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 going steady with a neighborhood boy named Pasquale, Lenù’s mind becomes filled with one “single true thought: to find a boyfriend,” 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.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love, Sex, and Strategy ThemeTracker
Love, Sex, and Strategy Quotes in My Brilliant Friend
I said no because if my father found out that I had gone in that car, even though he was a good and loving man, even though he loved me very much, he would have beat me to death, while at the same time my little brothers, Peppe and Gianni, young as they were, would feel obliged, now and in the future, to try to kill the Solara brothers. There were no written rules, everyone knew that was how it was.
“What would it cost you to let him see them?” I asked, confused.
She shook her head energetically. “I don’t even want him to touch them.”
What did she have in mind? She had to know that she was setting in motion an earthquake worse than when she threw the ink-soaked bits of paper. And yet it might be that she wasn't aiming at anything precise. She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.
Punctually, three days later, he went to the store and bought the shoes, even though they were tight. The two Cerullos with much hesitation asked for twenty-five thousand lire, but were ready to go down to ten thousand. He didn't bat an eye and put down another twenty thousand in exchange for Lila's drawings, which—he said—he liked, he wanted to frame them.
Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other.
She has Stefano, I said to myself after the episode of the glasses. She snaps her fingers and immediately has my glasses repaired. What do I have?
I answered that I had school, a privilege she had lost forever. That is my wealth, I tried to convince myself.
I didn't understand. The Solaras’ behavior seemed […] consistent with the world that we had known since we were children. What, instead, did [Lila] and Stefano have in mind, where did they think they were living? […] They weren't reacting to the insults, even to that truly intolerable insult that the Solaras were making. […] Was this her latest invention? Did she want to leave the neighborhood by staying in the neighborhood? Did she want to drag us out of ourselves, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what she was inventing?
In the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment […] His violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle. And it suddenly seemed to me that the only remedy against the pain I was feeling […] was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.
Marcello sat down, loosened his tie, crossed his legs.
The unpredictable revealed itself only at that point. I saw Lila lose her color, become as pale as when she was a child, whiter than her wedding dress, and her eyes had that sudden contraction that turned them into cracks. […] She was looking at the shoes of Marcello Solara.
[…] Marcello had on his feet the shoes bought earlier by Stefano, her husband. It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.
