novel is in many respects more nuanced and compelling than that of Sexual Difference. A more thorough vindication of that perspective will, I hope, contribute to an evolving appreciation of the riches of the Quartet, which in my estimation should be admired as a milestone in the history of the philosophical novel.
Acknowledgments
For helpful discussions of this material, I would like to thank Giorgia Alù, Jonathan Baskin, David Bronstein, David Collins, Helen Deutsch, Nate Gadd, Moira Gatens, Yarran Hominh, Rebekah Johnston, Sherry Marks, Dalia Nassar, Luke Russell, William Shpall, Caroline West, Andrea Westlund, Daniel Wodak, Lorenzo Zucca, and two reviewers for Hypatia. I am especially grateful to Taylor Markey and Natalie Stoljar for their support of the project, to Lily Patchett for her insightful and enthusiastic research assistance, and to Benedetta Magoga for her help with translations from Italian.
Sam Shpall is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He writes on a range of topics in ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of art. sam.shpall@sydney.edu.au
