Metamorphosis and Rebirth: Greek Mythology and Initiation Rites in Elena Ferrante's "Troubling Love"

The essay interprets Troubling Love in the light of the myth of Demeter and Persephone and the rites connected to it (Thesmophoria and the Eleusinian Mysteries), using a combination of literary critical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical approaches. The thesis is that Ferrante was inspired by this myth and these rites, considering them in combination a vehicle that is able to represent feminine identity as a fabric in which the ancient and the contemporary are inextricably entwined. The argument is not limited to the relationship of descent that links myth, rites, and the novel but goes further to articulate a more general value of convergence and continuity between these three forms of imaginative expression and their representations of feminine identity, which have so far received very little critical attention. The essay begins by identifying a series of narrative structures and dynamics shared by the myth, the rites, and Ferrante's novel. It goes on to analyze various symbolic patterns in the novel—the protagonist's relations to certain objects, to liquids, and to clothing—and relating these to the myth and/or the rites. Finally it interprets the protagonist's journey—which is both a physical journey across Naples and a psychological journey into the past of her own repressed memories—from a psychoanalytical perspective. The argument focuses on two ideas that contemporary feminine subjectivity elaborates about the fundamental bond with the mother: one reparative/ritual; the other twin/visual. Both converge to liberate the mother-daughter bond from the stereotype of the merely biological and instinctive and to give it, by contrast, a powerful symbolic construction. The novel is seen as imitating and subverting the genre of film noir, in that the solving of the external mystery (the cause of her mother's death) is secondary to the protagonist's internal unfolding and coming to consciousness of previously repressed memories.