On a perfectly quotidian day filled with bickering children and a lazy dog and chores left undone, a life is thrown entirely off balance at the whim of one man’s desire. Elena Ferrante begins her novel The Days of Abandonment with “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.” We follow her protagonist Olga’s descent into despair in the days following her “abandonment,” in which the use and further rejection of vulgarity becomes essential in the absence of this male presence.
Elena Ferrante—a pseudonym, which has led to misogynistic claims that she is actually a man—is a contemporary Italian author perhaps best known for her Neapolitan Novels (beginning with the acclaimed My Brilliant Friend), who writes in a visceral style that challenges stereotypical portrayals of motherhood, female friendship, and femininity. Her female characters often speak in Neapolitan dialect and use unrefined language to confront patriarchal expectations of feminine behavior, a break from the conventions of feminist literature before her.
The Days of Abandonment approaches these subjects specifically in the tradition of the existentialists. Ferrante’s novel holds many formal similarities to Simone de Beauvoir’s own short story, “The Woman Destroyed”, which chronicles her own version of an abandoned woman. In de Beauvoir’s story, we read the diary of Monique, whose husband, Maurice, leaves her for another woman. Monique, after agonizing over her inadequacies and even attempting to allow Maurice’s affair to continue, eventually comes to terms with her loneliness and accepts the absurdity of her life for what it is. Ferrante adopts this narrative framework—directly quoting portions “The Woman Destroyed.”
Ferrante’s Olga, like Monique, quickly becomes burdened with “the practical consequences of abandonment,” the tasks of everyday life that she once handled independently but now only remind her of Mario’s desertion. This burden of practical life becomes two-fold when she finds out that Mario has left her for a much younger woman, for whom Mario had feelings even while she was underage.
Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex argues that a wife’s meaning of existence is dependent on her husband, her children, her home; a housewife’s work does not remove her from her condition as a man’s could. The house is an outward reflection of the housewife’s condition. Olga’s self-worth is directly correlated to the beauty and order of her home, and thus she begins to lose herself as her chores become onerous. Her disordered home becomes reflected in her disordered thoughts and speech.
Unlike the well-mannered Monique, Olga reverts to using the obscene language she cherished as a girl, recovering “a sense of masculine freedom.” Olga curses aloud as she completes housework, laughs coarsely and loudly at inappropriate times, and most commonly, ruminates on imagined sex scenes between Mario and his young mistress, Carla:
What were his secrets of a man alone, a male obsession with sex, perhaps, the late-life cult of the cock. Certainly he, too, saw no farther than his ever-weaker squirt of sperm, was content only when he could verify that he could still get it up, like the dying leaves of a dried-up plant that’s given water. Rough with the women’s bodies he happened to encounter, hurried, dirty, certainly his only objective was to score points, as in a rifle range, to sink into a red pussy as into a fixed thought surrounded by concentric circles.
Perhaps it is precisely her obscene ruminations that make Olga unable to keep up with her duties as mother and homemaker. And yet, it is through her consistent, uncontrollable, lewd fantasies of Mario’s sexual encounters, that Olga entirely surrenders herself and abandons the idea of “trying to find a new measure” for herself in the wake of this separation.
Vulgarity was often recognized by existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre as a tool to reckon with an absurd existence. Sartre defines vulgarity particularly in relation to class dynamics: vulgarity is that which the bourgeoisie associate with the physical degradation of the lower class. However, as Stuart Zane Charmé points out in Vulgarity and Authenticity, Sartre also concludes that crude language can be used by the lower classes against the repressive force of the bourgeoisie. Charmé writes that vulgarity and ugliness can symbolize “those who are authentically in touch with the reality of life,” abandoning any pretenses of an upper class, civilized life.
Ferrante recontextualizes Sartre’s view of vulgarity in a feminist context—Olga abandons the pretenses of her previous life, but in this new context, the outcome changes. Charmé writes that vulgarity is a subjective category whose definition is dependent upon who or what is defined as the Other. Olga’s collapse into the obscene allows her to see herself as this Other, not as herself or what she—as a housewife—is expected to be. Vulgarity allows Olga to drop her facade of civility to reject not bourgeoisie repression, but patriarchal dominance. The cursing and sexual ruminations do not transform Olga; rather, they expose the inauthenticity which existed in her former life.
What a mistake it had been to close off the meaning of my existence in the rites that Mario had offered with cautious conjugal rapture. What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life. What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.
It was necessary for Olga to experience this period of vulgarity in order to define a new way of life, one in which she lived for herself. Vulgarity should not put women in a hierarchy with men; rather, it can be a tool used for a woman’s own contemplation, or as in Olga’s case, a stepping stone to her growth. Olga herself even outright rejects that it was her vulgarity in and of itself that brought her to her new outlook. She rejects vulgarity itself independent of how men view it—typically placing women in a binary of “proper women” or “vulgar women.” Olga is able to use vulgar language when it is useful to her, but ultimately rejects it when it no longer serves a purpose. In fact, she becomes ashamed at having lost her “good manners” in the process, showing a newfound authenticity that denies the presupposition of the male gaze in relation to vulgarity.
Ferrante does not argue that vulgarity is necessary to overcome heartbreak or abandonment, but that women might use vulgarity, without defining it in relation to men, to reflect on their existence in a patriarchal world. The “vulgar woman” is so because any other language would be inauthentic. Olga thus comes to terms with her new life, not with a reluctant acceptance of the absurdity of life like de Beauvoir’s Monique, but with a renewed sense of herself: “Existence is this, I thought, a start of a joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”