Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment explores Olga’s grief and identity fracture after her husband’s departure, with a critique by Abhignya, exclusively for Different Truths.
Certain books are grim, draining, and awkward. But those are the ones we remember best. Italian author Elena Ferrante’s “unsentimental and unyielding depiction of motherhood, marriage, and solitude” (as advertised on the blurb, published by Europa Editions in 2005, translated by Ann Goldstein) is, simply put, a difficult, stubborn book. It is the harrowing tale of a thirty-eight-year-old woman as she tries to navigate her newly changed reality. Olga is an unemployed mother of two, suddenly abandoned by her husband of fifteen years.
The novel opens so with the jarring lines: “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me”; Ferrante does not like to meander. Thus begins the mad undoing of the protagonist’s life. She is unable to accept her husband’s leaving and learns to cope by indulging in several unhealthy mannerisms (including self-harm; she claims to be gripped by a “black mania for destruction”).
Confrontation and Catharsis
She forgets to pay her bills, cook for the children, lock the door, set the coffee etc. She realises one time that she has left the gas on (“the blue flame had remained discreetly lighted, shining all night like a crown of fire on the metal of the store, a sign of lunacy…”). She even thinks of abandoning her children like Mario abandoned her and how it could become a potential scene of confrontation and catharsis:
“…I really wanted to abandon them forever, forget about them, so that when Mario finally showed up again, I could strike my forehead and exclaim: your children? I don’t know. I seem to have lost them: the last time I saw them was a month ago, in the gardens of Citadella.”
She begins to obsessively pen down her thoughts; these materialise as hundreds of letters to her husband, Mario, “a man of quiet feelings” (somewhat afraid of confrontation). She beats him up, tears his clothes as she spots him in public once. She expresses frustration over the loss-how is it that she has no agency in the event of being forsaken, discarded like an old sock:
“I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go aside with his. At every crisis of despair, I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, his hours, so that he could concentrate. I had taken care of the house, taken care of the meals, taken care of the children, I had taken care of the boring details of everyday life, while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our underprivileged beginnings. And now, he had left me, carrying off abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become.”
Poverella Fixation
She constantly fixates on the figure of Poverella (poor woman, in translation), a woman she knew as a child who lost herself in the event of her husband having eloped. The poverella was once a cheerful, functional woman who eventually disintegrated to be a weeping, self-hating body of pity. Olga is determined to not be the poverella and yet she finds herself acting like her. She even hallucinates the poverella into existence. Another spectral presence in the book is Olga’s dead mother who (quietly, from the realm of the non-living) berates her daughter for having failed as a wife (she has thus not performed femininity well, a disgrace).
Why is it that the author chooses to taint Olga’s childhood with the presence of these women who only serve to make life more stifling for her? And why is it that women are often caught playing agents of patriarchy? She nevertheless had attempted to acquire the reigns of a career; she’d wished to be a writer. She compares herself to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina who numbly stood before the train that was to take her life.
When Olga watches herself in the side panels of her bathroom mirror (multiple/schism images), she is unable to accord herself one, stable identity. Her children too are confused and pained: who, after all, is their mother? They act in defence and rage, shouting, hitting, and sulking. Olga notes with bitterness that “if the child needed me, I felt no need of her.” The children idealise their (absent/visiting/absent again) father and his new youthful partner.
Olga Bleeds
It is Olga’s daughter Ilaria who seems to help her return to reality (in effective but unsafe ways). She has been instructed to graze her mother’s thigh with a paper cutter when she is unable to function. When asked how she was to decide if Olga is distracted and she would need to use the cutter, she is told that “a distracted person is a person who no longer smells odours, doesn’t hear words, doesn’t feel anything”, and suffers from “overtones of unreality”. So, Olga has been feeling dissociated often; she rarely returns to the reality of psychosomatic aches and pains (her stomach ache never really leaves her). Ilaria does give her mother a bad cut, Olga bleeds physically and metaphorically.
Their dog too dies because Olga is unable to operate the new lock on their place to reach the vet (the son is sick too, but the doctor cannot be called as the telephone bills aren’t paid). Desperate times, yes, but the protagonist is unable to ground herself in the present; she keenly applies makeup as her son throws up in the backdrop. As the dog lay dying (perhaps poisoned by a dog-hater in the park, perhaps having ingested the insecticide Olga left out), Ferrante writes: “How unbearable the body of a living being who fights with death, and now seems to win, and now to lose.” In the defeated entity of the dog, Olga perhaps locates herself. After many an episode of emotional dysregulation, she seems to have reached a point close to reality. Friends help; they try to set her up with other single people (she does not approve, does not refuse). She reflects on her “days of abandonment” with better clarity as time passes. Earlier her thoughts were coloured by regret, delusion, self-centeredness, and resentment:
“It seemed to me an action so unjust, a behaviour so offensive, that I couldn’t believe it, and sometimes I thought his mind had been obscured, he had lost the memory of us, was helpless and at risk, and it seemed to me that I loved him as I had never loved him, with anxiety, rather than passion, and I thought he had a pressing need for me.”
Pursuing her Dream
Towards the end of the book, Olga learns to view herself only as a part of the narrative. She learns to employ “the thread of light-heartedness” that “kept at bay the reflux of desperation” She understands, to a certain degree, that there is meaning to life, still. In her youth, she was “shamelessly certain” that she could fashion herself into a “memorable person”. She decides she can still pursue her dream. She confesses that she’s been falling off a precipice and now seems to want to do better. Her older, one-time lover Carrano is with her and Ferrante hints to the reader that a quietly beautiful friendship is beginning to be conceived. Olga’s story thus, culminates in hope.
What is it about this endearing text? It is a story that brings to the fore a complex, ugly version of womanhood; we wouldn’t want to be Olga (or anyone else in Ferrante’s novel). The structure of the novel is not linear, it is at times, tedious to keep up with the timeline. Despair, loneliness, and fragmentation (existential and physical) seem to be central to the universe of the novel; reading it causes a sensation akin to claustrophobia. The book is an almost clinical, human depiction of the state of fallibility (using psychological realism, stream of consciousness, and disturbing imagery). It discusses the various ways in which the female psyche is rendered vulnerable and how it is conditioned by (patriarchal) culture.
Damage to Identity
Ferrante speaks of damage to identity but also warns the reader of the harms of becoming Olga or the poverella; a moment of rupture awaits us all, and we ought not to be caught off-guard. Like Plath’s protagonist in The Bell Jar, women will always have many conflicting choices; like in Victoria’s dream, all the figs will shrivel and fall off because to choose one means to reject the rest. I, for instance, often think of how life would have turned out if I had not moved out of my hometown. The Days of Abandonment reminds one of Greek author Ottessa Mosfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Stories that deal with mental ill-health are often able to wonderfully encapsulate female rage and resilience. This text will(hopefully) make one mull over:
1) the institution of marriage. How is it, in the novel, that fifteen years of togetherness cannot even lead to a clean parting? Love, friendship, abuse, tenderness, disregard, and marriage can co-exist.
2) the ways children learn to deal with upheaval (Estha and Rahel in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, for instance). For no fault of theirs, Olga and Mario’s children find themselves in a dysfunctional setting. They become pseudo-adults and try to exert control over their rather erratic life.
3) grief. Through the course of the novel, Olga expresses disbelief, anger, and sadness, bargains to undo the loss, and finally, seemingly, accepts the new state of affairs. How do we grieve? For how long can we grieve? Is it embarrassing? And does grief ever leave us?
and perhaps most pertinently,
4) the feminine self. How does a woman act her gender?
Elena Ferrante’s own secret identity (she uses a pseudonym and only occasionally sends emails via the publisher for interviews) is an interesting phenomenon and deserves more discussion and attention. She rejects the trappings of the authorial persona and the fame that comes with writing bestselling books. Would her stories be interpreted differently if we knew of her biography?
Like her characters, her own identity as a writer is constructed; it appears that she derives great pleasure in this play (think of how Freud describes the child-like writer in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming)! Ferrante’s book survives without its maker; we invest solely in the story. As we engage with the tale of Olga’s collapse, we acknowledge that recovery is not free of lapses. We fail; we regress – but we ought to forgive ourselves.
Picture by the reviewer
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