“The Lost Daughter” (post 1) by Elena Ferrante (post 9): In chapter one, protagonist cannot understand herself (main theme?) and is named Leda.

“I had been driving for less than an hour when I began to feel ill,” begins the one-and-a-half-page first chapter of this 140-page novel. In the first paragraph, she feels weak and disoriented (thinking she was at the beach in childhood, frightened by her mother’s warning to heed the red flag that warned of a rough sea and the danger of drowning). In the second paragraph, she wakes up in a hospital and is told she had been in a one-car accident. In the third and last paragraph of chapter one, she concludes with what could be the novel’s main theme, that there are things about herself she cannot understand:

“I said it was drowsiness that had sent me off the road. But I knew very well that drowsiness wasn’t to blame. At the origin was a gesture of mine that made no sense, and which, precisely because it was senseless, I immediately decided not to speak of to anyone. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand” (1).

1. Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa editions, 2006/2008.

The name of this first-person narrator and protagonist is “Leda,” which may allude to the woman in Greek mythology who was raped by Zeus disguised as a swan. One of Leda’s daughters was Helen of Troy, discussed in the following past post:

June 28, 2014

Plato and Euripides say Helen of Troy had Multiple Personality

If multiple personality is a real, observable, psychological phenomenon—and not just a modern fad—it should be reflected in the history of literature, even in antiquity. And since multiple personality is often represented in literature by the theme of the double, it would be interesting to know how far back that theme goes.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey say that Helen really went to Troy. But there was another version of that story in Ancient Greece, one in which it was Helen’s double, and not Helen herself, who went to Troy.

Plato, in both his Phaedrus and Republic, cites Stesichorus’s Palinode, which is a recantation of Homer’s story that Helen went to Troy. According the Stesichorus version, which is dramatized in Euripides’ play, Helen, it was not Helen, herself, who went to Troy, but only her eidolon (ghost, shadow, image, phantom), which impersonated her.

“In 412/411 B.C.E. [Euripides] produced Helen, a play in which he takes up the theme of the eidolon, to dramatize two confrontations—the one in the mind of Menelaus between the true Helen and her fickle double, and the other between Helen herself and the image of her for which the Greeks and Trojans fought at Troy…Euripides’ Helen is the only surviving treatment of the phantom-Helen theme from antiquity…splitting Helen into her self and her image…Across the Greek world the disjunction between essence and phenomena was the chief topic of conversation among the philosophers and mathematicians, and one of the principal themes of Athenian tragedy. What plot more topical in late fifth-century Athens than the story of a woman divided into her real and her imaginary selves?” (1, pp. 8-9).

Of course, Plato and Euripides did not use the term “multiple personality,” but the theme of the double is close enough.

1. Austin, Norman. Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994.