Roi Guillotine

Capitaine Malavard 👑🦀

[dearlylostdoe]

[pansexualrevolutionary]

Follow for more beautiful things!

[mylittleteenageideas]

coastal town ༄

[d-iaphane]

[vintage-tigre]

Supermodel Yasmeen Ghauri, June, 1993.

Photographed by Eamonn J. McCabe for Marie Claire Italia

[meeems-world]

[lenucciaurl]

elena greco lives ineluctably within her own head but wants to be part of the real world SO badly. she is the writer and the artist but she so deeply wants to be the muse, she wants to be the fundamentally REAL and ALIVE girl that people will write books about. unfortunately she knows that she is always going to live in this transcendent plane in which she can only ever be a conduit for others' lives and personalities. so many of her problems are interior. this is why when she idolizes lila, she is particularly concerned with lila's lived experiences as elena perceives them and lila's very alive mind, both of which elena sees as proof of lila's very sturdy, unstinting EXISTENCE. this is also why elena is not particularly distressed by dissolving margins. reality has never contained elena why would it start now.

lila meanwhile is both steadied by and trapped within real life. she faces such violence and oppression at the hands of the world, but it grounds her. she was born in naples, she will always be inextricably involved with naples, she wants desperately to leave naples, for most of her life she CANNOT escape naples. but as much as lila finds herself entwined with the real and present goings-on of the world, she wants very badly to be someone else, to be the type of complex and internal person that elena is. for her mind to have independent permission to flourish and become something beautiful and autonomous and unconfined. this is why she idolizes elena and why she hates it when elena is too grounded in real life, in the truth of naples. this is why dissolving margins is so distressing for her as opposed to elena: lila does not know how to exist outside of her communities, her people, her life.

all this to say lila is viciously, painfully alive and elena is in a perpetual state of half-death

[venuscrows]

me and the girl i’m completely normal about

[themonstrousother]

Disappearing is an extreme, two-pronged response by women to the sense of loss they experience because of male violence. The plunder and expropriation of oneself is a vacuum that generates another vacuum. Erasing oneself becomes “an aesthetic project” (slc 455), undertaken by Lila as it is by the protagonists of Ferrante’s other novels. On the one hand, these feminine figures seem to have definitively succumbed to male violence, yet by making an abrupt exit they challenge the traditional structures of that violence, particularly the family structure. As Ferrante points out, “The disappearance of women should be interpreted not only as giving up the fight against the violence of the world but also as clear rejection. [ . . . ] ‘Io non ci sto’ [is literally a form that] means: I’m not here, in this place, before what you’re suggesting” (fr 327). This form of “removing oneself from the picture,” of “refusing to engage” (fr 339) in the sometimes explicit, sometimes underhanded game of violence can be deemed an “aesthetic project” because it allows women to reshape their lives and the lives of others.”

Elena Ferrante's Key Words, Tiziana de Rogatis

[swanmaids]

Ever since I was a child I had constructed for myself a perfect self-repressive mechanism. Not one of my true desires had ever prevailed, I had always found a way of channeling every yearning. Now enough, I said to myself, let it all explode, me first of all.

Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

[warningsine]

[deerest-deer]

homoerotic bath scenes in film and tv you are so special to me <3

[venuscrows]

ferrante is so good at putting into words the inherent masochism of engaging in heterosexual relationships, feeling love and desire for a class of people that very rarely if ever considers your humanity equal to their own, that doing so can often be detrimental to one’s own personhood

[2009rad]

Lenu: No matter what I do, Lila’s always going to be better than me. She’s always one step ahead of everyone, and I’ll never catch up to her. All she’ll have is her brilliance while I’m stuck trying to recreate it, because she’s part of everything I do

Meanwhile Lila:

[epifaniacintilante]

Elena Ferrante

I love, love this answer so much

[fitzcrozier]

Lila Cerullo x Helen of Troy Sparta

[tragedygf]

Industry 4x06 // Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante