“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”- Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence
I love reading about women. I love seeing shows about women. And most importantly, I love seeing complex and nuanced female characters who cannot be put into stereotypical boxes in order to ease up our society’s limited understanding of the female gender.
I want to see controversial women, annoying women, toxic women. I want to see them just as we’re given complex, kind of toxic, but somewhat redeemable male characters that we end up rooting for (I’m looking at you, Tony Stark). Yet somehow, female characters have often been categorized as ‘The Cool Girl’ or ‘The Smart Girl’ or ‘The Girly Girl’, because there is no way women can be smart AND beautiful, right?
Now that I’m done with barely scratching the surface of one of Hollywood’s main problems with having well developed female characters, not even mentioning the hatred that such characters get because ‘she’s too bossy’ or ‘too something’ because we can never just let women be and must always criticise them for something, I must recommend a show. In fact, I recommend the books first, because at heart I am a bookworm first.
‘My brilliant friend’ by Elena Ferrante is a series everyone should read. And I mean it…everyone. Probably not everyone will get it, but it still is a magnificent testament of this woman’s writing prowess and one of the best social commentaries I have ever had the honour of reading/watching on HBO (first three seasons are already out, go check them out).
I could talk all day about these books, but I will concentrate my post on the protagonist, Elena Greco. Spoilers up ahead; don’t forget, you have been warned.
As an ambitious woman who has always put great value on her education but who’s also a vapid people pleaser, I strongly resonated with her. And nothing broke my heart more than her story in the 3rd instalment, ‘Those who go and those who stay’.
The first two books follow Elena as she tries to escape the poverty and vile mess that is her hometown of Naples. She is somewhat more privileged that her friend Lila; her parents allow her to continue studying. She is enamoured by books and the overwhelming pressure to be the best. Not only because of her own internal ambitions and will to prove that she can make something of herself, but also because the condition that her father imposes on her when he agrees to keep her in school instead of making her stay home to help her mother like most girls her age were supposed to. She needed to be the best.
After long struggling with her own ineptitude and shortcomings and nights of restlessness, she finishes college. From then on, her own limited privilege comes to an end. There is nowhere higher for her to go. At least not alone. She wishes to become a college professor. Such is not feasible for a woman of her background. The best she could do is teach in her filthy hometown that she desperately wants to escape.
That’s where her future husband Pietro comes in. He is sweet, affectionate, very awkward and most importantly, the son of important people. Elena manages to get her first book published not only because of her undeniable talents that she has a constant habit of always diminishing, but because of powerful connections that she makes. In fact, we never know how much of her success is attributed to her and how much to the help she receives on the way.
Lila, her best friend who is stuck all her life in Naples despite her stunning intellect and wasted potential might have been even bigger than Elena. But she was never one that people liked and jumped to offer help to. Naturally, she is left being in the of neighbourhood full of loan sharks and messy crimes.
Compared to her, Elena is having a wonderful life with university professor Pietro Airota that she marries. His mother has helped her publish a book and gotten her a job at a local newspaper. So what if she cannot teach? Her former classmates were being domestically abused on the daily, while she had a fancy house and great connections.
And yet she is only as secure as the man next to her allows her to be. She is only a published author as long as his mother encourages her and only has the luxury of a life in a new apartment as long as her husband can pay for it. She is miles away from Naples and yet she cannot escape her fate.
Her husband ends up belittling her. He wanted a smart woman for show, but a submissive wife at home. Meanwhile she wanted a smart man thinking he would be better to her than the men back in her neighbourhood had been. When he hits her for the first time, she isn’t hurt by the gesture itself, she says she had been physically abused by men her entire life, she is merely surprised to see such an educated young man of such fine upbringing do something like that.
Reading the chapters of her slowly decaying in her tedious marriage where she had to deal with household chores all day because her dear husband didn’t want to lift a finger was agonising. He insisted to not use protection after their wedding despite the fact that she explicitly said she wanted to focus on her career a bit more before having kids. She wanted to get out of Naples so badly she agreed to marry him despite that mishap. After insisting he wanted kids straight away, he does absolutely nothing for them, so Elena ends up resenting her daughters and neglecting them as they have stood in front of her continuing to have a great writing career.
Thing do end up changing for her when she runs into her former crush, Nino. Incidentally, the new changes in her life and her ending up publishing her second book are also due to a man’s influence upon her. Had Nino not come along she would have never left her husband. Where could she have gone alone? Besides, she needed another man to point out how complacent she had become in her marriage because she is either unwilling to acknowledge it, either unwilling to change anything about it in fear of losing the social status she has gained.
You would think that after Nino pushes her to further pursue writing she would do better? Certainly, she wouldn’t end up in the same dead-end relationship she had with Pietro? Certainly, Nino wasn’t all talk and he surely was ‘not like other men’ and actually respected her intelligence? Surprisingly, but not quite, he ends up treating her much worse than Pietro did. You end up with the conclusion that maybe she would have been better off with her husband. She wouldn’t have; she was doomed either way.
The tragedy of her character is also the tragedy of all female characters in the series; their lives are always dominated by the men around them and no matter what decisions they might take they are never independent of themselves.
Elena finds herself single at 40 with three daughters doomed to have the same fate as her, just as she ended up having the same fate as her mother’s.
Her mother’s limp and her emotional abuse have haunted her almost her entire life and she has done everything in her power to not end up like her. In reality, the tumultuous relationship she has had with her mother does not save her from her mother’s doomed fate as a woman living in a patriarchal society.
She eventually manages to take off as a writer after her life has stopped being defined by the men around her. Or so she thinks. In the wake of her divorce and her split from Nino, she is left to her own resources to move back to Naples where her daughters suffer greatly from being brought up in the toxic environment that she was. The fact that by now she is so enamoured with her writing since she hasn’t had the time in her youth, nor a partner to help her pick up the domestic chores. She is now doomed to have a worse than average relationship with her daughters.
The girls grow up to be rude and insolent and their only salvation is the fact that Pietro eventually takes them to the States for college. Their fate is once again being determined by the male presence in their lives, just as Elena’s has always been.
Elena is finally left alone, now a relatively successful author, with the same insecurities about her own talents. Her life seems wasted away. She has been a horrible mother; her children are now across the world and only call from time to time and her achievements now seem insignificant. The battle of career versus motherhood has taken over her life.
It feels quite discontenting that after all her hard work and academic achievement, at the end of everything it all seems to have mattered very little. Both Pietro and Nino however and rich successful men and have been all their lives no matter what happened to the women they screwed over. Nino doesn’t even acknowledge the daughter he has with Elena, nor the other children he has had over the years in his various romantic and sexual escapades. Pietro does eventually become a present father but only after the divorce. It’s much easier to swoop in and be the good parent when you can leave any time. Neither of the two men has had the parental difficulties that Elena had to take up. They both are allowed to continue with their success without it impending their children’s perception of them.
Similarly, Elena’s preferred parent is clearly her father as he is much more helpful than her mother is. He is also the parent who is the least present in her life and her upbringing. We see this trope a lot in media dating all the way from the unhelpful Mr. Bennet who makes fun of his wife’s very reasonable panic about her daughters’ fate but is still beloved by his children.
Elena is not by far a good person; she cheats several times, she lies, she profits off her friend’s trauma to gain traction in the literary world. She isn’t supposed to be a good person necessarily; none of us are inherently all good and she is as all the characters are, nuanced products of their environment.
Her faults, however do not make her fate any less tragic as she ends up struggling for most of her life just to realize that going up in social steps cannot be done in a single generation and even more so as a woman.