Love, Sex, and Strategy Theme Analysis

As Lila and Lenù grow from children to young women over the course of My Brilliant Friend, they compete with each other not just in terms of academics, creativity, or even beauty, but in the measure of male attention they receive over the course of their adolescent years. As the girls rotate through a veritable carousel of crushes, boyfriends, and violent or nonconsensual sexual encounters, they struggle to understand the world of love and sex while maintaining their ever-shifting senses of self. As Lila and Lenù chase the attention of the boys and men around them (or, in some cases, halfheartedly submit to it) Elena Ferrante suggests that while romance and passion are powerful forces in the formation of one’s identity, they are just as often strategic as they are impassioned and genuine.

Lila and Lenù’s friendship diverges and converges again and again throughout the novel as the girls’ individual and intertwined experiences with love, sex, and romance unfold—and Ferrante demonstrates how there are most often highly strategic or otherwise unemotional motivations detached from real passion behind those choices. “In the courtyard [of school] […] only love and boyfriends counted,” Lenù recalls of her middle school days. Even as a young teen, Lenù recalls considering romance and partnership a social strategy—she is “proud” when Gino, the son of the neighborhood pharmacist, asks to be her boyfriend, but she rejects him out of hand and enjoys the feeling of power that rejection gives her. When Lila begins spending time with a neighborhood boy named Pasquale (though she does not reciprocate his romantic feelings for her), Lenù’s mind becomes filled with one “single true thought: to find a boyfriend.” She is desperate not to lag behind her friend in terms of emotional or romantic experience. As the girls themselves become older, the ages of the men they attract also become socially strategic factors. For instance, when Lila becomes betrothed to the older and wealthier Stefano, Lenù, too, becomes determined to get herself a man—not a scrawny, poor neighborhood boy. She begins using Alfonso, Stefano’s brother, both to compete with Lila and to distract herself from her own longing for the aloof Nino Sarratore. While Lila and Lenù enjoy having boyfriends, they are less attached to the men themselves than to the status and privileges having a boyfriend allows them: the social superiority of a well-positioned boyfriend and the idea of a built-in chaperone are more appealing ideas than romantic love or sexual passion. Though Lenù does secretly harbor genuine feelings of love and longing for Nino, she focuses instead on the strategy of dating rather than allowing herself the possibility of real love, a concept which is considered secondary, in her and Lila’s world, to the advantages of a well-made match.

Lila and Lenù’s romantic exploits comprise much of the novel’s trajectory, yet toward the end of the book Ferrante chooses to center the climactic event of Lila’s wedding to Stefano Carracci in order to show how the pursuit of strategic, advantageous matches have in fact blunted both girls’ experiences of the world and, in Lila’s case, thrown their lives off course perhaps forever. As Lenù helps Lila get ready for her wedding to Stefano, she reflects on her deep love for her friend—but also admits to feeling the impulse to “distanc[e] her with words just at the moment of greatest closeness.” Lenù considers the divergent paths their lives are now taking for the first time: “In the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her […] just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night.” Lenù’s pain in this passage shows her belief that Lila, in strategically marrying herself off to Stefano in pursuit of wealth, improved social status, and an investor in her father’s shoemaking business, has made the wrong decision. Lenù aches for her friend, who is soon to be “sull[ied]” forever by a man who does not truly love or care for her. Lenù herself is at this point dating Antonio, a boy she doesn’t love, while pining for Nino as she has for years. Lila’s decision to marry someone out of strategy seems to confirm Lenù’s fears as real: Lila’s decision solidifies the notion that the pursuit of romantic love will always be foolish and perhaps even useless.

Ultimately, Ferrante uses Lila and Lenù’s story of intense friendship to underscore the ways in which romantic and sexual relationships between men and women are so often strategic or calculated. Lila, Lenù, and their classmates see love as a means to an end: security or protection, social or financial advancement, or escape from one’s family or neighborhood. Love is a frivolity or even a waste in this world—a fact which will have devastating consequences for both Lila and Lenù as they make decisions with their heads rather than their hearts.