Female Friendship Theme in My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is a novel about many things—community, poverty, violence, toxic masculinity, and education—but at its heart is the profound, complicated relationship between Elena “Lenù” Greco and Rafaella “Lila” Cerullo. As the two girls grow up together, they find themselves helpless to resist each other’s influence—and as they move from childhood into adolescence, they make sometimes bizarre but always impactful choices based on their desire to impress each other, to draw each other in, or to push each other away. In charting the waxing and waning of the girls’ bond over the years and demonstrating the ways in which Lena and Lenù’s journeys reflect and refract each other’s opinions, ideas, and decisions, Ferrante argues that female friendship has the power to control the course of one’s life and choices—even if the friends themselves rarely discuss this dynamic—because women throughout history have had to rely on female friendship due to their vulnerable status in their respective communities.

Even as first-graders, Lila and Lenù are both aware of a peculiar magnetism between the two of them. Over the years, Ferrante charts how their closeness, a fact of their lives that they cling to for protection and sustenance, morphs from a blessing into a curse (and back again) at various points in the girls’ lives. The first major instance in Lila and Lenù’s friendship in which the girls realize that their choices revolve around one another comes when, during an afternoon playing with each other’s dolls near a cellar grate, Lila betrays Lenù by throwing Lenù’s doll, Tina, into the dark grate. Lenù barely hesitates before tossing Lila’s doll, Nu, into the cellar as well. “What you do, I do,” Lenù says to Lila—and the words take on a vow-like quality as the girls continue to grow older. The girls’ paths diverge as they grow up—Lenù remains in school while Lila drops out and goes to work in her father Fernando’s cobbler shop; Lila becomes slender and beautiful in puberty while Lenù grows full-figured and afflicted with acne; Lila grows sharp, stoic, and aggressive while Lenù remains softer, quieter, and more romantic. But Lenù’s thoughts are always consumed by worry and love for Lila, as well as the desire to impress her—and Lila, though often inscrutable, works to make something of herself and prove herself to Lila in a similar way. “In losing pieces of [Lila’s] life,” Lenù later reflects, “mine lost intensity and importance.” In other words, without each other, the girls feel that they have no audience for their triumphs and failures—no rival and no ally. As both girls’ vulnerability rises alongside their entry into womanhood, they feel the need to cling to each other even more deeply—even as barriers to their closeness, the consequences of their newfound adolescence, creep into their relationship.

As Lila and Lenù grow older, their friendship continues to influence their individual choices as they seek to confirm their bond in the face of mounting troubles with men. Their relationships with men are socially necessary but often leave them vulnerable to violence or lack of agency—so Lila and Lenù attempt to continue circling each other even as circumstance pulls them apart. Another major instance in which Lenù reflects on the entwined nature of her and Lila’s fates—a quality which she herself has made sure to imbue their friendship with over the years—occurs as Lenù helps wash and dress Lila for her wedding to Stefano Carracci, their childhood bully and the son of the deceased loan shark Don Achille, toward the end of the novel. As Lenù imagines, in great and horrific detail, Lila losing her virginity on her wedding night, she is full of stark revulsion. She determines that “the only remedy against the pain I was feeling […] was to find a corner secluded enough so that [my boyfriend] Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.” This passage is perhaps the most pointed moment in the entire novel related to the ways in which female friendship steers one’s impulses and decision-making. Lenù and Lila have been competitive all their lives, but in this moment, the more sexually experienced Lenù isn’t jealous of Lila reaching the threshold of losing her virginity first. This passage instead suggests that Lenù simply wants to experience what Lila is feeling—whether it is pleasure, pain, degradation, or anything else—at the same time her friend is experiencing it out of solidarity. Lenù cannot imagine her friend having an experience she can’t relate to for fear that it would drive them apart, and so Lenù wants to make sure that she and Lila experience the exact same thing at the exact same moment, for as long as they can. At the most vulnerable moment of Lila’s life, Lenù wants to make herself vulnerable too, in hopes of symbolically making her friend feel less alone and thus stronger.

By showing how Lila and Lenù go through life entwined with one another out of a desire to be less alone (and to help the other feel less alone as well,) Ferrante demonstrates how female friendship—with its attendant pressures, problems, and possibilities—can be a force powerful enough to define one’s life. Though Lila and Lenù often fail to communicate the ways in which they look to each other for guidance or admit how profoundly they depend on each other, they nonetheless circle each other, emulate each other, and compete with each other as their friendship proves itself to be the driving force behind the major decisions of their lives.

Female Friendship ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Female Friendship appears in each chapter of My Brilliant Friend. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.

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