In the poor suburb of Naples, Italy where My Brilliant Friend is set, opportunities for economic and social advancement are few and far between. As Lila and Lenù scheme throughout their shared childhood and adolescence, forever imagining ways to elevate themselves socially, economically, and academically, Elena Ferrante points out the fierce competition that arises between even the best of friends when matters of self-preservation enter the fray. Ultimately, Ferrante suggests that for those faced with a lifetime of poverty and hardship, it’s often necessary to sacrifice emotional health, ideological values, and personal happiness on the road to escaping such dire circumstances.
Through the novel, Ferrante highlights several important moments in both Lila and Lenù’s journeys where the girls—together and individually—seek the advancement of their social, economic, and intellectual stations. As Lila and Lenù strive for better social positions for their families, dream of amassing wealth for themselves, and seek escape through the promises of education, Ferrante demonstrates how both girls are forced, at different moments, to sacrifice their values, their dreams, and their hearts’ desires in search of material betterment. Early on in the novel, Lila and Lenù begin to think of ways to escape poverty through their achievements. Lenù recalls, “In [our] last year of elementary school, wealth became our obsession. [Lila and I] talked about it the way characters in novels talk about searching for treasure. […] We began to link school to wealth. […] All you had to do was go to school and write a book.” Lenù and Lila’s shared the belief that if they studied hard and wrote well, they’d achieve fame and fortune as novelists. This passage is the key to understanding a great deal of the competitiveness that Lila and Lenù engage in throughout their academic careers. Lila and Lenù both see academia as the one way in which they can differentiate themselves from their parents and neighbors and make something of themselves—but when school is stripped away from Lila (her parents can’t afford to pay her fees), she begins thinking of other ways to climb the rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Lenù, meanwhile, knows that in continuing school, she is sacrificing a part of her relationship with Lila—the two will never again be able to bond over schoolwork or books, the foundation of their friendship, and there will always be a seed of jealousy between them. Nonetheless, Lenù takes advantage of the opportunity she’s been offered and pursues an education with vigor and determination.
As Lenù continues her studies, Lila goes to work in her father, Fernando’s, shop and begins to blossom into a beautiful young woman. Sensing the change in the way men look at her, Lila begins to see love and romance as a way of advancing her social position, given her failure to convince her brother Rino and her father to manufacture a line of shoes of her own invention—as well as the fact that learning and books are off-limits to her. As a result, Lila feels compelled to turn to partnership in order to live a comfortable life. Using her skills to invent and craft shoes would give Lila a way to make her own money—and her own social impact—while avoiding a painful sacrifice. But ultimately, Lila has no choice but to turn to romances with men anyway. Throughout courtships with the cruel but powerful Marcello Solara and the wealthy but self-centered Stefano Carracci, Lila sacrifices her time and attention—and, in Lenù’s view, her dignity—as she abandons books and learning to focus only on becoming a beautiful and submissive wife. Just as Lenù sacrificed something enormous—her kinship with Lila—in pursuing her own advancement through education, Lila, too, chooses to sacrifice her relationship with Lila as she pursues the economic and social advancement that a good match will bring to her and her family. Lila rails against her parents’ belief that she should marry the corrupt Marcello, perhaps believing that such a marriage would require too much sacrifice. But even when she takes up with Stefano Carracci, Lila still finds that she must still give up her autonomy, her integrity, and ultimately her dignity to ensure the match is sealed. Stefano’s betrayal of Lila at the end of the novel takes place when he invites Marcello to their wedding against Lila’s wishes and even gives him the special shoes Lila worked so hard to make as proof of her ideas’ worth. In the middle of her wedding reception, Lila realizes that she has sacrificed her values in order to secure money, freedom from her family, and the ability to pursue her own life.
In the world of My Brilliant Friend, simply bettering oneself intellectually and emotionally doesn’t really translate to the betterment of one’s circumstances, no matter how much the protagonists wish that it would. Pulling oneself up out of poverty, according to Ferrante, necessitates a cutthroat competitive streak and a sense of determination. Most tragically of all, it requires a willingness to renounce one’s happiness and one’s inner world in pursuit of more money, more power, and more security.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Poverty, Social Climbing, and Sacrifice ThemeTracker
Poverty, Social Climbing, and Sacrifice Quotes in My Brilliant Friend
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.
Something convinced me, then, that if I kept up with her, at her pace, my mother’s limp, which had entered into my brain and wouldn’t come out, would stop threatening me. I decided I had to model myself on that girl, never let her out of my sight, even if she got annoyed and chased me away.
Things changed and we began to link school to wealth. We thought that if we studied hard we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich. Wealth was still the glitter of gold coins stored in countless chests, but to get there all you had to do was go to school and write a book.
"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 tried to remind her of the old plan of writing novels… […] I was stuck there, it was important to me. I was learning Latin just for that, and deep inside I was convinced that she took so many books from Maestro Ferraro's circulating library only because, even though she wasn't going to school anymore, even though she was now obsessed with shoes, she still wanted to write a novel with me and make a lot of money. Instead, she shrugged… […] "Now," she explained, "to become truly rich you need a business."
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 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.
I established convergences and divergences. In that period it became a daily exercise: the better off I had been in Ischia, the worse off Lila had been in the desolation of the neighborhood; the more I had suffered upon leaving the island, the happier she had become. It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.
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?
"Whatever happens, you'll go on studying."
"Two more years: then I'll get my diploma and I'm done."
"No, don't ever stop: I'll give you the money, you should keep studying."
I gave a nervous laugh, then said, "Thanks, but at a certain point school is over."
"Not for you: you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls."
Nothing diminished the disappointment. […] I had considered the publication of those few lines […] as a sign that I really had a destiny, that the hard work of school would surely lead upward, somewhere, that Maestra Oliviero had been right to push me forward and to abandon Lila. "Do you know what the plebs are?" "Yes, Maestra." At that moment I knew what the plebs were… […] The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts.
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.
