Donna Ferrante's Library: Resonance of the Classics in the Neapolitan Novels (original) (raw)

Chapter II: The 'Genius Friend' and the Genius (Loci)…………………………………………….54 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………110 Bibliography.………………………………………………………………………………………114 Pietro, Elena opens her own publishing house and moves to Turin. In Turin she writes the short story "Un'amicizia." It is probably because of this book that Lila stops answering her phone calls and then disappears completely. At the very end of the novel, the two dolls that Lila and Elena played with as kids, come back. Someone sends in fact old Elena, in Turin, a packet containing the two dolls. My first chapter, "The Feminine Founding myth: Ariadne, Dido, Medea" is a close reading from Frantumaglia's chapter "Le Città". There, Ferrante talks at length about the possible founding of a feminine city or a women's community. The Classical myths of Ariadne, Dido and Medea come alive in order to indicate the winning models of women (and heroines) in literature. For instance, when a woman can dominate space in a fashion akin to that of Ariadne, she succeeds. In general, however, for Ferrante, cities without love cannot subsist and thrive. This is something that comes back in Lila's words in My Brilliant Friend. 11 My interpretation of this sentence owes a debt to Franco Gallippi's article "Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend: In Search of Parthenope and the 'Founding' of a New City." 12 In his writing Gallippi posits that in the Neapolitan Novels 13 Lila has the project of founding a new city, which would be connected to the need for a change in the style adopted when writing of Naples. The concept of the city without love is rooted, for Gallippi, in Serao's Leggende Napoletane. Moreover, he sees Lila as the siren Parthenope and confirms this identification through a description of the myth by Serao. All in all, my interpretation holds similarities to Gallippi's, but we have very different approaches and conclusions. Importantly, his analysis does not encompass the fourth book of 11 La Frantumaglia, 72. "La città senza amore è una città ingiusta e crudele." Frantumaglia, 77. "The city without love is an unjust and cruel city." L'amica geniale, 156. "Se non c'è amore, non solo inaridisce la vita delle persone, ma quella delle città." My Brilliant Friend, 160. "When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities." 12 Gallippi in Russo Bullaro, Love, 101-128. 13 His identification of the Neapolitan Novels with My Brilliant Friend is inaccurate, because it is based on the Italian equivalent L'Amica geniale, title of the first book of the series as well as cumulative title for the whole tetralogy. Moreover, his analysis focuses on only three of the four books Ferrante wrote. representation of both. For this, the concept of heroization is key. I compare this Hellenistic (and then Roman) phenomenon to that of smarginatura by Ferrante. This notion will also come back at the end of my thesis, when I elaborate on the penates. All of the aforementioned Classical elements should convey the sense of Lila as a genius in the Roman sense, having, among other things, all the appropriate religious paraphernalia. Lila has a sort of lararium 17 for herself and, at the end of the story, she leaves behind two dolls which, I posit, could be seen as penates. The penates are connected to the founding of Rome in the Aeneid and so I maintain that the dolls, in the series, might have a similar meaning. Through intertextual comparisons from the Aeneid, the Neapolitan Novels and Graves' Greek Myths I finally show that these statuettes, or dolls, have the task of strengthening Elena's will to "found a new city", whichever this city might be. "Le Città" quotes the version of Ariadne's myth at Amathus from Graves' Greek Myths. Looking closely at the text, I have found out that Graves references two statuettes that Theseus employs in the process of heroization of Ariadne, creating a cult of her person at the site where she died. Furthermore, according to Graves, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra owned two dolls as children and brought them wherever they went. I believe these references are not casual, because they come from a locus of Graves' text that Ferrante cites explicitly. Through this explanation, I attempt to elucidate that Lila underwent some sort of heroization and that the two dolls might be seen in this context as the statuettes of the dead ancestors, reconfirming in the survivors the will to 'found a new city', one that, following Ferrante's suggestions, is capable of hosting love.