Modes of Resistance
Eileen Manion
“…every disobedient act contained
breathtaking opportunities.”
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
As we know, women are supposed to be compliant, pleasing, biddable.
To men. To social norms.
Girls learn this very young. Smile. Look pleasant.
How long does it take us to unlearn it?
As readers, we are initially drawn to Lila, as is Elena, because she refuses to accept this basic tenet of female being-in-the-world, so the narrator thinks she needs Lila more than Lila needs her — to give her the courage she lacks.
At the boys Lila throws stones instead of running away, like a girl; she provokes her father to the point that he throws her out a window. She forces Elena to climb the forbidden staircase with her to confront Don Achille, the neighborhood bogeyman, for she is driven to overcome not only her own fears, but also the terrors of her parents and neighbors for whom Achille represents a holdover from the fascist past of compelled obedience to a tyrant.
The arrest of Alfredo Peluso for the murder of Don Achille is “the most terrible thing witnessed” — in their childhood.
Guilty or not, he goes to prison for the murder because he’s a communist and had a motive. His conviction becomes a cautionary tale for the neighborhood, representing the danger of rebelling against oppressive forces that are still in control of the destinies of the poor through wealth acquired from black market trading and loan-sharking.
In addition, Elena attaches herself to Lila because she has suffered from lack of nurturing; her father’s approval depends on her success in school, while everything she receives from her mother is given grudgingly — like her words of encouragement after she fails the Latin exam and must retake it, or the silver bracelet, offered with a warning — don’t lose it.
She perceives her mother as wounded — with her limp and unfocussed eye — and she is terrified of turning into her as she matures.
Attaching herself to Lila who seems to know “how to be autonomous” is a way of rejecting her mother and escaping her mother’s destiny.
The women of their mothers’ generation are not disobedient; they are either angry or mad and take these feelings out on one another, like Melina and Lidia. Embittered and envious, they desperately try to keep their daughters from being any better off than they are.
How can girls escape their mothers’ fate? Will Lila’s disobedience free her?
Although Elena sees Lila as acting with “absolute determination” to impose her will, where she is “without conviction,” this dichotomy breaks down as the novel progresses.
Compliance, for Elena, becomes a form of resistance. In school, Elena is a compliant student, eager to please her teachers in order to avoid going to work to support her family or staying at home to help her mother with the younger children.
But compliance is not enough for her; she also needs the stimulation, the competition she gets from Lila, always perceived as the one who’s ahead. Even when Lila’s family refuses to allow her to go to middle school, she learns Latin on her own; before Elena starts high school, she begins to study Greek. Lila “intensified reality… injected it with energy.”
Whenever Lila withdraws her energy and interest, Elena has a hard time maintaining her commitment to learning. But she still wants the approval from her teachers that her parents failed to provide. In Lila’s absence, she looks to Nino for the validation she misses.
As an intellectual, Nino represents a kind of masculinity absent from her previous experience of boys in the neighborhood who rely on violence, money, or both to impose their will on others. But Elena does not realize how narcissistic Nino is; he wants to talk, to perform and needs her as an enthusiastic audience.
In the girls’ friendship, Lila begins as the disobedient one; she suggests they take a day off from school to walk to the sea. Although Elena is energized by separating from her family and neighborhood, Lila is distressed, frightened.
Elena ultimately can break away from her family; Lila cannot despite their lack of appreciation for her creativity and intelligence, their willingness to sell her into a wretched marriage.
By the end of the novel, we see that disobedience and compliance are not absolutes; they are territories that require constant exploration, negotiation. Able to comply with the demands of school, Elena turns her back on her family, unheard of for a young woman of her class and era.
Lila’s life moves in a cycle from disobedience to compliance with her family’s demands to disobedience to her husband, Stefano.
Her ultimate rebellious act is her disappearance, her erasure of herself, at 66, from family, friends, neighborhood, which provides the quartet’s framing device, provoking Elena’s anger: “We’ll see who wins this time.” And her motive for writing; at last she has internalized Lila.
