College Research Papers and Essays

The Female Rage

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 

Note: I received an 8.5/10 in this essay.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, published in 2011, is set in Naples, a poverty ridden city scarred by the remnants of war and socio-economic crises. The residents of Naples express their frustration through different forms of rage. While the men engage in physical conflicts, the women are expected to let the rage boil inside until the bubble bursts. '...men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end...' (38). Ferrante uses the image of two girls, Elena and Lila as they grow up and navigate through society, to depict how this frustration in women manifests into the female rage which then further materializes into something empowering.

The first act of female rage is depicted in the Prologue, when sixty-six-year-old Elena finds out that Lila has removed all trace of herself and decides to write the story of their friendship down to the minutest details as an act of revenge. Elena is neither anxious, nor worried, she is provoked to the point that only destroying Lila's plans of non-existence can satiate her anger. 'I was really angry. We'll see who wins this time, I said to myself.' (15). Her rage materializes into a novel honoring her friend's life, her struggles, and her love. It may even be a confession of how hurt she feels to have been left behind by Lila, the kind of raw pain that can only be expressed through anger and retaliation. This act is the consequence of fury that has boiled down from a long history of rage – towards Lila, towards Naples' poverty and deprivation, and towards the men and women who passed on generational trauma and violence into their children. Her writing is perhaps allowing her to make peace with the past, this is evident as her prose is controlled and never loses pace; she isn't writing through a frenzy, her anger is calculated and precise. It allows her to contemplate carefully on all that has happened. Elena's writing is the sword she wields against the memory of Lila and their friendship, or maybe she wields her writing as a shield to protect and preserve it. Either way, her rage provides her with the drive to act in response to Lila's disappearance in the form of a novel.

As Elena and Lila come of age they are exposed to violence and even murder. All around them loan sharks intimidate their debtors, jilted lovers create scenes in the street, and revenge killings are shrugged away. Often their own families inflict violence upon them. They are both able to intuit this malicious presence in the neighborhood which ultimately manifests as the feminine rage. This rage allows them to strive against the system. The first instance this rage manifests, is when the two girls confront Don Achille over the theft of their dolls. 'In fact, it was when I became convinced that nothing could stop her [Lila], and that every disobedient act contained breathtaking opportunities.' (75). Lila and Elena do something no one else dared, not even the men who've normalized violent displays of masculinity. Their feminine rage allows them to acknowledge Don Achille as a conquerable menace, and they succeed in making him pay. In a way, the payment is not for the lost dolls, rather it is an atonement for all the terror he's caused them, 'I felt that he was not angry but unexpectedly pained, as if he were receiving confirmation of something he already knew.' (78). By rebelling against the neighborhood's most dangerous man and bringing him some ounce of shame, Elena and Lila are able to reject societal power and gender dynamics at a very young age. They are able to break out of the cycle of fear and conformity that plagued even their parents.

The feminine rage Elena and Lila accumulate due to their excruciating circumstances eventually transforms into a push towards escape. They use it as fuel to power their intellectual capabilities so they could write books, gain wealth, and break free from Naples' suffocating atmosphere, or at least make it more bearable. 'In the last year of elementary school, wealth became our obsession... We thought that if we studied hard, we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich.' (83). Elena and Lila garner and project this anger in different ways. Elena pursues brilliance in intellect as a way of competing against Lila. It is clear at first that she is disdained by Lila's presence in her classroom, '...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.' (44). This does not, however, thwart her performance in anyway, it empowers her to do better, 'I think I studied, not so much for school as for her.' (47). Eventually this compulsion to be better than Lila, to have what she cannot possess (perhaps even for both their sakes), is what leads her all the way to high school by the end of this novel. Even her rage at having lost Lila's attention to the shoes transforms into a sense of superiority brought upon by her access to institutions of higher education, 'I was with boys and girls who were studying Latin and Greek, and not like her with construction workers, mechanics, cobblers...', and this invocation is reflected years later in the Prologue, 'we'll see who wins this time.' (15). But it's not projected as a spiteful anger, rather a passionate feminine rage that radiates love and longing towards her friend.

Lila, on the other hand, is deprived of a chance at education, and her rage manifests as rebellion, ambition, love, and courage. Lila 'thinks as violently as others fight' (Chihaya, Emre, Hill, & Richards, 2020), '...her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite...Every one of her movements said that to harm her would be pointless because, whatever happened, she would find a way of doing worse to you.' (49). She rebels against her father for not sending her to school until her arm is broken, after which Lila devotes her rage towards innovating her family's shoe business. 'In an attempt to modernize her father's faltering repair shop against his wishes, she roars and rages, falling into a fury that knows no bounds...' (Chihaya, Emre, Hill, & Richards, 2020). This anger eventually does lead her to develop and sell the shoes she creates. Lila's feminine rage also allows her to set a protective boundary around herself and her loved ones. She carries a shoe-maker's knife that she uses to prevent Marcello from harming Elena, '... "Touch her again and I'll show you what happens." ...In my mind there remains the absolute certainty I had then: she wouldn't have hesitated to cut his throat.' (74-75). She is fearless and dares people, especially the men, to test her anger and see if they can survive it. When Marcello threats to kill her and Stephano, she tells him, '...make it clear to all of them that you had better kill me first. Because if you touch anyone else while I'm alive, I will kill you, and you know I will...' (353). Lila's rage allows her to break stereotypes and gender dynamics. Despite going down the path of marriage, she is as resilient as ever. Given the opportunity, she would unleash her checked rage with no hesitation.

Elena and Lila's rage exists as a support system, it is also what ties them together. Despite their pull-and-push against each other, they are fighting patriarchy and societal constructs together. Unlike their other female friends, Carmela, Gigliola, or any of their condescending family members, Elena and Lila alone possess, 'the capacity together – only together – we had to seize the mass of colors, sounds, things, and people, and express it and give it power.' (182). Elena and Lila's rage is different from that of the other women in Naples, while Melina and Linda fight over a man to the point of murdering and driving each other mad, Elena and Lila channel their anger into an expression of twisted love for each other while combating with the world together. Elena often holds the fact that she's going to school against Lila, but that is only because she wants her attention, 'I was compelled to go away, because she preferred the adventure of shoes to our conversation, because she knew how to be autonomous, whereas I needed her.' (172). She believes that 'Lila was malicious' (190) when she surpasses Elena in intelligence and beauty, but that is the result of her own internal turmoil, she never really tries to actively ruin her friend's chances at happiness, instead she does everything in her power to help save her relationship with Stephano.

Lila tries to sabotage Elena's chances at school once as well when she promises to take her to the beach and ends up backing out halfway through. When Elena receives a beating for this transgression, Lila's response is, 'They're still sending you to study Latin?'. Elena speculates, '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?' It is obvious that they do love each other, but rage stemming from their circumstances may mislead them, however one can argue that such instances have only made their friendship stronger as it seems that no one else in the neighborhood is as transparent with one another as Lila and Elena are. From the moment they threw each other's dolls into Don Achille's basement and said, "Now go and get it for me", "If you go and get mine." (59), they knew the friendship was real and unfiltered, and that clarity was the result of feminine rage seeping into their worlds, 'dissolving' their 'margins', and melting them into one another, 'I was afraid, and tried to stay close behind Lila who seemed angry, and intent on finding her doll...Then I abandoned Tina to her fate, and ran away, in order to not lose Lila.' (61-62).

The most prominent proof of this clarity is when Elena saw what no one else could see in Lila after her engagement to Stephano, the perseverance of the female rage boiling inside of her, 'I knew...that no form could ever contain Lila, and sooner or later she would break everything again.' (374). Their calculated and shared female rage sets them apart from everyone else in Naples and entwines them into a force to be reckoned with.

References

Chihaya, S., Emre, M., Hill, K., & Richards, J. (2020). The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism.Columbia: Columbia University Press.