the blue fairy

Regarding that last point: I think what scared Lila most when Carmen first started copying her without a thought of her own is her influence. When Lila acts, she does so for the action in itself, immediate, not for the consequence of the action. She’s not future-oriented. So the idea of influencing others doesn’t occur to her. It scares her to some degree, and she tries to use it, though she can’t always control it.

it pertains to everything, to so much messaging sent out to young women and girls today

Disappearing is an extreme, two-pronged response by women to the sense of loss they experience because of male violence. The plunder and expropriation of oneself is a vacuum that generates another vacuum. Erasing oneself becomes “an aesthetic project” (slc 455), undertaken by Lila as it is by the protagonists of Ferrante’s other novels. On the one hand, these feminine figures seem to have definitively succumbed to male violence, yet by making an abrupt exit they challenge the traditional structures of that violence, particularly the family structure. As Ferrante points out, “The disappearance of women should be interpreted not only as giving up the fight against the violence of the world but also as clear rejection. [ . . . ] ‘Io non ci sto’ [is literally a form that] means: I’m not here, in this place, before what you’re suggesting” (fr 327). This form of “removing oneself from the picture,” of “refusing to engage” (fr 339) in the sometimes explicit, sometimes underhanded game of violence can be deemed an “aesthetic project” because it allows women to reshape their lives and the lives of others.”

[….]the uncanny charge of smarginatura also acts as the main storytelling technique, dissolving the story by withholding from readers important parts of the plot and never clearing the air of mystery and suspense. Indeed, six decades of lives and stories revolve around five inexplicable disappearances that translate to ellipses in the narrative and black holes in the plot. The dolls disappear for almost the entire story, and readers will know nothing about their theft, or the joint liability for their theft, over the course of six decades. The dolls do not resurface until the end of the quartet, thereby closing and dissolving the circle (cf. Chapter 1). Then there are the eight notebooks Lila gives to Elena in the spring of 1966, which disappear when, several months later, Elena throws them in the Arno in a fit of jealousy—a “clearly metaphorical murder” (Turchetta 109). The reader never has access to the notebooks that can confirm Lila is the superior artist. Tina disappears and, after that, Lila’s phantom book about Naples, a book that, for the obsessed Elena, would have reembodied the girl and the narrative brilliance of her friend. Finally, Lila vanishes, mirroring the uncanny fates of her daughter and the dolls, and leaving the reader with no idea of the cause nor positive closure.

I'd very much like to punch a feminist.

Or if you’d like to have some more options….

(Since they’re the only active accounts left on this post)

Like every account here is deactivated. I feel like an archaeologist.

Listen that doesn’t even account for all the weird shit local farmers are getting up to.

“The structure of the narrative is such that neither Lila nor Elena can ever be definitively locked within a formula that makes one the opposite of the other.”