The Role of Gender in the Hong Kong Film "After This Our Exile"

!WARNING: SPOILERS!

After This Our Exile won numerous film awards, including Best Film at both the Golden Horse and Hong Kong film awards in 2006. It is a touching, often tragic film. A family falls apart when a father indulges his character flaws at the cost of his family. He gambles and borrows, losing money and failing to repay his debts.

His wife (Lin) realises he won't change his ways change and decides to leave him. Their poor young son is caught in the middle. He spots her attempt to leave the first time around, but is blamed when she gets away the next time around. Referred to as "Boy" (at least in the English translations), Lin abandons him too. Her role is simplified, no doubt as a way to focus on the father and son's relationship.

Boy misses her and experiences conflicting feelings of loyalty. However his Dad's influence prevails, and he soon adopts his dad's negative view about his mom. Only when it is too late does he realise  his dad is the real bad apple of the family. His father, impulsive and unwilling to work, forces the boy to steal for money. At this point the boy gets caught and thrown into a correctional facility.

FAfter This Our Exile is therefore a cautionary morality tale. Now that China has an up and coming middle class, the film is perhaps saying don't throw away your parental responsibilities to chase your dreams.

While I found the film genuinely affecting, I lament the missed opportunity to realise the potential in the mother's role. Her character is at first wonderfully interesting, full of passionate restraint as she schemes to escape a dead end life. Sadly this is marred by the father's view of her as merely an unfaithful woman, which Boy believes and is reinforced when she exchanges parental love for a kind of naive yet inconsequential sentimentality about Boy. And so she finally transforms into yet another stereotype, of the lover turned domesticated wife. For someone so strong-willed this doesn't make a lot of sense.

Shing, the dad, is portrayed as a weak-willed character. He is all the more dangerous for having once possessed a dream of success that may have been within reach had he worked at it. He doesn't want to lose face completely and looks for easy solutions. However the interest of the tragic story is based on more than character flaws. A central part of the plot revolves around the particular way in which gender roles play out in the narrative.

The Chinese version of the title is 父子, which literally means "father son". We should therefore be under no illusion that Shing and Boy are the central characters in this story. The moral seems to be that only a father can give his son the right education in life, and when he fails to do so, tragedy will follow.

It is worth remembering that Chinese culture is largely paternalistic, so this moral injunction isn't a surprise to Chinese audiences, nor even the strong filial loyalty, as filial piety is an essential part of Confucian teaching. However to Western audiences such a paternalistic morality is more likely to meet with disapproval as they would expect a more equal, nuanced message about gender roles, such as I have expressed above. However it is precisely the strict partitioning of roles that proves instructive about the forces that drive the story.

Lin, the mother, runs away but fails (the first time) due to a premonition the boy has. In a powerful and dramatic early scene Shing apprehends her and takes her home in a fury. He treats her badly in what appears to be a domestic pattern of abuse, he also ignores her accusations about his bad habits. Instead he becomes very emotional - almost histrionic (a character trait that, in the West at least, has a long and unhappy association with women).

On the other hand Lin keeps her cool and gets to the point, even if it takes her a while to open up. It is a very powerful scene. Shing remains in denial at first, but eventually succumbs to the truth. It appears to be out of deep love, but we soon learn that he also needs Lin to help him pay his debts. She is the provider. His love has a dark side.

She, on the other hand, manages to win back his trust to win herself time. He clearly believes in his own masculinity, as they make love that same night in a scene that gives an insight to Lin's precarious position. She still finds him attractive enough to give in to their passion, but the viewer is aware that she may have something up her sleeve and probably needs to keep him on her side.

It is this 'cunning' element of her character that is juxtaposed with his more straightforward bad character. The question is hinted, if not exactly asked: is it worse to be honest and emotional, yet a hopeless case, or more capable but a bit cunning and hypocritical? Given the way things play out, it is clear that Shing's character is judged in the negative. His is a bad sort who fails his own son in the worst kind of way. But what of Lin? Could she have saved them by staying on?

I think the answer is no, she was always more ambitious, and the context is about the father-son relationship being the backbone of society. However this also shows the way in which Lin's character is problematic. She has to leave because by staying and saving her family she would be fulfilling the father's role. She would become the backbone that rises through the slackness of her husband's lack of moral fibre. And this will not do. She can't be the man, she can't be the one to wear the trousers. Instead, it is better that she disown her family in a double negative, moving from female victim to active seeker of happiness in the arms of another man who happens to be rich and successful - even if it makes her look flighty. She is not even evil, incapable of real evil - just inconsequential.

Given the film's ending it is probably safe to assume that the film doesn't directly acknowledge society's role in Lin's decision. Or to put it differently, it doesn't acknowledge that her choices are by default highly constrained. It's a lose-lose situation, morally speaking, so she might as well choose the option in which she gains something.

Although she does not want to cut herself off from Boy completely, she acts in her own interest for the new baby, and the narrative turns her parental care into distracted sentimentality. She completes a double negative leaving Shing and Boy to their circle of masculinity while she pursues a new motherhood. She is diminished by being seen as a giver of children, not a giver of souls, which is the role demanded from Shing.

It is perhaps slightly unfair to suggest that the film intentionally sets out to paint Lin as mere stereotype. After all, it was meant to be about the father and the son. But as pointed out, the film does not acknowledge the society's influence in her options. The film's limited view of gender roles has repercussions when, ultimately, the father fails to be a father - to be a man of substance - and we are left to wonder whether his excessive masculine posturing isn't partly responsible for his failure in fatherhood.

Boy, then, is the only character left to fulfil the expectation of being a man, and, being a boy, he cannot do so. It is only at the end of the film, once he has grown up, that he sets out to right those wrongs. He shows some of the backbone that both his parents lacked.

A Look at Ferrante's The Story of the Lost Child

SPOILER ALERT! This post discusses the final novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Saga and deals with plot points without warning or discretion. If you haven’t read the series up to the end and do not want plot spoilers, stop reading here.

Introduction

So much happens in The Story of the Lost Child and there are so many surprises that a good way to make sense of it is to begin at the end and consider what we know by the final stages of the book. Before I do so, however, a few preliminaries are in order.

Firstly, Elena analyses her own behaviour, and this layer of analysis illuminates her and others’ behaviour. I will try not to repeat the obvious. Secondly, the final novel veers off into territory I had not anticipated in my analysis of the first three. I am glad. As a reader I tend to prefer the Lila-centric parts of the novels over the Elena-centric parts of the novels, probably because they are the extraordinary ones. It also means that some of my observations were not conclusive. I will comment on a couple of these, but I won’t harp on about it.

The Lost Child

Until Tina’s disappearance, we are led to think of Imma as the lost child, because of her inability to adjust. She is an emotionally lost child. This turns out to be a clever ploy by the author to keep us ensconced in the joy of those Halcyon days before the cruel blow is delivered. Whether intended or not, the care with which Tina was made the focal point of the photoshoot signalled to me a symbolic exchange of destinies and, indeed, I feared for the worst. I had a sleepless night after Michele punched Lila in the face and sensed a terrible tragedy in the lives of the Lila and Enzo.

Yet by the end of the novel Tina’s fate is magnified in other characters and perhaps in almost all the familiar characters of the neightbourhood. Lila and Gennaro are both lost children. Gennaro, like Imma, is emotionally lost and weak willed. He never really grows up. Elena treats him like a stupid boy at the very start of book one. Lila herself is a lost child. Her precocious talents as a child have all stilted and repressed by adult responsibilities, an adult world, through work, through hardship, and now through tragedy. Yet the child inside never gave up, always held fast in some hidden corner. This child held fast to hope, and this hope is for the longest time connected to Elena, whose life was meant to justify Lila’s suffering. Once Elena’s activist efforts in the neighbourhood fail, and especially after Tina disappears, even this hope fades. Lila is disappointed in Elena.

The truth about Elena’s doll Tina, like a voodoo doll representating Elena, remains hidden inside Lila until the novel’s resolution. At the same time Lila herself remains tucked inside Elena’s soul. This hidden knot binds the two friends for a lifetime, and is the edifice on which the novel is built. Like those Neapolitan churches that come to fascinate Lila, and that commemorate forgotten atrocities, Elena’s story is a literary monument that exists because of the horrible events that caused suffering in their lives.

To clarify this point, let’s ask a question. Would there have been a story or indeed the need for one, if Lila’s life had proceeded according to her childhood promise? Yes! There would almost certainly have been a need for it, but chances are that she would have written it herself, even if that life unfolded side by side with Elena’s.

The lost child from Elena’s point of view, therefore, is Lila, and if Lila once admonished Elena for writing “ugly things” (in that second novel that only belatedly gets published, and then to great fanfare) it can be understood from this viewpoint: that Lila’s hidden child wanted beautiful things, and that Lila’s hidden, lost child wanted Elena to transform the world into beautiful things. Instead, Elena merely reflected the ugliness of their world. It is a world from which Lila never tried to escape, trusting Elena would help her to transform it, even if only in literature. Yet in old age, after even Elena disappointed her, she finally shifted out of Elena’s range. Lila’s hidden child is lost first because she is left behind, and second because Elena disappoints her, doesn't help her escape the ugliness. Tina’s disappearance is the symbolic reinforcement, or realisation, of this “lostness” - of being lost.

Elena suffers in the absence of Lila. It is a type of mourning that refuses acceptance. It is an angry suffering. Acceptance comes only at the very end. Elena’s suffering in the absence of Lila mirrors the suffering Lila felt in the absence of Tina. It is a suffering that results from not knowing whether she is dead or alive. This suffering finds further fertile ground in the imagination of the reader, who knows about Lila’s disappearance from the start, and learns about her tragic life only through the eyes of Elena. As readers we are outraged at Lila’s fate, but also at the fate of all the downtrodden characters.

The significance of the dolls have a direct connection to the lost child(ren), but I discuss them more fully in the next section. For now, let’s complete the round-up of “lost children” by acknowledging with Elena that, although the Solaras have been almost universally hated, they also did their bit for the neighbourhood, to make it what it is - even its good aspects. Alfonso, Rino, Gigliola, Gino, Bruno are all children who got lost somewhere on the way. They stand for the loss of innocence, of hope, of childhood in general. In their place Elena writes her literary monument that remembers all their lives - not just her and Lila’s.

More specifically, through the loss of little Tina, Lila’s suffering is the suffering of the whole neighbourhood. By disowning Lila and forgetting, the people in the neighbourhood disown themselves, and thus their redemption becomes truly futile. Lila realises that the neighbourhood cannot be truly changed - not even by her and Elena.

It is not an optimistic vision, but it is rooted in a reality that has an emotional authenticity that is difficult to dispute.

The Dolls

Now that we have considered the Lost Child of the title, what should we make of the dolls and their return at the end? Elena receives the two little dolls from their childhood, Tina and Nu, in an unmarked newspaper package together with her post. No addressee, no return address.

The first conclusion we can draw is that Lila is alive and well somewhere, which indeed is the possibility that Elena herself entertains:

“Maybe those two dolls that had crossed more than half a century and had come all the way to Turin meant only that she was well and loved me” - p. 473.

We see here Elena’s need for validation and approval on clear display (“she … loved me”), but it is the strong possibility that Lila is alive that is of primary interest to us. Lila could have committed suicide and planned it that way, but it would not be consistent with the lost child who has finally found a new life for herself. That child was too curious and irrepressible. That child, now lost to Elena, has been recovered by Lila unto herself. 

Secondly, it is an admission by Lila of the role - unspoken up to now - Elena has played in providing courage to her in the face of overwhelming fears, such as those she confessed to in the aftermath of the earthquake. When they went up to Don Achille to confront him - one of the scariest moments of their childhood - and Lila looked so brave she was partly brave because Elena was there beside her.

This fear-courage duality is part of the secret knot of their friendship alluded to in the previous section. It is not just that “Lila has let herself be seen so plainly” (p. 473), but the very knot of their relationship has been made plain. By being made plain it now also loses its power, because Lila has relinquished it. Lila no longer needs Elena to give her courage - she has made a leap, on her own, that we know nothing of.

Thirdly, by relinquishing it, Lila also releases herself. The suppressed confines of her life finally lifts and she is free. We don’t know anything about it, but we can perhaps imagine her: a cantankerous old woman no one would pay any attention to, yet whose intelligence is still sharp and inquisitive at nearly 70 years of age, and who still has a few years left to live and enjoy life without the neighbourhood, without children, without men, without Elena, without the expectations of her childhood - without even the expectation and intrusion of us as readers (here we are reminded of the contrast between the real author, Elena Ferrante, who prefers to live anonymously rather than riding the wave of fame the way Elena of the novel did for the sake of her career; in other words, Ferrante is more like Lila in this respect).

The returned dolls means Lila has gone beyond the pale, and beyond even the bounds of Elena’s tale.

Fourthly, since dolls are often stand-ins for babies in the cultural environment in which several generations of girls have grown up in, the return of the dolls also reflect on the motherhoods of Elena and Lila. Although Lila lost Tina, and Gennaro was a disappointment, she was nevertheless a responsible, dedicated mother - even to Elena’s children until adolescence. Elena was a far better mother than Nino was a father, but she still suffers from her own children’s admonishment that she was too absorbed in her own work. Lila filled this gap.

By returning the dolls, Lila relinquishes her own role as surrogate mother completely, as well as being mother to Gennaro. Their roles have reversed, and on Elena's side of the fence the story hasn't quite ended. She has three children, plus Lila had made Elena promise all those years ago. Elena is  now responsible for Gennaro.

Fifthly, the loss of those dolls were the stuff of childhood emotions. They chucked each other’s dolls into the cellar in a jealous rivalry, a dynamic pattern that repeated itself over many years. The return of those dolls means the end of that dynamic. No more jealousy, no more rivalry. Elena, however, thrived on that competition, and her career was ignited by it.

Finally, the timing of the dolls’ return suggests a simultaneous discovery and loss of Lila’s inner child. Elena wanted Lila to hack* into her computer and read the novel. It is not inconceivable that this actually happened, and that Elena’s conclusion to the contrary is simply more evidence of her inability to see coincidences and the connections between events. The novel is finished, and soon after the dolls arrive. Perhaps Lila, herself finally free, read eagerly and realised that what Elena wrote is actually good, even if not exactly beautiful. Lila no longer needs it to be beautiful. She sees something of herself, and perhaps above all she sees Elena. She takes mercy, and frees Elena.

* Readers may have noticed more than a passing resemblance between Lila’s character and that of Lisbeth Salander. I know that I have.

Elena and Lila

Where does this leave Elena? There are many things we don’t know about Elena’s day-to-day life, but she has told us about most of the truly important events. We know that for significant periods she thrived on the competition and inspiration Lila provided. That force has now faded from Elena’s life, and she can enjoy what’s left - children and relative fame - without that pressure, without that interference. Perhaps she can mend her relationships with her children, perhaps Gennaro will take up some of her time. Either way, it is without a doubt the end of an era.

As for herself, Lila has finally freed herself of the burdens and responsibilities that had taken up her whole life. She gives up Gennaro, she gives up Elena, the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood had given up on her over the years, but she had always been a fixture, an anchor. In the final instance, her energy and inspiration had also gone into the novel we've just read. In this way she served Elena's career, albeit frequently in her own interest. Now, finally, she was free. She who had always been afraid had finally done what she could never do before: be completely independent - even independent of Elena, of the novel. True to her nature, there is no tying her down, and no knowing who she really is.

Nino

The Neapolitan saga is full of characters struggling to escape the influence of their parents, only to find themselves emulating them in one way or another. Nino epitomises this theme. He hated and rejected his father throughout his adolescence, yet ended up taking womanising to a whole new level. We saw the first part coming, even if Elena did not. Yet when she finally processes his legacy, she judges him “disappointing”. Of course, Lila got there first and understands the nature of his character all too well. She judges him worse than herself because, she says, he is superficial. Guido Airota makes a separate observation about him, namely that he is “intelligence without tradition”. A talented man without roots, who has nothing to lose, and is all too eager to be someone. At the end of the saga Nino sings his own praises, but those who loved him from close up have all realised that he is an unreliable, lightweight human being.

What, therefore, should we make of Elena’s longstanding crush on him? She herself realises that she had created a fantasy, and that the person who showed up at her book reading in Milan had nothing to do with that fantasy. They were separate entities. However, fantasy and reality corresponded sometimes. For instance, his behaviour as an adolescent was real. She saw him as cool and untouchable, unaffected by the opinions of those around him. His head was somewhere else. That trait turned out to be a flaw, a disregard for everyone around him, even those who adored him and whom he sporadically loved in return when it suited him.

He had intelligence, charisma, and good looks. He seemed untouchable, smooth in all situations. When he showed up at the book reading he was a knight in shining armour, rescuing her from the attacks of a stuffy intellectual. What Ferrante is doing, as Nino’s character unfolds in all its mirage-like glory, is turn the literary convention of the hero - reminiscent of, say, Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch - on its head. She is taking a longer view. Book 3 could have ended with Nino willing to reform for the sake of his “true” love for Elena. We could have been told that “they lived happily ever after”. Instead, we got the bombshell that is book 4. Nino is a warning that many of the classics are perhaps guilty of building fantasies and gender stereotypes rather than looking at the genuine commitments to gender role realities that are implied by marriage and long term partnerships. It is a stunning critique.

If I had expected Nino’s general infidelity, his ongoing marriage to Eleonora was more of a surprise. It is a cleverly disguised plot device that all but defines his character. It anchors his tendency to put every relationship in service of his career ambitions. It provides him with monetary stability and a conservative societal esteem, namely of keeping a family. It also characterises his inability to finish off any relationship. In his personal life he is a politician: not a conviction politician, but one who goes where the grass is green.

Another surprise was the amount of time it took for Elena to get rid of him. In her case, also, we see what she is willing to sacrifice for her career - in her case her human dignity. For a while she lives the life of a concubine. Yet it’s not just a career, it’s also the children and the roof over their heads. She’d created a complex set of responsibilities for herself, and she was keeping herself entangled out of necessity.

It takes her even longer still to realise that his interest in her was due to the prestige she reflected back on him. This tendency in a man is so unusual that she couldn’t see it for what it is.

Only Lila put Nino’s life at risk by being of no use to his career. Lila is therefore in a league of her own.

“She stood out among so many because she, naturally, did not submit to any training, to any use, or to any purpose. All of us had submitted and that submission had - through trials, failures, successes - reduced us.” - p. 403

If Lila’s capacity for suffering is bottomless, Nino’s suffering is like a sulking child’s when it cannot gets its way. When he gets the upper hand once more, it is water off a duck’s back. By the end of the novel Nino is nothing but an annoying stranger whom Elena finds “large, bloated, a big ruddy man with thinning hair who was constantly celebrating himself” (p. 470).

By the end of the saga, Elena herself is leaning more towards traditional values again. She recognises that Pasquale is “much better preserved than Nino”, and speaks fondly about the values he took over from his father and that he upheld at great personal cost. Indeed, even the passing of the Solaras are met with a balanced sense of loss. Elena may share something of Nino’s flightiness and ambitious disregard for those close to her, but she recognises the love she had for her old friends, for the neighbourhood, for all the families that lived there - even for her own mother. We don’t truly know Nino anymore by the end of the saga, but his lack of interest in his own children speaks volumes.

I return to Nino a little later for a final look at his character.

Pietro

Pietro, who resembles MiddleMarch’s Casaubon and Wuthering Heights’ Edgar Linton in the during the earlier novels, in book 4 emerges as a far better partner and father than Nino. He never shirks his responsibilities, he is tender and observant (as when he advises Elena sensitively about Lila), and despite his general physical deficiencies, Elena judges him worthy of her bed one last time before he leaves for America. Elena recognises his selfish need to spend his personal time with his work, yet accepts it more readily later in life, since she recognises the similarity to her own character. In short, she endorses him as a good former husband, even if she has no desire to start something new. In all these respects Pietro also turns the classic literary stereotype somewhat on its head.

With both these male characters Ferrante is taking our common literary canon to task.

Alfonso

One of the great satisfactions of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan saga is the way in which the story lends itself to analysis. There is enough substance for a thesis, and a blog post can really only hope to probe a few angles. We have not even taken a look at the Solaras, and we should.

One perspective from which to tackle the changing fortunes of the Solaras in book 4 is via the prism of Alfonso. Alfonso is a gender bender who mediates between the destructive masculine energy represented by the Solaras, and Lila’s near-indestructible counterpoint of female energy. He is both a gay man and a cross-dresser, and his muse is Lila. Not only that, he wants to become Lila. The result is that he begins to resemble Lila even more than Lila herself.

Michele Solara, always the more dangerous of the two brothers, has lost the upper hand in his dealings with Lila since she established Basic Sight with Enzo. She and Enzo have become self-sufficient. Michele’s deep respect and yearning for Lila means that this energy now spills out over a cliff and he needs a surrogate for his obsession, which the shape shifting Alfonso provides. They become a type of couple, albeit covertly. (Marcello is furious, although there is nothing he can do.)

The Solaras epitomise a type of macho male energy that simply cannot co-exist with a true female energy. Michele is obsessed by his opposite, but it is also his downfall. Their violence is not compatible with equal distribution of male and female energy. They require submission. Lila and Enzo, on the other hand, embody the only example in the neighbourhood of a different, balanced model of male and female partnership.

As Michele and Alfonso get closer to each other, the Solaras are weakened. At the same time Lila and Enzo become stronger, especially after the return of Elena, and the birth of both their daughters. Masculine and feminine energies find a kind of equilibrium in Lila’s family life perhaps for the first time, and the result is a temporary happiness and harmony (which, after the loss of Tina, never returns). During this period Michele is reduced to a tentative, nervous man who can no longer act with vigour. Whereas Alfonso now embraces his own newfound identity of a woman in a man’s body, modeled on and inspired by Lila, Michele is completely at odds with himself.

We don’t really know what happens between Michele and Alfonso, but it seems that Alfonso overshoots his privileges and Michele kicks him out. The entire balance of masculine and feminine forces in the niehgbourhood are once again in jeopardy, stacked in favour of the destructive masculine element once more. Alfonso loses his feminine appearance, he becomes unreliable, and the whole sorry saga ends with his death at the hands of unknown assailants. It is the beginning of the end.

Tina’s disappearance is the visible culmination of this multi-generational journey. Whereas we are never sure who took Tina, the flow of energies suggests the Solaras were behind it, except that they thought it was Elena’s child - not Lila’s.

Everything from then on - even the death of the Solaras - suggests to Lila that nothing will ever really change in the old neighbourhood.

Nino and Elena

While we are on the topic of contrasting energies we should take a last look at Nino and Elena.

Nino exhibits a strong blend of the feminine and the masculine. His willingnes to sleep with influential women in order to get to the top is a strategy more commonly associated - rightly or wrongly - with ambitious women in society. Combined with his intelligence, charisma, and good looks, this is a killer strategy. He appears to have disguised his stereotypically Southern tendencies behind an alluring, more acceptable Northern veneer. His masculine aggression, paired with a keen feminine sensibility, which is to say an ability to tune into women’s emotions, makes him an effective and well rounded talent. Unfortunately it is almost completely erased by his lack of commitment to his roots, or indeed to any place where he puts down new roots - except where there is power. He sows the wild oats and moves on.

Elena comes across as conservatively feminine during most of her adolescence, but her ambition passes through masculine territory via her academic learning of the classics. She breaks out of academia and attempts, with Lila as inspiration, to marry her feminine and masculine sides to great subversive effect.

If the masculine and feminine are played off against each other, so are the Northern and Southern cultures. In this case Nino and Elena are the clearest examples of this co-habiting duality, since both rise high above their origins. Indeed, at times they mirror each other. However, unlike Nino, Elena increasingly recognises her roots and turns to the neighbourhood of her and Lila’s youth for inspiration. Even so, she moves to Turin in the North for her retirement.

Conclusion

As epitomised by Lila’s life throughout most of the saga, any equilibrium of opposing forces is extremely hard to maintain. Each character in his or her own way tries to find such an equilibrium, and success tends to come at the cost of others, or at the cost of social cohesion.

The Story of the Lost Child resolves the main plot points in often startling ways, but it is the openended implications of the ending that ensures the reader will continue to reflect on the rich material provided.

Towards a Reading of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Saga

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains spoilers, so if you've yet to read all three novels you may want to skip this post. However, if you're looking for a fresh angle on the novels, this is for you :)

I've read a number of reviews of the novels recently, especially since finishing Book 3 last week, and I have yet to see a serious critical assessment. It could well be that I just haven't looked enough. A few themes are typically mentioned - the saga of an enduring friendship, the tension between the North and the South of Italy - yet these are themes that could be true of other novels too. What's unique about Ferrante's gripping saga? It is especially disappointing when so much could be said about the novels, and when one considers that most reviews already assume spoilers. There really is no need for holding back.

The main exception appears to be James Woods' 2013 overview of Ferrante's work in English (including "My Brilliant Friend"), which touches on some of the feminist themes that are, I believe, at the heart of these novels.

Another informative pointer is Victoria Zhuang's observant article at the Harvard Review, in which she notes that the Neapolitan saga has something in common with George Eliot's MiddleMarch, a thread on which I will expand.

This post is not a thorough overview or analysis by any stretch of the imagination. A series of novels this rich deserves much more attention than I am able to stick into a blog post. Instead it expands on a few impressions and thoughts that occurred to me while reading - or lying awake at night, as the case may be - and which I hope will be of use to others while considering the works for analysis.

Part of my discussion will involve arguing against the view that this is simply a bildungsroman, where that is understood to be a type of coming-of-age novel "that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is extremely important." (Wikipedia). Yes, of course, the Neapolitan Saga is at least partly that, and perhaps when James Woods first mentioned it he did so with "My Brilliant Friend" in mind, which we know is merely a foundation for the heartbreak to come. However I do fear that if the whole saga becomes branded as a bildungsroman then its real value could be missed. There is more to it, as I hope to show. So stick with me. I start with Elena and Middlemarch, and come to Lila and more feminist themes later on.

Introduction

Towards the end of "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay" we are confronted with this remarkable passage, related by Elena:

"We were therefore at this point: my husband's sister considered my marriage a mistake and said it to me frankly. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, it seemed to me the ultimate and unbiased confirmation of my conjugal unease. Besides, what could I do about it? I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes. Day by day I grew calmer. My daughter Dede went to first grade early, already knowing how to read and write; my daughter Elsa was happy to stay alone with me all morning in the still house; my husband, although he was the dullest of academics, seemed finally close to finishing a second book that promised to be even more important than the first; and I was Signora Airota, Elena Airota, a woman depressed by submissiveness who nevertheless, urged by her sister-in-law but also in order to fight discouragement, had begun to study almost in secret the invention of woman by men, mixing the ancient and modern worlds. I didn't have an objective; only to be able to say to Mariarosa, to my mother-in-law, to this or that acquaintance: I'm working." - p. 353.

This passage summarises the dark hour of Elena's soul just before the dawn: in the very next chapter - a chapter with the prescient number of 100, like the gateway to a new journey - Nino is reintroduced into the story.  She finally judges her own marriage as Mariarosa does - a failure, with little to commend it. Even children bring her no real joy, despite their cleverness and obedience. They're just reminders of her own obedient, yet clever, nature.

Middlemarch

This is a good moment to turn to MiddleMarch. We find in Pietro hints of a more modern version of Casaubon, whom Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch marries and devotes herself to. Unlike Dorothea, Elena doesn't exactly devote herself to Pietro or his work. That level of idealism is never really present in Elena. Nevertheless, there is a hardworking academic bookishness that envelopes both Pietro and Elena's lives that initially pull them closer together. Pietro, as a professor of a dead language - Latin - approximates the Casaubon who busied himself with academic questions that no one else required answering any more.

In Middlemarch it is Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's younger cousin, who opens Dorothea's eyes to the fact that Casaubon's efforts - his life's project - and therefore also hers, may be in vain: those academic questions he deemed so important may have already been superseded.

Elena's situation is not as idealistic and extreme. She takes no interest in Pietro's work, and despite his professorial status, doesn't even trust his opinion of her own writing. But let's not forget that her childhood ideals included the semblance of what she now had attained. I will return to this later. One could argue that the gears of this existence are so well-oiled that Pietro's their influence in each other's lives is superfluous. Patriarchy's silent tentacles means she is still living out the recipe of patriarchy even while they lead separate lives: a submissive wife who looks after two perfect children while her husband goes out to improve his career and standing in the world. Meanwhile, she languishes.

Although it is tempting to want to judge Pietro the way one does Casaubon, he also has a humane side more reminiscent of another literary character - Edgar Linton - to whom I return later. Pietro is a complex intellectual man, isolated in his own thoughts. In other words, the opposite of what the rest of his family likes: a politically engaged intellectual, like Mariarosa, like Franco Mari, like Nino. This predilection makes them seem more alive, and Pietro pale and lifeless. Yet he has a tender side which comes to life with Elena's mother, with Nino, with Lila, and the life of his mind - although not demonstrated - is clearly vivid. In his own way he has rebelled against the norms of the Airota family, even as he upholds the status quo. His rebellion, therefore, is perhaps futile as much as Casaubon's ambitions were futile.

His choice of wife, Elena - the girl from Naples, from the poor neighbourhood - also shows his wilder, less predictable side. When things go wrong between Pietro and Elena, he turns out to be capable of coming unhinged, and of showing passion. Elena, for her part, naively hoped he would continue exhibiting that paternalistic reason, but he turns out to be flesh and blood after all. What Elena dislikes about him may in part include her increasing dislike of ivory tower patriarchal academia, but certainly an important part of what she loathes in him is what she also loathes in herself: the inability to act, to change. She has always relied on others for action: on Lila, on Nino. Thus, when Nino stays with them, she speaks of "the excitement - maybe yes, it was excitement - that gripped me in seeing, in hearing, how an Airota, an extremely well-educated Airota, lost ground, was confused, responded feebly to the swift, brilliant, even cruel aggressions of Nino Sarratore, my schoolmate, my friend, born in the neighbourhood, like me." (p.378).

Pietro's fortress turns out to be rather vulnerable to Nino's Trojan horse from the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is Pietro's undoing, just as the political perturbations that have reached even Florence and the university, disturbs him deeply. He prefers the quiet life.

For her part, Elena sees in Pietro's steadiness under fire not a virtue, but a status quo to be toppled and overcome. By the time Pietro has come to a decision to tell her about his resolve (which is balanced and principled) regarding the police's questions that he faced at the university, Elena no longer knows what he is talking about. He is left with his principles while her heart has moved on.

The tragedy of Elena and Pietro's relationship is that she never wanted him passionately, that they've never even really understood each other. The signs were there, but she walked into it. He sort of happened to her, and she was happy to be brought into his circle of influence. His family and all the surrounding excitement compensated - at least at first - for his own relative "dullness" - even when compared to Franco Mari. She could overlook even his conservative demands towards her. Meanwhile, she has never successfully exorcised Nino from her heart, and he still lurks there, waiting for the right moment to appear - or rather, pounce. She herself doesn't know how to pounce. The reader has suspected what might happen - although Ferrante's superb writing places everything in doubt, constantly - even if Elena herself has never completely believed in it.

Nino in Elena's life not only parallels the influence of Will Ladislaw in Dorothea's life, but also exceeds it in terms of the history he shares with her, by having known her since childhood, by being from her neighbourhood, and by being the one that she herself has always known she loved. We know that Nino's marriage is one of convenience for him (although not for his wife Eleanora) and he is conscious of his situation. Despite his intellectual appearance he is savvy and streetwise, and even his choice in marriage shows this. But he is also an incurable romantic, just like his father Donato, and when he loves he loves with total abandon. For a while anyway. He is aware of his own worth, and unlike the women in his life who usually have nowhere else to go to - Lila gave up everything for him - he manages to escape via education to save himself.

Nino's passionate volatility is likely to be his and Elena's undoing. Ironically, his initial request that they remain lovers is actually the more realistic alternative. But that would never satisfy Elena, who has always loved Nino and is fed up with her marriage anyway. She wants a new adventure, one way or the other.

If Nino is true to type - and I can only speculate, since I have yet to read the fourth installment, due out this week - I predict he will become bored with Elena sexually, and so be unfaithful to her. It won't happen immediately, but it will happen soon enough. The result? She will leave him, her dreams shattered, and she will become stronger for it in the long run. He may cheat on her against his better conscience, since he insinuated that he loved Elena even when he got involved with Lila, that he merely substituted Elena with Lila; but we also know that he is a somewhat unreliable narrator of his own life (eg., he "forgets" what he said about Lila's love-making back in Milan after the book-signing), and tends to think with his passions, at least when it comes to women. It's what makes him attractive, and it's also what makes him dangerous. He is a free spirit or a loose cannon, depending on where you are standing.

So with the clues there for us as readers, I foresee tears. Yet the reader can't outsmart Elena Ferrante, she's always ahead of us, and so I expect the journey to be more nuanced, and certainly more compelling than my prediction.

Lila

There is also the sense that Ferrante doesn't really do happy endings, but let's for a moment pretend that the end of "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay" really is the end of the saga. Some called it a trilogy, and perhaps it could stand on three feet. Just.

I have thus far left out the most important character of all: Lila. The novels start out with her disappearance, and the novels are a way of inscribing her reticent yet forceful nature into existence. This goes more than skindeep, and I can now return to the quote I started with, as it now comes into its own:

"I was Signora Airota, Elena Airota, a woman depressed by submissiveness who nevertheless, urged by her sister-in-law but also in order to fight discouragement, had begun to study almost in secret the invention of woman by men, mixing the ancient and modern worlds."

Contrast this with Lila's speech less than ten pages earlier (italics in the original text):

"You see how things change: if I had remained Signora Caracci I would be ruined, I would have ended up with my ass on the ground like all the Carraccis; instead I am Raffaella Cerullo and I'm the technical director for Michele Solara at four hundred and twenty thousand lire a month" - p.344

If we gloss over the technical hindrance of Lila's relationship with Michele Solara ("I'm using him, not him me", she says), what we are left with is an assertion of Lila's independent selfhood. She refers to herself by her birthname, Rafaella Cerullo, and then goes on to indicate how her whole family has forgiven her and now depends on her. In other words, she is the boss, she is the master of her own world.

Even Lila's relationship with Enzo is beyond marriage convention, and we may well look there for clues to a true respect not marred by all-consuming passions, which inevitably destroy as much as they create. It was that mutual respect that helped her to restore herself to herself after the violent and humiliating experience of her marriage and, to some extent, her life in the sausage factory (she nevertheless considers the sausage factory a way of earning independent income, so that she wouldn't be dependent on Enzo).

The timing of these two speeches, the one from Lila to Elena, and from Elena to us, is poignant because soon in chapter 100 Nino returns to the narrative in a starring role, and although we started with Lila as the driving force in Book 1, Book 3 ends with Elena and Nino on an airplane, metaphorically embarking on an exclusive journey, a great leap, with no solid ground beneath their feet. It also echoes Dorothea and Will falling in love in Middlemarch, that much is clear, but where on earth is Lila? She is mentioned briefly towards the end, talking about Manuela Solara's murder, and the effect this is having on the Solaras and even Lila's job. But otherwise she is neglected. What does it mean?

For the first time, Elena has made an independent decision that takes her beyond societal convention - even that of the middle classes into which she has married. Affairs are tolerated (like those of Pietro's mother Adele), but to break ranks and flee with one's lover, that is not common. In other words, Elena Airota is acting on behalf of Elena Greco, and like Lila - Lila her muse and inspiration, Lila her biggest influence, Lila her model of independent action - is restoring a sense of wholeness to herself by following her heart for the first time in her life.

Now we can begin to move backwards to the start, towards Lila. If the story ended here, after 3 books, we might be able to say something like the following: Lila's reticence requires mediation, but the model set by Middlemarch (for instance) is not enough. Dorothea Brookes is still "the invention of woman by men" (note the singular woman versus the plural men). Lila, on the other hand, embodies subversion of female stereotypes. Most reviews I read note that she is feral and catlike. This is quite apt. She is outside Italian, outside cultivated language, and her observations in or on language - "The Green Fairy", or her rhapsodic description of Beckett's play -  are highly original. She is also uncompromising, and has the ability to refuse without withdrawing. Unlike Elena, who withdraws and leaves, Lila's desire to be present, to assert herself, always overcomes her own attempts to withdraw and to escape. Her strength, her ability, her sheer alpha female quality exceeds words, and if Elena succeeds in describing Lila vividly it is likely also because Elena, by the time of writing, has restored and realised in her own self a fiery, independent self she first saw and recognised in Lila.

Reviewers, with some justification, have been intent (probably following James Woods) on calling these novels a bildungsroman. If we read the process of character construction as described above, then Lila is on the one hand herself (a force of nature, a femaleness outside the capabilities of both men and women to tame or integrate, at least for long, in part because they all represent a failed patriarchy with whom she cannot feel connected) and on the other hand this aspiring self of Elena, this part that she never knew she could become or at least approximate, but has finally taken the first major step into doing so by eloping with Nino. A woman who follows her heart and her dream.

The Lila that is "herself" is the one that remains to some extent beyond language, and which Elena's writing-Lila-into-existence problematises. It is one way of perceiving the feminist discourse taking place here, namely the circumscribing and engraving onto language and culture of the nature of Lila, of Rafaella Cerullo, of this force of nature whose arrival in the world is a unique event in literature. An event, in the Badiouan sense, as it can set in motion an attempt at truth procedures - such as this one - and inspire a fidelity to understand it. This fidelity is emotional, and Ferrante's brilliance lies in intimately connecting us to the lives of these characters, and especially Lila's character. In short, it is the inscription of a woman, by a woman.

Lila speaks in dialect nearly all of the time, and we are reading about her in English, with 99.9% of the intermediary Italian translated, so clearly we are not in a position to say anything definite about Lila, only what has been inscribed ... and yet here, even here, Elena has never been given genuine authority to write about Lila, or even about the neighbourhood:

"All right", she said, "write, if you want, write about Gigliola, about whoever you want. But about me no, don't you dare, promise."
"I won't write about anyone, not even you."
"Careful, I've got my eye on you."
"Yes?"
"I'll come look in your computer. I'll read your files, I'll erase them."
"Come on."
"You think I'm not capable of it?"
"I know you're capable. But I can protect myself."
She laughed in her old mean way.
"Not from me." - p.29

So the saga is a work written in anger, a furious love letter, a proof that Lila existed, despite Lila's desire to disappear.

Education

Elena is Lila's mediator by virtue of being her only real confidante over the years, and the only known woman she respects personally. When Elena declares that she is leaving Pietro, Lila shouts:

"Why did you study so much? What fucking use has it been for me to imagine that you would enjoy a wonderful life for me, too? I was wrong, you're a fool." - p. 417

Is Lila overreacting, finally reaching the limits of her influence over Elena, or is her judgement - "you're a fool" - prescient, a sign of drama to come?

Part of the answer lies a page earlier. Lila wants to send Gennaro to Elena to look after him, adding her reason by the by: "you're the only person I trust" (p. 416). For her own part, Elena doesn't speak her thoughts immediately, but thinks "You're the only person I trust. I felt like smiling, she still didn't know that I had become untrustworthy".

Elena is of course thinking of her own sudden decision to go with Nino and leave her life with Pietro - even her children - behind. She had become untrustworthy. She has always represented something firm, something - perhaps - controllable to Lila. For the first time she has upset and subverted Lila's own expectation. She has become untrustworthy. Lila, for her apparent strength, needs solid things in her life - Enzo's firm, unchanging character, even when he is distant at work, and Elena's unchanging intellectual virtuousness.

A part of Lila's happiness lives through the ideals she has seen realised in Elena's dependable progression through school and as the wife of the young professor Airota: "Why did you study so much? What fucking use has it been for me to imagine that you would enjoy a wonderful life for me, too?".

We hear a different version of that lament earlier, after Lila finished reading Elena's second novel:

"she almost cried: You mustn't write those things, Lenù, you aren't that, none of what I read resembles you, it's an ugly, ugly book, and the one before it was too." - p.273

Can it be that, all this time, Elena's life has represented a truer success to Lila than it has seemed to Elena herself? The perceived liberating role of education in these novels should not be underestimated, and resonates beyond the page even to our own world. It is a an idealism that is also  a realism, an aspirational pragmatism. Lila's pain at not being allowed to proceed beyond elementary school influenced her whole life from then onwards. That door that closed in her face placed her firmly under the influence of the neighbourhood, of courtship, marriage, and led to all her later disappointments. The wounds go about as deep as one can imagine.

Education lifts people out of poverty into a more comfortable life. Lila, like Elena, bought into that dream, and the evidence, at least on the surface, suggests that they were not wrong to do so: Elena is generally considered the most successful person from the neighbourhood, and Lila, were it not for her extraordinary precociousness, with a bit of help from Enzo and Elena, she would never have been able to earn the living enabled by her work as a programmer. Anyone with less ability - like most of those in the neighbourhood - have a hard life with few opportunities in life to look forward to. Yet with a better education, what greater heights could Lila have reached?

So Lila, the hardboiled girl from the neighbourhood, turns out to be a bit of an idealist herself, in what is an unlikely echo of the idealism of Dorothea Brookes. Her aspiration finds an outlet in Elena - indeed, in these novels - because they are ultimately the release of her demons, of her blocked ambition at the age of 13. When she chucks The Green Fairy into the fire at the end of Book 2, make no mistake, she is in hell.

Wuthering Heights

If we want to find a literary equivalent for Lila we must leave the neat environment of Middlemarch behind and head to the moorlands, to the land of Catherine Earnshaw ... and Heathcliff. It is Heathcliff, forever outside society, who resembles more closely the forceful, uncompromising and inventive nature exemplified by Lila. Like Heathcliff in Brönte's novel, Lila has a habit of reinventing herself. Their circumstances may be different, but they both share that survivor's mentality, and the ability to adapt when the chips are down. Both are also inscribed into language and culture by a mediator, and in a cultural space that they themselves both resist and are barred from.

Edgar Linton as Heathcliff's foil, and representative of culture and cultivation, is mirrored by characters like Pietro and cultivated ivory tower academia in general. Edgar Linton's weakness in the face of Heathcliff's (and Cathy's) raw passion is echoed in Pietro's inability to face off Nino's street smart aggressions. The tension between the benefits of cultivation, and the raw rootedness of passionate nature (in Wuthering Heights) never really resolves, and we may reasonably expect this to be the case in Ferrante's saga too. Elena shares with Catherine Earnshaw this entanglement, but unlike in the case of Cathy and Heathcliff, we get the story firsthand from Elena. One mediator less.

Not a Bildungsroman

If we follow the emotional logic of the Neapolitan trilogy strictly as a bildungsroman and consider Lila as an ingredient - albeit an important one - for Elena's own character building as she develops into a strong independent woman, in contrast to Elena's perception of herself as timid and passive, then it follows that Lila's influence should begin to disappear when Elena finds her own feet. This is indeed what appears to happen towards the end of "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay".

However, if we did this, we would also be confronted with an apparent contradiction: Elena's world (of language, of culture, of middle classness, of mediated desires, of retreat into private life, of disconnection with the neighbourhood) would form a kind of Hegelian thesis to the antithesis of Lila's world (of raw dialect, of coarse manners, of working class suffering, of violence and forced sex, of the invasiveness of never-ending community and public life). If the restoration of her wholeness is brought about when she becomes "untrustworthy" and follows her heart, by rediscovering who she was even before she fell into culture, then here at the end of Book 3 we find that synthesis. Nino certainly fuses both culture (he's a published, respected intellectual in his own right) and the neighbourhood, and by uniting with him she is, we might conclude, securing for herself a new wholeness, a new synthesis. The best of all worlds. Or is it?

Wouldn't that be too Hegelian? That strikes me as a problem, because Hegel comes in for cutting commentary about two thirds into Book 3, in one of the most striking passages in the entire novel, just as  Elena discovers feminist literature. She reads an essay entitled "We Spit on Hegel":

"Spit on Hegel. Spit on the culture of men, spit on Marx, on Engels, on Lenin. And on historical materialism. And on Freud. And on psychoanalysis and penis envy. And on marriage, on family. And on Nazism, on Stalinism, on terrorism. And on war. And on the class struggle. And on the dictatorship of the proletariat. And on socialism. And on Communism. And on the trap of equality. And on all the manifestations of patriarchal culture. And on all its institutional forms. Resist the waste of female intelligence. Deculturate. Disacculturate, starting with maternity, don't give children to anyone. Get rid of the master-slave dialectic. Rip inferiority from our brains. Restore women to themselves. Don't create antitheses. Move on another plane in the name of one's own difference. The university doesn't free women but completes their repression. Against wisdom. While men devote themselves to undertakings in space, life for women on this planet has yet to begin. Woman is the other face of the earth. Woman is the Unpredictable Subject. Free oneself from subjection here, now, in this present. The author of those pages was called Carla Lonzi." - p. 280

Don't create antitheses. Is Elena in danger of having created an antithesis in Lila for her own sake? Is that why Lila always resists assimilation, that she understands this danger instinctively and cannot be a mere stepping stone for another - not even for her friend Elena? A response of sorts is formulated soon after in the same paragraph (my italics):

"I - after so much exertion - don't know how to think. Nor does Mariarosa: she's read pages and pages, and she rearranges them with flair, putting on a show. That's it. Lila, on the other hand, knows. It's her nature. If she had studied, she would know how to think like this." - p.281

Thus we return here to the question of Lila. She cannot be assimilated, and the fact that we get a sense of her through Elena's telling is already a kind of miracle. Education too, it seems, is not all it is cracked up to be. Yes, it can raise people out of poverty, but it also colludes with patriarchy, and hence is full of traps - and that is really the story of Elena's life from secondary school until she leaves Pietro.

Education, therefore, is best suited to those who have the right innate capacity for it. Someone like Lila. It's her nature ... She would know how to think like this. This assertion has an interesting parallel to Nietzsche's thinking, which also subverts Hegel's master-slave dichotomy by standing firmly on the side of a master morality, and deems slave morality a form of resentment. One wonders what he may have made of a character such as Lila. Most likely, he would have been impressed by her keen intelligence, resilience and creativity, and her innate resistance to any type of slave mentality.

Conclusion

Thus, in conclusion, I resist the temptation to call this saga a simple bildungsroman. Lila's character does not permit easy integration either into language or culture, and yet this series of novels is all about her. If Elena finds her an inspiration, so much the better for her. But labelling it a bildungsroman, at least one in the traditional sense, could make a mockery of the aspirations at the heart of this novel.

Lila tends to know what she wants - or more frequently, doesn't want - in any given situation, and so outpaces Elena when it matters: in matters of the heart, in matters of life. In that sense we get to know Lila belatedly, through Elena's eyes. Via Elena she appears like the woman of Carla Lonzi's proclamation that "Woman is the Unpredictable Subject". She has the uncanny ability to surprise, and as Elena says, with her there was never a way to feel that "things were settled."

But if Lila often surprises Elena - and us, as readers, via Elena - Lila herself seems less surprised at how things around her develop, at the ways of the neighbourhood, of events on the ground, at herself. When they happen, she knows what to do. Desire and violence, they have a logic. This logic might even eventually be discernable to the reader, in the afterglow of Elena's narration, even though its immediacy remains foreclosed as part of Lila's resistance. Yet one thing is for sure: that of which Lila is master follows, for her, as surely as a computer programmer's flow chart.

In the final instance, perhaps this: Lila as an anchor for a certain femaleness, a reference and a benchmark, and a reminder not to compromise. If patriarchy's strategy is to divide and conquer - through marriage, through children, through the oppression of domesticity - Lila, via Elena, shows what is possible when one becomes two, and two becomes many.

Roland and the Dark Tower: An Inverted Oedipus Complex

Introduction

Stephen King does both horror and sympathy exceedingly well. For those who know him better for his reputation as "America's Shlockmeister" it is worth pointing out his uncanny ability to sympathise with and inhabit the worlds of his characters. This is seen and felt very clearly in some of his famous non-horror stories, such as Rita and the Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (if I had a pound for every time I mentioned that Stephen King wrote the story for The Shawshank Redemption, and people responded: "Really?!" then I could probably feed Hackney's homeless for a day), and also his early work Blaze (a re-discovered "trunk novel" published in 2007).

In this respect the type of stories King writes, both of the horror and the non-horror kind, actually fits quite well with the legacy of Romantic fiction in America. It is in spirit akin to Poe, and shares his deep sympathy of the soul. Whereas I'd noticed these traits before, and Bag of Bones in particular is a remarkable blend of the romantic and the supernatural, it was after reading Wizard and Glass that I felt compelled to make a few observations in this regard. Whereas Wizard and Glass compelled me to start writing this, it was The Wind Through the Keyhole that allowed me to complete it. So at this point, anybody who hasn't read The Dark Tower up to The Wind Through the Keyhole, or Salem's Lot, and don't want any PLOT SPOILERS, do stop reading now.

Roland and Ben, they walk away

A part of the plot line in Salem's Lot, Stephen King's 1975 vampire novel set in the small town of Jerusalem's Lot, involves Ben Mears' relationship with Susan Norton. Susan, unfortunately, falls prey to Barlow, the resident vampire overlord of Jerusalem's Lot. As a result she dies - first as the human Susan at the fangs of said vampire, and again later, as vampire, at the hands of Ben Mears. There's a memorable moment in the film version where Ben heads away from the burning mansion and mutters something like "sorry Susan" before leaving the cursed town behind.

There is something similar at work in Wizard and Glass, and this got me thinking a little bit. In this case it is Roland of Gilead who, lured by the Dark Tower, walks away from Susan. She is captured and dies at the hands of the town folk due to her association with Roland. It is interesting, if not necessarily intentional, that both Susan Norton and Susan son of Pat share the same name.

We know that, due to what the orb revealed to him after Roland takes it from Eldred Jonas, Roland saw that Susan is not in his future. As a result he became less concerned with her as the love of his life, and more and more pre-occupied - nay, consumed - by the Dark Tower. He later speaks to his friends of a choice he was offered. There were two alternatives: family life with Susan on the one hand, and pursuit of the Dark Tower on the other. He reasons - or rationalises - that he and Susan would have had no future if the Dark Tower was not saved, so he chose the pursuit of the Dark Tower. This choice, brought on by the glimpse offered by the orb, coincides with him losing Susan to death. He had underestimated the orb and Rhea, and by focusing his attention on the Dark Tower the orb had led him away from protecting the one he loved. 

 

Roland's Guilt

Now we skip forward a bit. It is revealed that Roland unintentionally killed his own mother. Roland is consumed with guilt. Roland, naturally, thinks he is responsible for his mother's death, even though it was probably a trick played on him by the orb. The irony, of course, is that it happens exactly when Roland goes to beseech his mother to "change her ways". On the other hand it may have been predestined. "Ka," as Eddie remarked. "Ka like a wind."

In both cases, his mother's and Susan's, Roland suffers because he believes he had a hand in the victim's death. In the case of Jake, again, he has the option of saving Jake or pursuing the Dark Tower. He chooses the latter, and suffers for it as Jake dies. He suffers terribly ... and so does Jake.

An Inverted Oedipus Complex

Roland's story is a partial inversion of the ancient Oedipal archetype. Recall that King Oedipus runs away from Corinth to escape his foretold destiny (he believed his parents in Corinth to be his real parents) and inadvertently kills his father on the way back to Thebes, his real home. After solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus is entitled to marry the queen - who actually turns out to be his own mother. Much later he realises his true identity, and therefore that he murdered his own father and is sleeping with his mother, and is so consumed by guilt that he pokes out his own eyes.

Roland's story goes the opposite way. Firstly, it is not his father who is killed by his hand, but his mother. In addition Susan Delgado, his love, also dies due to a choice he makes (when he chooses to pursue the Dark Tower). In the Oedipus complex, destiny brings Oedipus closer to his mother (who also becomes his lover), whereas Roland's destiny takes him further away from both his mother and his lover.

The Evolution of Consciousness

 

1. The Uroboros

In the history of world mythology there are recurring patterns and mythical images, which Erich Neumann (a student of Carl Jung) correlates with the evolution of consciousness. Western civilisation as an evolving consciousness, he argues, started with the Uroboros, the self-contained circle that encapsulates both masculine and feminine opposites. It is the self-begetting circular snake that bites its own tail. This early state is what Neumann calls in his work The Origins and History of Consciousness the "dawn state, showing the infancy both of mankind and of the child" (p. 11). Compared to the world as it became once it had "moved on", Roland's time in Gilead seems idyllic and self-contained, like the Uroboros.

2. The Great Mother

The next stage of the feminine is the Great Mother, also called the Terrible Mother because she overpowers men and literally drives them mad. Both personality and body are dissolved. In early cultures the Great Mother was attended by eunuchs with weak egos. But the Great Mother is also a powerful sorceress who "transforms men into animals" (p. 61). Rhea is an echo of the Terrible Mother, and is in a sense Roland's nemesis in Wizard and Glass (in contrast to Maerlyn, who turns out to be a rather tame obstacle). According to the logic of the evolution of consciousness, she is the unconscious aspect of the Great Mother, who has been split out into the Good Mother (Roland's own mother at the point of her death, when she wanted to appease) and the Terrible Mother, which is relegated to the unconscious. It is therefore apt that Roland's mother's image in the glass orb shows up as Rhea. They are two sides of the same coin. (One could argue that Roland's mother's unfaithfulness is a dark side he cannot accept, and therefore would prefer to repress. Yet it surfaces just as Rhea appears, which provokes his own violent unconscious urges and results in his mother's death.)

3. The Hero

It is only much later in the evolution of consciousness that the heroic figure comes to pass. The hero signifies a progression in consciousness as the male principle is split away from the female, and femininity becomes suppressed in culture. The rise of the hero corresponds with the domestication of the female (suppression of femininity) and the subsequent relinquishing of female goddess worship in favour of male god worship. 

As Neumann says: "The individual has in his own life to follow the road that humanity has trod before him." Roland can be construed as a heroic figure who must live through various unconscious phases. We've already seen that he enacts a curious mirror image of the Oedipus myth (by killing his own mother), but there is more: he is also a harbinger of awareness. He himself is more intuitive than intellectual, more romantic than rational. But his eyes, set on the Dark Tower - and a tower has ever been a symbol for human aspiration, achievement, intellect and also folly (think of the tower of Babel) - is a journey towards awareness. We may therefore say that Roland chooses consciousness over the alternative, which could be called the domestication of his own passions and unconscious, but according to him also the very destruction of reality. This decision results, not in domestication and repression of the feminine, but in death for his mother and for Susan. Potentially also resurrection, just as in the myth of Osiris, who after he is murdered by his brother Set, is resurrected by Isis. But about that we will have to wait and see...

The Myth of Osiris

The Osiris myth is also instructive in other ways. In the myth, Osiris is murdered by Set. Isis then resurrects Osiris and conceives a son with him, a boy called Horus. Horus is now in direct competition with Set for the throne. Here we find further parallels with Roland's story (as well as deviations). We see hints of Horus in Roland, of Osiris in Gabrielle, and of Set in Marten Broadcloak. In particular, Marten knows that the young Roland is a threat to him, and provokes him to try to earn his guns prematurely. This strategy backfires, as Roland succeeds. At this point in the story, Roland is not yet the hero figure, but still a struggling consciousness that is only beginning to emerge from opposing forces.

Roland's family drama also deviates from the Osiris myth in that Marten Broadcloak seduces Gabrielle, rather than trying to kill Steven Deschain directly. Roland's father Steven is emasculated psychologically just as Isis was emasculated physically (in the myth, Isis' penis is the only part of him that Osiris could not recover), even though Steven Deschain remains an important part of his life and a wise mentor. The seduction poses questions about Gabrielle. In the Osiris myth, Isis' role is unequivocally on the side of Horus. Yet Gabrielle has allied with the "enemy", even if unwittingly, and this complicates things. Whereas most characters in the Dark Tower are clearly delineated as good or evil, Gabrielle's role puts her in an ambiguous position. It also leaves a residue of consciousness that is a wildcard in Roland's quest for the tower.

Reconciliation

Nevertheless, the revelation at the end of The Wind Through the Keyhole resolves this potential anomaly more or less elegantly. SPOILER WARNING! Gabrielle Deschain, it turns out, was foretold the fate of Gilead, and also her own ("you die at your brat's hand") by Marten Broadcloak during a much earlier stay at Serenity. She wrote what she heard in a message to be kept safe by Everlynne, to be given to Roland one day when ka finally brings him to Serenity (an event that is effectively the main story of The Wind Through the Keyhole).

All of the letter is significant, but the final words are the most important:

"I forgive you everything. Can you forgive me?"

Gabrielle foresaw Roland's torment, and knew that he had to reconcile his guilt in order to fulfill his own destiny. Yet it also required great moral courage from him, because it asks him to forgive her in turn. Indeed, it requires compassion.
 
Once Roland reveals the words to his ka-tet, Susannah asks Roland: "And could you, Roland? Did you?" To which he answers unequivocally: yes.

As if to emphasise the great importance of this act of forgiveness, Stephen King treats readers to a short afterword, which we must read as the very last word on the Dark Tower if we consider the chronology in which the Dark Tower books were written. These final words of the afterword are:

"The two most beautiful words in any language are: I forgive"

We are left in no doubt as to their importance.

Reconciliation through forgiveness would clear Roland's mind of the cobwebs of guilt and confusion, and focus his mind on the true task at hand, which is to reach the Dark Tower. In the letter Gabrielle reveals she was also warned by Marten not to return to Gilead. Yet her intuition told her it was ka to go back to Gilead. So she did, a fact that restores Roland's mother's dignity. It reveals her to be someone who acted according to her own convictions. She was therefore not just a helpless pawn of history, even though she could not change her own destiny. (Bear in mind that it would probably have been a great convenience to Marten Broadcloak if Gabrielle had stayed on in Serenity.)

Most of all forgiveness, and therefore compassion, hints at the unity of consciousness that is an increasing feature of Roland's world. It binds the ka-tet, and also connects characters across the various worlds.

Conclusion

It is perhaps apt that this post should end where it began. I observed that Susan Norton's  relationship to Ben Mears in Salem's Lot, and her subsequent fate,  was an interesting precursor to Susan Delgado's relationship to Roland (and her subsequent fate).

I was therefore more than a little surprised to find Father Callahan, also from 'Salem's Lot, making his return in Wolves of the Calla (which I recently started reading). Not only that, but Father Callahan's retelling of the story of Jerusalem's Lot has Eddie, Roland and Susannah finding parallels with their own ka-tet. In a sense, the world of The Dark Tower is also Stephen King's metaphor for the connections and parallels between his own various fictional creations.

To conclude, I wondered what - if anything - it means that Roland's relationship to Gabrielle and Susan inverts the old Oedipus complex. The Oedipus Complex (a proposal by Freud) concerns desire for the parent of the opposite sex and competition with the parent of the same sex, and we likewise see Roland desiring Susan and competing with Marten Broadcloak. The Dark Tower represents Roland's search for the truth about the state of the world (and to fix it), but his real evolution of consciousness happens while he becomes more compassionate and draws his ka-tet around him (the Dark Tower novels don't actually reveal all that much about what is really happening to Roland's world, and in fact are much more about the various people and their stories).

If it is suggestive of anything, perhaps it is that Freud's (now often considered defunct) proposal harks back to an earlier stage of Anglo-European civilisation wherein the intellect dominated. In Roland's world intuition and surprising synchronicities are more the order of the day than empirical and analytical certainties. In this perspective, The Dark Tower is a story about that stage of civilisation entering its last days. The Oedipus complex is replaced by a different family interaction that reflects the need for compassion and intuition over intellectual and technological achievement.

And now I can't wait to read the rest ...!

What is Odradek? : A Badiouan Perspective

One of Franz Kafka's strangest stories is a mere two pages long. It is called "The Worries of a Head of Household" ("Die Sorge des Hausvaters"), or sometimes "The Cares of a Family Man". It concerns an unusual being called Odradek, who appears to be without purpose, and whose very name has no identifiable meaning - at least none that can be readily deciphered.

"There are some who say the word Odradek comes from the Slavic and they look for its etymology there. There are others who say it's a germanic word, merely inflected by the Slavic. The doubt surrounding both versions forces on to conclude that neither is true, especially as neither is any help in finding a meaning for the word." (The Worries of a Head of Household, p. 211)

Nevertheless, we are told in no uncertain terms that the Odradek exists.

"Of course, no one would bother themselves with such questions, were it not that there is a real being called the Odradek." (The Worries of a Head of Household, p. 211)

We are drawn deeper into the mysterious world of Odradek - because despite the primacy of the narrator, the scales seem to tip ever so slightly in favour of the Odradek, making it very much Odradek's world - and we cannot help but begin to wonder: what is Odradek?

The paradox is that the Odradek is described as if it is an object, "a flat, star-shaped reel of thread" from which "a little rod emerges" and so on. We are also told that "the whole thing is able to stand upright as on two feet", which gives Odradek a hypothetical humanoid appearance.

Odradek's object-ness continues to be emphasised with further descriptions, but the mystery deepens when we are told that "the whole thing looks functionless, but after its fashion complete". It is an alien object, without apparent origin or purpose, yet disturbingly familiar. We, as human readers, would conclude that it might have been made by a human, and yet it escapes such an identity. In fact, it is entirely elusive. "There is not much more to be said about it, other than that Odradek is extraordinarily manoeuvrable and impossible to catch".

Odradek's elusiveness is a puzzle, and according to the narrator many have tried to discover the meaning of its name, perhaps hoping that the meaning of its name would thereby also clarify its origin, purpose, indeed its very existence *in reality* as an object-being. This in itself is not a great cause of concern for the narrator, but the plot thickens when the narrator's real concern is revealed: his anxiety that Odradek might outlive him.

"In vain I ask myself, what will happen to him. Can he die? Everything that dies has once had a sort of aim, a sort of activity, which has worn it out; this is not the case of Odradek. Will he therefore one day tumble down the stairs before the feet of my children and my children's children, trailing a line of thread after him? It's clear he does nobody any harm; but the notion that he might even outlive me is almost painful to me." (The Worries of a Head of Household, p. 212)

The question here is existential, and indeed it is about being. This led me to wonder how the strange question of Odradek can be addressed. This question, it appears, has intrigued many thinkers in the past, and various approaches have proved fruitful. Willi Goetschel surveys some of the approaches, and the most convincing, perhaps, is the Marxist approach. In this approach Odradek  represents a commodity made by someone (eg. a factory worker), yet which is nevertheless divorced from the worker. (Marx talks about the alienation of the worker from his work, and the anguish the narrator feels resembles this worker alienation. )

A Freudian approach casts Odradek as the return of a repressed memory in objective form, representing the unwanted memories of things we would like to forget.

Each of these interpretations have strengths, however they also have shortcomings. For instance, on the surface a Capitalist critique suffers from the fact that even though Odradek appears to be a useful object its purpose is in fact unknown. Nevertheless, if we take the appearance of Odradek to be a vision from the period of time beyond the narrator and his children and their children, when Odradek's origins (as a useful object created by a worker) are no longer traceable, then such an interpretation could still be consistent.

The Capitalist critique comes up against a further difficulty when the question of Odradek's being - as opposed to its object-ness - is raised. It is up to (for instance) the Freudian interpretation to explain the psychologising of the object by way of a repressed memory. Odradek thereby has a life force and therefore can attain its being qualities. It remains difficult to see how the Marxist approach can account for it on its own.

A different way of looking at Odradek would be to take a Badiouan perspective. If we begin by noting that Odradek is "impossible to catch" (even though Odradek is presented to us and indeed is available to the narrator for occasional interaction in his own house) we may say that Odradek exists at the level of presentation, but not at the level of the state of the situation. This may appear to be a contradiction, but in fact occurs in the case of what Badiou calls singular multiples.

A full explanation of a singular multiple would involve an understanding of set theory as well as a wider understanding of Badiou's philosophy. The fast track route is via an understanding of Badiou's view of a subject. Not everyone is a subject, and a subject can only emerge as a result of fidelity to an event. In the story the father may be considered a potential subject, because by marrying, having children, etc. and then deciding to be faithful to this event, he would be a subject and emerge as a father. It is this very subject-ness that is at stake in the story of Odradek, called "The Cares of a Father".

Related to the subject is the state of the situation, in this case the narrator's family life and supporting environment. Odradek is not part of the state of the narrator's family life. Nevertheless, he is part of the general background or milieu and therefore must be included in the general situation, which Badiou calls the presentation of the situation. This is what makes Odradek a singular multiple.

We may go one step further and suggest that Odradek appears to be something, or a being, that evokes the dissolution of the subject by potentially surviving the subject. This is the father's great anxiety, that his subject-ness, i.e. his purpose, will dissolve while Odradek "lives" on. Odradek's unravelling thread is a metaphor and mirror reflection of this dissolution. In this respect Odradek has the potential to be an evental site. What is yet lacking is an event and the possibility of fidelity to such an event. Currently, the only event is the father's reflection on Odradek and the resulting anxiety, which is the beginnings of his dissolution as a subject.

What about Badiou's doctrine of the void? Can Odradek be related to it? For Badiou the void is that which makes the being of a presented situation possible (in set theory it is the null set).

"The void is the 'suture' of being to presentation because it is the point through which a situation comes to be ... The void of a situation is simply what is not there, but what is necessary for anything to be there" (Infinite Thought, p. 12)

Yet when we recall Odradek as a being of "no fixed address" and one who is encountered, now here and now there, we find an uncanny similarity to the void:

"It would already be inexact to speak of this nothing as a point because it is neither local nor global, but scattered all over, nowhere and everywhere" (http://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/badiou-on-the-void/)

Yet we know that Odradek cannot be that void because the void "is such that no encounter would authorize it to be held as presentable." We feel a hint of truth when considering that Odradek may be the crack in the fabric of reality that allows the narrator to perceive the nature of things and the limits of his being, even in his children and his children's children. Nevertheless, Odradek is not the void.

Lest we forget, the story emphasises that Odradek is a being, and as a being he has vaguely humanoid life-like qualities, such as the ability to stand, to respond intermittently, to move around, and to laugh, in addition to his more understandable object-like qualities.

It may be easier if we compared Odradek to another being in the story, namely the father. The father, as we have already indicated, is a potential subject and perhaps already a subject. On the other hand, Odradek is the opposite of what Badiou considers a subject, having no fidelity of any kind: no fixed address, no relationship with anyone, no purpose, and frankly no material effect ("he does nobody any harm") except for being there and getting around.

What, in Badiou's scheme of things, would be the opposite of a subject? Is it being, the multiplicity of multiplicities? The fact that Odradek is rather concrete and self-contained rather than the inconsistent multiplicity of being suggests not. Perhaps, then, there is no opposite to the subject, except simply the dissolution of the subject.

We have also already accepted that Odradek is a part of the situation, yet not part of the subject's family fidelity, and therefore Odradek is a potential evental site. We can therefore say that the dissolution of the subject is contained in the situation. Dissolution is inevitable - the father will pass away and so will his children, eventually; the subject will dissolve. Therefore Odradek is an evental site and is likely to survive the narrator.

Dissolution is a meta conception, and it would seem that Odradek is a kind of meta-being that nevertheless exists in the situation. This brings up the question, once more, of whether Odradek is somehow a representation of the void? We know that it is essentially impossible to present the void, and therefore must avoid that conclusion, but Odradek certainly permits the narrator to reflect on the limits of the subject, and is the source of his disquiet.

Sources:

1. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event, Meditation Four. Ktismatics. 2008.
2. Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought. Edited and Translated by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London, Continuum. 2005.
3, Goetschel, Willi. Kafka's dis/Enchanted World. 360.com (originally from fathom.com).
4. Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Translated by Michael Hofman. New York, Penguin Books. 2008.
5. Wikipedia editor. The Cares of a Family Man. Wikipedia.

All Change in 1940s China: "Red Rose, White Rose" by Eileen Chang

Note: This post originally appeared on my discontinued website maartensity.com. The published date and time has been adjusted to mirror the original.

I browsed the web for information and commentary on Eileen Chang's novellas and short stories, yet found very little that is publicly accessible. I do not include online academic journals, which generally require paid membership. This lack of information was a surprise, like seeing an exciting ad for a new chocolate bar, then discovering it can only be bought overseas. Let's not forget that the recent Ang Lee film “Lust, Caution” is based on one of her stories, or that she moved to the USA in 1955 after already establishing herself as one of the greatest novelists of her generation (you can read more about her personal life elsewhere), and even translated some of her own works into English. You'd therefore think her work should have been discussed in English forums more widely!

This lack of freely available commentary motivated me to post a close reading of at least one of her stories. Once I came to the end of “Red Rose, White Rose”, with its powerful conclusion, I knew that this is the story I want to write about.

My reference is the Penguin Modern Classics version of the text in “Love in a Fallen City”, p. 253-312.

The very first paragraph introduces us to Zhenbao, and even before we know anything about his character, we are told that there are two women in his life. They are, significantly, symbolised in ideal form: a white rose (a chaste woman) and a red rose (a passionate woman). In the very next moment, the narrator deems it necessary to comment, somewhat critically:

Isn't that just how the average man describes a chaste widow's devotion to her husband's memory—as spotless, and passionate too? - p. 255

When, in the next paragraph, the narrator says “maybe every man has had two such women—at least two”, the assumption of the desirability of both a chaste and a seductive, passionate woman may appear strange to a Western reader. It should be borne in mind that when the story was written (1940s), China had only recently become a republic. Traditional values still held sway. Classical images (for instance the line of a poem by Li Po) are contrasted with mundane, negative images (such as a bloody mosquito):

Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is “moonlight in front of my bed”. Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark over your heart. - p. 255

The classical images come across as artefacts from another time. The wife is described through the eyes of a married man, as someone annoying. Neither a passionate woman nor a chaste woman, once she becomes a wife, can hope to remain romanticised in his mind. In each case the mistress, on the other hand, is idealised. This is not simple hypocrisy on the man's part. There is an indirect co-dependency between these descriptions: the romantic memory of his mistress is like the spice in curry, covering the underlying rotten meat that he wants to avoid tasting.

If we take it at face value, Zhenbao is said not to be like "every man", instead he is “logical and thorough”. He has a special ability that sets him apart:

If he did bump into anything that was less than ideal, he bounced it around in his mind for a while and—poof!--it was idealized: then everything fell into place. - p. 255

However, this statement is actually highly ironic, as we shall soon see.

The “Red Rose” and the “White Rose” of the title are Zhenbao's idealised women. But unlike the description above, where the mistresses are idealised poetically and the married wives are given negative associations, Zhenbao's “White Rose” is an exception--she is his wife. This relation towards his idealisation is problematic for Yanli, his idealised white rose. Presumably, in a previous era, this would have protected her. But in the present age she gets a raw deal, because there is a structural failure of the social environment to support his ideal. The world has moved on.

Idealising Yanli denies her the status of a proper wife. At the same time she is deprived of the benefits of a mistress. She is excluded from both categories, caught in a no-woman's-land between the old and the modern. As a result she is socially powerless and disconnected, isolated behind the abstract, scholarly “white membrane” that both protects her, and cuts her off from the world:

For ten years now Yanli had gone to school, diligently looking up new words, memorizing charts, copying from the blackboard, but between her and everything else there always seemed to be a white membrane. - p. 294

Her education seems to keep her out of touch with the changing world around her. The ability of traditional learning to make sense of the rapidly changing social environment is impaired.

Yanli's lack of power and status is concluded by the story's ending, when Zhenbao returns to being his “good” self after a self-destructive period. This goodness deprives Yanli of the limited power she obtained as a wife publicly suffering at the hands of her husband, and therefore deserving of sympathy and support. Not only does the foundation for her short-lived status crumble when Zhenbao becomes a “good man” again, she also loses credibility. Her social status is arguably lower than it was before:

The next day Zhenbao rose and reformed his ways. He made a fresh start and went back to being a good man. - p.312

Her esteem is obliterated. Unlike Jiaorui, who has found a better life away from Zhenbao, Yanli has no life and no social status of her own. She is a snow flake of Zhenbao's fantasy. She is his White Rose. He denies everything else.

Hence the mocking tone when the narrator refers to the idealised chaste rose mistress as “'moonlight in front of my bed'”. In the case of a “good” man like Zhenbao, who applies it to his wife, it is disastrous. The metaphor has a distant relation in Browning's “My Last Duchess”. The girl, who was a bit too full of life for the Duke's liking, he prefers as a painting. In Chang's story, the metaphor is split into two parts: the “Red Rose”, the lively one, who Zhenbao consciously does not choose; and the “White Rose”, who is nevertheless still in real life too distasteful, and too human, and has to be idealised to be tolerated.

Although Zhenbao encourages Yanli to listen to the radio, as a way to further a modern woman's education, “he didn't know that Yanli listened to the radio just to hear a human voice” (p. 302). The only place where she feels at home is in the bathroom. There she can be alone with her constipation, cut off from everyone else: “Only in the day-lit bathroom could she settle down and feel rooted” (p. 304).

When Zhenbao accidentally observes her through the open bathroom door in a voyeuristic setting late one night, the narrator frames his view with an aesthetic metaphor. It is false flattery, because, as with Browning's Duchess, this aesthetic reduction is precisely her undoing:

But never in dynastic history has a painting of a pretty woman taken up such an awkward subject: Yanli was pulling up her pants ... In America, the scene would have made an excellent toilet-paper advertisement, but to Zhenbao's hasty glance it was household filth .. damp and giving off a stagnant, stifling, human scent” - p. 307

Even Yanli, already little more than a pale, pretty ghost roaming the house, is too stiflingly human for Zhenbao. The reference to America alludes to the uneasy tension between traditional and modern, and the fact that the present societal and normative environment is not yet up to describing modern domestic realities in China. As a result individuals like Yanli are excluded from proper description, and remain disconnected from social community. If Yanli is curiously inexpressive throughout the story, it is because the language to give expression to her problems does not exist yet.

This China that has its feet in the future and its head in a more traditional era, is described earlier in the story as detrimental to women:

In China, as elsewhere, the constraints imposed by the traditional moral code were originally constructed for the benefit of women: they made beautiful women even harder to obtain, so their value rose ... Women nowadays don't have this kind of protective buffer, especially not mixed-blood girls, whose status is so entirely undefined. - p. 286

It is time to re-evalute Zhenbao's inherent need to be a “good” man. At the very start, the narrator suggests (somewhat mockingly) that Zhenbao isn't the kind of man to idealise his mistress and then hold a negative view of his wife. As we have just seen, this is not the case. He may publicly refer to Yanli as his White Rose, in order to save face, but the truth is just as the narrator described the average man's view of his wife: he thoroughly despises Yanli.

Although on the surface he seems an ideal, good man, his inability to understand his own heart leads to great domestic unhappiness. For a while he even becomes highly self-destructive:

He couldn't smash up the home he'd made, or his wife, or his daughter, but he could smash himself up ... He had to be smashed to bits! Smash him to bits! - p.310-1

The following description is therefore highly ironic, and ultimately mocking:

But Xhenbao wasn't like that; he was logical and thorough. He was, in this respect, the ideal modern man. - p. 255

On the other hand, the irony is also tragic, because these very traits are in some respects necessary for a man born to a poor family, and who has to struggle through life to make a success. New opportunities were made possible by the fall of the monarchy, and for those willing to work hard and make sacrifices a measure of middle class success was attainable. So Zhenbao joined thousands and thousands of others in a quest for a better life. It was still an untrodden road, so only those who were very committed and dedicated could succeed.

His attitude towards women was already set during his studies in Britain,.long before he met Jiaorui and Yanli, To be master of his future, he deemed it necessary also to be master of the women in his life.

... though he could spend money on her, he couldn't be her master ... later, when Zhenbao had figured out how to get what he wanted out of a whore, he'd think back to that time in Paris, his first time when he'd been such a fool. Now he was the master of his own world. - p. 258-9

Some time after his return to China he meets Jiaorui. He quickly categorises Jiaorui as someone who isn't appropriate for him to marry. She is too free and without restraint, too demanding, breaks too many rules, and can't be controlled without a great deal of effort. In short, to master her would probably cost him his future. Or so he thinks:

... if a man had to forge ahead on his own, as Zhenbao did, such a woman would be a major impediment. And he wasn't easygoing like Wang Shihong, who let a woman flout every rule. What was the point if you had to argue all day long? That was sure to sap a man's energy and drain him of ambition. Of course ... she was like this precisely because her husband couldn't control her. - p. 269

On the other hand, he is also aware that he is very attracted to her. She is his type:

He felt quite agitated. He liked women who were fiery and impetuous, the kind you couldn't marry. Here was one who was already a wife, and a friend's wife at that ... She was everywhere, tugging and pulling at him. - p.264

Why then, even though she loves him, does he not follow his heart? The answer is that, first of all, he must follow his own logic to the end: he must think of his future, and he finds her too carefree and irresponsible to allow him to make the necessary effort to achieve his ambition:

She seemed scatterbrained, like a child who goes out and picks dozens of violets, one by one, gathers them into a bunch and tosses them all away. Zhenbao had only his future to bank on, a future he'd prepared for all on his own. How could he bear to see it thrown to the wind? - p. 287

When it comes to his heart he is unwilling to take risks for the long term. Jiaorui's child-like nature (like Rose before her) unsettles him. Even if he could be her master, it would be at a price, possibly impeding his future.

When Jiaorui makes a move to break from her husband (Wang Shihong) to be with Zhenbao, he bolts and uses his mother as an excuse:

... if you love me, then you have to consider my situation. I can't cause my mother pain. Her way of thinking is different from ours, but we have to think about her, since she has only me to depend on ... And Shihong is, after all, my friend – p.293

The adultery with Jiaorui, who is Shihong's wife, is not even an afterthought. The excuse that Shihong is his friend is for the sake of Zhenbao's reputation, rather than any moral scruples, or true friendship. His mother's welfare is his primary stated reason. For her sake he wants to find a more stable future. His mother's hint to Jiaorui when Zhenbao is in the hospital indicates that she may have approved of Jiaorui. Zhenbao's unwillingness is mainly down to his insecurity about being able to control her.

The tragedy's design sets in when he looks to older, more established structures to support his future. Those very structures, it would seem, are no longer as reliable as they were for previous generations. Nevertheless, he doesn't know this until it is too late. The importance of his mother is genuine though. His traditional sensibility finds expression in a secret desire to be adored and praised by many mothers:

He wanted to get ahead, move up in the world .. he'd contribute something to society ... even now he had a fuzzy intimation of the warm welcome awaiting him—not just from his own mother but from a whole world of mothers, tearful, and with eyes only for him – p. 289

He eventually allows his mother to choose a wife for him.

His mother cried in front of him a few times, urging him to marry, and he put it off for a while, then finally agreed. His mother arranged the introductions.- p.293

His mother is motivated to marry him to a girl so that she no longer has to worry about him not taking care of himself. She chooses Yanli for him, but Yanli is a disappointment and they do not get along. His mother, showing a strength of resolve to match Zhenbao's own, moves out of the house. This double blow is the beginning of Zhenbao's deep disappointment with his life:

Zhenbao was very disappointed in his wife: having married her for her tractability, he felt cheated. He was also unhappy with his mother—moving out like that and letting people say he wasn't a good son. - p. 297

His brother and sister also turn out to be lazy, preferring to feed off their older brother's endeavour. The esteem and praise he expected from his family for his good deeds and hard work never materialise. He is deeply unhappy, and after a period of self-destructive behaviour wherein he unashamedly takes to drink and women, he reforms his ways—but still at the expense of his wife.

Most of the story is taken up by his affair with Jiaorui. The intensity and anguish that accompanies it, and the tears he cries when they meet once more many years later, illustrate how much more emotion he felt with her, even though he tried to deny his feelings at the time. He is the architect of his unhappy destiny though, and therefore, in this analysis, I have spent more time analysing his relation to the problem than to the cure he abandoned.

Jiaorui, for her part, followed her heart and found someone else to love—and now has a family. The narrator would side with her, it seems, and there is ultimately a sense that Zhenbao wasn't man enough to go for a feisty woman like Jiaorui—even though he felt attracted to her. She is the most modern, in that she wasn't afraid even to break up her marriage to find her happiness, whereas Zhenbao's deference to older values in the end didn't serve him as well as he'd hoped.

One might conclude by saying that both Jiaorui and Yanli suffer through Zhenbao's tendencies, but whereas Yanli is permanently diminished through his idealisation of her as a White Rose, and her gradual isolation, Jiaorui might reply that she has no need of being idealised as his Red Rose, that she is happy without him. It merely reveals his inability to understand and listen to his own heart.