The world of My Brilliant Friend—set in a poor suburb of Naples, Italy in the 1950s and 1960s—is one suffused with violence. As the men of the neighborhood engage in acts of violence as a means of securing revenge, of defending the honor of their wives or sisters, and of settling debts and slights, Elena Ferrante demonstrates how this atmosphere of unending, pervasive male violence trickles down to the women of the community. Ultimately, Ferrante suggests that even in a culture in which physical violence is perpetrated primarily by men, women eventually mirror that same violence, replicating in their own relationships with one another the physical and emotional cruelty to which they bear witness each day.
As Lila and Lenù come of age in a small, insular, violent neighborhood in Naples, they witness violence and even murder—and they are themselves subjected to physical attacks from men and women alike. Loan sharks intimidate their debtors; jilted lovers create scenes in the street; revenge killings and assaults are commonplace. Often, Lila and Lenù’s own parents or siblings are the perpetrators of the violence against them. As the novel progresses, Ferrante charts how the pervasive violence committed often unthinkingly or obligatorily among the men of the neighborhood dulls and normalizes the relationship that the women of the neighborhood have to physical violence.
Even as a child, Lenù is able to intuit the malicious presence in the neighborhood which ultimately manifests as feminine rage and indeed violence. “I feel no nostalgia for our childhood,” the grown-up Lenù—who now goes by Elena—recalls early on in the novel. “The women fought amongst themselves more than the men [….] I imagined tiny invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood […] and entered the water and the food and the air, making our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.” Though the young Lenù imagines “tiny invisible animals,” as a grown woman, she is able to examine the connection between the omnipresent violence perpetrated by the men in the neighborhood and the “rage that had no end” which seized the women of her neighborhood. Where, for example, the loan shark Don Achille, a frightening, powerful, and wealthy man, is murdered in his pajamas by an unseen assailant, the kinds of violence women perpetrate against each other are more personal. The disgraced Melina Cappuccio, abandoned by her married lover Donato Sarratore, flings household items out of her window as the Sarratore family flees the neighborhood to move somewhere else, nearly killing the young Nino Sarratore. Lila and Lenù are both sensitive to the violence all around them, and they are particularly affected by the fear that they themselves are doomed to be infected by “tiny invisible animals.”
The violence women perpetrate against one another in the book is often but not always physical—sometimes, it is emotional in nature. Through examples of the cruelties the women in the novel level against one another, Ferrante shows how this emotional violence is a direct reflection of the rampant (yet casual) physical violence committed by the women’s fathers, lovers, brothers, and schoolmates. As Lila and Lenù grow older, the violence in their neighborhood morphs and begins to affect them more directly. No longer are Lila and Lenù silent, petrified witnesses to the ravings of Melina Cappuccio or the revenge killings involving loan sharks and Camorrists (members of an organized crime syndicate). Now, as young women, they find themselves surrounded by young men who have learned that violence is the answer to every perceived slight. For instance, men will react violently at an untoward glance another man makes at a sister or girlfriend. Young men are also determined to show their dominance through any means necessary: fistfights, firework displays, fast cars, and even shootings. Lila and Lenù internalize these responses and become violent in their own ways. Lila carries a knife which she brandishes at any man who threatens her (a response learned from the violent men around her), but she also begins acting cruelly toward Lenù when the two are in competition with each other in school or in love (a response learned from the spurned, angry women around her). “Lila was malicious,” Lenù thinks to herself as she realizes that Lila has surpassed her not only in smarts but in beauty. “I said to myself: she will release something more vicious [soon].” Womanhood, to Lenù, is synonymous with the release of viciousness and ill will—as her friendship with Lila grows more intense and more competitive, Lenù begins to feel that the only end the two can arrive at is one marked by malice, evil, and indeed danger.
The violence around every corner in the world of My Brilliant Friend is the status quo—it defines how people in the neighborhood talk to one another, respond to one another in times of need, raise their children, run their businesses, and plan (or fail to plan) for the future. By contrasting the violence committed by men (often in the name of honor or revenge) with the violence committed by women (often physical but just as often emotional), Ferrante shows how violence is a learned response that’s replicated and disseminated throughout an entire community. The violence that forms so much of the novel’s tension has roots in toxic masculinity and sexism—yet as women adopt the violent tendencies they see perpetrated by the men around them each day, they confirm violence’s utility as an unhappy tool not just of men but of women struggling to be seen, heard, and respected.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Masculine vs. Feminine Violence ThemeTracker
Masculine vs. Feminine Violence Quotes in My Brilliant Friend
I was really angry.
We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.
I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. […] The women fought among themselves more than the men… […] As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night […] and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.
Anyway, however it had happened, the fact was this: Lila knew how to read and write, and what I remember of that gray morning when the teacher revealed it to us was, above all, the sense of weakness the news left me with.
I merely threw into the cellar her Nu, the doll she had just given me.
Lila looked at me in disbelief.
“What you do, I do,” I recited immediately, aloud, very frightened.
“Now go and get it for me.”
“If you go and get mine.”
We went together.
"All they did was beat you?"
"What should they have done?"
"They're still sending you to study Latin?"
I looked at her in bewilderment.
Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid that punishment? Or—I wonder today—did she want at different moments both things?
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.
I told her in a rush that I was going to the high school. […] I did it because I wanted her to realize that I was special, and that, even if she became rich making shoes with Rino, she couldn't do without me, as I couldn't do without her.
She looked at me perplexed.
"What is high school?" she asked.
"An important school that comes after middle school."
"And what are you going there to do?"
"Study."
"What?"
"Latin,"
"That's all?"
"And Greek."
[…]
She had the expression of someone at a loss, finding nothing to say. Finally she murmured, irrelevantly, "Last week I got my period."
She had begun to study Greek even before I went to high school? She had done it on her own, while I hadn’t even thought about it, and during the summer, the vacation? Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me?
[Rino] had always seemed to her only generously impetuous, sometimes aggressive, but not a braggart. Now, though, he posed as what he was not. He felt he was close to wealth. A boss. Someone who could give the neighborhood the first sign of the good fortune the new year would bring by setting off a lot of fireworks, more than the Solara brothers, who had become in his eyes the model of the young man to emulate and indeed to surpass, people whom he envied and considered enemies to be beaten, so that he could assume their role.
Stefano, according to Lila, wanted to clear away everything.
He wanted to try to get out of the before. He didn't want to pretend it was nothing, as our parents did, but rather to set in motion a phrase like: I know, my father was what he was, but now I'm here, we are us, and so, enough. In other words, he wanted to make the whole neighborhood understand that he was not Don Achille and that the Pelusos were not the former carpenter who had killed him.
[Lila] was staring at the shadow of her brother—the most active, the most arrogant, shouting the loudest, bloodiest insults in the direction of the Solaras' terrace—with repulsion. It seemed that she, she who in general feared nothing, was afraid. […] We were holding on to each other to get warm, while they rushed to grab cylinders with fat fuses, astonished by Stefano's infinite reserves, admiring of his generosity, disturbed by how much money could be transformed into fiery trails, sparks, explosions, smoke for the pure satisfaction of winning.
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.
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.
