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Mothers and Body Image Sydnei Hall

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Violence Against Women in FOXFIRE

JILLIAN MCCONNELL

          In Joyce Carol Oates’ FOXFIRE Confessions of a Girl Gang, violence against women is seen as a major theme in the novel. FOXFIRE seeks revenge against men throughout the novel to rebel against the oppression of women. This is still relevant today and women are continued to be seen as a lower standard to men.  

           Oppression of women goes far back in our history as humans. Lori Heise states in her journal taken from Francis Power Cobbes’ book Dobash & Dobash, 1979, “as far back as 1878, Francis Power Cobb observed in his treatise, Wife torture in England, that the notion that a man’s wife is his property in the sense in which a horse is his property… is the fatal root of incalculable evil and misery” (Heise 280). Cobbe is stating here that women being property is the root to the oppression of women. He goes on to state in his book,

Under English common law, The wife came under the control of her husband and he had the legal right to use force against her in order to insure that she fulfilled her wifely obligations, which included the consummation of the marriage, cohabitation, maintenance of conjugal rights, sexual fidelity, and general obedience and respect for his wishes (Heise 280).

This common law shows that women were forced to do whatever a man wanted them to do. They had to abide by the rules of the man since they were his property. Women being seen as property gave them a lower class status to men, which made it more difficult for women in the later years to have a voice and be recognized as a person instead of property.  Relating this history to FOXFIRE, in the setting of the book, the 1950s, traditional gender roles were still in play. Women were meant to identify primarily as wives and mothers and to avoid work outside the home. However there was still a push for women to be in the workforce and many did leave the role of wife and mother to go and work outside the home. In FOXFIRE Confessions of a Girl Gang the roles of women are pictured in this way. At the end of the book when Rita decides to date a man and gets expelled from FOXFIRE, she eventually marries him and takes the role of the wife and mother. Instead of defeating all odds and standing up for women’s rights, she succumbs to the idea of a patriarchal family.

This idea of man controlling women and wives being submissive to their husbands has come into view in our society today. Some cultures see respect when it comes to physical chastisement of women. Heise states “generally, any transgression of a gender norm, such as disobeying a husband, failing to prepare meals on time, or sexual infidelity, is considered just cause for abuse” (Heise 281). This statement decleares the fact that if a woman in a relationship doesn’t conform to her partner’s rules, then she will be punished. The men in this scenario take great pride in showing off their control over their wives to the people of their culture. This example of pride over abusing women is seen in the news of today. Many of our news sources are filled with stories about a man in a hearing for beating his wife. There are many theories behind this behavior that Heise puts into perspective in her article stating “for husbands who are violent toward their female partners, only two developmental experiences have emerged as particularly predicative of future abuse: witnessing domestic violence as a child and experiencing physical or sexual abuse as a child” (Heise 267). The idea of witnessing or being a victim of domestic violence implies that the abuse is a learned behavior from former experiences in childhood. Women are a victim of this violence from the learned behavior of men. Just like in FOXFIRE Confessions of a Girl Gang, Legs’ dad who was described as being an abusive alcoholic father. Legs is a victim of this abusiveness towards women from her father. Even though the background of his life is not actually known, it can be implied from the book’s description that since the girls grew up in low socioeconomic families, most, if not all, of their parents might have come from an estranged background. That being said, the abusive nature of many of the male characters in the book could have been a learned trait of their own childhood.

Heise also states that “There is also considerable evidence that men raised in patriarchal families are more likely to become violent adults, to rape women acquaintances, and to batter their intimate partners than are men raised in more egalitarian homes” (Heise 270). That being said, it can be inferred that the families in FOXFIRE Confessions of a Girl Gang more than likely came from patriarchal families because of the known history of the 1950s. In the book a sexual aggression towards Maddy from her uncle Wimpy is seen when he asks for sexual favors in turn for the type writer he is selling her. That sexual aggression most likely came from growing up in a patriarchal family and thinking that he has power over her to do this to her. The history of oppression of women gives this idea of men being all powerful and women being submissive to them a backup to the novel.  

According to Christian Hansen-Knarhoi, who wrote about Joyce Carrol Oates and postmodern feminism, FOXFIRE “employs postmodern feminism notion of a ‘positive’ other, where women as a collective fight against the male-dominated society of the 1950s. Thus both use aspects of historical periods to show women breaking out of male oppression” (Hansen-Knarhoi 35). “FOXFIRE becomes a surrogate family where the girls are free from oppression and can forge their own identity” (Hansen-Knarhoi 75). The fact that 1950s Hammond, New York, is filled with violence towards women is seen throughout the novel and this small family formed to get away from the violence is a safe place for the girls. Maddys states in the book “FOXFIRE is a code for the other, and the other is a code for us” (Oates 40). This statement that Maddy writes confirms that their group is an outsider to the world around it. The definition of other is a word used to refer to a person or thing that is different or distinct from one already mentioned or known about. By definition FOXFIRE is this different group separated from the world. They are different because they don’t want to be a victim anymore to this oppression against women and they separate themselves from the world and fight back.

In the book Legs declares war on all men stating “It’s a state of undeclared war, them hating us, men hating us no matter what our age or who the hell we are” (Oates 97).  FOXFIRE’S first success as the “liberating powerful female other” is over Mr. Buttinger. They successfully humiliate him for his sexual harassment against Rita. There are many more successes in FOXFIRE’S revenge throughout the book. The ultimate indication of female oppression is revealed in the retarded dwarf women, Yetta and FOXFIRE fights back by burning down the farmhouse where she was imprisoned and abused. Hansen-Knarhoi writes in his article “thus again we see Joyce Carol Oates using the postmodern feminist notion of the ‘positive other’ to develop her feminist subtext: showing ‘woman’ as a group that is powerful and all encompassing” (Hansen-Knarhoi 84). The “positive other” in FOXFIRE’S sense is the fact that the women are challenging the male-dominated society against oppression utilizing female power.

The idea of female power relates back to our theme of postmodern feminism. Feminism in definition is the common goal to seek equality of the sexes. Throughout FOXFIRE’S time this theme is seen through the girls fight for oppression to end. They feel that they need to go out and actively do something to try and end this war of men hating women. Back in the 1950s not a lot of women had the will power to actively say something they felt was wrong since women were still seen as a lower standard to men. Maddy writes “it was a time of violence against girls and women, but we didn’t have the language to talk about it then” (Oates 100).  By the gang actively going out and fighting to end oppression, they were discovering that language that they couldn’t speak by using their actions. They did this in a non-secretive way to make sure everyone knew what was being said. They did however keep who had done it a secret. No one knew who FOXFIRE was, but they did know their message. This push for equality shows that the girls were rebels against this oppression. Their rebellion does come at a small price because they do get caught for their actions. However this doesn’t stop them and they change their goal from getting revenge on men to using their womanly status to their advantage.

By the novel’s end the girls have spiraled out of control. Their idea of war against men has changed into a need for money. Their final solution turns into a big mistake and the gang ends up dispersing and never heard from again. This event shows that even though we can fight for what we believe, we might not always come out victorious. The girls of FOXFIRE did gain power against men and they gained the knowledge that language can give them to act in their power.

Oppression of women is still seen in our society today. Even though there are many more opportunities for women in the work force, the idea of a woman having a man’s job is still joked about in our world. Many times a woman will not get hired for a job that usually would be a man’s job just because they think a woman wouldn’t be able to do it. There is also continuous abuse towards women in our world. It is heard all over the news of rapes and beatings of women by men. Some men think women are here as pleasure objects. This act is wrong and women should fight for their rights. Women should be allowed to have equal status to men and not have this distinction of being here for their amusement or enjoyment.

The fight to end oppression and violence against women is seen throughout FOXFIRE Confessions of a Girl Gang. FOXFIRE is the ‘other’ of the outside world. They rebel against the hatred towards them and come out victorious many times. In the end the world around them gets ahold of them and their fight ends. Still to this day women are fighting to end this violence and they will continue to fight until it is stopped.  FOXFIRE Confessions of a Girl Gang gives us women empowerment to go and fight for what we believe and never stop until we have what we want.

 Works Cited

Heise, Lori L. “Violence Against Women An Integrated, Ecological Framework .” Vol. 4, no. 3, June 1998,

Hansen-Knarhoi, C. (1994). Joyce Carol Oates as Postmodern Romantic : A Postmodern Feminist Critique of A Bloodsmoor Romance and Foxfire : Confessions of a Girl-Gang.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Foxfire: confessions of a girl gang. Penguin Books, 1993.

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Erica Kenworthy

The Language Ladder

In Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend, language is used as a status symbol throughout the entire novel. The novel explores the use of language and dialect to establish the characters and their motives in life. The characters spoke a different dialect or a different language depending on who they were with or what their intentions were for their future, such as continuing to go to school and leave the neighborhood in Naples, or staying to work for their parents in order to take over the business one day. Language was a gateway for characters, especially women, to express themselves and gave them the power to tell their own story. In the 1950s, Italy was divided in many different ways, from social class to gender to education. In turn, language, through education, became the door to moving up the socioeconomic ladder and defying social norms; however, it was only obtainable to those that had access to it.

My Brilliant Friend was written just after World War II when Italy was vastly divided by social classes, lack of opportunity, and gender roles. By mastering proper Italian, or any language other than their own dialect, suddenly any person had the power to tell their own story and escape the troubles of the neighborhood. In the prologue, Elena set the scene for the novel by exclaiming, “We’ll see who wins this time” (Ferrante 23). After she found out Lila had gone missing, she became angry and decided to write down everything about her life from the first moment she became friends with Lila. For Elena, knowing how to read, speak, and write proper Italian gave her the ability to write down the accounts of her life in order to make sense of her friendship with Lila. Writing the novel finally allowed Elena to step out of Lila’s shadow and tell the world everything she went through to get to where she is today. According to a study on the economy of Italy in My Brilliant Friend, Elena “embodies the rise of the lower middle class through socially sanctioned opportunity” (Bullaro 2016). Through education and her ability to speak the language, Elena was able to overcome her struggles in the neighborhood and open up more opportunities for herself.

In post-war Italy, men were the symbol of power in each social class. If an opportunity arose, the men of the family were the first to take advantage of it. In elementary school, Elena exclaimed “I felt the poison of defeat more acutely when it was Sarratore or Peluso who did better than me. If, however, I came in second after Lila, I wore a meek expression of acquiescence” (Ferrante 46-47).  Even from elementary school, Elena consistently out-competed the boys in her class and made just as good, if not better, grades as them. Elena was always contending against the boys in her grade in order to prove that she deserved to be in school and continue her education. The girls felt that they had to always be better than the boys in order to get where they wanted to be or to move up grades.

However, for some of the women, such as Lila, even if they were smart and could speak proper Italian, they could not afford to continue to go to school because of their family’s status. This is conveyed when Ferrante displays a conversation between Lila’s parents and her brother about sending her to middle school. After mentioning that Rino never even went to school, her father went on to say, “Then why should your sister, who is a girl, go to school?” (Ferrante 69). To her parents, Lila should not receive something that her brother never even had access to. She is meant to stay at home and either help her mother with chores in the house or her father at the shoe store. By refusing to let women further their education past the required time in elementary school it limits the girls on what they can do with their life and forces them to stay home until they are married. This goes to show the gender inequality that Italy was still facing at this time. According to the policy written on gender equality in Italy, “female employment rates remained low, especially in Southern Italy and in general for women with low education” (Rosselli 2014). The only way these women had access to leaving the neighborhood was through education or marriage, but they were restricted even within those possibilities.

Within the different social classes, not only was there a binary with genders, but there was a binary when it came to education. Ferrante illustrates this when she writes “‘Tell Cerullo that she would do well to study for the diploma, instead of wasting time.’ And although she kept Lila’s novel, she left it on the table without even giving it a glance” (Ferrante 71). Lila was not allowed to continue on to middle school because her parents could not afford it, but she still managed to write a novel entitled The Blue Fairy. Although she was able to write this novel in beautiful Italian, Maestra Oliviero would not even give her the time to read it simply because she had dropped out of school. However, with Elena, Maestra Oliviero was willing to go out of her way to make sure that she would get the lessons and books she needed in order to move on to the next level. The working class that Elena and Lila come from was further subdivided by the educated and non-educated. As noted by Jillian Cavanaugh in her study of the use of language in Ferrante’s novels, “during this post-war period, Italian was not only the language of the classroom, where its value was instilled through everyday written and spoken instruction, it was also the language of privilege, of public political debate, and of economic advantage” (Cavanaugh 2016). This language became a status symbol to categorize people and label the educated and uneducated. The educated children ended up having more opportunities to advance in life and receive the necessary attention in order to show off their abilities.

As Elena continued her education, she easily became the smartest person in her class and passed all of her language courses with nines. Suddenly, Elena started to become noticed and receive more interest from her teachers. Elena noted that “she began to expect new praise that would prove [her] autonomous virtuosity” (Ferrante 189).  Teachers in the upper grades now smiled at her in the halls and the attention gave her pride knowing that she was praised for her intelligence. Her education gave her an advantage that not very many people, especially females, from her neighborhood even had the resources to obtain. By continuing to go to school, she was able to further her knowledge of proper Italian and receive the attention the needed in order to prove her abilities.

Later in her life, Elena was presented with the opportunity to leave the neighborhood in Naples and travel to Ischia for the summer. As Elena was leaving she exclaimed, “For the first time I was leaving home, I was going on a journey, a journey by sea. The large body of my mother—along with the neighborhood, and Lila’s troubles— grew distant and vanished” (Ferrante 209). Maestra Oliviero offered Elena a chance to go and stay with her cousin in Ischia in order to relax and read some books. This was only offered to her though because Elena not only continued her education, but excelled in all of her courses. Lila could speak and write proper Italian just as well as Elena, but she never received any credit for her efforts since she did not continue her education past primary school. This was evident when Lila wrote Elena a letter while she was in Ischia and Elena claimed “…she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word” (Ferrante 227). Lila was just as smart as Elena, but her family did not have enough money or access to resources in order to keep her in school. Since Elena had access to proper books and a higher education, people were more willing to look at her and help her get what she wanted in life. Through her education and her ability to speak many languages, Elena was able to finally leave the neighborhood to experience something new and see more of the world other than just the small city she knew.

Not only does language give someone the power to control their own fate, it also characterizes them by placing them in a specific social class or group. According to a study done on the use of language in Ferrante’s novel, “whether one speaks standard Italian, or one of the many local languages like Neapolitan they call “dialetti” (dialects) at a particular moment, places Italians within complex social and geographical hierarchies” (Cavanaugh 2016). From the very beginning of the novel, Ferrante implores the use of language as a narrative device. The novel was originally set when Rino called Elena to tell her that his mother had gone missing. He spoke to Elena in an “awkward, muddled way, half in dialect, half in Italian” (Ferrante 19). This description linked his personality and how he carried himself. The use of language was implemented as a way for characters to express themselves in moments of crisis or during personal growth.

While very little dialect was actually used in the novel, Ferrante frequently pointed out which language or dialect the characters were speaking in order to set the tone of the situation or use it as a way to describe what the characters were like. According to Bullaro, the “Italian language is a “literary” acquisition; [the characters’] stance toward it is a statement of their self-perceived identity and their aspirations” (Bullaro 2016). Each language, and even dialect, spoken is a part of who that person is and where they came from. It can either shackle the character to a specific place or open doors for them to excel in life and make a name for themselves.

Throughout the novel My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, the strategic use of language gives a person the power to tell their own story and express themselves. By mentioning which language or dialect the character was speaking, Ferrante subsequently divided the characters between the uneducated and the educated. With more education and focus from teachers, any person could have more opportunities to do something bigger or better than just following in their parents’ footsteps. However, being educated was only available to those with the necessary resources, and in the neighborhood these were not readily available. By learning to speak and write proper Italian, Elena was able to get the attention she needed from teachers and professionals in order to break out of all of the social norms that would keep her tied to Naples. Language became the open door she needed to take control of her future and have the power to account for her own life story.

Works Cited

Rosselli, Annalisa. “The Policy on Gender Equality in Italy.” Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs, Mar. 2014, doi:10.2861/58550.

Bullaro G.R. (2016) The Era of the “Economic Miracle” and the Force of Context in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. In: Russo Bullaro G., Love S. (eds) The Works of Elena Ferrante. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York

Cavanaugh J.R. (2016) Indexicalities of Language in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels: Dialect and Italian as Markers of Social Value and Difference. In: Russo Bullaro G., Love S. (eds) The Works of Elena Ferrante. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York

Ferrante, Elena. My Brilliant Friend. Europa Editions, 2012.

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In Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Lila and Elena’s experiences through the public education system as well as in their neighborhood and families show how language is both a fluid and powerful source that can enable socioeconomic development for those who have access. Elena is set free from the constraints of her violent, abusive, oppressive, negative, domestic, neighborhood because she had access to language. At the end of the novel we see that language and literacy have quite truly set Elena free while Lila is trapped; Lila has hit the ceiling of her available resources before the finish line, and she is stuck. Elena has broken free, and Lila encourages her to keep going.

A common theme in the novels of this course is that language can give someone the power to describe what is happening to them and around them. The female protagonists we’ve encountered often find themselves stuck because they cannot express what they are feeling. In some cases, such as in Nightwood, the world hasn’t made a word for a particular concept yet. Instead of being a lesbian or simply a woman attracted to another woman, Robin is a freak along with anyone else who can’t find a label that already exists. She can’t even find the words to define herself.

In My Brilliant Friend, though, we see this power in effect when Lila verbalizes what everyone is thinking and trying to suggest about her marrying Stefano. They tell her to be careful about his intentions and how he is courting her, and she responds by saying, “’Look, Marcello tried in every possible way to buy me but no one is going to buy me.’” (Ferrante 242). Lila uses language to voice what is happening to her and that she knows what people are afraid of. Everyone else is thinking it, but she put it quite literally and clearly when she says this.

Though it comes much later (as in, when she writes her story), Elena finally uses language to describe what Donato Sarratore did to her and how it made her feel. “In fact, this is the first time I’ve sought words,” she says “for that unexpected end to my vacation” (Ferrante 233). She uses language to work out why she couldn’t love Nino anymore, or rather why she had to stay away from him even though she did love him.

“Seeing him immediately brought to mind Donato Sarratore, even if they didn’t resemble each other at all. And the disgust, the rage aroused by the memory of what his father had done without my being able to repulse  him extended to Nino. Of course, I loved him… I [rackled] my brains: Why do you behave like that, the father isn’t the son, the son isn’t the father, behave as Stefano did with the Pelusos. But I couldn’t. As soon as I imagined kissing him, I felt the mouth of Donato, and a wave of pleasure and revulsion mixed father and son into a single person” (Ferrante 255).

Xuela does the same with The Autobiography of My Mother. The final paragraph is her final confession. By telling the story she is able to conclude that she lived her sad life so that she may survive, and that she did. She uses words to understand herself.

Not only does language have power in itself, but holds a certain kind of weight when it is written down. Spoken word is important but can be forgotten; the written word lives on forever. We see this is Foxfire. Maddy writes down, as Legs suggests, exactly as it happens. Memory cannot compete with the true facts that Maddy records on her typewriter. When she reflects on her recordings, she can relive the true experience. And no one can challenge her because she wrote it down.

In My Brilliant Friend, the written word carries its value in actual money. Lila and Elena realize this at a young age when Lila decides to write The Blue Fairy: “We thought that if we studied hard we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich” (Ferrante 70). While the girls’ attempt was fruitless, as Maestra Oliviero never takes even the slightest peek, we find out later in the novel that they had the right idea. In chapter eleven, we find out that Donato Sarratore has written and published a book. He is transformed from a man into a poet in the eyes of the neighborhood, and Lila is giddy with the idea that the whole Sarratore family will become rich because of this book.

Even Lila’s shoe drawings are a good example. While they may not be words, Lila drew shoes designs, thus materializing her ideas. These drawings would lead her all the way into marrying a very wealthy, powerful man who could help her family. No one would have listened to her if she would have just described the shoes; she had to visually show how unique and good they were (people also don’t take her seriously because she is not a boy). Stefano and Rino had to see this in order for the shoes to eventually come to be. Writing things down gives power and money (like Maddy and the typewriter).

Elena uses language to describe herself. “As soon as I could,” she says, “I locked myself in the bathroom and looked in the mirror, naked” (Ferrante 96). She uses words that she probably used from society to describe herself (ex. “I got fat).  Xuela had this same moment, and maybe all girls have this moment, but Xuela falls in love with her body. Elena is instead ashamed because she is told by people like her mother that her breasts are too big. She looks inappropriate, according to her mother and the boys at school, which she absolutely cannot help.

Another super power of language is that it gives status without explanation. No questions asked. Everyone is impressed when Lila and Elena first go to school and do well in their language courses. The novel doesn’t mention the other subjects like Arithmetic very often because their importance is almost nothing compared to the way people in the town value language and literacy. Almost none of the adults can read, so for a child to be able read is to see a glimpse of a brighter future. Elena’s father, though terribly abusive towards her, takes her to town and is proud of her for maybe the first time after she gets her first set of nines.

“Illiteracy does not occur at random but is typically the plight of poor and powerless people, and it is a fundamental manifestation of the problem of social inequality” (“Women and Illiteracy”). The people in Elena’s neighborhood are illiterate because they are poor, so for Elena to learn how to read and write means that maybe she can become something more than poor.

We see this idea of status in literacy again in chapter five when the girls are beginning to talk about their feelings towards boys: “’Why do you say no’” Lila asked [Elena] in dialect. I answered unexpectedly in proper Italian, to make an impression, to let her understand that, even if I spent my time talking about boyfriends, I wasn’t to be treated like Carmela” (Ferrante 103). Elena knows that she, Lila, and Carmella are all guilty of discussing the same subject matter, but she believes speaking properly will elevate her and will somehow justify the “petty” talk. She’d be talking about the same thing regardless, but depending on how she says it will push her up or pull her down on the socioeconomic ladder.

This leads me to my next point, which is that language is fluid. Very often throughout the novel, we hear Elena say things like “I said in Italian” or “she said in dialect” to express the tone of situation and of the person speaking. Why does it matter in which language the character is speaking? And why would they choose to speak better or worse depending on whom they are speaking to? Nino expresses himself in Italian more so than in dialect, and this is attractive to Elena (Ferrante 215). Just how in chapter eighteen she says she wants a boy who wears pants, she wants a boy who can speak the way people richer than her do. Pants means manhood and manhood means class. She speaks in dialect when she wants to relate to her peers but in Italian when she wants to rise above them. Fluidity of language represents the way people, Elena, can shift between social classes.

Language also helps people communicate. A problem for characters in the novel is that they cannot express how they feel, and this resorts to violence. “Numerous studies have reported that more education for women results in fewer children per family, less infant mortality, marriage at a later age, healthier children, and better reared and educated children.” (“Women and Illiteracy”). Children are the future, but if they grow up with violence in an absence of language, they will grow up to foster the same.

Women are often the victim of the violence, and this of course correlates to literacy as well. Women are truly an abused group, and while it might be nice for them to use language like Elena does to escape, they can’t due to lack of access. Lila is our prime example. “We sense early on that Lila will stay trapped in her world, and that Elena, the writer, will get out” (The New Yorker). She has the intelligence and the will to rise above the neighborhood, to escape the trap of eternal domesticity, but she can’t because 1) she doesn’t have the money and 2) she doesn’t have the encouragement or assistance from her teachers like Elena does (because of who her family is, something over which she has no control). When Elena mentions Lila to her teacher, her teacher responds “if one wishes to remain a plebian, he, his children, the children of his children, deserve nothing. Forget Cerullo and think of yourself” (Ferrante).

Women, especially women in poor neighborhoods, don’t have as much access to education. In chapter 15 when Rino decides he will pay for his sister to go to school, his father asks him “why should your sister, who is a girl, go to school” (Ferrante 69). Such a statement says so much about the world these characters live it.

Language gives strength. It gives excitement and motivation to Lila when she has access, and it gives Elena freedom because she has more. It gives these characters the ability to describe what is happening to them and in the world around them. It even allows Elena to have a better life than anyone in her family or neighborhood could have dreamed. The issue is that Elena is the only one who got to truly reap the benefits of literacy. Lila hit a wall, as many women in literature and in life do. It’s been proven what a better world we would have if women could read and write, but we can’t make that change until they have access. Lila’s experience shows reality, and Elena’s shows hope.

 - Catherine DeBuys

[rebelsandrulebreakers-blog]

The Business of Men

The Exchange of Women as seen through the characters of Elena, Lila and Jiang Qing.  

In the novels My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante and Becoming Madame Mao, by Anchee Min, a reader could assume that both authors, being female, seemingly chose their characters to be portrayed as being commodified to highlight the exchange of women that can happen within a society, whether it is obvious or not.   Becoming Madame Mao has a much more literal illustration of the commodification of women through the character of Mao, than My Brilliant Friend, which has a much more underlying theme exemplified in the characters of Elena and Lila.   In Luce Irigaray’s excerpt, “Women on the Market,” She studies the position of women in society and how they are commodified, specifically by men.   She begins her theory with the statement, “the society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women” (Irigaray, 799).   Irigaray demonstrates the idea of the commodification of women as a system in what she defines as a business between men.   In My Brilliant Friend, the characters of Elena and Lila are shown growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Naples, Italy where the reader follows their story through every stage of life.   They face the struggles of dealing with the intimidation and harassment from the men and boys of the neighborhood, which appears to be one that operates under a patriarchal society.   According to Irigaray, “the law that orders our society is the exclusive valorization of men’s needs/desires, of exchanges among men” (Irigaray, 800).   One example of an exchange found in the novel is when Elena takes money in an exchange to show a couple of her male classmates her breasts.   Elena narrates the scene, “he gave me ten lire and we all went…I lifted up my shirt and showed them my breasts” (97).   This is an image of the female body being subjected to men for its value.   Her breasts, in this scenario, have literal monetary value now that the boys are interested in them.   Throughout the entirety of the noel, readers see the characters of Elena and Lila face the harassment and pressures imposed upon them by the male characters present in the novel.   Irigaray defines a commodity as being something that value must be placed upon by something external, for a commodity would not be a commodity without the ownership of something, “its value is never found to lie within itself” (802).   An example of valuation from men in Becoming Madame Mao is in the fact that Jiang Qing, throughout her acting career, searches for men who are inspiring and powerful to gain power herself.   She has affairs and even marries the men she seeks out in order to advance herself.   She sees herself in the novel as having power herself, but in reality, her power was made possible through her being commodified by men.   She found identity in her relationships with the different men and without them giving value to her, as an actress or as a communist, she admits that, “no pain could ever be greater than the isolation and loneliness of the heart” (65).   She paints herself to be a hopeless romantic in the novel but is driven by her desire for power.   The places Jiang Qing finds herself in however, she is still under the control of man in some way.  

Another study done on the exchange of women is Gayle Rubin’s critical essay, “The Traffic in Women.  ” Rubin dives into what it means to be oppressed and what is at the root of sexual inequality.   She claims that, “if innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of all female oppression, then the feminist program would logically require either the extermination of the offending sex, or else a eugenics project to modify its character” (Rubin, 770).   The question becomes one of context and if oppression is completely relative.   In her essay, the idea of women being a tangible good, or commodity, as discussed earlier, is also evident in Rubin’s argument that, “kinship systems do not merely exchange women.   They exchange sexual access, genealogical statuses, lineage names and ancestors, rights and people – men, women, and children – in concrete systems of social relationships” (Rubin, 780).   Focusing on the idea that it is all about what men can get out of it or the beneficial quality of an exchange.   She states that there is a, “sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products” (Rubin, 771).   She proposes the idea of what she calls the “sex/gender system.  ” The sex/gender system is a construct that people will naturally operate under depending on the conditions or culture of the society.   The characters in both novels happen to fall in a place where the social organization is male dominated because of the time periods.   Madame Mao, in her novel, is born into a concubine so she starts off with expectations to be owned by a man.   Throughout Becoming Madame Mao, Madame Mao, also known as Jiang Qing, rises to the top while she gains power through her relationships in the novel and eventually succeeds in securing a relationship with Mao, she is still “kept in her place” by the men working for Mao and the fact that Mao has affairs throughout their relationship.   Mao has several affairs as well as twelve virgins that he owns.   This is very literal image of men’s ownership of women and how Mao exercises his dominance over Jiang Qing.   His literal ownership over these women exemplifies Irigaray and Rubin’s idea of the ownership of women.   One specific instance in My Brilliant Friend that alludes to this idea of ownership by man is where Lila becomes engaged to Stefano.   In an examination from the following passage from My Brilliant Friend, a reader can see the prevalence of ownership and how Elena’s jealousy could allude to the idea that their value, as characters in the novel, was imposed upon them by the male characters.   Elena states,

“I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine.   But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly.   With them I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself.   What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them.   I asked myself what I was doing in that car.   They were my friends, of course, my boyfriend was there, we were going to Lila’s wedding celebration.   But that very celebration confirmed that Lila, the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged, no longer belonged to us and, without her, every intermediary between me and those youths, that car racing through the streets, was gone” (320).  

Through this engagement, Lila obtains wealth and a higher status.   The feeling of jealously that Elena experiences from Lila’s engagement and newfound wealthy status could also be an example of how the women in this novel have value placed upon them by men.   Irigaray states that, “women thus have value only in that she can be exchanged,” because “commodities, women, are a mirror of value of and for man” (Irigaray, 802).   The novel, ending with a wedding, could be symbol of ownership of Lila because it is seen as practical by the family and Stefano because he has money.   The shoe business that Lila was involved in throughout the entirety of the novel brings the idea of business and trade to the foreground of the novel.   My Brilliant Friend ends with an image of the business of men.   Everything is put out of the control of the girls and leaves the reader with a sense that the characters were ruled by a patriarchal construct.   Because the majority of Elena Ferrante’s novel revolves around the idea of status, it is easy to see theme of valuation through the exchange between men that is imposed upon the female characters and that, as commodities, “they only become so when they are compared by and for man” (Irigaray, 803).  

In Becoming Madame Mao, Anchee Min fantasizes the life of Jiang Qing, otherwise known as Madame Mao, and her need for power that she sought through men.   The fact that Jiang Qing was portrayed in the novel as having to have men in order the achieve success falls in line with the male-dominated valuation principle that Irigaray suggests.   Her power was unattainable without her many different relationships with men.   In the novel, that is what gave her power.   Even when she ended up rising to the top, in the end, Jiang Qing still needed Mao’s protection for her safety.   She became Mao’s asset and nearing the end of the novel, everything still revolves around Mao and how he is perceived by the people.   Jiang Qing is not allowed to step out of her space that has been defined for her by the men.   Later in the novel, when Jiang Qing has proven herself worthy, her and Mao’s relationship becoming purely beneficial to one another where they only see each other as having use value.   In Rubin’s essay, she analyzes the relation between gift-giving and kinship, stating that, “kinship is organization, and organization gives power.   But who is organized? If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it” (Rubin, 779).   Going back to the similar idea that Irigaray suggests of there being an instituted exchange of women by men.   Rubin states that it is the social construction that keeps this exchange in power,

“The exchange of women does not necessarily imply that women are objectified, in the modern sense, since objects in the primitive world are imbued with highly personal qualities.   But it does imply a distinction between gift and giver.   If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners.   And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (Rubin, 779).  

She argues against the idea that exchanges of women happen because of their biology or sexuality but that it is dependent on the social structure in which the women are placed.   In both My Brilliant Friend and Becoming Madame Mao, the setting and environment is the institution in which the men take control and exchange the women, the history and social acceptability of it makes the characters more subject to being exchanged and commodified by men.   This is evident in My Brilliant Friend when Elena would insouciantly mention things about her neighborhood.   She revisits the abuse of Lila she witnessed by saying Lila’s father was, “screaming horrible threats at his daughter.   He had thrown her like a thing…Fathers could do that and other things to impudent girls” (82).   The use of the word “thing” alludes to the commodification of women as well.  Through examining the female characters of Elena and Lila in My Brilliant Friend, and Madame Mao, or Jiang Qing, in Becoming Madame Mao, accompanied with the theories of Luce Irigaray and Gayle Rubin, readers can draw the conclusion that the female characters are commodified by the male characters.

Works Cited

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women.” Literary Theory, an Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1998. Print.

Irigaray, Luce. “Women on the Market.” Literary Theory, an Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1998. Print.

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“Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.” ― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

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            Psychological Effects of Gendered Abuse in a Life of Poverty

     In today’s society, physical and sexual abuse are all too prevalent, but fifty to sixty years ago in lower socioeconomic towns it was far worse, but also, well hidden. In Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, the endless cycle of gendered abuse and aggression in the girls’ poverty-stricken lives develops into sexual abuse causing proven delays in psychological development in which the affects can be seen later in their adult lives. The day to day abuse from the men in their lives becomes normal and is accepted as so. As the girls mature and their bodies fill out and blossom, the physical abuse develops into sexual abuse from other men and persistent suitors.

     Abuse began early on in the girls’ lives. Their home was a chaotic place with “violence between generations, between the rival gangs, between men and women” (Lee, 492). The violence was everywhere and could be found as fights, attacks, or even the occasion murder case. Beginning in childhood, the violence they faced was in the form of physical abuse by the hands of their parents, older male siblings, or some other close family member. While “all fathers had fits of anger,” in My Brilliant Friend, Raffella Cerullo, or Lila’s, father especially “lost his head” when disrespected (Ferrante, 81). At the young age of ten, Lila was thrown out of her family’s apartment window and onto the asphalt street below by her father who had “thrown her like a thing” because his “rage had fed on itself” after Lila had made a small mistake (Ferrante, 82). The parents’ rage in this small town never began and ended with their children. Their anger was rooted in the simple fact that they were hard workers, but were still considered lower middle class. It was impossible to escape poverty and was infuriating to not be able to give your family a comfortable, stable life. This deeply rooted aggression the men face is oftentimes taken out on the innocent women in their lives, beginning, as we saw, at a very young age and continues throughout adulthood.  While the physical abuse inflicted upon the girls in My Brilliant Friend was more apparent, it was less so in Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.  When we are first introduced to Margaret Ann Sadovsky, or better known as Legs, she was a runaway, or rather running back home to her father where she was unwanted, but it was still home, although deemed “unsuitable for a minor” (Oates, 10). At the young age of ten, there was an incident in which Legs’ father “slapped her… knocked her flying across the room and against the sharp edge of the table” leaving her with a scar to always remind her of the violence she has faced and the potential violence she will face as a female (Oates, 16). Like many other girls in a 1950s lower class family, Legs was roughed up as a child, possibly causing her  to adopt this her staple tough, no nonsense persona, but it was not enough to protect her from the casual violence from males.

     The short-term effects of child abuse are numerous, but there are specific, textbook examples illustrated in both novels. General fear, “anxiety, and depression” are much more prevalent in children who have been victims of abuse (Feldman, 410). We see this expressed     in an adolescent Lila and Elena, but through their dolls, Nu and Tina. “The terrors [Lila and Elena] tasted” inside their homes and their neighborhood “everyday were [Nu and Tina’s]” (Ferrante, 31). The young girls projected their worst fears onto the dolls hoping to displace such complex, negative emotions that made them too uncomfortable to face. “Child abuse is more likely when there is a history of violence between spouses,” and not only was there a long history of violence between the girls’ parents, but between everyone in the neighborhood creating a fearful, volatile nature in which the girls grew up in (Feldman, 410). In Foxfire, Legs took a different route in channeling her emotions caused by her unstable life and the abuse inflicted upon her by her father. Legs became an aggressive girl, and according to Albert Bandura’s research of social learning approaches to aggression, “exposure to aggressive models leads to increased aggression” especially if the observers themselves are “angered, insulted, frustrated,” or in this case, abused (Feldman, 368). She became violent in an effort to first defend herself against men and it soon turned into a mission to get revenge against those same men. The fear and aggression the girls face every day of their lives becomes a thing of normalcy. At some point, it would be somewhat of an oddity to not hear the shouts of men scolding their wives, or the clamor of dishes breaking, or the occasional unwanted graze from an older man. These events became a normal part of life.

     There was an awful, inevitable truth that with the girls’ maturing bodies would come a different form of abuse. Casual violence against women in the 1950s and 1960s was not limited to leaving bruises or scars left by a husband’s angry blow, but included sexual abuse within marriage and also outside of it. Men felt as if they had every right to do as they pleased to a woman because in the end who was to tell them no? Elena Greco found this to be true at age fifteen when she spent most of her summer on the island of Ischia living and working at the home of her teacher’s friend, Nella. She “had some mandatory obligations” which included caring for the family that happened to be staying there with her and this is how she met the always charming Donato Sarratore (Ferrante, 209). After weeks of putting on a show and charming the women of the house, he entered the kitchen late one night where Elena slept and molested her. He forcefully “kissed her with care, with passion” which led to other unwanted and extremely violating advances (Ferrante 232). “[She] felt an uncontainable hatred for Donato Sarratore and disgust for myself,” because part of her involuntarily enjoyed the physical feeling in itself. Her “uncontrollable sexual feelings” not only disgust her thoroughly, but “embarrass her” (Lee, 496). That incident was out of her control for fear of angering a strong man like Donato, or worse, being rape, which seemed to be all too common for women in her socioeconomic class in this time period (Ferrante, 232). And without her protector Lila by her side, she was even more helpless against Donato. While My Brilliant Friend focuses more on the obvious physical violence in this poor Naples neighborhood, Foxfire has many more accounts of explicit and graphic sexual abuse. The girls of the Foxfire gang begin their mission of revenge because of the long-believed notion that older men feel as if they can take advantage of younger girls with no repercussions. Legs and her crew were quick to show that there would be repercussions and they were likely to be painful. Our narrator in Foxfire, Madeleine Faith Wirtz, or Maddy was a victim more than once in her retelling of the gang’s story. The first incident of sexual violence against Maddy was by her very own uncle, Wimpy Wirtz. As a true conman, he tried to sell Maddy a junky old type writer and each time she came forth with the money he asked for, he raised the price until he offered her a compromise “if [she] was a good girl” insinuating she could have the type writer in return for a sexual favor (Oates 69). As a young girl in a lower middle-class town, it would have been easier for her to succumb to men’s advances because she did not have much to lose, and potentially much to gain, but the girls fought against those men and they fought hard. When men took advantage of the Foxfire girls and treated them as lesser people then they, it only angered the group more causing them to take action. The difference between the girls in both novels is that the Foxfire gang actively fought off their assailants, but both groups ended where they began, but as meeker females being controlled by their male counterparts, or in Legs’ case, forced into hiding, but not for lack of trying to take control of their own lives first.        These girls constantly experienced all types of abuse throughout their lives making it seem normal and was accepted as such. The acceptance of the abuse at such a young age shaped who they became as adults. The severe abuse the girls faced throughout their lives very well might have led to psychological maltreatment, which is constant “abuse that occurs when parents…harm children’s behavioral, cognitive, emotional, or psychological functioning” (Feldman 412). In Lila’s case, she became much more timid than her younger self because she aimed to please and to avoid any future unwanted abuse. Her main goal in life became to rise above the poverty of her home town by the only way she was able to: marry a successful man who will protect her and give her a life of financial stability. Elena chose a life of intellect in which she hoped would save her from her poor home and the abuse that inevitably came with it. She was ultimately saved through her education in which she eventually found solace and confidence. In Foxfire, Legs showed aggression as a result of her maltreatment, but at the same time resilience or “the ability to overcome [her] circumstances that place [her] at high risk for major psychological or physical damage” because she was able to escape it all and have a life elsewhere, although in complete secrecy (Feldman, 412). And lastly, Maddy Wirtz, who left her underprivileged hometown for a life of a working woman, but a woman who avoided her old hometown like the plague after she left to escape the painful memories that came with it.  Considering the amount of abuse these girls endured in their childhood and young adult lives, their outcome could have been a lot drearier, and even if in some cases, they may have settled for a lesser life than they could have achieved, they ultimately escaped abuse.

     The aggressive behavior of the men always seems to come back to the fact that they live in a poverty-stricken area and are unable to escape it and feeling as if they have fallen short of their true potential. Their lack of success is embarrassing and emasculating. This deep-rooted frustration bursts out into fits of rage in which they take out on their family, most times the females. As we saw in the novels, this abuse from their fathers becomes an expected behavior for when they make even the most minor of mistakes. This acceptance of abuse evolves as the girls do and takes on a sexual tone. Just as the girls accepted the physical abuse, they now accept the sexual abuse, because it, too, is a normalcy in the life of the overworked and the underprivileged for those that cannot escape it.

Madeline Mayeux

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Nisha Gallow

Human Trafficking in Women

           “Becoming Madame Mao,” conveys Anchee Min’s perception of human trafficking in women and influences how gender ties into this theory as well. As we all know, human trafficking is a serious matter and a crime along with that. My definitions of human trafficking are simply kidnapping someone or taking a person and having or subjecting some sexual encounters or favors with or for that person. According to dictionary.com, human trafficking is the illegal practices of procuring or trading in human beings for the purpose of prostitution, forced labor, or other forms of exploitation. Human trafficking not only occurs in real life, but it has occurred in “Becoming Madame Mao.”

In addition, I noticed a little passage that was displaying some form of human trafficking while reading the novel. On (Min 131-132), Mao and Mao Zedong get into this heated argument. Mao Zedong begins to what I refer to as verbally abusing someone. Mao Zedong calls/ refers to her as a coward, tells her to get out, and commands her to obey his order. Those are words that are used when you are in control of someone and when someone is what I call your “slave” or “captive.” Even though Mao Zedong wasn’t forcing Mao to have sex with him, when she didn’t give the initial reaction that he was hoping for, he simply told her to leave him alone.

This refers back to the context of how gender has a lot to do with that. You see Communism in China was very alive during this time. Most people in the Communist Party were men. Mao Zedong was a communist leader, which meant that he was in charge.

The Communist Party was formed in the 1920’s, 1921 to be exact. Mae Zedong took over the people just like he was trying to take over Madame Mao. Back in those times, there were no acts or laws passed for human sex trafficking. According to (O’Brien 2010), Congress didn’t pass an act to protect all the victims of human trafficking until the year of 2010.  The name of this act was called “The Trafficking Victims Protection Act. ” This would have been the perfect act to be passed in “Becoming Madame Mao” during the time of the Chinese communism. The purpose of the Trafficking Victims Protection act was just to do the exact thing that it sounds like. This act was drawn up simply to protect. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act was utilized to withstand sex trades, which in turn would give the person in authority whom was being victimized the authority and power to prosecute any sex traffickers that were found guilty. An example of how long it can take for people who are trapped when it comes to human trafficking can be found in this scholarly article that I was reading. The example was paraphrased as followed:” “A steel gate caged four young Detroit women in an unearthly nightmare of sex slavery. Their captor pimp, Richard K. Jackson, allegedly coerced the young women into the sex trade, forcing the, to have sex with the customers to finance into this heroin addiction.  The women were between the ages of twelve and thirty-one. These women were subjected to beatings while they were in Jackson’s two-story home. It took months for the two of the women to escape out of there “home away from home.” They escaped imprisonment through a window. However, it took only an instant for Jackson to advertise their sex services on a classified ad website.”  The good news about this is since the incident occurred, the person whom was in control of this website was charged with this pitiful act. In addition, the moral of the story was that the women were trapped. This reminds me of Madame Mao in “Becoming Madame Mao.” Madame Mao was trapped. She was this beautiful woman inside and out.  She had what most people would call an okay life.

Madame Mao came from a family as an unwanted daughter of a concubine to a woman who married a high quality communist leader.  This is what most people would say that dreams are made of. However, Madame Mao experienced a lot of pain. In (Min 6-7), Madame Mao recalled her incident of pain that molded her to become the woman that she has become today. On pages six through seven, Mao talks about a process called foot binding. Her mother wanted her to go through this process in hoping to become someone’s wife some day. Foot binding was a customary process in which a young woman would bind her foot to keep the foot from being too big. In other words, this was a way in which women would enhance their beauty and portray their social status as such. That doesn’t mean that every woman that went through the foot binding process were rich. In fact, many of the women were of lower class. I would say that the pain of Madame Mao knowing that she weren’t good enough for her mother was hand in hand with human trafficking.  

Now, my viewpoint of human trafficking still stands. Human trafficking is not right, but also I truly believe that gender ties into this as well. Human trafficking is definitely gender-based. By this, I am implying that human trafficking is solely based on the perspective of feminism. There have been more cases involving women in the last few years.  According to (Archarya 1), “The International Labour Organization estimates that currently 12.3 million people worldwide are victims of forced labor.  ” This concludes that 98 percent that are the victims of human trafficking are women and young girls.  The last 2 percent remaining in my opinion would probably be victims who never spoke up or victims whom were never heard about.  These statistics are based in Mexico but I can promise you that the percentage is somewhat in correlation with the percentage in the United States.  In another study, there was information that every year that there was about 10,000 young women and older women that were victims of human trafficking in Mexico. However, I noticed something very interesting.

There were six different main cities of Mexico that the human trafficker focuses on. The six main cities that the human traffickers entrench are as followed: Cancun, Mexico City, Acapulca, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, and Monterrey. That is very interesting to say the least being that only these six cities are targeted. There has to be something special about these cities for this to continue to go on.

           Also, human trafficking has other effects on women besides just the mental aspect of it all. It also can have a physical hold on us as women. Over the years, human trafficking has caused women immediate injuries. These injuries can vary to a very broad of women. One example of this injury is impregnating a woman. Most of these women do not even know that they are pregnant when it happens. Remember, human trafficking isn’t planned behavior. Human trafficking is a hateful crime that targets women.  According to (Archarya 3), it comes to no surprise when a woman attracts diseases of different sorts. One of these diseases is HIV/AIDS. According to (Archarya 3), a woman’s vulnerability ties into connection and violence. That’s why I honestly and truly believe that human trafficking happens because of a person’s mental state. There were interviews conducted with the women about human trafficking. The thing that was really odd but realistic was that these women never wanted to talk about the sole issue at hand. This is just like Madam Mao. Madame Mao was very similar to these women in the interviews that went through human trafficking. She was often very silent to most things that happened in her life. However, these things shaped Madame Mao to some of the decisions that she made prior to her life and her relationship life as well. Now, to be honest, all her decisions were mainly based on her childhood experiences. Here is a little background information on Madame Mao’s childhood. When Madame Mao was a child, her father kicked her and her mother out of the house. Along with being kicked out of the house, Madame mother became a concubine. In my opinion, a concubine is a woman who shacks up with a man in which the two of them aren’t married. According to dictionary.com, a concubine is a woman who, in some societies, lives and has sex with a man she is not married to, and has a lower social rank than his wife or his wife.  So, Madame Mao’s mom was and will forever be a concubine. Along with her mother being labeled as a concubine, she is also known as being what I call a woman who was physically abused by her husband. When Madame Mao was a younger girl, she would watch her father mishandle her mother. This brought so much pain to Madame Mao. Even though her mother wasn’t a victim of human trafficking, Madame Mao’s mother was a victim of physical abuse along with what I refer to as mental abuse as well. However, being there is violence that continues between Madame Mao’s father and mother, Madame Mao goes to live with her grandfather. There was definitely something unique and heartwarming about Madame Mao’s grandfather. He was not like the average grandfather. Madame Mao’s grandfather shaped her into the woman that she would possibly become. Madame Mao’s grandfather acquaints his granddaughter to what is referred to as “Chinese operas.” Being that Madame Mao was going to be living with her grandfather for good, she began to become more familiar and intrigued by the world of acting and what I call show biz.  Madame Mao begins to start to imagine she being on stage and being that star that she was born to be. Later on, Jiang who becomes Madame Mao later on, fools her grandfather and runs away. Madame Mao then starts off her life by her first marriage. As I recall her first marriage was nothing but a disaster. Mao wasn’t happy one bit. The way the novel characterized her first marriage can be simply described as terrorizing Madame Mao’s first husband treated her just like she was a Thanksgiving meal. It is stated that she felt as if she was an animal being slaughtered across the table. Later on, Madame Mao meets the man who changes her life for the better in many different ways, even though he was a communist leader.

           In addition to human trafficking with women in relation to this novel, there has also been a recent incident that shows something similar human trafficking in men. This is now happening in a country by the name of Libya. Libya is a state located north of Africa. Libya’s population is fairly large to say the least. Libya has about 6.23 million people.  There has been a recent incident that in Libya that shows that there is illegal acts of slave trades going on. Now, even though this isn’t human trafficking, this is still a major issue that correlates with the idea of kidnapping someone against his or her free will. This type of activity is a crime that has become a recent headline in the news. According to CNN, the team has traveled in and witnessed some men being auctioned for as little as $400 each. The one thing I find surprising in all of this is that the persons being auctioned are men. Often times, when we hear situations similar to this, it’s in relation with women. That is the exact reason why I say that gender is a social contract. When I hear certain situations, I often adhere to either the female or male gender that the situation or case may be associated with.

           To close, that is why I feel like this novel was very eye opening to say the least. In the novel “Becoming Madame Mao,” this novel brought many different ideas and many different approaches to look at things differently. I would say for a fact that human trafficking has been a problem. The real question is that if I feel that it’s still a problem now. Honestly, I would say that it’s not a direct problem. When I say that it’s not a direct problem, I mean that it’s not a problem that can’t be solved. Over the pass years, there have been many laws passed that

can help with the colossal problem that has evolved over the years. I truly believe that human trafficking has been controlled and solved presently. As for gender being a social contract, the statement made will forever stand as a whole. Gender will forever be a social contract. Now, can we solve it is an even bigger mystery that we fail to realize or mention. If it’s one thing I know for sure, it is that Madame Mao used all her wrongs and turned her life around for herself.

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Clothing in Relation to Gender Identity"             The avant-garde population of the twenty-first century have redefined how society views clothing. They are experimenting even further with what the world labels as women’s clothing and men’s clothing. When it comes to one’s clothing, there is a fine boundary between what is sociably acceptable and what deepens the crevice of normalcy. From wedding dress etiquette to professional attire, there is no question clothing can make a statement. The question that stands, however, is how far can society push the imaginary boundary. In literature, there are several examples of individuals in various novels who push the boundary, some further than others, for some higher purpose. Nina Felshin, in her article titled Clothing as Subject, addresses clothing in relation to oneself, as she writes, “Central to the work of many cultural theorists is the idea that the self is no longer seen as something simply innate and biologically determined, rather it is considered a mutable reflection of sociality, a kind of repository of cultural values” (20). This idea correlates to the theory that clothing can define one’s gender identity. Furthermore, the clothing choices of multiple protagonists from various novels in history constitutes clothing as a means of expression for deciding one’s internal attitude towards gender, challenging the worlds preconceptions of the power of wardrobe in order to demolish the pre-existing gender stereotypes to achieve exhilaration.              Joyce Carol Oates’ fiery novel Foxfire has a female protagonist, known to her friends by the nickname Legs, who challenges her society’s acceptance of labeled female and male clothing. The novel is set in the 50s. Traditional women’s clothing in the fifties includes pointy breasts, hourglass figures, and form-fitting skirts (Vintage). To accompany her blazing, passionate personality, Legs chooses to wear loose, baggy men’s clothing, and not in a subtle way. Sporting a tomboyish style accompanied by lace up boots and a leather jacket, Legs is bursting with female pride and all the ideals that come with it. Legs even carries a knife with her, as described, “Legs was still in her clothes, her jeans with items in her pockets including her switchblade with its several blades” (Oates 18). This act of carrying a knife directly contradicts the feminine, traditional purse women of the 1950s typically carried around. It is uncommon to find a woman, even in today’s century, who carries around a switchblade in her pocket. Why, then, would she choose to wear men’s clothing if she defines herself a feminist? It is hypothesized that Leg’s intention is to draw attention to her personality rather than to her female body. Ironically, she is purposefully putting on male clothing to draw attention away from her female body by drawing attention to her ‘male’ body. In a way, this obscure act is blurring the lines of her gender identity. With this new unknown identity, and much to the dismay of the world around her, Leg’s is simply portrayed as fierce and strong: exactly her intention. Anchee Min’s revolutionary novel, Becoming Madame Mao, also challenges the idea of being born into a certain gender identiy. The Protagonist is Madame Mao of the 1950s Communist China who is budding with power from her recent marriage to Mao Tse-tung. However, Madame Mao is constantly put down and stumbled upon because she is a woman and women are not expected to have power. To combat this obstacle, Madame Mao chooses to dress herself in male clothing, similar to Legs from Foxfire. In fact, the clothing she chooses is that of the army uniform of the men during that time: this in itself is loaded with symbolism. The first-time Madame Mao meets the infamous Mao Tse-tung, Anchee men describes Madame Mao’s appearance as, “She has put nothing on her face. In fact she has washed her face twice. She has decided to show her own to earthiness, her reliability. She is in her uniform, her full costume” (Min 117). On their wedding day, November 28, 1938, Madame Mao wears, “…a faded gray uniform and a belt over it” (Min 153). There are even images of Madame Mao from real-life events where she stands tall in the bulky, grey uniform. Why would Madame Mao choose to wear the bulky grey male uniform? It is speculated that Madame Mao desires to wear the male clothing to conceal all of her outward female body. This diminishing of her natural born body is proving that she does not want to associate herself with the soft, feminine appearance so that she may be taken seriously. Her choice does, however, grant her immense power and she is feared by many. By taking on this male appearance, Madame Mao is directly challenging society’s view on women with daring eyes and a determined mind.             Jamaica Kincaid’s grotesque novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, features a strong leading lady known as Xuela. Abused and beaten all her life, Xuela rebels and refuses to follow the traditional pattern of an innocent girl to an obedient wife to a caring mother.  Clothing appears to be a significant factor of Xuela’s life; a tool she uses to convince others around her that she is extraordinary. Xuela’s appearance is described as, “It was these clothes, the clothes of a dead man, that I wore to work each day. I cut off the two plaits of hair on my head; they fell to my feet looking like two headless serpents. I wrapped my almost hairless head in a piece of old cloth. I did not look like a man, I did not look like a woman” (Kincaid 98-99). Instead of merely taking on the image of a man, Xuela is choosing to stray from labeling herself as neither a man nor a woman. For Xuela, however, clothing has an even deeper meaning than simply an outward portrayal of one’s internal emotions. It is because of Xuela’s abandonment from her father and the abandonment from all who have cared for her that Xuela chooses to let go of her outward appearance, the way that people see her. Each time her father came to pick up clothing from her caregiver, who washed and cleaned all his clothing, it is a constant reminder to Xuela that she is nothing better than a sack of clothing. It is no wonder, then, why Xuela would choose to adorn herself in ratty male clothing than to adorn herself in colorful, feminine clothing. She refuses to adopt society’s expectation of how she should act morally and how she should appear physically. Xuela believes the clothing her father wears defines him, as she states, “And these clothes, these policeman’s clothes, came to define him; it was as if eventually they grew into his body, another skin” (Kincaid 90). In mockery, Xuela wears male clothing to disrespect her father who mistreated her all her life. The power Xuela gives to clothing defines her life and allows her to choose her own path.            Djuna Barn’s gothic novel, Nightwood, also contains numerous accounts of clothing as a means of self-expression. However, the complicated character, Dr. Matthew O’Conner, uses his clothing to express his wants to become female: one of the first transgenders documented in literary fiction. In contrast to the previous protagonists mentioned, who are all females choosing to wear male clothing, Matthew is a male choosing to wear female clothing. In one instance of the novel, Matthew is found lying in bed, and he is described wearing a woman’s flannel nightgown. The doctor is also found wearing, “a wig with long pendant curls that touched his shoulders” (Barns 85), and also, “he was heavily roughed and his lashes painted” (Barns 85).  This image of Matthew adorned in a female nightgown with a full face of makeup and lengthy curls is surprising to those around him. Littered around his apartment, besides the obvious medical tools, lay women’s undergarments and empty perfume bottles: further emphasizing his wish to feel more feminine. Matthew seems to be embarrassed by the fact that another face has caught a glimpse of him adorned in women’s fashion. Nevertheless, Matthew uses clothing to comfort himself and to conform himself to be more of what he wishes. Clothing, to him, is a staple and a symbol of what he wishes to be in life. In a way, clothing is his silent way of expressing his internal monologue that he cannot speak out loud. Judith Butler, a Philosophy professor from George Washington University, discusses the idea of abandoning one’s gender in her article titled, “Perfomative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Femenist Theory.” She quotes, “One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman” (519). Matthew is one of the most famous protagonists who successfully clouds the imaginary boundary between males and females, breaking down the idea that one is simply born a male or simply born a female but rather becomes the gender of their choosing.             In today’s modern society, there are many clothing lines available for men and women that are labeling themselves as gender neutral. One example is VEER, defining themselves as, “…a contemporary fashion retailer for women seeking clothing that blurs the lines of modern masculine and feminine style. Veer was started from an Indiegogo campaign and has been made into a successful tomboy shop. They create clothing for androgynous women by androgynous women. The designers Jenny & Allie hope to contribute to the growing acceptance and awareness of variations in non-gendered fashion” (HER). Another upcoming style shop is called Androgyny. “Androgyny is a clothing brand designing clean, sharp shirts for androgynous women. They reject the view that only “men” wear “menswear,” and are creating menswear to fit the female body. Androgyny is on a mission to inspire confidence by making clothes that fit true to ones body type” (HER). After evaluating the stylistic choices of the protagonists Legs, Madame Mao, Xuela, and Matthew, it is possible that these clothing shops reflect their goals and ideals of continuing to minimize the outline of gender through stylistic choices. To these protagonists, there are countless positive outcomes that minimizing gender would offer the world. By choosing to wear men’s clothing, Legs, for example, draws attention to the oppression she feels women are under at that time period in history. Her and her friends constantly combat abusive men; giving Legs all the more reason to wish to abolish gender and look forward to approaching her ultimate goal: happiness. By wearing the masculine army uniform, Madame Mao is one step closer to acquiring power for herself in choosing her own life’s choices instead of being forced into one of two occupations: motherhood or prostitution. Her ultimate goal is happiness. By choosing to label herself as neither male nor female, Xuela breaks free of the bonds of becoming a proper woman, striving to forget her unforgiving past and look forward to the present, hoping to achieve happiness. And finally, by categorizing himself as a man longing to become a woman, Matthew opens society’s harsh eyes to the mistreatment of people like him who are suffering because they do not feel comfortable in their native skin, yearning for a life where he can be at ease and happy. Citations Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. Faber & Faber, 2015. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519–531. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3207893. Felshin, Nina. “Clothing as Subject.” Art Journal, vol. 54, no. 1, 1995, pp. 20–29. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/777502. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013. Min, Anchee. Becoming Madame Mao. Mariner Books, 2000. Oates, Joyce Carol. Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. PLUME, 1994.

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Disguising Rebellion: A New Consideration of the Dense Language in Nightwood

           The dense language and clouded rhetoric of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood creates a difficult yet enlightening path through the repressive environment of Europe in the 1930s. In this environment, people on the fringes of mainstream society were overtly outcast, and their identities were minimized. The modernist ideas of homosexuality were based on Freudian notions popularized in this period. These notions were widely read and translated in a misogynistic way which ultimately painted homosexuality in a light of sexual deviance. As a queer woman living in this same environment, Djuna Barnes was fully immersed in a society that was not welcoming to her identity. Barnes' writing of Nightwood allows her an outlet to rebel against these popular notions. Through the characters in Nightwood, Barnes gives voice to several different under-represented groups within her own society. Through the use of clouded and complicated rhetoric, Djuna Barnes represents the story of faltering identities such as homosexuality, race, and gender through the characters of Robin, Felix, and Dr. Matthew O’Connor respectively. Barnes uses this complicated rhetoric in order to shroud her insertion of these character’s representations and illuminate their oppressed identities into an environment that is not receptive to their existence.

Djuna Barnes has first-hand experience as a minority in an environment that is combative to her identity. As a lesbian in Europe in the 1930s, Barnes was a queer woman in the face of a starkly homophobic society. Barnes is often criticized by modern feminist critics because of her public unwillingness to be identified as a lesbian. This criticism is based in the idea that Barnes was ashamed of her homosexuality and was simply unwilling to claim it as part of her identity. I will suggest that this unwillingness stems from her disdain for the general societal idea of being a lesbian, influenced by Freud, in which homosexuality is perceived as a deviant behavior. As Susana S. Martins shrewdly asserts in her article "Gender Trouble and Lesbian Desire in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood", "being a lesbian is something entirely different from, or more than, the simple fact of loving women; being a 'lesbian' means entering into a realm of discourse that is largely out of one's individual control but that nevertheless produces and orders one's identity" (Martins, 110.) This suggests that Barnes was not ashamed of the fact that she was a woman attracted to other women. On the contrary, Barnes was ahead of her time in realizing that the identity of the homosexual in the public sphere was controlled by misogynistic explanations of its existence. In this way, Barnes fought against adopting a wide range of negative social implications inherent in publicly adopting the identity of being a lesbian. This interpretation of Barnes' aversion to explicit identification begins to give us a glimpse into the motivations of her writing. Barnes actively fights against this representation and other deviant representations in her novel Nightwood.

In order to take a stand against these representations in her combative environment, Barnes utilized clouded and complicated rhetoric. This kind of writing was widely used during the Modernist era of literature, during which this book was written. The recent events of World War I and the looming threat of World War II created a Europe engulfed in turmoil. This environment fostered a feeling of uncertainty, which led to a new era of literary style. Barnes was a pioneer of this new literature and used this dense and complicated literary style to her advantage. This technique allowed Barnes to write the story she wanted to tell, which included several different factions of marginalized groups, in a way that was less obviously sympathetic to them. The use of this kind of technique was necessary in order to call attention to their loss of representation in a society that does not accept any assertion of their identity. Victoria L. Smith, author of "A Story Beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood", makes the claim that the complicated language that Barnes employs in Nightwood "enables us to see the shadows, the psyches of those people, particularly Jews, lesbians, and male homosexuals, that have previously been unremarked, unspoken, and unaccounted for" (Smith, 195.) The "shadows" that she refers to can mean the suggestion of their existence without an overt statement, making the idea of their existence more palatable to a closed-minded audience. This opacity in language also allows Barnes to mask her progressive views, which can be uncovered through a close examination of her characters. The characters of Felix, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, and Robin represent their own histories, and according to Smith, are characters "who seem to function as tropes within the novel" (Smith, 195.) Through covertly revealing their existence in this way, Barnes subtly calls attention to their faltering identities.

The novel opens with a discussion of Felix and his family, who are of Jewish descent. It quickly becomes clear in this section that Felix's identity is determined by his family ancestry. The novel is set in Europe on the brink of World War II which is an environment heavy with anti-Semitic sentiments. Felix and his father, Guido, are well of aware of the negative societal implications of their Jewish heritage, similarly to Barnes’ awareness of the negative social implications of her homosexuality. As a result, Guido creates an elaborate fantasy about his family's history which excludes any traces of Jewish heritage. This fantasy includes a collection of fake portraits of Austrian nobility, which Barnes depicts as attained by Guido “when he has been sure that he would need an alibi for the blood” (Barnes, 10.) Felix is brought into this unwelcoming world, and his father’s denial is continued throughout the novel by Felix, who calls himself a Baron and hangs these portraits of fake Austrian ancestors on his walls. Felix perpetuates his father’s shame and becomes a fake collector of history in order to insert himself into the dominant history and attempt to make up for his loss of representation in society at large. Martins notes this by arguing, "Felix, who feels himself forever compelled to "bow down" to aristocracy and to authority, no matter how he fights the urge, has been similarly distorted by a culture predicated on his inferiority" (Martins, 112.) Despite his dogged attempts to erase his own history, Felix cannot escape his racial identity. Through beginning the novel with Felix, Barnes uses the framework of Felix as a Jewish man to represent a familiar story of a loss of history and representation. This lends itself to an understanding of less familiar identities within this society such as homosexuality and gender that Barnes will represent in this novel.

Through the character of Dr. Matthew O'Connor, Barnes represents a gender identity that is deviant from the societal norm of the time. Dr. O'Connor occupies a similar space as Felix in his quest to break free of his rigid identity assigned to him by society. As a man in society, Dr. O'Connor is cast aside as a fake doctor, associating with many other outcasts. Martins suggests, "What he wants is to be seen as a particular gender, to escape the nonexistence to which he has been confined" (Martins, 113.) In this way, Dr. O'Connor's gender identity is linked to this notion of his existence, which is unsuccessful in the public world as a man yet confined to the private sphere as a woman. This creates an extreme crisis of identity that his character is constantly trying to break free from. The main way in which he attempts to do this is by expressing himself through oblique language. In this environment, there was a lack of a lexicon for people who were transgender, leaving them to hide their identity or exist on the fringes of society. Due to this, he cannot speak directly about his gender and sexuality, and must shroud his true identity in oblique language. Just as Dr. O'Connor dresses himself up in makeup and women's clothing, he must dress up his language to acceptably represent himself within society. Dr. O'Connor is by far the most talkative character in Nightwood, with his dialogue filling the majority of chapters. An example of this can be found in “Watchman, What of the Night?” when Nora finds Dr. O’Connor dressed as a woman in his bedroom. Dr. O’Connor fills the scene with non-stop cryptic language, yet it seems to covertly speak truth to his true feeling. In the midst of his rants to Nora about Robin, he claims “am I not the girl to know of what I speak?” (Barnes, 97.) In this statement, Dr. O’Connor enlightens the reader to his split identity in a subtle way. This statement suggests that he speaks so constantly in order to verbally outline his true identity. This may also shed light onto why Dr. O’Connor becomes a sounding board for the other character’s issues in the novel. In his position of stifled identity, he has a unique perspective on the plight of others with stifled identities, such as Robin and her relationship with Nora.

Robin's love affair with Nora, and Nora's subsequent obsession with Robin is a main focus of the novel. Barnes uses the relationship between Robin and Nora as a concrete example of a lesbian relationship in this environment. In several ways, Barnes also represents them as a binary of identity in order to address and debunk corresponding Freudian ideas that exist within the modernist environment. The first way that Barnes does this is to exhibit Robin as a symbol for nature. This representation of Robin can be seen from her initial introduction to the story, as Felix and Dr. Matthew O'Connor walk into her hotel room to find her strewn amongst plants of all different kinds. Robin is often referred to as a beast, which is another method in which Barnes highlights her connection to nature by representing her in an animalistic way. The night is another symbol used to refer to Robin throughout the novel, which is an additional image synonymous with nature. As the end of the natural day comes and the cover of night begins, Robin can truly begin to thrive. As a homosexual woman in an unwelcoming society, Robin and the night have very distinct similarities, which Smith points out as both of them being, "the antithesis of the seen, the acceptable, and the recorded world" (Smith, 199.) This connection that Barnes makes between Robin and the night further strengthens this image of Robin as nature. In order to counter Robin as nature, Barnes presents Nora as a representation of culture. The biggest example of this can be seen when Nora's dog takes Robin down in the final scene. The closing image of Nightwood, shows Robin and the dog running around, “until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping” (Barnes, 180.) Nora’s dog, as a representation of Nora, is the final attack of culture on Robin’s identity. In this final image, culture ultimately defeats nature, which is symbolic of the way in which negative cultural views of homosexuality force natural sexual desires into repression.

This binary of nature versus culture can be taken further through the suggestion that nature has a passive element, and culture has a dominant element. The binary of passive versus dominant is often compared to feminine versus masculine within patriarchal societies. Barnes brings up these specific binaries between Robin and Nora in order to counter Freud's influential ideas regarding homosexuality. Freud tends to attribute female homosexuality to early childhood, as Martins points out, "Freud suggests that penis envy could be the cause of female homosexuality, that in recognizing the superiority of men, the woman 'insists on being like a man'" (Martins, 117.) Barnes would have been familiar with this theory, and used in her building of the characters of Robin and Nora in order to debunk it. Freud goes on to theorize that small children begin to sexually admire their mothers because they want to be like their fathers. Barnes also addresses this through the relationship of Robin and Nora, representing Robin as child and Nora as mother. Barnes addresses both of these binaries through the figure of Nora’s grandmother, described as “the grandmother who, for some unknown reason, was dressed as a mam, wearing a billycock and a corked mustache, ridiculous and plump in tight trousers and a red waistcoat, her arms spread saying with a leer of love ‘My little sweetheart!’” (Barnes, 69.) This vision of Nora’s grandmother shows her aggressively masculine appearance, which suggests the Freudian idea of penis-envy. Nora’s remembrance of this moment also suggests the effect it had on her as a child, which led her to infantilize Robin within her relationship just as her grandmother did to her as a small child. Through covertly addressing these binaries through the characters of Robin and Nora, Barnes is calling attention to their significance within society.

It quickly becomes clear as the novel progresses that none of these binaries accurately explain the dynamics of homosexual relationships. Martins notes, "Barnes seems to take Freud's observations as her starting point in theorizing the relationship between Nora and Robin. She touches upon almost every possible variation on Freud's theme, for none of the explanations seem sufficient" (Martins, 117.) All of the characters ultimately find that the homosexual desire resides within themselves. This is particularly true for Nora, who finds herself weeping at the loss of Robin and searching for guidance from Dr. O’Connor throughout the second half of the novel. In relation to her love for Robin, Dr. O’Connor tells her, “There is no truth, and you have been unwise enough to make a formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known” (Barnes, 145.) This proclamation by Dr. O’Connor asserts that in the end there is no one “formula” to explain her relationship with Robin or her overall homosexual identity. This statement also highlights the issues with trying to pin down something as “unknowable” as love or desire to one single explanation, as society attempts to do. This connects to Djuna Barnes' idea of her own identity and her unwillingness to accept the single explanation of her homosexuality. Through this groundbreaking novel, Barnes attempts to bring light to the issues she finds with the modernist representation of homosexuals.

                          Works Cited

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New Directions Books, 2006.

Martins, Susana S. “Gender Trouble and Lesbian Desire in Djuna Barnes's

‘Nightwood.’” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 1999, pp. 108–126. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3347225.

Smith, Victoria L. “A Story beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes's

Nightwood.” PMLA, vol. 114, no. 2, 1999, pp. 194–206. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/463391.

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My Brilliant Friend

Let me start off by saying that I love this novel. I assumed that since this was the last novel and it was close to the end of the semester that it would be so hard to start this novel. The start of the prologue started me off with a laugh when the author explained that the phone call received was at first thought as a phone call for a favor. I laughed because that’s how I am sometimes when my phone rings. I was shocked that I laughed at just the first sentence because that was the first time that has happened. But soon after the first sentence my laugh turned into a face of concern. This change was due to Rino saying that his mother was gone. At first, I assumed that she passed away. But the next few sentences changed that feeling. A sigh of relief came next. I love how this book triggered all of my emotions in just one page! The first page encouraged me to be engaged in the book even more! The friendship between the girls reminded me of high school. In high school, my friends and I were very competitive due to the fact that we all were in the Top 10. After a big exam, we would compare our grades, and the person that scored the highest would show the others what we did wrong. It was a friendly competition. This competition motivated us to do well so we can have a chance at a brighter future. Elena and Lila needed each other to survive day to day obstacles. I feel as if every girl needs at least one best friend just to cope with the struggles that life has to bring. When I look back at my closes friends in high school I know that they are one of the main reasons why high school wasn’t so sucky. From boy problems, to just pushing through each school year, if it wasn’t for them I don’t know how sucky high school would have been. & we all know high school can be suck

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I always caught phrases that seemed to me beautiful, and they made me suffer.

Elena Ferrante, from My Brilliant Friend (via pairedaeza)

- Caraleana Bustamante

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my brilliant friend

Lila’s gone,                   left me for dead. I wish she’d killed me first instead. So soon               this love came to an end - so soon to lose my brilliant friend.

What if             I don’t                        accept my fate? I grow, I lead, I subjugate -                      steady myself,                      refuse to fall. Perhaps I’m Lila after all.  

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Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (via antigonick)

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My Brilliant Friend

In recently reading the novel My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, there were a few interesting concepts and themes that stuck out to me. Even from a very young age, Elena and Lila have a very strong “frienemies” relationship. They are growing up in post war Nepal in a very poor and rough neighborhood, setting them up for what most would expect as a very poor future as well. However, in an attempt to turn their futures around the girls strive to be the best they can be in school and other areas. They are both very intelligent but Lila is just a tad smarter and prettier. This incites a competition in the friendship that walks the line between being healthy and unhealthy. Even though it is borderline unhealthy I do think it benefits the girls in a way to make them fight to be the best they can be and drives them to excel past the life they were born into. Elena receives an ,“advantage”, you could say when Lila’s parents refuse to pay for her to continue her schooling. Despite this Lila is still the prettiest girl and Elena attempts to keep up to her and her many suitors. Elena goes away for a summer and it is a crucial point that aids in finding herself and finding self love and confidence. Lila’s fate takes a different turn. Though she thinks in her fiance funding her father’s shoe company she will be set free, it is revealed right at the end of the novel she is trapped right where she first began because he has sold her company out to the “mobster” family of the neighborhood. I believe the end of this novel is supposed to serve as an example or metaphor of how hard it is for some people to get out of their born into conditions and start a new future 

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Years earlier, I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed, I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from. Missed opportunities. Ambition was still burning, fed by a young body, by an imagination full of plans, but I felt that my creative passion was cut off more and more thoroughly by the reality of dealings with the universities and the need to exploit opportunities for a possible career. I seemed to be imprisoned in my own head, without the chance to test myself, and I was frustrated.

Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter (via neoyorzapoteca)

This reminded me of Elena and Lina, even though it was from a different novel

-Hana O’Neill

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I just thought this was funny and cute, even though we were kept on a schedule 

-Hana O’Neill 

tfw all your library books are due in 2 days and you still don’t know the final fate of lila and lenu