The English edition’s otherwise appealing subtitle elides the pain inherent in Ferrante’s literary project. Her voice emerges in the friction between pleasure and pain. As the essays of In the Margins attest, carving out space for oneself as a woman writer in a male literary tradition that seeks to confine you, that tries to convince you that your woman’s brain cannot escape its “congenital slowness,” is hardly enjoyable. But writing through such pain, uncovering genealogies of women’s stories, envisioning new forms of narration that breach the cage of the male model: this act of resistance can be gratifying, satisfactory, revolutionary. And maybe even the tiniest bit pleasurable.
The first three essays, as per the Editor’s Note, were a lecture series written at the invitation of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Umanistici “Umberto Eco” and delivered in Bologna by the actress Manuela Mandracchia. The fourth, “Dante’s Rib,” was similarly intended to be read aloud; Ferrante composed the piece to conclude the conference “Dante and Other Classics,” hosted by the Associazione degli Italianisti (Association of Italianists). The pieces are decidedly erudite, verging on academic. Ferrante tackles canonical works by Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Denis Diderot, intertwining them with ideas from Gertrude Stein, contemporary Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, and Mexican poet María Guerra. The collection has thus marked Ferrante’s entrance into an echelon of writers, including compatriots Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, who have achieved recognition as both authors and critics.
Ferrante is arguably the first Italian woman to reach such a level of prestige. We must, of course, believe that she is a woman for this to be true, and In the Margins unequivocally asserts as much (without giving airtime to the pesky speculations about Ferrante’s identity). Admittedly, this stance is not new for Ferrante. She has mentioned the anxieties that come with writing as a woman in The Paris Review and has made her case for the power of female narrators in The New York Times. Her protagonists are writers, and female ones at that. But being a woman writer takes on new significance in this collection. It gives Ferrante a starting point to unravel the authority of a male literary model and propose a new way of thinking about narration and literature. Such a standpoint rejects an unshakable, authoritative, and authorial “I” in favor of an expression that not only transforms literature but accepts the requisite pleasure and pain of such a process.
At the heart of these essays is a classic feminist problem: man embodies a universal human experience, but woman does not. As Simone de Beauvoir puts it in The Second Sex: “I have sometimes been annoyed, in the middle of an abstract discussion, at hearing men say to me: ‘You think this or that because you are a woman’ . . . It would be out of the question to retort: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man,’ for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity” (translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier). The same dynamic is true in literature. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations are not read as novels for a particular gender (men). But we cannot say the same about works by Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, or even Beauvoir herself. In fact, as our canons become increasingly diverse (this is a good thing!), “woman writer” and “woman artist” have entered our vernacular with ease, but men rarely, if ever, must qualify their artistic production with their gender. If anyone bothers to specify “male writers,” it is typically alongside “women writers,” while “man writer” is so foreign it sounds like someone misheard the lyrics to the 1982 Hall and Oates hit, “Maneater.” If men get to speak for the whole of humanity, what can women do with their particularity, or better still, their marginality?
A tentative answer unfolds tenderly across In the Margins. Ferrante grapples with her younger self’s belief that, being a woman, she will never be enough. She fears “that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express.” She traces a genealogy of female authors only to distance herself: “I felt I had different ambitions.” She sees herself in the sixteenth-century writer Gaspara Stampa, a self-styled “lowly abject woman,” and arguably Italy’s most famous woman poet. Stampa’s voice speaks to Ferrante, reminding her “that the female pen, precisely because it is unexpected within the male tradition, had to make an enormous, courageous effort—five centuries ago, as today—to employ ‘uncommon skill’ and acquire ‘style and vein.’” Stampa, however, does something remarkable; she makes that enormous, courageous effort. Imbuing the clichéd love poems of her male contemporaries with her desire and her pain, she supersedes their model. From the margins, Stampa harnesses her particularity and joins it to the existing tradition; she makes her female voice part of the universal.
In “Pain and Pen,” Ferrante feels divided between, on the one hand, compliant writing that conforms to the traditionally male mode and receives praise from others, and, on the other, an elusive, intense eruption of words, one that is always fleeting and leaves unhappiness in its wake. Ferrante initially prefers the safety of the former, the cage of literary expectations—the dettato, if you will. But it is frantumaglia which eventually shapes her writing. Frantumaglia, that sense of fragmentation of the self, will be a familiar Ferrantean theme to many, first appearing in her non-fiction collection of the same name. There, an assemblage of broken pieces—reflections, interviews, letters—allowed Ferrante to create a composite, if not complete, image of herself as an author. Here, frantumaglia returns as a way to approach the practice of writing. Insisting that there is not some whole and complete “I” that we pull out of our interior when we write, Ferrante concludes that “writing has come to mean that permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up.” When we break free of the cage, when we accept the frantumaglie of ourselves and our lives, we don’t have to erase our individual particularity. We can reshape the notion of the universal, accepting each of us in our particularity, as an embodiment of an amalgamation of traditions that will never be stable.
But where is the pleasure in this practice, promised by the collection’s title? Ferrante’s enjoyment materializes most tangibly when interpreting the works of other women and challenging hackneyed visions of literature and history. Ferrante marvels—and laughs—at Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as she “boldly defines herself, through the mouth of her ‘necessary other,’ as a genius and, setting herself beside two men, puts herself first.” She delights in Emily Dickinson’s brief reference to “History and I,” adapting it for the title of her essay, “Histories, I.” Through a plurality of women, including Adriana Cavarero, Hannah Arendt, and Ingeborg Bachmann, Ferrante explodes the singular “I” who writes. Cavarero, in particular, provides a framework; she outlines the need for an other to whom we can recount our life story and who can give meaning to our unique, narratable selves. Like Cavarero, Ferrante insists on the shared aspect of writing. But rather than focus on the relationship between two individuals, Ferrante turns her attention to how the “I” who writes emerges out of, and in turn becomes a part of, a vast literary history: “We have to accept that no word is truly ours . . . Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune.” When we tell a story (our own or someone else’s), we are always, for better or worse, every piece of literature we have consumed.
And so, the universal and particular collide. The pain of writing and the pleasure of constructing the female “I” are not opposites but necessary complements. For Ferrante, the arduous task of this female “I” is to enter the cage, to navigate her position from the margins, and to find a way to express truth in the face of writing’s inevitable inadequacy. Ferrante’s subdued sanguinity shines as she declares, “the pure and simple joining of the female ‘I’ to History changes history.” The “universal” purported by the male model of writing is useful only if we recognize that each of us emerges from a concatenation of particulars. We are most successful when we accept how deeply we are shaped and molded by that model, and when we find a way to join ourselves to it, to make our particular universal as well, and in doing so, to shift our way of imagining literature, history, and the stories we tell.
In the final chapter, “Dante’s Rib,” Ferrante’s female “I” fully takes on the role of literary critic as she assays a magnum opus of the Italian canon. Dante specialists may chafe at Ferrante’s attempt to intervene in their field of study, but she masterfully begins her essay by anticipating this critique, citing Maria Corti’s skepticism of amateur attempts to interpret the poet. Nevertheless, unencumbered by the academic obligation to address the many debates in the field, Ferrante’s interpretation of Dante’s Beatrice takes shape unpretentiously, shedding new and welcome light on a well-known figure. Beatrice, Ferrante shows, need not embody our contemporary archetype of a feminist or woman intellectual in order to matter for a history of women writers, women intellectuals, and women who resist the bounds of social expectations. According to Ferrante, Dante synthesizes two distinct forms of knowledge in the figure of Beatrice—the theoretical and philosophical knowledge taught in the Scholastic university setting, available only to men, and the religious and spiritual knowledge of the female mystics, which they accessed not through traditional forms of learning but through a direct rapport with God. Beatrice, like the other “I” who writes, is a composite. And while that composite might serve as a symbol for Dante, Beatrice still breaks open “what is possible for women” in the fourteenth century and beyond. While non-specialist readers might find this essay challenging, it is rewarding, and might even spur one to read Dante, as Ferrante did, “out of love.”
Across the collection, Goldstein proves herself once again to be a faithful translator, producing a recognizable and readable rendering of Ferrante’s voice in In the Margins. Her translation of Ferrante’s increasingly critical and academic work, however, does not always maintain the same effortlessness that we find in Goldstein’s translation of Ferrante’s novels. At times, the English of In the Margins feels stretched to its limits, like the rubber of an overfilled balloon, as if the Italian might burst through at any moment, leaving only shreds of English behind. Since Goldstein initially learned Italian by reading Dante and made a name for herself as Ferrante’s translator, I imagine that the experience of translating “Dante’s Rib” was particularly meaningful. But it could not have been simple.
The opening sentence of “Dante’s Rib” illustrates its difficulties. Goldstein translates:
In a 1966 essay, Maria Corti — to whose extraordinary work I owe the impulse to reread Dante after first reading him in high school — drew a distinction, with proper sarcasm, between Eugenio Montale’s competence on Dantean matters and “a certain dilettantism, although brilliant, in vogue among our writers, or vacuum of militant improvisation, [which] gets accustomed to rapidly ransacking a text or two, then produces, confident in its own cultural virginity.”
Culturally, there’s a good deal of context embedded in this sentence: reading Dante in high school in Italy is a rite of passage; Eugenio Montale was a Nobel prize-winning poet and respected critic who maintained a relationship with an American Dante scholar, Irma Brandeis; the field of Dante Studies is both colossal and insular, stretching over seven hundred years. This information isn’t essential to understanding Ferrante’s point, but it certainly helps. Linguistically, the partial quote from Maria Corti consists of a series of clauses that barely amount to a cohesive thought in English. Upon closer examination, the distinction outlined in this opening sentence is not especially complex: there are Dante scholars and there are amateurs who believe their interpretations to be “virginal” (they aren’t). In many instances, Goldstein’s tendency toward literal translation has given Ferrante’s voice distinctiveness and clarity, but in this essay, it also means the reader may be left to navigate tricky syntax and decipher unusual diction. Nonetheless, the effort is worthwhile.
Ultimately, Goldstein’s translation of In the Margins presents a Ferrante who is at once strange and familiar. Her fans will no doubt hear the echoes of their beloved novelist in these erudite musings. Yet even more than in her other writings, this collection affirms and explores her position as a woman writer and woman critic, confronting head-on the complexities that come with that identity. And it is precisely from her position in the margins, writing as a female “I,” that Ferrante begins to elaborate a new theory of narration and a new understanding of literary history. This kind of writing could only be both a pleasure and a pain.
