Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Brilliant Friend, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Female Friendship
Masculine vs. Feminine Violence
Women’s Work
Poverty, Social Climbing, and Sacrifice
The Uses of Community
Love, Sex, and Strategy
Summary
Analysis
As Lila’s wedding approaches, the preparations being made for it become entangled with the “rancorous birth” of the Cerullo shoe company. While Fernando and Rino make Lila’s designs, they must also keep up with cobbler work in order to keep money coming in. Because of the pressure to provide a dowry for Lila, the men are overworked. Lila and Stefano are oblivious to the pressures facing the Cerullo family—they’re busy figuring out their future home. They settle on a new apartment in a nicer neighborhood. At just 16, Lila will soon be the mistress of her own home.
Even as Lila’s family continues struggling to make ends meet—and to keep up with her wealthy fiancé’s demands upon them—she remains absorbed in her own personal struggles. Lila has turned to shoemaking—and to Stefano—in order to escape the strife and poverty of her family, and now that she has achieved a degree of separation, she seemingly doesn’t plan on looking back.
Themes
Other tensions emerge: Lila and Stefano have trouble agreeing on a honeymoon location, and they quarrel when Stefano makes rude digs about Lila’s family or expresses worry about returns on his investment in the shoe company. Lila always sides with her family during these disputes, and Stefano always apologizes profusely and lovingly once she bristles.
These early tensions in Lila and Stefano’s relationship as committed partners portend greater difficulties to come. Stefano is clearly contemptuous of Lila when it comes to certain things—yet he hurries to mend fences when he agitates her.
Themes
One day, Lila takes Lenù to see the new apartment. It is small but luxurious, with gorgeous tile floors, a refrigerator, a telephone, and a huge bathtub. Lenù searchingly asks if Stefano and Lila ever come to the apartment alone, and Lila says they do. Lenù asks what they do when they’re here, but Lila doesn’t seem to understand the question. When Lenù asks if they ever kiss, Lila says they do, but when Lila asks if they do anything else, Lila states that they can’t because they’re not married yet. Lenù is shocked. Lila asks if she and Antonio do more than kiss—Lenù, ashamed, hurriedly says that they don’t do anything else, either.
Lenù is shocked, embarrassed, and mildly horrified to realize that she has outstripped Lila in terms of sexual experience. Again, Lenù’s goal has never been to surpass Lila and leave her behind—it has simply been to remain apace with Lila and not fall behind her at any cost. Realizing that in this effort she has inadvertently left Lila behind fills her with apprehension and shame.
Themes
