Breaking the Cycle: Daughters Repeating Mothers in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend

This article reads Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend through a feminist lens to challenge the role of relationships among women in informing their identities. Based on a methodology that draws on Luisa Muraro’s symbolic mother and Sara Ahmed’s argument about repetition as a feminist practice, my argument focuses on how the novel’s protagonist seeks alternative mother figures and role models to avoid becoming like her biological mother—lacking agency and confined to Naples. As protagonist Elena seeks to emulate the courage of her strong-willed friend Lila, she realizes that she will only be able to leave her Neapolitan neighborhood by accessing education and learning standard Italian from her teacher. Ultimately, I argue that Elena’s fear and desire of Lila spurs the protagonist to look for another role model, her teacher, whom she can trust and who will provide her with another mother tongue that she would need to access the world outside of Naples.