Classism in the Neapolitan Novels: Dissolving Boundaries
The series begins with the disappearance of an old woman.
Lila leaves nothing of herself behind — not even a hairpin (this I find hard to believe as bobby pins seem to grow from all surfaces I touch). Her oldest friend, Lena, remembers that her friend had said that when she died she would disappear, untraceable, and Lena decides — in her last gesture of their friendship — to spite Lila and her self-inflicted disappearance by writing down everything she can remember of their lives.
The first book in the series, My Brilliant Friend, follows the main characters through their childhood in 1950s Naples, growing up in the constant shadow of their neighborhood, which they attribute to the local gangster — a man imagined in their child minds as a monster, something inhuman, an all-encompassing evil that keeps the families down with violence.
That black shadow, the monster, the inhuman, pervasive evil that keeps them trapped in a world of violence and dependency is not that man, Don Achille. What he personifies is the true enemy: poverty.
Throughout the series (The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child), the women fight against the culture of poverty. One woman stays in Naples and goes to great lengths to change the way of the neighborhood from the inside to end the violence; the other woman makes it her mission at a young age to get out, to separate herself, to become “better,” more successful, richer, above all the violence. They both succeed; they both fail.
Violence inhabits the people who live in a culture of poverty. The aggression of survival is in their behavior, their words, their relationships. Violence, however, is a temporary state, and the land and cities in one era engulfed in violence are, at others, grand and wonderful. Near the end of the series, Lila suggests that the whole world is a place of cyclical wonder and violence — of both grandeur and ugliness — of creation and destruction. She does this by teaching Lena’s daughter the great and terrible sides of Naples.
These two sides of places and people are mirrored in the women, the two friends, whose lives continuously enter and exit phases of success and failure, fear and confidence, intellectualism and stupidity, security and instability, violence and peace, fame and domesticity, clarity and disillusionment, opulence and poverty.
At times, I wondered if the elusive Elena Ferrante actually wrote the story of one woman, written autobiographically about a parallel version of herself. The names and nicknames of the two women throughout the novel are so interchangeable: Lena, Lila, Lina, Lenu. Perhaps it is just one woman, pondering her life had she remained in poverty or elevating her life had she had escaped the neighborhood. The two characters practically raised each other’s children, had an affair with the same young romance, and appeared in and disappeared from each other’s lives throughout the story.
As a writer, it would be an interesting study, to split yourself and the choices of your life — perhaps the sides of your personality, the classes of your families, the Lila and the Lena — and create a world in which the two sides were friends, mirrors, contrasts, competition, creative inspiration, and sources of conflict, even hatred.
Where would I and myself keep meeting one another? Which parts of my life would two sides of myself live side by side and which parts would we be disconnected?
Throughout the series, Lila refers to an experience she has sporadically that she calls “dissolving boundaries,” which she describes (in my very simplified understanding) as seeing-feeling other people and herself breaking apart and mixing together. As both a writer and a mental health counselor, the description of this phenomenon is a wonderful literary example of mental illness within a life of constant fear, stress, and chaos. Her sense of “dissolving boundaries” is less about what is going on in her head and more about what has gone on around her all her life. This lack of self-identify, this fear of shattering, this sense that the violent pieces of the people around her enter her, does not seem to be a mental illness but an unfiltered realization that she lacks control over her life, her body, her children’s lives, and her friends’ and families’ safety. That’s not an individual diagnosis. That’s a cultural problem.
On an individual level, the series is about a lifetime friendship of two women in all its uniqueness and ugliness, but on a cultural level, the series is about politics, classism, and feminism. The phrase “dissolving boundaries” — though not a direct reference to the larger issues in the series — provides a sense of breaking down those cultural walls…the lines, the categories, the boxes we use to keep ourselves separated.
This series has gone to the top of my favorite books of all time list. It takes the child-view, the complicated mother-daughter relationship, and the educational climb out of poverty from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and expands it. It looks at the wonder, horror, and politics of women’s friendships and lives like …And Ladies of the Club and condenses it. It manifests Women Who Run with the Wolves in its entirety. It exposes raw hostility in poetic storytelling like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It is an old woman telling a story of the glory and violence of a single place and a female friendship like Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café but in another time from another view across the world.
I read a review of the series that said nothing like this had ever been written. Perhaps it was meant to be a hyperbole for the sake of sensation, but that just made me think the that reviewer hadn’t been reading literature about women.
This series encompasses many of the universal stories of women — and the writing is exceptional (thank you, Elena Ferrante, whoever you are, and snaps for Ann Goldstein’s translation).
If you’re looking for a series to hunker down with this winter, I highly recommend the Neapolitan Novels. I eventually bought the series because I loved it so much, but I read the first three through interlibrary loan — support your local library! (Lila would want you to).
