Tessa Finley

Face Value

Seeing and being seen in Elena Ferrante’s “The Lying Life of Adults”

Our parents are the first people in our lives to tell us, directly and indirectly, who we are. They show us what to value and how to speak; they correct our behavior; they praise us when we do something right. They tell us who we look like: we have our father’s eyes, our mother’s hair, our grandmother’s chin. They know who we are—we’re like them. They’ve never been wrong about anything before, and we have no reason to suspect that they might be wrong about us.

Then, one day, something causes us to begin to doubt them: we notice that they’re capable of telling lies. They lie to each other, to the other adults in their lives, to themselves, and to us. It occurs to us that perhaps they’ve been lying to us all along, that the picture of the world and of ourselves that we received from them may not reflect the truth. Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, translated into the English by Ann Goldstein, explores the fallout of such an experience in the life of adolescent Giovanna, who overhears her father make a cruel remark about her that sets off a crisis of self-understanding: does this cruel remark represent the truth of who she is?

The narrator begins: “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.” From this moment, she writes,

“I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot.”

Her father’s words cause a profound change in her sense of self, such that even as she writes her story, the “I” by which she calls herself is slippery, indefinite. There is even some uncertainty as to whether the story that follows is “her” story—is “the one who at this moment is writing” the same person as the protagonist, Giovanna, or not? Ferrante frontloads Giovanna’s story with this narrative ambiguity, such that even as the reader is let in on the workings of Giovanna’s mind—the things that Giovanna learns to hide from others—a part of her continues to elude.

We learn that what Giovanna actually overheard her father say to her mother was not quite that she, Giovanna, was ugly, but rather that she was “getting the face of Vittoria,” her father’s sister, whom he openly loathed to the point that young Giovanna “didn’t consider that terrible aunt a member of the family.” The reason for this remark was that Giovanna was beginning to not do well in school. (Both parents are teachers.)

Giovanna had, in the past, been vaguely aware of “two fathers very different from the one I loved,” evidenced by the different manners of speaking he used on the phone and elsewhere, but it hadn’t yet occurred to her that these different voices implied duplicity—that her father could be duplicitous towards her. Suddenly all the times he’d praised her become suspect to her—was her father merely acting, lying, when he complimented her pretty hair? Which version of her father, if any, was the true one? And she—was she still her good, former self, the rightfully belonging daughter of her parents, or was she really becoming Vittoria, a “monstrous being,” a corrupted figure, exterior to the family? She studies herself in the mirror, thinking, “if I just had a nose like so, eyes like so, ears like so, I’d be perfect. […] I was I—whatever I I was—and had to concern myself with that face, that body, those thoughts.”

Giovanna decides that she has to lay eyes on Vittoria for herself in order to resolve her uncertainties. Her father drives her to the gritty neighborhood where Vittoria lives—the neighborhood in which he grew up—and waits in the car for the meeting to end. When it turns out that Vittoria fascinates rather than repulses Giovanna, she begins to spend more time with Vittoria, who urges her to “look carefully” at her parents: “Don’t let them fool you.”

She does begin to look carefully at her parents—and to doubt them. She also looks carefully at others, including Vittoria. Each time her allegiance ricochets between Vittoria and her parents, she seems somehow farther away from them both. She learns to decipher the various lies told by her parents, Vittoria, her parents’ friends, and her own friends—to detect what darkness seems always to lie just beneath the surface of the lie. For example, when looking at Rosario, a boy who is attracted to her, she observes: “For a second I saw him as a very bright demon who would grab my head in both hands and first forcibly kiss me, then beat me against the window until I was dead.” She learns how to modulate her manner, words, and actions with that dark sub-stratum in mind, as she does while talking to her father, observing that “he thinks he loves me and he’s afraid of hurting me. I changed my tone.” She also learns to lie, of course, in order to get what she wants, though what she wants is often obscure to her and changes quickly.

What she is discovering is that the people with whom she is in various ways entangled—her parents, Vittoria, her friends, the boys who are sexually interested in her—have their own ideas about who she, Giovanna, is, and they all want to extract something from her, and it’s on the basis of this misapprehension that they speak to her. At the same time, Giovanna also wants things from other people, and she knows she can comport herself in a certain way to try and get it out of them. While thinking about a man with whom she becomes infatuated, Roberto, she rehearses in her mind what she’ll say to him:

“Be careful what you say: my face has already changed, and because of my father I turned ugly; don’t you, too, play with changing me, making me become beautiful. I’m tired of being exposed to other people’s words.”

This is an astute line of thinking, and I would wager that it represents her true feelings. But does Giovanna herself know that? Would she be able, and willing, to express her true feelings as such even if she did know what they were? Ferrante seems to want to undercut the very notion, and the expressive value, of “true feelings” when she has Giovanna wrap up this mental rehearsal with: “There, that’s the sort of speech he should like.”

 --        

Is there a truer “I” beneath the person who is the subject of the manipulations of others, beneath the “I” who comports herself in a certain way in order to manipulate others herself? Certainly there is a subjectivity inside of the Giovanna who, looking carefully, recognizes the ways that the adults (and adolescents) with whom she interacts are always trying to deceive her, others, themselves; she seems at times also to see, from within, herself participating in the same behavior. Is this hidden subjectivity the one true Giovanna, and all her other faces false? In my view, Ferrante’s novel doesn’t permit such a tidy reading. Whatever “I” exists within, it is impossible to extricate from the person others see when they look at us, and the person we present to others.

I think it’s significant that the narrator interprets her father’s words as a judgment of physical ugliness. It’s not the most obvious interpretation, although, as Giovanna has learned, what people mean is often in careful contradiction to what they say. The preoccupation with physical beauty—with being seen by others as beautiful—is so often regarded as the lowest of the many vapid, contemptible qualities in teenage girls, victims of their own vanity who haven’t yet learned how to take themselves seriously (which entails becoming self-obsessed in other, more dignified, male-er ways, obviously). Rather than sending Giovanna on a journey to discover that beauty is simply something different than what her father thinks, or that being ugly like Vittoria isn’t so bad after all, Ferrante represents the anxieties of one’s beauty or ugliness as necessary to Giovanna’s education in recognizing herself as she is seen by others, and in thinking and re-thinking what she means when she says “I.” Judgments of “ugly” or “beautiful” seem in a certain sense to become equivalents to Giovanna: they are words that other people, frequently older boys or men, call her, depending on what sort of mood they’re in. Perhaps they really believe these words as they say them to her, or perhaps they only mean to flatter or wound her.

To be called “ugly” or “beautiful” represents a sort of judgment that the looked-upon one is basically helpless to, in the sense that one can’t really avoid having others look upon them—and being looked upon in new ways is a fundamental aspect of adolescence. What began for Giovanna with an urge to prove to herself that she was not ugly like Vittoria ends neither in that proof, nor in a rejection of the ideas of beauty and ugliness altogether, but rather in the cultivation of a deep sensitivity to the experience of being perceived—and to the strange, opaque tissue between what’s perceived and what’s within.