"I'm not wise, but I read a lot of novels."
Elena Ferrante, The Lying Lives of Adults
I have read a lot of books in my life. I’ve been what people usually say is a “voracious reader” since I was about 9 years old. I studied English literature in college mostly because if I had to read so much every week, it might as well be literature. It would force me to read in the canon, which I would never do of my own accord, but wanted to be someone who had read and could speak knowledgeably about “Literature.” This has always been important to me: being well read. After college I even attempted to take the great Ralph Williams’s Shakespeare course via iTunes because I hadn’t properly taken it in college. I still haven’t read Hamlet. I likely never will. Indeed, I haven’t read a work by a white male writer since I read the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle in 2017 (you can check the receipts on my Goodreads lol).
On the one hand it feels embarrassing and trite to say this, but on the other hand, I mean it when I say that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series radicalized me. Her work awakened something in me that I don’t think I had ever fully considered or nourished in myself. In ways deeply personal, but also openly political, Ferrante’s work shaped the person I’ve become.
My Brilliant Friend introduces the reader to a landscape that is dirty, violent, and desperate. Her prose is highly naturalistic, but with the angst and hyperbole of adolescence.
What Ferrante told me (or perhaps more reasonably, what I heard from her), eloquently and candidly, is this: relationships between men and women are almost always couched in some kind of violence, or, at the very least, the potential for violence. This is made obvious in her work, even when the main characters are children: even as young girls (perhaps, especially as young girls), they will be threatened with and victims of many kinds of violence. Emotional violence. Physical violence. Sexual violence. Psychological violence. Financial violence. Political violence. Particularly in the second book of the cycle, The Story of a New Name, which explores the relationships between young men and women and the violence of their passion and abuse, and the consequences of actions and inactions. Ferrante remains unrelenting to her characters as they navigate the weird world of growing up.
"I listened, I understood and I didn’t understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker’s knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.”
—Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
And as the relationships between men and women in the novels are fraught with this constant threat, so too are the female friendships fraught with fear, envy, and an attraction that walks the tightrope of love and hate. By the third book in the cycle, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Lila and Elena's friendship is likely the most incredible portrait of two women growing up, coming of age, and navigating adulthood and womanhood that I've ever read (lots and lots and lots of words have been written about this, I don’t feel the need to expand lol).
And, though it feels wrong to say so, Ferrante told me that motherhood is a trap. I started reading Ferrante in 2014, a year before I got married, 2 years before I turned 30. My future and my fertility were constantly on my mind. I felt conflicted and unsure about taking this next step in my life. This apprehension confused me for years; I had always just assumed I would have children. I had never actually considered the possibility of not having them until I read Ferrante. She is, I think, honest and forthcoming about being a mother in Italy in the second half of the 20th century, and I think one could argue that being a mother is maybe easier now than it was then. I don’t think I believe that. Eight years later, I’m not planning to have children. Elena Ferrante’s work contributed to that decision.
"Then, turning to Pietro, he said, ‘you should leave your wife more time.’
‘She has all day available.’
‘I’m not kidding. If you don’t, you’re guilty not only on a human level, but also on a political one.’
‘What’s the crime?’
‘The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.’
I waited in silence for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm, ‘Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes. The essential thing is that she not take time from me.’
‘If she doesn’t take it from you, then who can she take it from?"
— Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
These feminist motifs jumped out at me immediately the first time(s) I read the Neapolitan series. The more times I’ve read it, the more obvious the motifs of anti-capitalism and class struggle are to me. These motifs are obviously feminist as well; economic liberation goes hand in hand with the struggle for personal autonomy. So much of Ferrante’s work is a meditation on the struggle for personal autonomy—not just the freedom over one’s own body, but also the freedom over one’s own mind.
further reading
Ferrante, in her own, different, words: