Elena Ferrante’s Divided (Female) Self

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When I was expecting my first child, people warned me, “Your priorities will change.” We generally use the word “priority” to mean “a thing that is regarded as more important than others; something that needs special attention” (Oxford English Dictionary). I was a teacher and a scholar, eager to complete my first book. My professional identity also qualified as “a thing that is regarded as more important than others.”

The statement “your priorities will change” suggests that after having a child, a person—usually a woman—will devalue her former aspirations, feeling a glow of welcome acceptance for the new order of things. I did not change in this way. What happened is that I split in two, divided between personal and professional identities. Splitting in psychoanalytic terms means that one views good and bad aspects of oneself or of others in polarized terms, as in borderline personality disorder. But the term aptly applies to other forms of dissociation, such as the fracturing of identity I experienced.

Leda, the protagonist of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, is a professor who is similarly split. Leda had married another academic, and while his career forged ahead brilliantly, she was sequestered at home with two young daughters, trying to write in the interstices of child care. Leda attends a conference where her one published article receives abundant praise from a renowned scholar. She meets this man, and they begin an affair. When Leda returns home, she begins to take time to concentrate on her work, but her husband “protested that he couldn’t keep up with work and the children both.” He does not regard Leda seriously enough to support her career, to sacrifice some of his success to ensure hers. Soon after, she decides to leave her husband and her children, ages 4 and 6, cutting off all contact for three years in order to pursue her career and her romance. Really, these two are the same because her lover represents academia; her erotic fervor is as much a displacement as a passion. Leda literalizes the split in her identity, not reconciling her two selves but actually taking off into her other life and her other identity. She leaves to find what the great 20th-century psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott calls the “true self”: “I loved them too much and it seemed to me that love for them would keep me from becoming myself.” Three years later, Leda returns and resumes the care of her daughters.

Leda narrates The Lost Daughter, interweaving her account of the past with that of a recent vacation by the seaside. On Leda’s arrival, she encounters Nina, a gorgeous young woman and ostensibly a perfect mother to her 3-year-old daughter Elena: “She seemed to have no desire for anything but her child.” Nina’s relationship with Elena revolves around their play with a doll which they both nurture, attuning to one another harmoniously, merging identities by taking turns making the baby talk. Leda finds this particularly annoying. She becomes obsessed with Nina, Elena, and the doll, fascinated and exasperated because they represent a harmonious motherhood she failed to achieve. How marvelous to be free of the ambitions that led her to take the drastic measure of cutting herself off from her children, leaving damaged, “lost things behind me.”

Leda’s jealousy leads to action. She steals the doll, that “shining testimony of perfect motherhood” to attack that perfection, to diminish its power of reproach for her own failings as a mother. With a touch of magical realism, her attack succeeds. Once the doll disappears, the imperfections in Nina’s life, including those in her relationship to Elena, begin to show. The child becomes ornery, driving Nina to express the kind of discontent that Leda experienced as a young mother. Leda discovers Nina kissing a boy her own age. “I just want to be a girl again,” she tells Leda. A girl—free of the responsibilities of motherhood.

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The doll has functioned as a fetish for Nina and Elena. In anthropology, the fetish refers to an object that is worshipped for magical powers and indeed, the doll creates harmony that vanishes with its absence. For Freud, the fetish is a substitute for the female genitals, an object eroticized to avoid confronting the castration anxiety evoked by the woman’s “missing” penis. To analogize with Freud’s theory (without endorsing its misogyny), the fetishized doll creates a relationship that masks the tensions of motherhood.

When Nina asks Leda why she returned to her children. She replies, “I returned for the same reason I left: for love of myself ... I felt more useless and desperate without them than with them.” This is not a confession of having gotten priorities wrong. By leaving, Leda has had three years in which to establish herself in academia. She returns because her “true self” comprises motherhood. But here’s the crux: only after fulfilling her professional ambitions is Leda able to integrate the different parts of herself that had split apart. She could do so because both parts had been allowed to develop.

Leda does not have an easy relationship with her daughters; she pays a price for her ambition. Even so, this is not an unhappy novel. Leda’s daughters know she loves them, and they love her in return. Whatever damage she inflicted, she also did much to repair it. At the end of her vacation, her daughters phone saying that they hadn’t heard from her in so long that they didn’t know if she was alive or dead. “Deeply moved, I murmured: ‘I’m dead but I’m fine.’” We can assume a psychological rebirth. Leda’s experiences with Nina, Elena, and the doll help her to feel a sense of resolution about the choices she has made. Mothers make compromises in the best of circumstances—conditions that few of us enjoy. But we adapt and we do our best, which is usually enough to make most of us, in Winnicott’s words, a “good enough mother."