Elena Ferrante's 'My Brilliant Friend'

Beauty, Agency, and Ferrante's Humiliation of the Writer

WARNING: SPOILERS

My Brilliant Friend is about the frenetic mimesis of female friendships, the humiliation of writers, the impotence of tracked study, and the overwhelming power of beauty, money, sheer physicality, and agency over words.

There is much to appreciate in Elena Ferrante’s first novel in her Neapolitan series. There is perhaps no greater portrait of mimesis in literature. Agency as the sole defense against mimesis. The uneven intensity of memory and experience is delivered in a charming patter of youthful Italian and ‘dialect’ audible even to a reader in English. The outsized, monstrous effect of ideas and words from near-history (monarchy, communism, fascism) and the people that lie on the periphery of the familiar (like the strange neighbour you had as a child). The irresistible power of a woman’s beauty. But most ironic of all is how one of the greatest literary authors of the 21^st century totally denigrates the written word and the writer in her great literary work.

Ferrante chuckles at herself often enough: through her child protagonist’s eyes a woman a little over 30 is old and a writer must be rich:

Evidently his father, although he had written a book of poems, was not yet wealthy.

No, writing will not bring you riches. Writing does not even make you better. In fact, Ferrante says, writing can be a trap, its lure a lie.

The book’s sole author is Donato Sarratore, a sexual predator who mangles a widow’s mind and molests our underage protagonist Elena. He writes poems and a book, which seems wildly romantic and idealistic and successful to Elena until that fantasy careens into the older man’s sexual approach, and is left pathetic as he desperately begs for her affections, promising poems, threatening suicide. The grand writer is reduced to a disgusting worm.

Our two girl friend protagonists, Elena and Lila, are initially enthralled by books and stories. They represent an intellectual, economic, and status ladder out of their backward little town, out of the vortex of village gossip in which they’re stuck. Elena, our narrator with no sense of self or agency, defines herself exclusively through the prism of such aspirations:

I was secretly convinced that I would truly exist only at the moment when my signature, Elena Greco, appeared in print.

The narrative structure hammers her lack of agency endlessly: Elena describes their world, Lila commands it from its centre.

As Elena acquires Italian and Latin and Greek at school, so Lila, working instead in her father’s shoe shop, teaches herself all that and more. Even if knowledge is real, school is fake. But then Lila drops even the learning. She stops reading. The scrawny intelligent street tough blossoms into the most beautiful girl in town. Writing their own Little Women is a fantasy of youth that dissipates with first contact with the physicality of early womanhood.

something had begun to emanate from Lila’s mobile body that the males sensed, an energy that dazed them, like the swelling sound of beauty arriving.

Men in their town are violent and rowdy, but they are reduced to nothing, totally at the mercy of Lila’s beauty. Life is too full of vitality, yearning, lust, the impossible physicality of being for books. Books are for the poor and ugly.

Books and study are forgotten, relegated to irrelevant dark corners when it is time to try wedding dresses and to look upon beauty. A woman’s superior beauty defeats other women and enslaves men. Beauty even enthralls a father, not sexually, but with its sheer magnetism, manifesting in pride. A beautiful woman need only speak to “shape” a man. She makes him anew with the Word as in the moment of Creation.

It is the physicality of beauty and early womanhood that crowds all else out. Even when Lila writes, it is the physicality of her script itself that manifests something essential, just as the physical writing of the Torah itself is holy.

Beauty often shines in a monied gloss. The beautiful inhabit an alternate reality where only they exist. They do not condescend to the ugly, to the poor; they simply do not see them.

It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us. They seemed to have breathed another air, to have eaten other food, to have dressed on some other planet, to have learned to walk on wisps of wind. I was astonished. All the more so that, while I would have paused to examine at leisure dresses, shoes, the style of glasses if they wore glasses, they passed by without seeming to see me. They didn’t see any of the five of us. We were not perceptible. Or not interesting. And in fact if at times their gaze fell on us, they immediately turned in another direction, as if irritated. They looked only at each other.

Boys begin at a young age to try and capture something of the magic they sense in girls. In awkward, jagged words and gestures they approach girls, appeal to them, dissipate in humiliation. Later they acquire the tools to hunt properly; charm perhaps, violence also, but most of all money.

Ferrante presses on this unhealing wound for writers everywhere. Writers are neither rich nor beautiful. She herself may be the greatest literary author on earth, but she does not wield an iota of the power of a town beauty. It is total defeat for the literary person, the bookish person, the aspiring poetess. You think that way lies fame, or money, or charisma, or immortality, or a glimpse of the divine? No, you dag. You are nothing before the blossoming youth. Your rich inner life is cope for a lack of physicality. The sun and the sea and a momentary taste of flesh, however fleeting, will always defeat the bookish compensatory life.

In Ferrante’s universe, beauty, despite its potency, is nevertheless instrumental: it culminates in marriage, before wilting either with age or destruction by man with pregnancy:

I had never seen her naked, I was embarrassed. Today I can say that it was the embarrassment of gazing with pleasure at her body, of being the not impartial witness of her sixteen-year-old’s beauty a few hours before Stefano touched her, penetrated her, disfigured her, perhaps, by making her pregnant…

So marriage remains at the peak of this world. Work, intelligence, bookishness — these will never fill the marriage shaped hole. This is a shockingly transgressive message.

I felt with vexation that, that day, my success in school consoled them not at all, that in fact they felt, especially my mother, that it was pointless, a waste of time. When Lila, splendid in the dazzling white cloud of her dress and the gauzy veil, processed through the Church of the Holy Family on the arm of the shoemaker and joined Stefano, who looked extremely handsome, at the flower-decked altar—lucky the florist who had provided such abundance—my mother, even if her wandering eye seemed to gaze elsewhere, looked at me to make me regret that I was there, in my glasses, far from the center of the scene, while my bad friend had acquired a wealthy husband, economic security for her family, a house of her own, not rented but bought, with a bathtub, a refrigerator, a television, and a telephone.

Beauty’s transience grants it a chaotic power. Beauty burns hot and fast. Lila’s beauty is terrifying precisely because it attracts men who will destroy it. Pregnancy, marriage, violence — these are the costs beauty extracts.

If My Brilliant Friend is an inside study of female mimetic desire and rivalry and how it reaches its apotheosis in the physical blooming of youth’s beauty, Lampedusa’s The Leopard can be read as the flipside: the decay of a man whose engagement with and conquest of such beauty is long behind him. In The Leopard, old men like old empires have little left but nostalgia. They’re exhausted. Where once they conquered, now they only dream of former glories, former beauties they could once claim. My Brilliant Friend looks upon a beauty from a girl friend’s perspective, The Leopard from a lustful man’s beyond his prime. My Brilliant Friend stares at the sun from the perspective of a lesser rival star; The Leopard stares at it from the perspective of the sullen moon banished to cold death.

Beauty can be defeated. In the final pages, Elena confesses the impotence of her studies. She is unable to escape the web of small town relationships and the mimetic pull of her eternal friend Lila. We are at the culmination of this beauty’s maidenhood: her wedding. She is the centre of the universe. Elena is but one of the constellation of people unable to escape her orbit. But there is one who escapes. Whose movements are not slaves to mimetic determinism, who is able to escape the force that keeps everyone else in obeyance.

Studying was useless: I could get the highest possible marks on my work, but that was only school… Nino could do anything: he had the face, the gestures, the gait of one who would always be better. When he left it seemed that the only person in the whole room who had the energy to take me away had vanished.

Nino, the outsider. Dressed like a schlub. Slinking out of the wedding without even meeting the bride. Yes, it’s still his physicality that is the centre of his power (not his mind or bookishness) — his face and gestures and gait — but it is not his beauty. It is his break from mimesis. He doesn’t care. He’s not bound by town gossip (“he used the word “literature” to be critical of anyone who ruined people’s minds by means of what he called idle chatter” — another dig at writers). He was not enslaved to a young woman’s beauty. He had broken away from his father, his town. He was Abraham leaving his father’s people to found a nation of his own. This, here, is the true power at the centre of all things: agency.

Ferrante’s agency is not exclusively masculine. The entire story pulsates around Lila, whose agency is more charismatic and powerful to us, the blind reader, than her beauty. She leans into her bestowed beauty and the money of the man she uses her beauty to ensnare; but these games are precarious for a woman, full of “pleasure-fear”. Lila is at her most powerful when she doesn’t care. She is not driven by the same mimetic desires as her friends, who are deranged by them.

She seemed as usual to have no need of male attention. We, instead, out in the cold, in the midst of that chaos, without that attention couldn’t give ourselves meaning.

Whereas Elena is constantly flailing to define herself through the prism of another — Lila, Sarrotere, Nino — Lila’s force of will is her utter indifference. Her independence, her agency. “She knew how to be autonomous whereas I needed her,” knows Elena. While the bookish Elena uses language to draw lines around her life, Lila’s agency is so intense that it threatens to dissolve the very margins of her being. She’s always at risk of being consumed by her world’s raw, unmediated physicality.

Beauty is a local monopoly. Every instance of beauty projects its own total uniqueness and total dominance. This projection of monopoly is beauty’s greatest trick — for beauty is totally ubiquitous. Every suburb or town has a local beauty. The beautiful woman you pass might be the most beautiful woman you have ever seen, and you will in that moment completely forget that this might happen several times a day. Agency breaks free from beauty’s monopoly. Lila becomes queen of the town, wielding her beauty to marry it with money. Nino escapes the town altogether.

Ferrante doesn’t actually despise writing or writers. She’s written a great novel. And she deserves to poke fun at herself and her literary audience. Her irony is novel in today’s dour age. As is her warning that writing is not redemptive. In our age of writers and artists insisting on the most banal kind of didactic activism, that might be her most transgressive statement of all.