As Lila and Lenù come of age in their Naples, Italy neighborhood, their paths diverge when Lenù remains in school while Lila goes to work in her father’s shop after her parents refuse to pay for her education. Elena Ferrante sets My Brilliant Friend in the 1950s, a time when women’s intellectual and professional aspirations were not taken seriously but were on the cusp of a new kind of recognition—thus contrasting Lila and Lenù’s wishes for their own futures with the realities of the lives of the older women all around them. Ferrante explores the different kinds of “work” both available to and foisted upon women of Lila and Lenù's generation, ultimately suggesting that women’s bravery and initiative are too often met with ridicule, cruelty, and even betrayal due to the entwined forces of capitalism and sexism.
Throughout the novel, Lila and Lenù persist in their struggles to make themselves known through their work in the face of unimaginable odds. While Lenù focuses on academics, Lila becomes preoccupied with dreams of revolutionizing her father’s shoe business—an idea to which her father, Fernando, is deeply resistant. Toward the end of the novel, two climactic incidents—the unhappy culmination, for both women, of their youth’s “work”—underscore how even when women devote themselves entirely to an idea or a project, the forces of capitalism and sexism conspire to blunt their initiative and render their efforts meaningless. Just as their mothers before them were reduced to roles as wives and caregivers, Lila and Lenù are confronted with the smallness of their efforts in the eyes of the men who surround them. Lenù, who has devoted her life to academics and who has recently, inspired by her crush Nino Sarratore, submitted a paper criticizing religion to a journal in which Nino frequently publishes work, learns that her piece has not been accepted for publication. Lenù is devastated as she reckons with the failure of what she sees as her life’s work. Since her youth, Lenù has felt academically inferior to the preternaturally smart Lila, whose proficiency for languages and whose effortless writing style have continued to flourish in spite of the fact that her parents, unable to pay for an education, pulled her out of school at a young age. Lenù’s academic and ideological work has been the focus of so much of her life, and as she faces down its failure, she thinks the following: “Nothing diminished the disappointment. […] I discovered that I had considered the publication of those few lines, my name in print, 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.” Lenù’s work has always been meaningful in her relationship with Lila—she knows that her continued success in academia has made Lila jealous, and when she showed the piece she submitted to the journal to her friend, Lila admitted that Lenù’s writing made her jealous and sad. Lila has told Lenù that she is “brilliant” and must continue studying no matter what—but in the eyes of Nino and the (presumably male) editors of the journal, Lenù’s work is not worthy.
Meanwhile, the intrepid Lila, barred from attending school, tries to make something of herself in other ways, turning to a capitalistic approach to attempt to combat the forces of sexism that have kept her from an education. When she goes to work in her shoemaker father’s shop, she decides to design a line of fancy shoes of her own. Lila believes they will sell for high prices and allow her father’s business to flourish. Lila’s ideas are discounted by her father and her brother Rino—and her attempts to make herself heard are often met with physical or verbal abuse. Eventually, the wealthy Stefano Carracci, in wooing Lila, offers to support her financially in producing the shoes. However, in the book’s final lines, Lila realizes that Stefano has betrayed her not just by inviting her enemy and former suitor Marcello Solara to the party, but also by giving him—in an apparent show of fealty and goodwill—the very first shoes Lila herself made. “Marcello had on his feet the shoes bought earlier by Stefano, her husband. It was the pair she had made with [her brother] Rino,” making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.” Not only has Lila’s work been sullied by the hated Marcello, but also her husband has seen the work she “ruin[ed]” herself for as nothing more than a tool in a compromise meant to protect himself, his honor, and his business from the wealthy and vengeful Solara brothers. Lila also realizes that her attempt to take on work of her own in order to game the forces of capitalism (which conspire against women) has been for nothing. The men in her life do not respect her, and the one to whom she has promised herself for life sees her dreams as things to be bought, sold, and traded.
Ultimately, both Lila and Lenù are forced to reckon with the ways in which their attempts at making their accomplishments known have failed. As Ferrante highlights the disappointments both girls face, she argues that women’s work will always be overlooked. Even though Lenù is narrating from the present day, there is not much optimism in her voice as she recounts the ways in which she and Lila, as girls, “ruin” themselves time and time again in hopes of achieving the recognition they deserve.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Women’s Work ThemeTracker
Women’s Work Quotes in My Brilliant Friend
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?
“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.”
Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her.
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.
When she gave me back the notebook, she said, "You're very clever, of course they always give you ten."
I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness:
"I don't want to read anything else that you write."
"Why?"
She thought about it.
"Because it hurts me," and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.
"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.
