Elena Ferrante (post #2): The First-Person Narrator of Her First Novel Has Multiple Personality

At the beginning of the novel, Delia’s mother, Amalia, has recently committed suicide by drowning. The end of the novel is as follows:

“I dug in my purse and took out my identification card…With a pen…I drew around my own features my mother’s hair…I was Amalia” (1, p. 139).

Delia’s switch to an Amalia alternate personality is not an acute grief reaction. The whole novel is about how this has been going on since Delia was a child.

“But I still had the impression of not being alone. I was being spied upon, not by that Amalia of months before who now was dead but by me coming out on the landing to see myself sitting there” (1, p. 24).

Delia is prone to dissociative trance states (not unusual in people with multiple personality): “I fell into a torpor crowded with images…in my waking sleep…I had dreamed it that way countless times with my eyes open, as I did now yet again…” (1, pp. 30-31).

“By then I knew that in that image of fantasy there was a secret that could not be revealed, not because one part of me didn’t know how to get to it but because, if I did, the other part would have refused to name it and would have driven me out” 1, p. 35).

“When I came to myself, I felt drained, depressed by the sensation of being humiliated in front of the part of myself that watched over every possible yielding to the other” (1, p. 37).

“I decided to put on makeup. It was an unusual reaction. I didn’t wear makeup often or willingly…But just then I seemed to need it…’You’re a ghost,’ I said to the woman in the mirror. She had the face of a person in her forties… ‘I don’t like you,’ I whispered as I put on some blusher. And in order not to be contradicted, I tried not to look at her” (1, p. 42).

As I have previously discussed in this blog in reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others, people with multiple personality sometimes have a problem with mirrors, because they may see another identity in the mirror, and they may not like it.

In childhood, one of Delia’s alternate identities had evidently told her father stories about her mother Amalia’s infidelity. It is not clear what had actually happened. It may have been that, in childhood, Delia’s Amalia identity had been molested. “‘You told your father everything.’ Everything. Me. I didn’t like that suggestion and didn’t want to know what ‘you’ he was talking about’” (1, p. 50).

A typical statement by a person with multiple personality, each of whose identities has its own, separate, memory bank: “I remembered but I couldn’t tell myself” (1, p. 118). That is, one of her identities had memory of something that it wouldn’t share with another of her identities.

Delia says of her childhood, “I was pretending not to be me. I didn’t want to be ‘I,' unless it was the I of Amalia. I did what I imagined Amalia did in secret…I was I and I was her…I felt I was her, with her thoughts…” (1, pp. 130-131).

In childhood, she had told her father that someone “had done and said to Amalia, with her consent, in the basement of the pastry shop, all the things that in reality Antonio’s grandfather had said and perhaps done to me” (1, p. 133).

In short, the novel describes a woman who has had multiple personality since childhood.

Note: I have not read Elda Buonanno’s La Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante's "Fragmented Self,” which is based on Elena Ferrante’s own nonfiction book, and on how this theme appears in Ferrante’s novels. I don’t know if multiple personality, per se, is discussed.

1. Elena Ferrante. Troubling Love [1992]. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa Editions, 2006.