Violence at the Seams: Womanhood, Feminism, and the Neopolitan Novels

I finally finished the 4th book of the Neapolitan Novels series by Elena Ferrante (otherwise known as the My Brilliant Friend series). To transform my impressions and emotions about that series into cold hard words on a page almost feels obscene, but she so accurately captures those fleeting vividnesses into the written form that I feel I should endeavor to do the same. Unfortunately she's significantly better at that whole thing than me, so just bear with me lol.

The Neapolitan novels are four books detailing the lives of two working-class women in post-war Naples, Italy from the late 50s to the early 2000s. The books are character-focused, with an immersive, non-florid style. Despite their focus on these two lives, they’re somehow sweeping, touching on poverty, violence, feminism, politics, the neighborhood, how far we can go to escape our childhoods, the complexities of female friendships, the complexities of motherhood, and more. The central plot throughline is that Elena Greco - industrious, intellectual, successful, but envious - is not willing to allow her best friend from/since childhood, Lila Cerullo - naturally brilliant, manipulative, undereducated, enchanting - to erase herself, a task Lila fantasizes about at various points during her life (and eventually succeeds at doing when she disappears without a trace in her 60s). Elena, a successful novelist like her author-namesake, writes up the story of their lifelong friendship from childhood to old age into books, ultimately ending their relationship by doing so. Along the way this series tells the story of the impoverished neighborhood the girls came from, what it took for Elena to escape from and then eventually be pulled back into the neighborhood and Lila's radius, the effects and ubiquity of violence, the interactions between education and class, the tumult of Italy in the second half of the 20th century, how leftist ideas changed over time in response to societal changes, how men behave, how women behave in relation to those men, the ways that the almost exclusively female labor of childrearing is bought and shared, the competing tugs of work and family, and the tricky complexities of female friendships. 

I don't want to say that Elena Ferrante writes the lives of women well. What I want to say is that she scratches at reality and reveals it. What I want to say is that she writes so vividly the experience of womanhood that it transcends the page. What I want to say is that I have never seen the lives of women depicted so accurately in writing– and I don't mean “lives of women” in a limited or limiting way. What I mean is that I - despite the differences of class and generation and fictionality - somehow saw myself and reality on the page. What I mean is that the lives of women are the default, not the lives of men, that our lives are the center of the universe and men circle around us like satellites, that our sensory experiences are distinct from those of men, our friendships richer, our emotional worlds bigger, our problems of a different category. What I mean is that ‘the lives of women’ - if one misunderstands my usage of the term - might bring to mind something slight, something exotic, something less valuable than the lives of men, something set aside. But to reduce the lives of women to marginalia not only means closing oneself off from an enriched life, it means fundamentally misunderstanding reality itself. And yet women's lives are marginalized, are beset by violence, are affected by the caprices of the men we love.

This book review is something I am writing for myself more than anyone else. We are living through - especially in a US context, but in Europe as well - an insurgent right that promotes radically different gender dynamics than what I grew up exposed to in popular culture. Although misogyny existed during my girlhood and teenaged years, I came of age in the girlboss era. (And thank God for that. I’m a sensitive person by nature, who is easily affected by the social tides and currents I am buffeted by.) Unfortunately, however, these days there’s a real mainstream push to return women to the domestic sphere, and it’s knocking around in all sorts of weird places. Despite having a graduating class of around 160 and being one of the top 15 best public schools in the country, my high school has produced not one, but two religious tradwife content creators from my graduating class. Although one of them was always religious, neither of them was like this until a lot more recently.

At the same time, the subjugation of women and the marginalization of our lives is not new at all. The LA Times did a rare interview with Elena Ferrante in which she talked about feminism's changes over time. It’s a theme echoed in the final book as well, when one of Elena Greco’s daughters reads aloud her several-decades-old feminist writing to some friends and mocks it for its datedness.

A certain disdain for the feminism of mothers and grandmothers has spread among the younger generations in recent years. There is a conviction that the few rights we have are a fact of nature and not the product of an extremely hard cultural and political battle. I hope that things change and that girls will realize that we have millenniums of subservience behind us, that the struggle should continue and that if we lower our guard, it won’t take much to eliminate what, at least on paper, four generations of women have with great difficulty gained.

This really struck me, because I too had begun to think of equality as natural. I have in recent years mostly sought out history books about places and times with more egalitarian social dynamics. Although I recognized that European history, for example, has certainly been patriarchal since the times of the Greeks and Romans, I felt that this was an attribute of some of the cultural “winners” of history that just got passed down through the ages and waxed and waned rather than patriarchy being a historical given for all places and times in the existence of our species. I attributed some of the continued strength of patriarchy around the world to the legacies of the horrifying violence and social structures wrought by colonialism (while recognizing that plenty of cultures have their own horrific homegrown misogyny too). And equality, when you experience it, is easy to take for granted. It certainly felt natural in my childhood home. It felt natural in the workforce. It feels natural in my relationship now. And in some ways, it is a powerful feminist position to declare that subservience is a historical aberration, and that men and women are naturally equal. But of course, there is nothing more foolish than to declare as natural a social dynamic that has varied so dramatically from culture to culture and era to era and that is forever politically contested. Of course, what has been gained over these last few generations is fragile and requires eternal vigilance. Not because we’re naturally subservient, but because power relations are always contested.

As I was writing the previous paragraphs, I was struck by a sense of the world collapsing inwards, of impending social doom. This is not my usual temperament, which is a hardened strategic optimism that urges one to the fight, and it didn’t last long with me. But, I am reminded, there are time periods where things do completely collapse, when ways of life fall away, never to return. The collapse of the lives of the native peoples of the Americas, for example. The lives of all those swept into the World Wars, or those caught up in the Cambodian genocide. The lives of West Africans captured for the Middle Passage. History teaches us that times do change, and sometimes the center doesn’t hold. Sometimes things do in fact fall apart (although of course one cannot dwell on it). This knowledge, hard taught by history, does give me some pause as I debate endlessly whether it is really a good idea for me to return to the US this summer.

That sense of violence, of order breaking down, of reality escaping its edges, is a recurring theme in the novels. Elena Greco the character writes to impose order on facts, and Lila is perpetually secretly afraid of reality’s fuzzy edges engulfing her. Elena Ferrante the author talks in the same LA Times interview about the violence of Naples:

One has to be very fortunate not to be touched even slightly by violence and its various manifestations in Naples. But perhaps that’s true of New York, London, Paris. Naples isn’t worse than other cities in Italy or in the world. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to an understanding of it. In the past, I used to think that only in Naples did the lawful continuously lose its boundaries and become confused with the unlawful, that only in Naples did good feelings suddenly, violently, without any break, become bad feelings. Today it seems to me that the whole world is Naples and that Naples has the merit of having always presented itself without a mask. Since it is a city by nature of astonishing beauty, the ugly — criminality, violence, corruption, connivance, the aggressive fear in which we live defenseless, the deterioration of democracy — stands out more clearly.

And that interview was from 2018.

I worry about our particular moment. I worry that tweens and teens are being indoctrinated by severely conservative gender relations. I worry about how even I – at age 27, highly educated, a lifelong feminist, who is not even in the US – can feel the need to make myself smaller professionally out of fear of some kind of retaliation from a rising reactionary social order. I think about Megan Markle, rebranding now as a domestic goddess, and that former ballerina-turned-homesteader, trapped by her billionaire husband into giving up her dreams. I think about the rise of milkmaid dresses and the edgy fash-y Trad Caths in Dimes Square and on the Red Scare podcast and that Black Mormon model making cereal from scratch and the dearth of non-capitalistic-but-still-girlboss role models for women on social media. I think about how I have somehow narrowed my vision for my own future, and how I cannot at the moment even imagine anything other than domestic fantasy garbage for myself, even as I apply for jobs and even as I experience how miserable such a dynamic makes me. And then I think of my aunts, my grandmothers, and how each generation of us had greater opportunities than the ones before, and how to squander such opportunities in the face of fear is to spit in the face of all that they suffered through.

Collages by me. L: Tradwife (2025). R: Blue (2025).

Anyway. The book series. Yes. It’s excellent. And in fact, a good way to combat such internalized fears and biases, to get out of one’s own head and off social media, is to read works like these and marvel at their richness and complexity. There is no greater proof of how women’s lives are whole, central lives. These books are exceptional, but they are not exceptional in a masculine way. They are the exceptional normality, banality, of womanhood.

There is a trap in praising the writing of exceptional female authors (or Black authors, or Black female authors). Exceptionality is a white man's world, and whenever someone ‘other’ comes to that door, there is a tendency to masculinize their excellence, to contort and distort that woman's relationship with womanhood to fit her within the bounds of the exceptionality box. But Elena Ferrante is excellent via her womanhood. I don't mean that in a base way. I mean that her gender and her mastery of the written form intertwine to produce excellence because of her personal attributes. Gender matters for an analysis of her work because men are viewed as the default by society. But they are not. 

And she is truly excellent. I think every woman should read this series and see if their own lives echo the lives of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo and to see if my praises ring true for their own experiences of the books as well. I think every man should read this book and understand that although the specifics of these women’s lives differ from my own, and although these are in fact novels, I found truth there. The emotional ‘excesses’, the nuances, the violence, the indignities, the complexities, the detail, the connections between women and to men were all real, real, real. Elena Ferrante held up a mirror, and look at all that was visible within it.

And there’s so much more I didn’t get to discuss in this review! The series raised questions of brilliance and the girls co-creating each other’s lives - who really was the “brilliant friend” between them? I also read the first books in the series at the same time as reading When the Crawdads Sing and thought a lot about how the books, set in the same time periods, mirrored each other despite their very different cultural contexts and tones. I didn’t talk about how I have my own lifelong best friend, and how I relate my own friendship to the book series. I didn’t talk about the books’ “chick lit” cover art, which is how I first heard about Ferrante through this article from the Atlantic. I didn’t talk about how Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, and how some people have suggested that a man is in fact the author (preposterous, in my mind). I didn't talk about how it was originally published in Italian and then translated by Ann Goldstein, or about how there's now a television series that's apparently really good. And I’d really like to talk some more at some point about the rise and normalization of fascism in pop culture.

So anyway. The Neapolitan Novels. I liked them. I liked them a whole lot. Go read them, or at least give the first book a try. And maybe someone needs to start that aspirational non-capitalistic-but-still-girlboss social media account.

Until next time.