I just finished Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series.
Here is what I find hilarious. The novels are a primer in feminist theory, and more specifically, the radical wing of feminism. If I needed to teach a course on feminist theory, I’d ditch all the readings and just use these novels because all the theory is right there and in a very accessible form, too.
The really funny part is that the novels are international bestsellers. I constantly see very conservative male bloggers who worship Ron Paul and even Reagan praise the novels to the skies. It was actually because of one such blogger that I started reading Ferrante. It’s clear to me that such people are not aware where the ideology that informs Ferrante’s work originates.
This is priceless, people. Half a planet devours these novels without even realizing that everything they are enjoying so much has already been said many times over by the vilified and “scary” radical feminists. And hey, it’s not like the writer tries to sneak these ideas by the readers. The first-person narrator states very clearly that she reads rad fem literature and is inspired by it to write her own rad fem analysis. There is even a very 21-century discussion of transgenderism placed in 1970s (obviously, without the word “transgenderism”) and conducted in terms that could appear verbatim on any of today’s rad fem sites.
There are two conclusions that can be drawn here:
1. Art has the power to make people swallow anything.
2. People are a lot more receptive to rad fem ideas than they are aware of. The bad rap the rad fem movement has is owed to the clumsiness of its founders and the defeatism of today’s followers.
P.S. Read the novels! They are great. You will thank me and yourself for the decision to read them.
Clarissa's Blog 
I am a little puzzled about the feminists having Valerie Solanas and Simone de Beauvoir as icons. The first was a drug addict with mental problems, and made her fame by trying to kill Andy Warhol and a couple of other men visiting his office. She never regretted the shooting, just regretted that she hadn’t taken a better aim. AW was gay from day 1, and hardly the role model for a male supremacist.
And her SCUM Manifesto is a misandric rant that give you a dé ja vù feeling, resembling the antisemitic writings in Germany of the 1930’s. But she put “men” instead of “jews”. ~~~
Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that humans are born as a white sheet of paper, and that the gender is a “social construct” has been disproved over and over, but the feminists still cling to it. SdB had not not studied the topics she would have needed, philosophy and literature is not the right background at all. ~~~
And her private life was a caricature of the male philandering sex predator – she seduced her young students one after another, and passed them on to her S&M part-time lover Jean Paul Sartre when she got tired of them. That caused mental problems and at least one suicide among the vulnerable young girls. And yes – she actually was banned for life from teaching young persons. ~~~
Of course there must be lots of eminent women much more suitable as figureheads for the women’s struggle for equality? Or is it required that a feminist icon must hate men and issue the hate in print?
Worth reading! Review: A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones 574pp, Century, £20
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/apr/19/featuresreviews.guardianreview8
“/,,,/ De Beauvoir taught the 17-year-old Russian emigrée Olga Kosackiewicz, who inspired both her first novel, L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), and Sartre’s Age of Reason. In a classroom seething with crushes on the “incredibly dazzling” young teacher, Kosackiewicz was picked out, seduced, and presented to Sartre, who developed an obsessive desire for her. De Beauvoir, despite the shrugging protestations in her memoirs, was consumed with jealousy. Sartre then took up with Olga’s younger sister. Bohemian free love was not without its complications.
The pattern was repeated later: De Beauvoir taught, seduced, and procured girls for Sartre. /…/”
A similar plot, from which the title was borrowed:
“Dangerous Liaisons is a 1988 historical drama film based upon Christopher Hampton’s play Les liaisons dangereuses, which in turn was a theatrical adaptation of the 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. /…/”
“The result is a perverse “student-teacher” relationship between Cécile and Valmont; by day she is courted by Danceny, and each night she receives a sexual “lesson” from Valmont. In the meantime, Merteuil begins an affair with Danceny. /…/”
LikeLike
Yes, Solanas was a mentally ill person, and it only makes sense to discuss her in the context of mental illness. Beauvoir is a genius but she is not one of the icons of the current rad fem movement. As for her personal life, who cares? It’s only the brilliance of her work that matters.
LikeLike