Gender and Generation: Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux and the Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir

ABSTRACT

Simone de Beauvoir’s novella La Femme rompue tells the tale of Monique, who is abandoned by her husband after twenty-two years of marriage. In a didactic style, Beauvoir represents Monique as a caricature of a woman dependent on a man. Several decades later, Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux published texts that explore the motif of a woman being abandoned by a man: Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono and Ernaux’s Passion simple. In this article, I examine these two texts and the ways in which they offer a riposte to Beauvoir’s novella. Reading their work through theories of diary fiction, I argue that these two writers depict women who are able to move beyond a narrative of abandonment and, in so doing, they stretch the boundaries of this genre to offer new approaches to the representation of female subjectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Female subjectivity
• abandonment
• diary fiction
• non-fiction diary

Introduction

‘La honte me brûle’ (La Femme rompue, 35) [‘I burn with shame’ (The Woman Destroyed, 140)],’ writes the narrator of Simone de Beauvoir’s novella La Femme rompue after her husband leaves her. Published in 1967, this text tells the tale of Monique, who is abandoned by her husband after twenty-two years of marriage. In a didactic style, Beauvoir represents Monique as a caricature of a woman dependent on a man. Monique finds the news of her husband’s departure shattering and, since the text is comprised of her diary, the reader reads her first-person account of how she had constructed her identity on the basis of her marriage. She had always aimed to be an ideal wife and mother, had few contacts outside the home beyond a small number of friends, and had no professional training or activity. Through the diary, we follow Monique through the months after the separation, in which she reacts obsessively — both she and other characters use this word to describe her behaviour — to what she perceives as an abandonment. She writes in her diary of how she is incapable of renewing her identity, and indeed, she ends the tale alone, obsessed, abandoned and ashamed. Several years later, Beauvoir wrote in her memoir Tout compte fait (1972) that she was dismayed to receive letters from women in similar situations, telling her that they appreciated her sympathetic rendering of their plights. As discussed by several critics of Beauvoir’s work, including Toril Moi (1990), Elizabeth Fallaize (1990) and Suzanne Dow (2005), these misreadings of Monique’s character and situation were a source of disappointment to Beauvoir, who wrote of how she had hoped in La Femme rompue to represent the traps inherent in women depending on a man for their livelihood, femininity and identity.

In this article, I discuss two texts that take up Beauvoir’s mantle: one in French and one in Italian. Several decades after the publication of La Femme rompue, Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux published texts that explore the motif of a woman being abandoned by a man: Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono [The Days of Abandonment] (2002) and Ernaux’s Passion simple [Simple Passion] (1991).¹ Both writers have become iconic literary figures in their respective cultures — and the former is now also a ‘global’ phenomenon. Italian author Ferrante has achieved fame for her subtle and innovative representations of female subjectivity. Beginning with her first novel in 1992, through her Neapolitan quartet and to her series of novels and short stories, her intimate, confessional portraits of female characters lay bare their vulnerability. Celebrated French author Annie Ernaux began publishing in 1974 with a searing account of an illegal abortion. Since this initial third-person narrative, most of her works have explored approaches to first-person narration, with a series of partially autobiographical texts that depict women from marginalized, working-class backgrounds. Both writers may be said to write in the literary tradition of Beauvoir, then. In this article, I argue that these texts resonate in important ways with her iconic yet oft misinterpreted La Femme rompue. By focusing on the way in which these two texts subvert the generic expectations of diary fiction, I suggest that they depict women who are capable of moving beyond the traps in which Monique was confined. This article begins with a theoretical introduction to diary fiction, then reads the two texts through the lens of a feminist scholar’s theory of this mode of writing. Overall, it argues that these texts manipulate diary fiction to represent different forms of female subjectivity, thereby renewing the narrative of the abandoned woman in ways that would perhaps have countered Beauvoir’s disappointment at the reception of her own text.

Self and Story: Diary Fiction

In this article, ‘diary fiction’ is used to refer to literary texts in which authors have adapted the non-fiction diary by using a structure formed of a chronological sequence of (sometimes loosely) dated entries. Literary scholar Lucy Hosker underscores the contested nature of the term ‘diary fiction’, suggesting that it ‘forces us, as readers and critics, to traverse the boundary between truth and fiction, and to navigate a realm in which these two entities coexist, more or less comfortably and convincingly’ (2015, 211). As Desirée Henderson (2019) argues, diary fiction emerged in the eighteenth century and western literature is replete with examples of this form of writing. Hosker identifies the 1970s and 1980s as the heyday of criticism of diary fiction, pointing to four extended studies that analysed its parameters.² The most comprehensive of these is Lorna Martens’s analysis which, with reference to works in English, French and German and from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, defines this mode of writing as ‘a fictional prose narrative written from day to day by a single first-person narrator who does not address himself to a fictive addressee or recipient’ (1985, 4). By contrast, H. Porter Abbott (1982) argues that this form of writing constitutes a device rather than a genre. He suggests that diary fiction has three main functions: the mimetic function, or how diary fiction plays with truth and realism; the thematic function, or how it represents identity and self; and the temporal function, or how it represents time.

More recently, feminist critics have probed diary fiction in order first to counter the perception that it is a predominantly feminine form. Critics such as Rebecca Hogan (1991) and Rebecca Steinitz (2011) point to the feminization of this mode of writing. They question the stereotypes that have associated diary writing with women and girls due to its perceived connections with the private realm. Mary Jane Moffat further underscores that the diary in general is perceived as ‘emotional, fragmentary, interrupted, modest, not to be taken seriously, private, restricted, daily, trivial, formless’ (1975, 5). Henderson (2019), who has written extensively of diaries and diary fiction by women writers, advances a theory of diary fiction that counters its feminization, and it is through this theory that I read Ernaux and Ferrante’s works.³ Henderson suggests that diary fiction encompasses four components. First, the narrator or protagonist is the diarist: they are a fictional character, distinct from the autobiographical author of a non-fiction diary, who explains why they are writing and who explores how the act of writing a diary impacts upon their identity. Moreover, there is often an explanatory framing narrative that introduces the ‘editor-reader’: the person who found the diary and who is sharing it with the world. Furthermore, diary fiction has a chronological structure that emphasizes immediacy and vitality and which serves to ‘heighten suspense by placing the reader alongside the diarist in the middle of experience and in a state of ignorance about the future’ (2019, 113). Finally, there is typically a ‘diary manuscript’ in the work: ‘Paper artifacts that can be touched and handled by characters in the story’; ‘the materiality of the manuscript frequently functions as a key component of the story’ (2019, 101).

In this article, I read Ferrante’s and Ernaux’s works through Henderson’s theory of diary fiction. Before discussing their works, however, it is worth pausing to explore Beauvoir’s approach to this mode of writing. La Femme rompue conforms to the first component of Henderson’s theory mentioned above, since the fictional character of Monique is the major voice heard in this text, to the extent that her diary becomes monotone, vertiginous and repetitive. Monique is obliged to reassess her sense of selfhood without the husband on whom she previously relied, but — as was Beauvoir’s explicit aim — finds herself incapable of renewing her narrative of self. While the ‘editor-reader’ does not feature in Beauvoir’s text — or in Ernaux or Ferrante’s — its chronological structure and the resulting immediacy is one of the most striking elements of this work. The reader follows Monique through her daily ruminations over several months. The diary is dated from 13 September to 24 March, permitting the reader to follow the progress of the narrator — or, more precisely, the lack of progress, since her diary reveals that she is confined to the same mindset throughout. At the outset, the dates are close together as Monique writes frequently, almost daily, while the entries become sparser as the narrator unravels. These frequent entries, especially in the days immediately following the husband’s departure, create an intimacy between writer and reader, who reads Monique’s daily record of panic, loss and shock. This intimacy soon changes, however, as Monique’s diary entries become increasingly repetitive and the reader is obliged to witness her negotiating the same emotions and reactions. While Beauvoir intended this element of her diary fiction to render her message self-evident, her highly credible story and the way in which the text recounts a seemingly truthful tale renders it highly relatable. The intimacy it creates between reader and protagonist is likely the reason for the letters she received. Finally, the ‘diary manuscript’ is very evident in Beauvoir’s work, since Monique is engaged in writing detailed, dated accounts of her isolation following her husband’s departure. She refers to the act of writing but does not reflect deeply upon it — tellingly, writing herself only in relation to others: as Abbott writes, Monique is ‘so deeply ingrained in this dependency of hers on the perspective of the other that in writing her diary-mirror she holds it up to every face but her own, trying to reconstitute her identity through the subjectivity of anyone but herself’ (1982, 19). Beauvoir’s text corresponds neatly to Henderson’s theorization of diary fiction, then. The two texts under discussion here, by contrast, subvert it in ways that probe the parameters of the genre and its representation of female subjectivity.

The Narrator Diarist

In Henderson’s theorization of diary fiction, a distinct fictional character takes the role of the diarist. This technique creates a sense of interiority, as the reader is drawn into reading the character’s thoughts and feelings, and involves both a justification of the diary and an exploration of its impact upon the diarist’s identity. In I giorni dell’abbandono, the fictional diarist is Olga, who explores her narrative of selfhood as she lives almost in isolation. Following her husband’s announcement that he is leaving her, and her subsequent discovery that forty-year-old Mario is living with a woman twenty years younger than him, Olga is isolated at home. She has little contact with others during this time, except for a neighbour, a friend and her two small children. In this isolated state — she is even physically confined since she becomes locked inside her apartment — she ponders her identity and the reasons why her husband left her. As opposed to Monique’s unchanging mindset, however, Olga’s questioning of her identity leads her through three specific phases. The first delineates her reaction to Mario’s departure and the immediate impact of his decision on her daily life. A crucial aspect of this questioning is her references to La Femme rompue. Just a few pages into the text, Ferrante’s narrator writes of having read the text as a teenager:

Evita di assomigliare alle donne in frantumi di un libro famoso della tua adolescenza. Ne rividi la copertina in ogni dettaglio. Me lo aveva imposto la mia insegnante di francese quando le avevo detto con troppa irruenza, con ingenua passione, che volevo fare la scrittrice, nel 1978, più di vent’anni fa. ‘Leggi questo’ mi aveva detto e io diligentemente l’avevo letto. Ma quando le avevo restituito il volume, mi era venuta la frase superba: queste donne sono stupide. Signore colte, di condizione agiata, si rompevano come ninnoli nelle mani dei loro uomini distratti. Mi erano sembrate sentimentalmente sciocche, io volevo essere diversa, volevo scrivere storie di donne dalle molte risorse, donne di parole invincibili, non un manuale della moglie abbandonata con l’amore perduto in cima ai pensieri. […] Lo dissi con affanno, tutto d’un fiato come non facevo mai, e la mia insegnante fece un sorrisetto ironico, un po’ astioso. Doveva aver perso qualcuno, qualcosa anche lei. E ora, più di vent’anni dopo, la stessa cosa stava succedendo a me. (I giorni, 20–21)

[Don’t be like the women destroyed in a famous book of your adolescence. I saw the cover again in every detail. My French teacher had assigned it when I had told her too impetuously, with ingenuous passion, that I wanted to be a writer. It was 1978, more than twenty years earlier. ‘Read this,’ she had said to me, and diligently I had read it. But when I gave her back the volume, I made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed to me sentimental fools: I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts. […] I said it breathlessly, all in one gulp, which was something I never did, and my teacher smiled ironically, a little bitterly. She, too, must have lost someone, something. And now, more than twenty years later, the same thing was happening to me. (Days, 20–21)]

Olga makes explicit reference to the act of reading Beauvoir’s text and, moreover, to having misinterpreted it due to the inexperience of youth. Ferrante, a woman writer of a different generation, thus portrays a protagonist who misinterpreted Beauvoir’s story as a younger woman but who comes to appreciate it differently as she questions her identity through her diary.

Differently from Beauvoir’s Monique, however, Olga moves beyond this initial obsession and shame, in accordance with Henderson’s notion that the narrator diarist explores the impact of the diary on their changing identity. In the second phase of the text, the narrator recounts a crisis that takes place one day. Locked in her apartment, her son falls ill, her dog dies, a colony of ants invades her home and both her landline and mobile phone stop working. The questioning of her selfhood becomes acute, as she fears she is losing control of herself and her mind, writing, for example, ‘rimettersi in moto, subito, pensare soluzioni. Evitare di arrendersi all’insensatezza del giorno, tenere insieme i frammenti della mia vita come se fossero comunque destinate a un disegno’ (I giorni, 153) [‘get moving again, right away, think of solutions. Avoid surrendering to the senselessness of the day, hold the fragments of life together as if they still had their allotted place in a design’ (Days, 136)]. Victor Zarzar interprets this section as ‘the unravelling that needs to happen in order for Olga’s life to be restructured after abandonment’ (2020, 332). Following this day-long crisis, the third section of the text depicts Olga’s return to self-control and the advent of an altered reality in which she finds harmony. In the final pages, after seeing Mario several months after the separation, she writes: ‘Era proprio così, non c’era più niente che mi potesse interessare di lui. Non era nemmeno una scheggia di passato, era solo una macchia’ (I giorni, 209) [‘It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain’ (Days, 186)]. Her self-questioning thus enables Olga to achieve resolution and to develop an identity separate from that of her husband — as Monique was unable to do. As Stefania Lucamante argues: ‘Instead of despising Olga for her condition of societal “imperfection”, […] Ferrante empathizes with her, avoiding victimization and condemnation and pragmatically looking for a position in society for her’ (2008, 85).

By contrast, Ernaux’s Passion simple contains no specific reference to Beauvoir’s work. Nevertheless, the premise of the text is strikingly similar to La Femme rompue — but with several specific innovations that push the tale into a different era of female identity and sexual mores. The narrator diarist in this text is unnamed and does not mention her age but is an established writer with adult children; this is not a representation of a wife under forty as in Ferrante’s text, then, but a more experienced and independent voice. Moreover, this woman is not married; she refers to an earlier divorce and lives alone as a single woman who is professionally successful and financially independent. As readers familiar with Ernaux’s work will know, these factors mirror the situation of Ernaux herself, yet her career-long experimentation with first-person narrative problematizes any reading of this text as autobiographical. The narrator’s sense of abandonment emanates from her feelings for a married man with whom she has a romantic liaison. The man referred to only as A is a diplomat from Eastern Europe who is in Paris temporarily. The love affair is therefore destined to end abruptly, as the narrator recognizes from its beginning. Nevertheless, the narrator feels abandoned by this man and writes of obsessive behaviours she develops during his long and unpredictable absences. Indeed, the narration avows that this professionally successful woman has lost sight of all else in her life: ‘J’étais sure qu’il n’y avait jamais rien eu de plus important dans ma vie, ni avoir des enfants, ni réussir des concours, ni voyager loin, que cela, être au lit avec cet homme au milieu de l’après-midi’ (Passion, 19) [‘I knew that nothing in my life (having children, passing exams, travelling to faraway countries) had ever meant as much to me as lying in bed with that man in the middle of the afternoon’ (Simple Passion, 8)].⁴

The questioning of selfhood and identity that is central to diary fiction is a recurrent theme in the narrator’s meanderings. Significantly, the narrator does not write about the man or about the affair; instead, this text depicts the narrator’s reaction to it, and especially to her reaction to what she perceives as his abandonment of her. She writes in the opening pages, ‘à partir du mois de septembre l’année dernière, je n’ai plus rien fait d’autre qu’attendre un homme: qu’il me téléphone et qu’il vienne chez moi’ (Passion, 13) [‘from September last year, I did nothing more than wait for a man: for him to call me and come round to my place’ (Simple Passion, 3)], uses the word ‘obsession’ to describe her behaviour and writes that when he finally leaves France, ‘au début, quand je me réveillais à deux heures du matin, cela m’était égal de vivre ou de mourir’ (Passion, 52) [‘at first, when I woke up at two o’clock in the morning, I didn’t care whether I lived or died’ (Simple Passion, 39)]. Indeed, the narrator’s relationship with A may appear challenging from a feminist perspective. This woman writer, who has a long history of representing female subjectivity, portrays a first-person narrator who is wholly dependent upon a man: obsessive, reliant and compulsive, and seemingly with no trajectory or values beyond this relationship. Yet, this representation of identity and selfhood is completely different to that of Beauvoir’s Monique. While Monique’s questioning of her selfhood revealed that she relied so heavily on her husband that she had no identity beyond her marriage, Ernaux’s narrator reveals a delight in her sexuality and freedom. Sylvie Romanowski (2002) suggests that this text marks a change of direction in Ernaux’s writing since it is the first to recount a narrator’s passionate relationship with a man, and Loraine Day argues that it ‘bear[s] witness to Ernaux’s desire to see women throw off the constraints which hinder the free expression of female sexuality’ (2000, 218). Although the narrator is obsessed and at times feels uncomfortable with her behaviour, she also claims to feel no shame whatsoever (Passion, 29). The narrator’s candid expression of this lack of shame demonstrates that this is not a portrayal of a woman who is overcome by pain at a failed relationship. Instead, this exploration of selfhood reveals a woman delighting in the luxury of a passion while she has the opportunity to do so, and — contrary to Monique, who felt incapable of ever finding a renewed sense of identity — knows that this luxury is a temporary pleasure from which she plans to benefit fully. Nearly fifty years after the publication of Beauvoir’s novella, Ernaux’s text thus positions an ‘abandoned’ woman in a very different societal context and reinvents the possibilities available to her. In this sense, Passion simple can be read as a subtly crafted update of the story of abandonment, representing a renewed approach to female identity, sexuality and desire in the late twentieth century.

Telling Time in Diary Fiction

Works of diary fiction typically follow a chronological structure and mimic diary time, as Henderson identifies. Yet, they often manipulate time to emphasize certain aspects of the plot — ‘to close the gap between action and description of action’ (2019, 113), as Henderson puts it. In this sense, diary fiction provides an illusion of reality, inviting the reader to suspend judgment and believe the truthfulness of the character’s diary. The familiar mode of the diary, based upon intimacy and confession, can thus be manipulated to produce highly relatable characters and plots — something Beauvoir exploited in her novella. Both Ferrante and Ernaux use diary fiction in a chronological way to create an illusion of reality within their texts, yet for different purposes. The chapters of I giorni dell’abbandono are not dated according to a conventional diary but contain references to time that move the narrative forward chronologically. The opening line of the work locates it in ‘un pomeriggio d’aprile’ (7) [‘one April afternoon’ (9)], while the next chapter begins ‘passò una settimana’ (12) [‘one week later’ (14)], and markers of time recur — ‘nei giorni seguenti’ (25) [‘in the following days’ (25)], ‘il giorno dopo’ [‘the next day’ (49)] ‘la domenica sera’ (188) [‘on Sunday evening’ (167)], ‘due giorni dopo’ (204) [‘two days later’ (181)], and ‘tre giorni dopo’ (209) [‘three days later’ (186)]. The intimacy of the diary format is very tangible, therefore. Moreover, as in a conventional diary format, the entries are written from the perspective of an unknowing narrator who moves through her story day by day with no knowledge of how it will develop; there is no hint, for example, that she knows that she will eventually find harmony or fall in love again by the end of the time of writing. In the early chapters, this reveals the enormity of Olga’s shock in clear, lyrical prose. As she begins to spiral out of control, however, the tone and style of her narration change. Lucamante refers to what she calls Olga’s ‘useless silent dialogue’ (2008, 91) and points to the interplay between standard Italian and dialect in Olga’s language. Similarly, Zarzar notes a ‘transition from the highly curated Italian that opens Olga’s account into the ungrammatical and obscene language that she adopts later’, viewing this linguistic change as revealing ‘a crisis not only of identity but of language itself’ (2020, 332).

Alongside these changes noted by Lucamante and Zarzar, a further significant change in this section of the text is its pace. Whereas the first section of the text presents the narrator’s daily occurrences in a recognizable diary form, the narration of the second section of the text is marked by immediacy: the narrator narrates events that have just taken place, rather than presenting them as a reflection on the events of a day. A striking example of this is the one sex scene in the text. After calling in to see her neighbour Carrano — a man she hardly knows and describes as ‘un estraneo’ (I giorni, 87) [‘a stranger’ (The Days, 80)] — late one night, Olga tearfully tells him of Mario’s abandonment of her for a younger woman, and a sexual encounter follows. In seven long pages, Ferrante recounts the encounter between an abandoned woman who is desperate to feel attractive to a man, and a man who seems only vaguely interested in her. Olga’s first-person narration provides a running commentary of the awkwardness of their half-hearted movements and her feelings of disgust. She writes at the beginning, ‘non mi restava altro che sprofondare per gradi nella ripugnanza’ (I giorni, 88) [‘all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance’ (The Days, 80)] and her comments throughout reveal her perspective: ‘Mi venne di nuovo da piangere, stinsi i denti. Non sapevo che fare, non volevo scoppiare in lacrime di nuovo. […] Mi seniti avvampare di vergognanza’ (I giorni, 93) [‘I felt like crying, I clenched my teeth. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to burst into tears again. […] I felt myself flare up with shame’ (The Days, 84–85)]. All the while, the first-person narrative reveals that she is imagining sexual encounters between her husband and his twenty-year-old partner. This departs from the narration of standard diary fiction. To recall Beauvoir’s example, the narrator of La Femme rompue presents daily events with added reflection. In this section of Ferrante’s text, by contrast, the narrator presents the events in an interior monologue with no reflection or ordering of thoughts. The writing has thus departed from the conventional format of diary fiction and instead mirrors the narrator’s spiralling loss of self-control. Nevertheless, this temporary departure from conventional diary fiction increases its mimesis, since the text portrays a narrator who is even more relatable and recognizable. Whereas Beauvoir’s Monique was static and unchanging, Ferrante’s Olga lays bare the vulnerability of her character to represent the ravages that can still be wreaked upon a woman — but, importantly, she is able to overcome these and recoup her narrative by the end of the text.

Ernaux similarly represents the vulnerability of her female narrator. In this diary fiction, the chronological narrative depicts the narrator engaging in everyday activities, such as sitting in her living room watching the news. She learns of historical events that enable the reader to situate the story in a recognizable time frame — the war in Iraq, for example — but these events are far removed from her concerns, all of which revolve around her relationship with A. Michelle Scatton-Tessier notes that ‘no other of Ernaux’s texts depict the narrator’s direct interplay with living space as much as Passion simple, in which almost the entire narrative takes place inside the suburban home’ (2005, 136) and points to the angst the narrator experiences upon leaving it. When she does leave it, the narrator is portrayed as living a very recognizable daily existence, riding the metro, going to the supermarket and visiting the hairdresser, for example. The narrator confides in a confessional manner, for example:

Chez le coiffeur, j’ai vu une femme très volubile, à qui tout le monde répondait normalement jusqu’au moment où, la tête renversée dans le bac, elle a dit ‘on me soigne pour les nerfs.’ Aussitôt, imperceptiblement, le personnel s’est adresse à elle avec une retenue distante, comme si cet aveu irrépressible était la preuve de son dérangement. J’avais peur de paraître moi aussi anormale si j’avais dit ‘je vis une passion.’ Pourtant, quand je me trouvais au milieu d’autres femmes, à la caisse du supermarché, à la banque, je me demandais si elles avaient comme moi un homme sans arrêt dans la tête. (Passion, 24)

[At the hairdresser’s one day I saw a talkative woman to whom everyone had been speaking perfectly normally until she announced, her head tilted back over the basin: ‘I’m being treated for my nerves.’ Immediately, the staff stiffened and addressed her with distant reserve, as if this irrepressible confession were proof of her insanity. I feared I would also be considered abnormal if I had said: ‘I’m having a passionate love affair’. Yet when I was among other women, at the supermarket checkout or at the bank, I wondered whether they too were wrapped up in a man. (Simple Passion, 13–14)]

The narrator is thus depicted as an ordinary woman whose daily activities mirror those of so many other women, rather than as a successful, educated and independent writer.

Nevertheless, the unnamed narrator’s intimate, confessional style of writing lays bare her emotionally complex response to the situation. She highlights the pain she is experiencing and contrasts her feelings with A’s nonchalance, commenting tellingly that ‘quelquefois, je me disais qu’il passait peut-être toute une journée sans penser une seconde a moi. […] Ce décalage avec ma propre obsession me remplissait d’étonnement’ (Passion, 39–40) [‘sometimes I told myself that he might spend a whole day without even thinking of me. […] Compared to my own obsession, such indifference filled me with wonder’ (Simple Passion, 27)]. She also communicates her discomfort with this unfamiliar situation, hesitating to tell even her friends about the affair. Yet, Ernaux’s narrator also emphasizes the pleasure she derives from this situation. She comments tellingly in a footnote, for example: ‘Dans Marie Claire, des jeunes, interviewés, condamnent sans appel les amours de leur mère séparée ou divorcée. Une fille, avec rancune: “Les amants de ma mère n’ont servi qu’à la faire rêver”. Quel meilleur service?’ (Passion, 26) [‘A panel of young people interviewed by the women’s magazine Marie Claire strongly condemned the love affairs of their mothers, either divorced or living on their own. One girl remarked bitterly: “All my mother’s lovers could do was to help her escape into her dreams”. Who could ask for more?’ (Simple Passion, 15)]. The way in which she accentuates the pleasure of her situation highlights her position as an independent woman who chooses to exercise her sexuality as she wishes. Whereas Monique’s abandonment in La Femme rompue was so painful because of her lack of identity beyond her marriage, this narrator’s abandonment is painful because of the luxury the affair affords her. After all, she knows all along that it is merely a brief interlude in a much fuller life.

This brings us to the representation of time, which is of central importance in both texts. As we have seen, Beauvoir followed the generic convention of chronological time, underscored by Henderson, as the time when Monique’s diary, moving forward, is steady and regular, based upon the immediacy of the events it recounts, and gestures towards a future time. Only towards the end do her sporadic, repetitive entries demonstrate her inability to conceive of her situation any differently, hence the lack of resolution over her identity and future. In Ferrante’s text, time moves forward but in a far more irregular way. In the first section of the text, following Mario’s departure from the family home and his avowal of infidelity, Olga’s narration occurs at a steady pace; the first chapter recounts the first week following his departure, the second chapter covers the subsequent two weeks, and the successive chapters each deal with several days at a time. Although there are very few references to months or dates, the narrator is clear that some months have passed since the day in April that opens the text. She inserts hints as to the passing of time in the narration, such as when she refers to her anxiety over intruders in the family home and comments: ‘Alla fine, dopo settimane di ossessionati sondaggi e contrattazioni, mi decisi e cosi une mattina arrivarono a casa due operai, uno sui trenta, uno sui cinquanta, tutt’e due che puzzavano di tabacco’ (I giorni, 64) [‘In the end, after weeks of obsessive investigations and negotiations, I made a decision, and so one morning two workers arrived at the house, one in his thirties, the other in his fifties, both reeking of tobacco’ (The Days, 59)]. The reader understands that she has been anxious for weeks, so Mario has been gone for longer. This irregular passage of time is one of the ways in which Ferrante subverts the conventions of diary fiction: while the text moves chronologically forward to a future time and reads like a diary, the time of the present is irregular and the text’s immediacy is therefore in flux.

It is in the second section of the text, however, that Ferrante’s text departs most significantly from the chronological structure of diary fiction. As opposed to the irregular narration of the previous months, this second section spans one weekend in minute detail. Several changes in the narrative voice occur during this section, many of which are exemplified when the narrator comments, ‘Olga ha il terrore della frenesia di fare, teme che il bisogno di pronta reazione — passi veloci, veloci gesti — le migri dentro il cervello, non può tollerare il brusio interiore che allora comincia ad assillarla, le tempie che pulsano, la nausea allo stomaco, i sudori freddi, la smania di essere sempre più veloce, sempre più veloce’ (I giorni, 129) [‘Olga has a terror of the frenzy of doing, she fears the need for prompt reaction — quick steps, quick gestures — will migrate into her brain, she can’t tolerate the inner roar that will assault her, the pounding temples, the nausea, the cold sweat, the craze to be faster and faster, faster and faster’ (The Days, 115–116)]. An immediate note of departure is the use of the third person, as Olga is at this point objectifying herself. As Roberta Dahlman demonstrates, the focalization of the text means that the point of view is exclusively Olga’s and that, although she uses both free direct and free indirect speech, all we read is from her perspective and reflects her state of mind (2016, 139). While the use of the third-person narrator does not change the point of view, it moves the text further from the format of diary fiction. In addition to the third-person narration, this quotation also reveals a change in tense, as the past tense of much of the text is here replaced by the present. This generic subversion brings the reader closer to the mind of the protagonist, emphasizing Olga’s deteriorating psychological state. It also reflects the temporary nature of her suffering, since the text returns in the last section to the format of diary fiction. In the final pages, the third-person narrator disappears, the text returns to the present tense and the narration slows to its former pace. The return of the temporal function of diary fiction occurs as Olga finds resolution and harmony. Whereas Monique’s diary in Beauvoir’s text had no closure, the way in which Ferrante departs from a diary format and then returns to it demonstrates the ability of the later protagonist to overcome a situation the earlier could not.

Passion simple also subverts the temporal structure Henderson discerns in diary fiction. Ernaux’s work comprises short vignettes that do not contain specific dates but which mention nonetheless markers of time; they move from ‘cet été’ (11) [‘this summer’ (1)], to ‘à partir du mois de septembre l’année dernière’ (13) [‘from September last year’ (3)], to ‘au printemps’ (43) [‘in the spring’ (31)] to ‘cet été-là’ (47) [‘that summer’ (35)], to ‘maintenant c’est avril’ (66) [‘now it’s April’ (51)] and end ‘février 91’ (71) [‘February 1991’ (55)]. In this way, the narrative moves forward chronologically, recording the narrator’s thoughts and experiences as the relationship takes place. The text therefore records the present time of the action yet also gestures towards a future time. In the same way as Ferrante’s text, this narrative style creates an immediacy, reducing the time between the events and the writing of them, and placing the narrator in a position of ignorance — just as in a conventional diary format, in which the narrator writes of what has just happened with no knowledge of future events. Ernaux’s narration is thus suspended in time, capturing the intensity of the emotions the narrator experiences while obsessed with A and awaiting his next phone call.

Yet, Ernaux also complicates this chronology. Indeed, subverting narratological time is one of the major preoccupations in her writing: Simon Kemp reads her overall writing project as ‘one of writing time’ as she moves between timeframes, between the narrating self and the narrated self, and repeatedly revisiting past events and recounting them with the perspective of added experience (2010, 48). In Passion simple, the action is recounted in two main tenses. First is the imperfect tense, which is the time of ongoing, continuous action in the past, and which suggests a lack of finitude in the events and the relationship. Second is the perfect tense, which is seldom used in literary writing. This tense strikes a note of familiarity, reinforcing the notion that this is an ordinary woman talking informally of her experiences, whereas the simple past is considered to be more elegant and sophisticated.⁵ This past tense narration conforms to the chronological structure of diary fiction and reinforces the perspective of the diary writer who is unaware of how events will unfold. This past time is then disrupted, however, by sections in the present tense. In these sections, the narrator frequently writes about the writing process, which halts the narrative and offers commentary on it. This occurs when she writes, for example, ‘je continuais d’utilizer tous les moyens qui aident à supporter le chagrin, donnent de l’espérance quand, raisonnablement, il n’y en a pas: faire des réussites, mettre dix francs dans le gobelet d’un mendiant à Auber avec un vœu, “qu’il téléphone, qu’il revienne”, etc. (Et peut-être, au fond, l’écriture fait partie de ces moyens)’ (Passion, 62–63) [‘I went on doing the things that alleviate sorrow, offering hope when, theoretically, there is no longer cause for any: playing patience slipping a ten-franc coin into a beggar’s paper cup at Auber Metro station, making the wish that “he’ll call, he’ll come back”. (Perhaps, after all, writing is one of these things)’ (Simple Passion, 48)]. By calling attention to the present time of writing, after the episodes recounted in the past have subsided, this narrator highlights her existence beyond the relationship and beyond the timeframe it covers. By moving beyond the standard time of diary fiction, this narrator conveys her awareness that this relationship is temporary and that, although she experiences pain at the abandonment she feels between A’s visits, she appreciates its temporary luxury. Differently from Monique, then, who cannot move beyond the identity of the text and who cannot imagine a future time without her husband, this narrator is well aware that she will resume her life and her identity as an independent woman as soon as it is over.

The Materiality of Diary Fiction

Ernaux’s narrator’s commentary upon the writing process brings us to the final element of Henderson’s theorization of diary fiction, which concerns the materiality of the diary. Henderson refers to ‘scenes of composition’ within diary fiction that ‘portray the diarist in the act of writing, with an emphasis upon the materiality and embodied nature of diary writing’ and, further, that ‘the material presence of the diary manuscript within diary fiction creates an opportunity for authors to write about writing’ (2019, 101). Indeed, writing is a significant element of both texts under discussion here, as both narrators identify themselves as writers. This is a striking departure from Beauvoir’s novella, in which Monique had no professional activity. Ferrante’s Olga refers to a series of jobs she has performed that revolve around writing. For example, she mentions having written ‘un lungo racconto d’ambiente napoletano che avevo pubblicato con facilità’ (I giorni, 31) [‘a long story set in Naples and, the following year, had published it easily’ (The Days, 30)] and alludes to a novel she is currently writing.⁶ Yet, she claims to suffer from writer’s block and is unable to progress her novel throughout much of the text. As the narrative nears its end, however, writing becomes a key element of her recovery:

Per calmarmi cominciai a prendere l’abitudine di scrivere fino all’alba. In principio tentai di lavorare al libro che cercavo di mettere insieme da anni, poi lasciai perdere disgustata. Notte dietro notte scrissi lettere a Mario, anche se non sapevo dove spedirgliele. Speravo che presto o tardi avrei avuto modo di dargliele, mi piaceva pensare che le avrebbe lette. Scrivevo nella casa silenziosa, solo il respiro dei bambini nell’altra stanza. […] Quando le dita gonfie erano incise dalla penna fino a farmi male e gli occhi diventavano ciechi per il troppo piangere, andavo alla finestra. […] In quelle ore lunghe fui la sentinella del dolore, vegliai insieme a una folla di parole morte. (I giorni, 33)

[To calm myself I got into the habit of writing until dawn. In the beginning I tried to work on the book that I had been trying to put together for years, but then I gave it up, disgusted. Night after night I wrote letters to Mario, even though I didn’t know where to send them. I hoped that sooner or later I would have a way of giving them to him, I liked to think he would read them. I wrote in the silent house, with only the breathing of the children in the other room. […] When the pen had cut into my swollen fingers until they hurt, and my eyes become blinded by too many tears, I would go to the window. […] In those long hours I was the sentinel of grief, keeping watch along with a crowd of dead words. (The Days, 31–32)]

The narrator thus writes in several genres — letters to Mario, a novel and notebooks she refers to elsewhere — and presents writing as a source of pain and frustration that eventually leads to solace and understanding. She marks a turning point when she is able one night to ‘catturare tutta l’assurdità’ (I giorni, 189) [‘capture all the absurdity’ (The Days, 168)] in writing and begins the following day to look for work — which again involves writing, since she organizes correspondence for a local company in several languages. As opposed to the single-layered, repetitive narration of Monique, Olga writes about herself and expresses her thoughts in several different forms of writing, which enables her to achieve a renewed sense of identity. Ferrante’s narrator thus writes herself free of the constraints of the abandoned woman of the earlier text.

The unnamed narrator of Passion simple calls attention to the fact that she is a professional writer at several points throughout the text. As discussed above, as the text progresses, incursions into the text that reflect upon the process of writing become more prevalent. The text thus becomes a dual narrative; in one narrative, the passage of time moves forward and the reader is in the position of the witness to the intimate account of the narrator’s feelings of abandonment, and in the other, time is arrested by a commentary on the writing process. She writes, for example, ‘tout ce temps, j’ai eu l’impression de vivre ma passion sur le mode romanesque, mais je ne sais pas, maintenant, sur quel mode je l’écris, si c’est celui du témoignage, voire de la confidence telle qu’elle se pratique dans les journaux féminins, celui du manifeste ou du procès-verbal, ou même du commentaire de texte’ (Passion, 30–31) [‘during all this time, I felt I was living out my passion in the form of a novel but now I’m not sure in which style I am writing about it: in the style of a testimony, possibly even the sort of confidence one finds in women’s magazines, a manifesto or a statement, or maybe a critical commentary’ (Simple Passion, 20)]. Whereas Ferrante writes an interior monologue that allows the reader to view her narrator’s inward spiral, the narrator of Ernaux’s dual narrative allows us to read her vulnerability as well as her commentary on the process of writing it. What is particularly striking about this is that the narrator does not temper the narrative of obsession and shame and does not order her thoughts as a diary writer might. This act of laying herself bare is made more acute since she returns to the present of the text to reflect upon the writing process, proclaiming unapologetically that her experience is valid. Importantly, as opposed to the narrator of Ferrante’s text, she claims that the process of writing did not lessen her grief (Passion, 47). Whereas Ferrante’s narrator needed to overcome an abandonment in order to renew her identity and move forward, Ernaux’s is fully aware of her independent selfhood.

Conclusion

Taken together, these two texts provide an important riposte to Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue. While Ernaux’s text cannot be considered a rewriting of the earlier text in the same way as Ferrante’s is, both offer an updated version of the tale of abandonment. Ferrante shows that the pain of an abandonment endures, regardless of timeframe or cultural context; Olga feels equally as shocked, crushed and betrayed as Beauvoir’s Monique. Yet, without nullifying the intensity of such an experience and its effects upon a woman and her children, Ferrante depicts a way forward for her narrator. The text does not arrive at a complete and coherent resolution and there is little indication of Olga’s future identity, but the psychological turmoil subsides, she embarks upon a new relationship and she portrays her life as calm and harmonious. Ernaux’s text is more concerned with the pleasure of an affair the narrator knows to be temporary and the way in which she willingly endures the pain of it. More important, however, is that Ernaux appears to use the tale as a means of experimenting with writing, attempting to capture the time of an obsession and comparing it to the time of writing. By taking Beauvoir’s diary fiction and telling the tale several decades later with innovative approaches to this mode of writing, these authors both offer a corollary to Monique’s tale. They first insist that, while such an experience is traumatic, there is scope for women to move beyond a narrative of abandonment. Furthermore, their subversion of the genre of diary fiction used by Beauvoir pushes the boundaries of this genre, stretching it far beyond the ‘feminized’ stereotype and using it instead as a vehicle for a renewed approach to contemporary female subjectivity.

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Natalie Edwards

Natalie Edwards is Professor of French at the University of Adelaide and the University of Bristol. She specializes in women’s writing, transnational writing and migrant writing in French. She has published three monographs, the most recent of which is Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves (Routledge 2020). She is currently at work with Christopher Hogarth on an Australian Research Council funded project, ‘Transnational Selves: French Narratives of Migration to Australia’.

Notes

1. From now on, I refer in citations to I giorni dell’abbandono as I giorni and to Passion simple as Passion. The translated citations are taken from the published translations: The Days of Abandonment, translated by Ann Goldstein in 2005 and Simple Passion, translated by Tanya Leslie in 2003. I refer in citations to The Days of Abandonment as Days.

2. See Prince (1975), Abbott (1984), Field (1989) and Martens (1985).

3. It is important to note that Henderson’s theory does not lay claim to an explicit feminist or gendered lens: it is a broad and far-ranging study of diary and diary fiction writing. Nevertheless, Henderson is a renowned scholar of women’s writing, the text makes specific reference to gender, and the theory clearly aims to be as inclusive as possible regarding silenced or overlooked voices.

4. It is important to note that Ernaux later released the section of her diary in which she recounts the affair, published as Se perdre (2001). Since Passion simple is closer to the genre of diary fiction, this text has been selected for discussion in this article.

5. See Claire Marrone (1994).

6. This reference appears to allude to the Neapolitan Quartet, Ferrante’s major work and the source of the polemic over the writer’s real identity. Alessia Ricciardi analyses this polemic and situates Ferrante’s work in the broader context of European writing in Finding Ferrante (2021).