Love Is Dead? & The Female Voice
A look at ‘The Dry Heart’ by Natalia Ginzburg
Situated at the height of post-war Europe, one cannot help but wonder if the disillusionment with the world has trickled, however slowly or dramatically, onto a disillusionment with love. Love, the subject that all poetry and all poets, all dreamers, aspire to — the great, the unattainable, the light of the world — crumbles within the pages of Ginzburg’s prose. Is there even such a thing as love, when men kill men on battlegrounds raised by men, with weapons made by men, taking lives on the commands of other men?
Ginzburg doesn’t seem to think so.
In her novel, we see a woman marry a man because it feels nice to be paid attention to. We see a man marry a woman because she is safe, because she wouldn’t, couldn’t, make him suffer — ‘I’m lazy, when you come down to it, and I don’t want to suffer.’ This is a story about the marriage between our narrator and Alberto. But this is not a love story.
‘I shot him between the eyes.’
The novella begins and ends with the same matter-of-fact pronouncement: ‘I shot him between the eyes.’ It would only be most natural to think that the novella would centre around this seemingly unreasoned murder, but it doesn’t. Because at the end of the day, I believe, one more death no longer matters amongst the background of millions of deaths. When one treads on the bones of dead men while going to the grocer, what is one more?
It is not an ethical, nor a moral way to view death. But it is precisely the narrator’s refusal to make a big deal out of it, simply admitting that ‘of course they’d put me in jail, but I couldn’t exactly imagine how that would be,’ that drives home the intense nihilism of facing a world so bleak that nothing can matter anymore. But the novella at the same time rejects comfortable nihilism. This is not a story of a narrator who has given up — it is rather one about she who fights, who suffers, who feels ecstatic and depressed, all wrapped up in her tumultuous marriage. There may be nothing out there, but the individual stands her ground on grounds of nothing. It is what makes The Dry Heart so heartbreakingly tragic, so hard to read, yet so comforting to find humanity’s darkest, most humiliating thoughts laid bare on the table for us to see in its rawest form.
It hardly matters that Alberto dies at the end of the novella when all throughout he is a mere dead man walking. What the narrator does is simply translate the metaphorical, the psychological, into the literal. She brings out for the reader the obvious point that Alberto is dead, Alberto has been dead the whole time she knew him. He reads poetry and writes in its margin, he has an extra-marital affair with a woman, Giovanna, whom he claims to be the love of his life, but later admits that ‘I don’t really know how much I care for Giovanna.’ But at the root of it all, Alberto is a man who refuses to feel. According to the narrator, ‘he just lights a cigarette and walks away’ whenever he lingers on the prospect of suffering. Ginzburg drives home the emphasis that suffering makes us human, and refusing to suffer, submitting into a ‘laziness’ of the sort, makes us inseparable from the dead. After all, life is suffering, and unsuffering is death.
When nothing changes after Alberto’s death, with the narrator going out for a cup of coffee, do we actually see that her love was dead from the get-go. Literally, in the phenomenal world, Alberto is dead. But metaphorically love is dead. The man, or the idea, whom the narrator thinks she loves, doesn’t exist. Alberto alive and Alberto dead makes no difference to her.
She had spent the novella clinging onto a slice of the shadow of love, and while his affair seems like the reason she ‘shot him between the eyes’ on the surface, one could easily argue that his murder was unreasoned. Why the narrator ends up killing her husband is an age-old question, but I would like to propose that there is no answer. Looking for one seems to diminish The Dry Heart into easy speculation, into psychologically explainable factors when the crux of this novella centres around how one navigates life when life is not there, love when love is dead. It is unexplainable precisely because a life devoid of life and love devoid of love does not make sense.
I was surprised, having not thought to check beforehand, that this novel was written in 1947 when reading it felt so celebrating of its own tragic modernity. Part of the reason for this is the honesty of its female voice. Written in first-person narrative, Ginzburg allows the narrator to run astray with her thoughts yet at the same time always, always coming back to herself. She may at times act unreasonably, but her unreason is always reasoned within herself: ‘But when I imagined our making love together I felt something like disgust and said to myself that I couldn’t be in love with him after all.’
This, I think, makes The Dry Heart a feminist classic (but at the same time not being limited to it) of many generations. The narrator’s ability to be clear, concise and honest with herself reclaims generations of hysterical women in literature before her.
Take, for example, the governess in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. It is also written in first-person, but at the end of the novel, we are left questioning her sanity. It is the question that many critics have had many debates about — is the governess crazy, or are the ghosts real? Time and again, the trope of the unreliable narrator comes to undermine the female sanity.
Returning to The Dry Heart, then, Ginzburg disallows the popularised term ‘female hysteria’ to even come near her narrator. As a beacon for the post-war female voice, the narrator comes to embody reason, sanity, control. She reclaims in her voice generations of literary female hysterics, assuring us that women should not be held to any standards that men are not held to, but at the same time, the revolt against patriarchal standards and authority does not make one ‘hysterical’.
The Dry Heart is nothing short of a breathtaking read, if not heartbreaking. The narrator pioneers and champions a new female narrative, but she is not able to claim it. She ultimately falls victim and perpetrator of lovelessness, lifelessness, of a nihilistic view of the world.
But what makes Ginzburg the worthy read is ultimately the pavement of a new way to establish and reclaim a voice in a world where a voice seemingly cannot be found.
