Beyond Postmodernism: Mirrors, Mise en Abîmes, and Labyrinths in Elena Ferrante's Works

At the end of "Childhood. The Story of Don Achille," the first part of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend (L'amica geniale, 2011), the narrator Elena describes a perfect example of mise en abîme. She notices that two facing mirrors create an effect of infinite regression:

Una mattina stavamo nella camera da pranzo a giocare a dama, io e Carmela contro Lila. Eravamo sedute al tavolo, noi due da un lato, lei dall'altro. Sia alle spalle di Lila che alle spalle mie e di Carmela c'erano i mobili con gli specchi, identici. Erano di legno scuro e con la cornice a volute. Guardavo noi tre riflesse all'infinito e non riuscivo a concentrarmi sia per tutte quelle immagini nostre che non mi piacevano, sia per le grida di Alfredo Peluso.

(ag 81)

One morning we were in the dining room playing checkers, Carmela and I against Lila. We were sitting at the table, us two on one side, she on the other. Behind Lila and behind Carmela and me were the identical, dark wood sideboards with the mirrors in spiral frames. I looked at the three of us reflected to infinity and I couldn't concentrate, both because of those images, which disturbed me, and because of the shouts of Alfredo Peluso.

(mbf 85)

The three friends enclosed and trapped in the curved frames is a suggestive image that functions as a mise en abîme of the story itself. On the one hand, this image signals women's literal and symbolic entrapment within a patriarchal culture and a male-dominated discourse. On the other, it captures the doubling at work in the novel—Elena and Lila's specular relationship, their entwined and competitive voices, their dual authorial presence and shared authorship of the novel Elena is narrating.¹ This scene and the one that follows immediately––Alfredo Peluso's arrest for the murder of Don Achille––conclude the story of Elena and Lila's childhood on a note of terror: "Fu la cosa più terribile a cui assistemmo nel corso della nostra infanzia, mi impressionò molto" ("It was the most terrible thing we witnessed in the course of our childhood, and made a deep impression on me"; ag 81; mbf 85). In Elena's narration the disturbing effect of the mise en abîme is augmented by the trauma of witnessing Peluso's arrest, a trauma that encapsulates all the violence the girls have seen or endured as children. This narrative sequence relates the two facing mirrors to Don Achille and the story of Elena and Lila's childhood as precisely the story of multiple traumatic experiences.

Two facing mirrors, Borges posited, form a labyrinth––and the labyrinth is a monstrous house with a monstrous creature, the Minotaur, living inside it.² Indeed, Elena and Lila's childhood, along with the violent patriarchal space of the Neapolitan rione where they live, can be read through the image of the labyrinth.³ In this essay I suggest that in Ferrante's novels the trope of the labyrinth modifies the postmodern aura attached to it and becomes a pivotal aspect of what Tiziana de Rogatis has theorized as Ferrante's global feminism and global traumatic realism.⁴ The events narrated in the Neapolitan Novels portray a variety of traumatic experiences—from physical violence and domestic abuse to more subtle and pernicious forms of psychological domination and control.⁵

I take "Childhood. The Story of Don Achille" as a case study to argue that one of its key intertexts and narrative-thematic structures is the myth of the Minotaur, the monstrous man-beast in the labyrinth. The labyrinth as a site of enclosure, violence, and punishment also functions as the architectural manifestation of male power in the rione. The labyrinth created by the two facing mirrors in Alfredo Peluso's house at the end of "Childhood. The Story of Don Achille" thus references the labyrinth as the structural, mythological, and visual-architectural foundation of Lila and Elena's formative years. As such, it also reflects...