Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend transports readers to a vibrant yet fractured neighbourhood in 1950s Naples, telling the story of a friendship between two girls — Elena ‘Lenu’ Greco and Raffaela ‘Lila’ Cerullo. Against the backdrop of an array of themes in the novel such as friendship, social issues, politics, and family dynamics is a thread of violence binding the narrative together. The neighbourhood’s past and present is a complex web of mysteries, secrets, and scandals — as Joan Acocella observes in The New Yorker, ‘All these people are fantastically enmeshed. They practically can’t walk to the corner without running into someone they’ve slept with or beaten up’.
At the heart of My Brilliant Friend is a tapestry of violence that touches nearly every relationship and interaction. As Anna North wrote for Vox, it is not just ‘the violence of the men in the neighbourhood, who beat their wives and battle each other for dominance’, but the aftershocks of post-WWII restructuring of European and particularly, South Italian society — a time of economic struggle, political instability, and social transformation.
This article will examine how violence manifests across various dimensions of Elena’s world — within her family, friendships, community, and the broader social and political landscape of post-war Naples.
“Therapist, Mother, Maid”: The Gendered Origins of Violence
‘All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24∕7, baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour’
(Paris Paloma, Labour, 2023)
Violence is an indispensable family member in the homes of the people of the neighbourhood — men beat their wives and children, and society takes it as a given. This dominance is the status quo.
On page 45 of the first book, Elena recounts the dynamic between her parents, where her mother often became angry with her father due to the never-ending, fatiguing household chores and absence of money: ‘They quarrelled. But since my father never raised his voice, even when he lost patience, I always took his part against her, even though he sometimes beat her and could be threatening to me’. It is remarkable to what extent violence is normalised and internalised within Elena — this can be argued by the fact that patriarchal authority often goes unquestioned within families. The father’s calm demeanour, even within moments of violence, allows Elena to see his actions as justified rather than abusive. Furthermore, this passage suggests that Elena unconsciously views her mother as the ‘villain’ in the family dynamic due to her own gendered perceptions of when violence is appropriate.
In fact, this normalisation of violence — from man to man, man to woman, man to child — is a steady fixture throughout the community; it is natural to their lives. There are numerous allusions to this throughout the novels.
Another disturbing concept present in the community’s worldview is that violence is inextricable from a man’s love. One such observation that Elena makes in the second book is: ‘We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us’. This way of thinking makes the livelihoods of women with violent men in their private lives a painful paradox — you are sacred and untouchable to strangers, yet the men in your life, whom you have to love, respect, and cherish, may do with you as they please: they may beat and abuse you, and kiss you right afterwards.
This is echoed by Lila’s mother in the second book, who says: ‘Life is like that: one day you’re getting hit, the next kissed’. Nunzia delivers this in such an air of triviality that one cannot help but feel sorry for her, and for women who live in a dynamic similar to hers — women told from childhood that they belong to the men in the family they are born into, then to the men in the family they marry into, and that being beaten is a given in both.
This normalisation becomes even more unsettling as we observe it seep into the next generation, particularly in a scene in book three, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, where Elena’s daughter Dede is playing with a boy, pretending to be a mother and father. To Elena’s shock, Dede instructs the boy, ‘You have to hit me, understand?’. Elena reflects: ‘The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.’
This parallelism is used throughout the book to convey how the expectation for women to accept violence is sewn into the very fabric of their relationships, stitching love and abuse together into a pattern that repeats across generations.
Elena, throughout her childhood and adolescence, harbours a fear of becoming her mother — a disfigured, mean woman, grown tired and ill-humoured from her exasperating family life. Is this disfigurement of women not a manifestation of violence? To burden them with servitude to their families, to transform them through pregnancies, housework, and beatings? Young Elena has a vivid picture in her head: ‘They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labours or the arrival of old age, of illness.’ This sentence employs a range of literary devices to illustrate how women’s identities are eroded by the demands of the men in their lives. The metaphor of ‘consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers’ paints an image of women being figuratively devoured or overtaken by the influences and physical presence of the men around them. Is this covert domination not considered violence?
According to Pierre Bourdieu, a renowned French sociologist, symbolic violence is a form of non-physical coercion that subtly enforces power differences between social groups. It operates in three main ways: by legitimising social hierarchies as accepted norms; by encouraging individuals in subordinate groups to internalise the roles imposed upon them; and by embedding these power relations into cultural practices and daily interactions so that they seem natural and go unquestioned.
Is it not violence that these men, wielding chisels, mallets, and polishing stones — tools meant to sculpt and refine — chip away at the edges of women, smoothing imperfections and sanding down any trace of resistance and individuality, reshaping them into rigid, polished ideals of ‘perfect’? Is it not violence that this daily ritual of forcing women into oppressive moulds through pregnancies, housework, and beatings erases their dreams, hopes, and individuality? Some may argue that female submission is dictated by nature — that women are inherently submissive and must obey their husbands. But if submission and servitude are indeed coded into the female body and mind, why must women be coerced and dominated into conforming to this ideal? Could it be that this so-called ‘natural order’ is, in fact, man-made?
Through the imposition of these roles via daily rituals and coercion, society suppresses women’s self-actualisation under the guise of ‘natural order’, revealing symbolic violence as an insidious tool of control.
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