You might have noticed that I did not publish a newsletter last week. For the foreseeable future, I’m shifting to a biweekly schedule so that I have a bit more time to write longer explorations of themes.
The first time I read Elena Ferrante’s first novel The Days of Abandonment, I fucking hated it. Specifically I hated the fact that Olga, the narrator and protagonist, seems to be trapped by her performance of womanhood and also wholly uninterested in finding a way out. In fact, what she seems interested in is allowing herself to be victimized by her gender.
So much of Ferrante’s work deals with how we inherit and perform gender. Days follows Olga in the days after her husband has left her for another woman. Olga loses her mind, in large part because the tools she has to deal with what’s happened to her, all rooted in a prescribed performance of womanhood, are totally inadequate for dealing with the actual reality of what has happened to her. She can use them to deal with the symptoms, but not the causes, of her despair. She sinks herself into a pit of petty jealousy, unwilling to look inside herself to understand why exactly her husband’s leaving has been so world-shattering (I understand this to be a world-shattering event for everyone it happens to, but the reasons for experiencing that way must necessarily vary, just as the reasons for getting married in the first place do). She dismisses her husband’s lover as a whore while also comparing herself physically to her. She takes solace in the fact that she’s given her husband children — that she’s a real woman — but the comfort these often theatrically exaggerated attempts at mental one-upmanship bring her is short-lived. When she realizes she’ll need a job, for example, she remembers — and regrets — the career she gave up to raise her kids.
For Olga, womanhood is a cage inside of which she’s locked with her anguish and despair. The only ways she can see out are false escape hatches. She attempts and fails to seduce her neighbor to restore her belief in her own attractiveness; she vilifies and even physically attacks her husband and his lover. It all makes her feel worse, and it all keeps her from dealing with what’s really going on: her husband is in love with someone else, the rug has been pulled out from under her, she will need to start a new life. Eventually she pushes her despair down far enough to forget it.
Ferrante passes her concern with the performance of womanhood to Lenù, the narrator of the Neapolitan novels, who eventually writes a whole treatise on the topic. Lenú wants to think her way out of the cage — traditional gender roles have failed to satisfy her thus far; she needs a way to justify leaving her children and husband to be with her childhood love and irredeemable piece of shit Nino Sarratore — but struggles to bring herself to act.
I’m almost done reading the Neapolitan novels. The deeper I’ve gotten into the series the more frequently I find myself in awe that any of us are functioning human beings, when we spend the majority of our formative years inheriting stultifying lessons in performing our gender and then the rest of our lives engaging in that performance with varying degrees of begrudgement, inflicting varying degrees of psychic and interpersonal damage, or else figuring out ways to stop performing.
Maybe because I’m reading these novels I’m also seeing their themes everywhere, so when I watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, Alana seems to me similarly trapped by her gender, and in this case all she wants to do is act, not think.
Men want stuff from her — validation, attention, adulation, blowjobs, obedience — and each time one of them lightly cons her into giving him whatever-it-is, she thinks this is it, finally, I have it, the thing I wanted (true love, glamour, an older man’s undivided attention — he thinks I look like Grace Kelly!) is here, except no. In the end she’s always been drafted into a situation to serve as decoration or to clean up a mess she didn’t even make. Her tools are also inadequate. Even actively participating in her own objectification, which seems like the ultimate hack out of all-encompassing sexism, leaves her stranded and alone (no spoilers).
Last Saturday I was standing on the Church Avenue F platform when I noticed a girl — she can’t have been more than 18 — taking her earbuds out to react to a guy who was talking to her from pretty up close. He was much taller than her and leaning forward and down. For a second I thought maybe they were friends who happened to bump into each other, but there was something uncomfortable in the way she was laughing and stretching her arms out in front of her, filling the space between them with sound and body parts. I paused the music in my own earbuds (Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers) and walked fast down the platform — the train doors had just opened — so I could get in the same car as her.
I wasn’t trying to play the hero, but I was also thinking somewhere in the back of my mind about all the times some guy had been in my face or otherwise gross to me while I was riding public transport and how every time I thought to myself, I can’t believe all these people are just watching this happen.
I got in the train car and sat a few feet down the bench from her, and when the doors closed the guy stood in front of me, his hand on the metal bar above our heads, pointed a single finger at my face and said to me “will you tell her that she’s beautiful?” as that same finger traced a line in the air from my nose to the girl, who was looking down at her feet. “I told you you’re beautiful!” he said to her, complaining that she wasn’t listening to him, and I knew for sure she wasn’t doing great when, on hearing that, she claimed that she hadn’t heard him because she’d been preoccupied trying to keep her feet warm. “They’re so cold!” she said, trying to laugh him off, but he wasn’t going away.
I said something to the guy about how we were all just trying to get to where we were going, then kept repeating it as his voice got louder and his declarations more vile, kept repeating it as he took his attention off the girl and trained it on me, until he backed off into the seat across the car from me and the girl and eventually fell asleep.
I’ve thought about the girl looking at her feet, reaching for her ankles in a “brrr!”-ing pantomime, for days. Talk about an inadequate tool. I saw myself at her age, pretending that my head had started hurting when a guy ten years older than me insisted I give him a blowjob, hoping the boundary I was setting, softer and therefore less likely to anger him than a straight “no,” would make him see me as human again and, as a result, make him stop. You get headaches, too, don’t you? I only knew what to do in that train car because I’d experienced my own inadequate tools failing. I knew they hadn’t worked. I also know they’ll never work.