On Abandonment and Fury

Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante is a story about a woman who descents into fits of rage and helplessness after being abandoned by her husband of many years. Her seemingly picture perfect life crumbles before her very eyes and she is left to make sense of it all.

She oscillates between moments of self pity and frenzied rage at her husband who simply gets up one day and decides he no longer wants to be with her.

She grapples with what comes next — and her pain is palpable and destructive as she curses, screams, and scrubs clean her house in a desperate bid to put her life back together only to continually fall into a state of complete disarray.

There is a particularly gruesome scene where she goes to the park with her dog, Otto, without a leash, who immediately wanders off and starts barking at a woman and her baby in a crib. The baby’s mother lashes out at Elena. At first, Elena defends herself with a few choice words of her own but then directs her attention towards her dog who continues barking ferociously at the baby. She tries to stop the dog by whipping him repeatedly with a stick. She beats him into silence, into submission — only stopping when she realizes that the dog is whimpering in fright and pain and that the woman has scampered away with her baby. She has become so frightening, so despicable that nobody can bear to witness her descent into extreme cruelty.

The book explores the violence she commits to her own body, to her children and to those around her as she punishes herself for her husband’s abandonment. She unravels over the course of the novel — coming undone only to haphazardly put herself back together again. It is a dance she is constantly playing with herself — stitching the remains of what has been left and what she can salvage after being left behind.

It made me think of my own rage that has been bubbling up this past year and which I keep boxing away, hoping to unpack some other time, some other day — telling myself constantly: now is not the time.

But is there such a thing as the “right time” to express your rage? And when will we get this time? When will we be allowed to unravel, disintegrate, combust? I know that the emotional contagion of our pain, when projected outwards, can be far reaching and incredibly difficult to contain. But will we ever be afforded the liberty to choose alternative ways of being, of expressing pain, anger and a myriad of emotions that are not deemed socially compatible with who we are as women? Must we always practice kindness, empathy and forgiveness even if it no longer serves us?

Healing requires compassion. I hear this over and over again. I am not sure it is enough. Not when the body is keeping score and when it is impossible to practise self love while also grappling with aching isolation.

And so I suggest we self destruct instead. Be inconsolable for as long we need to. In some ways, many of us already are but in our own solitary ways. For once, I want our anger and it’s manifestation to be a glorious communal spectacle instead.