1

The Weak Messianic Power of Elena Ferrante’s Feminism:

A Reading of Smarginatura

“I belong to the ranks of those who feel attracted to anything that is enclosed within a frame,
partly because it helps me to imagine what has remained outside it.”1

– Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia

I. Against the Triumphalist Reading

My Brilliant Friend (2011-2014),2 the work of pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante, has

quickly become a classic of feminist literature. In an article for The New Yorker, Joan Acocella

even goes so far as to call it “the most thoroughgoing feminist novel” she has ever read, citing

the “exploration of women’s mental underworld” as a “singular achievement” not just in

feminist literature, but “indeed, in all literature.”3 Similar claims can be found widely in popular

criticism of the novel.4 However, it is not just the complex psychological picture of women’s

inner lives that has inspired readers to foreground its feminist power, but also the story of

triumph over one’s origins.5 This triumphalist reading derives from the extraordinary climb

1
Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia, trans. Ann Goldstein (Italy: Europa Editions, 2016), 320.
2
Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is often known in English as The Neapolitan Novels. However, Ferrante has said
that she regards the four-volumes as one work. See Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 336-337. Throughout this essay, I
will refer to it as one novel with the abbreviation MBF, the novel’s intended title, which highlights its central
theme: friendship. I will also primarily be referring to the English version, though I will be drawing on the
original Italian when no translation is adequate.
3
Joan Acocella, “Elena Ferrante’s New Book: Art Wins’” The New Yorker (2015).
4
The association with Ferrante and feminism is found in almost every piece of criticism on her, particularly from
the beginning of her reception in the Anglophone world with James Wood’s "Women on the Verge: The Fiction
of Elena Ferrante,” The New Yorker (2013). Her feminism is also a focus of scholarly writing on her. For some
key examples see Karen Bojar, “Ferrante as Feminist Theorist,” in In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and
the Question of Authorship (Jefferson, United States: McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2018),
150-167; and Sam Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 1),” Hypatia 36, no. 4 (2021):
676–701.
5
The triumphalist reading manifests most intensely in relation to the idea of artistic expression. For example, at
the end of her article, Acocella writes that “art wins.” For a discussion of these triumphalist readers, see Sam
Shpall, “Writing Together: Elena Ferrante and the Challenge of Collective Criticism,” ABC 27/04/21. URL:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/samuel-shpall-elena-ferrante-and-the-challenge-of-collective-cr/13319666; &
Erika Jost, “Those Who Rise and Those Who Disappear,” Current Affairs, June 1, 2019. However, Bojar notes
about how Anglophone criticism tends to de-emphasis the class aspects of the novel overall, 122.
 2

that the novel’s narrator Lenù makes from the poor Neapolitan neighbourhood she was born

into in the 1940s to the acclaimed novelist and feminist writer she ultimately becomes. Indeed,

throughout the novel, Lenù overcomes many traumas and difficulties related to the poverty and

violence of her childhood, as she is guided by an unrelenting work ethic which sees her achieve

unprecedented success for a woman of her era. Reading MBF from this angle, it becomes an

inspiring chronicle of the struggle for individual strength and artistic expression in the face of

seemingly insurmountable oppressions of class and gender in the latter half of the 20th century.

But this is only half of the story. The trajectory of the novel’s second protagonist –

Lenù’s rebellious and brilliant friend, Lila – is very different. While both girls show academic

talent in the primary school where they become friends, it is Lila who appears to be the more

naturally gifted. However, as primary school ends, only Lenù is permitted to go to middle

school – her parents being marginally wealthier and more progressive towards female

education than Lila’s. Lila’s early promise thus devolves into tragedy. After marrying the town

grocer who repeatedly beats and rapes her, she escapes only to be forced to work in a salami

factory where she is sexually assaulted and harassed daily; is abandoned by her lover while

pregnant; and then, when she is in her forties and has managed the incredible feat of

establishing a successful computer technology business (having spent many evenings studying

despite the exhaustion from working in the factory all day), her young daughter – who shows

signs of her mother’s brilliance – disappears without a trace. Unlike Lenù, Lila does not

overcome these traumas. In her sixties, she, too, disappears without a trace, leaving no

(material) legacy of her intellectual and artistic brilliance. All Lenù has left of her friend are

memories, which she recounts in the mammoth 1700-page novel that is MBF: an attempt to

“win” back Lila from obscurity, even if this means breaking the promise she made to never

write about her.6

6
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, trans. Ann Goldstein (Australia: Text Publishing Company, 2012), 23.
 3

Lenù represents Lila’s brilliance and her tragic life with the subtlety that is surely at the

core of the novel’s greatness. But just as Lenù is determined to show Lila in all her unrealised

genius, she is haunted by the idea that this may serve to minimise her own success. As Lenù

grows into an unhappy old age,7 she increasingly fears that Lila will write a book of such

unparalleled genius that it would immediately reduce her own life “to a petty battle to change

my social class.”8 Pace triumphalist readers, this may be precisely Ferrante’s own view of

Lenù. As Lenù becomes increasingly interested in literary fame, her intelligence is

instrumentalised for elevated social status, stifling her creativity and pleasure in writing as she

conforms to the tastes of the time. She is plagued by what in an interview Ferrante calls the

“permanent spectacle in which we are immersed.”9 This leads to a kind of superficiality;

subordinates try to please superiors to emerge from their positions, conforming to systems of

domination. In contrast, Lila’s intelligence is characterised by its recalcitrance to

instrumentalization, which contributes to its mystical aura, the sense of its specificity outside

of dominant cultural norms and the superficiality that the social climb induces. Sam Shpall

draws attention to the variety of magical and contradictory ways Lila is described, summarising

her representation as both a “formidable genius whose spirit is a beacon of liberation” and yet

also “an evil force, a troublemaking agent whose darkness has a mystical cast.”10 He argues

that these contradictions in Lila’s representation stem from patriarchy’s misunderstanding of

her special abilities – a misunderstanding that Lenù, and many readers, are sometimes complicit

with. This misunderstanding is amplified by Lenù’s growing sense of inferiority generated by

the patriarchal-capitalist system which marks measurable success as the primary purpose of a

life and prevents her from developing a creative practice outside of what can be

7
For a discussion of Lenù’s unhappiness see Sam Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part
2),” Hypatia 37, no. 1 (2022), 125.
8
Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, trans. Ann Goldstein (Italy: Europa Editions, 2015), 459.
9
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 243.
10
Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2),” 116.
 4

instrumentalised for further power.11 On this reading, Lenù’s climb up the social ladder accrues

a different valence. Indeed, as she escapes both Naples and Lila, determined to find her

independence, she is increasingly plagued by a lack of vitality and creativity, as she conforms

to and internalises the values of competitiveness and individualism that lead to her to forsaking

the value of collaboration with Lila that so ignited her creativity as a girl.12

Following on from readers who have pointed towards the special (and even magical)

status of Lila in MBF,13 I use Walter Benjamin’s concept of weak messianic power to

characterise Ferrante’s depiction of Lila, who holds the potential to transform society through

her connection to the female symbolic.14 In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin

claims that our idea of redemption is fundamentally connected to the past, the people we have

known and the lives we have lived. He thus argues that we are endowed with a weak messianic

power, which can “seize” the unrealised potential of the past, which “flashes up in a moment

of danger.”15 Viewing the past outside of received dominant narratives allows for a

revolutionary reshaping of the future. The fullest expression of Lila’s messianic power comes

through in the special condition she names smarginatura16 (an untranslatable technical term

used primarily in bookbinding to mean “cutting off the margins”) where “the outlines of people

and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared.”17 I argue that smarginatura is a quasi-mystical

revelation about the relationship between form and matter, and past and present, which reveals

11
Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2),” 125.
12
For a discussion of Lenù failed attempt to find meaning in autonomy, see Shpall, “Female Freedom and The
Neapolitan Novels (Part 2),” 123-127.
13
Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2),” 111-135; see also Judith Shulevitz “The
hypnotic genius of Elena Ferrante,” The Atlantic, October 2015, who argues that Lila sees something like
mystical visions.
14
For readers who discuss the female symbolic, see Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part
2),” 111-135; and Alessia Ricciardi, Finding Ferrante: Authorship and the Politics of World Literature
(Columbia University Press, 2021), 130.
15
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (London, Great Britain: The Bodley
Head, 1970), 247.
16
For the original, see Elena Ferrante, L’amica geniale (Roma: Edizioni e/o, 2011), 85-87 and 168-173. Ann
Goldstein translates this it as “dissolving margins” or “dissolving boundaries,” which does not adequately
represent the strangeness of the original. For a discussion of the untranslatability of this complex concept in
Ferrante’s work, see Ricciardi, 43-45.
17
Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, 81.
 5

human beings as fragile and dependent, governed by social systems and structures beyond

them. Indeed, through paying attention to the imagery of smarginatura that mirrors the

materiality of the female body, I argue that Ferrante reappropriates patriarchal ideas of women

as liquid and passive, foregrounding the fragility and interdependence of all humans.18

Ferrante’s feminism is thus a far cry from the triumphalist reading discussed above, even if it

is surely part of the novel’s appeal for some readers. Through Lila, and the way her story is

told through Lenù, Ferrante gestures towards revolutionary ways of thinking about the

patriarchal-capitalist symbolic order by engaging a mystical poetics which aims to break it

open, revealing the potential lost through increasing integration into these systems.

II. Smarginatura: Transforming Traditions

In The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (2016), the first anthology devoted

entirely to Ferrante, Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie V. Love claim that smarginatura is

“the thematic and conceptual platform of Ferrante’s oeuvre.”19 It is thus no surprise that the

term has become well-tread territory in Ferrante studies, proliferating a variety of different

readings and interpretations. Since the experience of smarginatura is most often triggered by

male violence, many readers focus on its most terrifying and negative elements, highlighting

its similarity to psychiatric conditions such as dissociation and panic disorders, common to

women living with patriarchal violence.20 While the negative elements of the experience are

undeniable, other readers argue that Ferrante develops a thread between trauma and creativity

18
Ferrante has openly expressed her sympathies with the philosophies French and Italian sexual difference
feminism, which claims that women have something special outside of the patriarchal symbolic order. For
example, see Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 77. For a discussion of representations of the female body as liquid and
passive, see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and
Unwin, 1994), 203.
19
Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie V. Love, “Introduction,” in The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring
the Margins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016), 5.
20
For example, see Emanuela Caffè, “Global Feminism and Trauma in Elena Ferrante’s Saga My Brilliant
Friend,” MLN 136, no. 1 (2021): 32–53.
 6

in her depiction of smarginatura. For example, Stiliana Milkova identifies the slipperiness of

the term with the “the leaky, ontologically unstable, pregnant female body,”21 arguing that

Ferrante reappropriates patriarchal depictions of women as passive and liquid to form powerful

sites of resistance and creative agency. Other readers, such as Shpall, continue the positive

appraisal of smarginatura, conceptualising it as “an expression of Lila’s visionary abilities”

linked to her special connection to the female symbolic, granting her the ability to “give

authentic, unsubordinated form to a woman’s personality.”22 Alessia Ricciardi also emphasises

the relationship between smarginatura and Lila’s exceptional creativity, arguing that it is the

result “of her determination to explore her ever-changing desires to their limits, to pursue

imaginative lines of flight that cannot be reversed.”23 Many of these interpretations resound in

my own. However, I go further by showing how the relationship between trauma and creativity

are connected to Benjamin’s mystical approach to history, arguing that the subversive power

of smarginatura is rooted in its feminine imagery that resists being subsumed by the patriarchal

capitalist narratives of individual triumph, gesturing instead towards a transformative vision of

the fragility of the human.

As the dictionary Treccani defines it, the literal meaning of smarginatura is “cutting

off the margins.”24 However, the negatory “s” at the beginning of the word could equally

suggest spilling over the margins. The technical meaning of the word and its poetic suggestion

are key to understanding Ferrante’s feminist literary praxis, which continually engages a

dialectic between form and formlessness – between what is inside and outside the frame – in a

productive contradiction which is aimed at pushing apart our complacency with the status quo

and generic categories. Indeed, while Ferrante happily makes use of genres in her fiction, such

21
Stiliana Milkova, Elena Ferrante as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 33.
22
Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2),” 119-120.
23
Ricciardi, Finding Ferrante: Authorship and the Politics of World Literature (Columbia University Press,
2021), 55.
24
“Smarginatura in Vocabolario - Treccani.” Accessed November 15, 2022.
https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/smarginatura.
 7

as romance and mystery, setting up expectations, she does this only to then disappoint them –

deform them – and make way for the new.25 Moreover, while Ferrante always admits her debt

to tradition, claiming that there is “no work which is not the fruit of tradition… a sort of

collective intelligence,”26 she is nonetheless determined to expand the bounds of that very

tradition, avoiding the rigid presumption that we have arrived at the “right” forms. Through

smarginatura – which portrays the female body as “both trapped and uncontainable”27 – this

dialectic between form and formlessness is at its most powerful. Lila’s special condition breaks

through Lenù’s well-formed sentences to reveal a chaotic and creative force always at play, a

force which wrenches open the written word and revivifies it from its false – or all too

comfortable – reality.28 It is this dynamic that makes smarginatura analogous to the mystical,

which, through its resistance to settled forms, opens new possibilities of expression,

challenging those entrenched in our imaginaries.

While smarginatura is notably feminine in its symbology, Tiziana de Rogatis points

out that it is men who are its first subjects.29 Indeed, Lila’s first intense episode of smarginatura

happens on New Year’s Eve 1959 when her brother Rino, now a young man, begins

aggressively throwing fireworks at another group of boys, the infamous Solara brothers.

Leading up to this day, Rino has been collecting as many fireworks as possible, which are to

act as a symbol of his material superiority in the rione (neighbourhood, particularly a poor one

on the periphery of the city) where the hegemonic masculinity is tightly tied to money. Though

Rino is far from rich, the desire for financial success is deeply rooted within him, a product of

knowing the vulnerabilities and humiliations of poverty. This desire is inflamed by Lila’s

25
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 279.
26
Ferrante, Franumaglia, 271.
27
Milkova, Elena Ferrante as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 30.
28
As Tiziana de Rogatis discusses, this is also built into the idea of a semantic neologism, which opens up the
meanings of common words. See Tiziana de Rogatis, Elena Ferrante’s Key Words (USA: Europa Editions,
2018), 87.
29
de Rogatis, 205.
 8

extraordinary shoe designs, which she plans to use to make them rich – a plan which Rino is

convinced will become a reality. The qualities that Rino had as a boy, which led him to his

support of Lila and her education – something he planned to fund through getting his father to

pay him for his work at the family shoemaking business – are broken by his desire for power,

which quickly transforms into a desire to dominate. In becoming smarginato,30 Rino enters the

vicious cycle of domination that characterises the masculinity of the rione. As Lila watches

Rino transformed by structures beyond his control, structures that existed before he was even

born, she experiences him as “breaking”:

Rino, before her eyes, lost the features he had had as long as she could remember, the
features of the generous, candid boy, the pleasing features of the reliable young man,
the beloved outline of one who, as far back as she had memory, had amused, helped,
protected her. There, amid the violent explosions, in the cold, in the smoke that burned
the nostrils and the strong odor of sulfur, something violated the organic structure of
her brother, exercising over him a pressure so strong that it broke down his outlines,
and the matter expanded like a magma, showing her what he was truly made of.31

The synesthetic mixing of the material world with powerful social structures until neither are

distinguishable from each other provokes disgust in Lila. Rino’s potential is dissolved by

systems which break down what is outside of them – namely, Rino’s alternative masculinity of

boyhood, his potential to become something outside of these systems – to forge a figure of

domination. As Tiziana de Rogatis writes, in the end, Rino is “dogged by more moral than

material poverty.”32 He will spend his life striving for financial success, joining forces with

whatever powerful group that may help him achieve it, including the Camorrist Solara brothers,

undisturbed by their connections to corrupt forces. This strategy, however, produces little of

30
Elena Ferrante, L’amica geniale, 179. Ann Goldstein translates this as “without boundaries” (Ferrante, My
Brilliant Friend, 180), unfortunately losing the nuanced relationship between the noun that Lila uses to name
her condition and is adjectival application.
31
Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, 176.
32
de Rogatis, 137.
 9

the effect he desires. Unable to form ambitions beyond mere financial gain, Rino ultimately

dies of a drug overdose in his forties, his relationship with his sister long embittered.33

As Lila watches this new version “drip” out of her brother,34 she describes him through

the feminine association of liquid typically allotted to the female body, suggesting his own

fragility as much as hers. While powerless to stop it, she experiences the profound urge to put

him back “inside his usual form.”35 In part blaming herself for Rino’s transformation, having

encouraged his fantasises of wealth through her shoe designs, Lila puts aside the idea of wealth

as salvation from this point on. Her childish “get rich quick” fantasises having come to an end,

Lila’s association with communist Pasquale Peluso begins to flourish. Together they read the

rione’s corruption through the past, obsessed by the chain of evil linking the before to the now.

The motivating idea of these amateur historians is that “there are no gestures, words, or sighs

that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.”36

The negative revelations of smarginatura combine with a pessimist sensitivity to the realities

of a history of human violence continuous with the present. As Ricciardi points out, their

historicising richly evokes Benjamin’s radical rethinking of history in “Theses,” wherein he,

too, affirms the overwhelming violence of human history in the much-quoted line: “There is

no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”37 I echo

Ricciardi’s reading here, but go further in linking this new way of historicising to Lila’s

smarginatura, which sets these revelations in motion.

“Theses” is the last work Benjamin completed before he fled from France to Spain to

escape the Nazis. At the border, he was denied entry and, fearing Nazi capture, committed

suicide at forty-eight. Benjamin’s critique of historicism arises directly out of the bloodshed of

33
de Rogatis, 137.
34
Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, trans. Ann Goldstein (Italy: Europa Editions, 2015), 177.
35
Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, 177.
36
Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, 154.
37
Ricciardi, 137; Benjamin, 248.
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the 20th century with which the tragedy of his life is deeply entangled. Rather than expressing

surprise at the rise of Fascism, Benjamin views it as a product of the way “its opponents treat

it as a historical norm.”38 He goes on to explain that thinking about history as a linear

progression leads to empathising with the victor; the thirst for domination further embeds itself

in our politics and social systems. To counter this tendency, Benjamin proposes a mystical

mixing of time, where the past and the present momentarily become one. This kind of

historicising does not involve looking back to find out what ‘really happened,’ but rather, “to

seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”39 In imagining this historical

materialist approach to history, he draws on the Paul Klee painting ‘Angelus Novus’:

[The angel’s] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in
front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what
has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before
him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.40

Benjamin’s angel symbolises both the power and fragility of his unique mode of approaching

history. As the angel sees the pile of wreckage, “his wings spread,”41 he gains in visionary

power, only to be violently attacked by the storm of progress, which multiplies the piling of

debris (the violent history of humanity), cutting him off from the revolutionary potential of his

remembrance. It is this conformism to domination to which we are all vulnerable: “In every

era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to

overpower it.”42 At the end of “Theses,” Benjamin links the revolutionary power of history to

the Jewish religious tradition, arguing that while Jews are forbidden from investigating the

future, “the Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance,” emptying “the future of its

38
Benjamin, 249.
39
Benjamin, 247.
40
Benjamin, 249.
41
Benjamin, 249.
42
Benjamin, 247.
 11

magic” – that is, the false hope of progress. However, this does not turn the future into mere

“homogenous, empty time,” as there perpetually remains the possibility of the Messiah

entering.43 For Benjamin, rather than filling ourselves with utopian visions of the future, which

may serve merely to perpetuate our unadulterated love of progress, we need to recover the past

in all its unrealised potential outside of narratives of domination and victory. Through

imaginatively seizing on this potential, we make way for the messianic era – an era which

leaves behind this cycle of oppression and violence which squanders the diversity and creative

potential of the weak and vulnerable, the possibility of positive transformation and change.

One of Benjamin’s closest friends and deepest influences was the historian of Jewish

mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897 – 1982), whose influential ideas about mysticism are

keenly felt in “Theses.”44 Scholem conceptualises mysticism as a fundamentally formless

experience which is then mediated through the tradition to which the mystic belongs (be it

religious or secular),45 revivifying traditional forms that have become deadened through time.

Mysticism thus plays an important role in the community.46 As the mystic attempts to articulate

what is fundamentally inarticulable – outside of language – they reinvent metaphors and

symbols mediated through the tradition to which they belong.47 In doing so, the tradition is

given new life, rescued from an ever-threatening emptiness, through the active and creative

reinterpretation that these symbols invite. However, this can only happen if the mystic tries to

communicate their experience. In the most extreme cases, a mystic may become nihilistic,

giving up on form altogether.48 In these cases, the mystic makes no mark on history. What the

43
Benjamin, 255.
44
A poem of Scholem’s is even quoted as the epigraph to thesis IX. See Benjamin, 249. For a short discussion
on the influence of Scholem on “Theses,” see Elisabeth Young Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
(USA: Yale University Press, 2004), 161-162.
45
Gershom Scholem, “Religious Authority and Mysticism,” in On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969), 16-17.
46
Scholem, 8.
47
Scholem, 8.
48
Scholem, 11.
 12

case of the nihilist mystic reveals is the tenuous relationship between mysticism and the

tradition. Indeed, even in more moderate cases of the so-called nihilistic mystic, the

communication of the mystic risks being seen as heretical. Mysticism itself verges on obscurity,

even if, at the same time, it holds a kind of revolutionary power. In Benjamin’s vision of

redemptive history, we must arrest the images of the past which “flash up in a moment of

danger.” This process is fraught with the ever-present threat of (a false) paradise named

progress – a tradition which enforces a kind of conformity which takes the angel from its

mystical remembrance, throwing off its revolutionary power. To allow the dialectic between

the angel and our tradition to develop, we must remain vigilant to Benjamin’s remembrance of

the horrors of human history, intent on using our perception of the wasted past potential to

build up new form outside of the dominating conceptions which threaten to crush them.

In Frantumaglia, Ferrante herself cites Benjamin in a way that immediately recalls

“Theses”: “I’m not going to talk here about Benjamin’s gaze, the extraordinary gaze of eyeballs

that are pupils in their entire spherical surface, and which therefore see not only before, not

only outside, not the afterward that is in store but the ahead-behind, the inside-outside, the after

in the then-now, without chronological order.”49 Even though Ferrante does not directly refer

to Benjamin’s essay (instead going on to fondly discuss his writings on Berlin), her admiration

for his visionary history is clear. She imbues the philosopher with the mystical insight he gives

the angel. This sight which breaks down chronological time is key to Ferrante’s

characterisation of Lila, whose condition of smarginatura collapses the borders between past

and present, revealing the potential latent within human history that is systematically crushed

by cycles of domination. Moreover, like Benjamin, Lila is represented as having extraordinary

49
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 143.
 13

sight, seeing much further than anyone else – her eyes two fessure (cracks or openings) through

which another order might enter.50

III. The (Communal) Struggle for Meaningful Forms

In Lila’s first intense episode of smarginatura, Rino’s breakage incites a cosmological disgust

of the human form, its fallenness and vulnerability to being overrun by corrupted forces: “How

poorly made we are, she had thought, how insufficient. The broad shoulders, the arms, the legs,

the ears, noses, eyes seemed to her attributes of monstrous beings who had fallen from some

corner of the black sky.”51 But this decidedly negative revelation about humanity’s

vulnerability to dark forces is also suggestive of the capacity of these boundaries to be reshaped

due to the very fragility of the human being. Indeed, part of Lila’s sense of disgust is the way

the way matter and form become so tied together, indistinguishable, even though they are –

metaphysically – separate. The struggle (perhaps impossibility) of untying them is central to

their being perpetuated. However, at the same time as this mixing disgusts, it nourishes the

awareness the ability of these forms to be violated and restructured anew. This helps explain

Lila’s sensation “of moving for a few fractions of a second into a person or a thing or a number

or a syllable, violating its edges.”52 Exposure to violence and evil creates a sense of moral

urgency to build up different forms from the destruction that lies in their wake.

Through her special capacity to grasp the fragility of the human being, Lila develops

the visionary power to reshape and transform that is central to her role in the novel. It is the

motivating force behind her lifelong project to reform the rione, using the past horrors to rise

50
Lila’s eyes are described as fissure many times in all four volumes of MBF. The first time her eyes are referred
to as fissure are particularly telling of their mystical significance. For example, see Ferrante, L’amica geniale,
44: “Gli occhi grandi e vivissimi sapevano diventare fissure dietro cui, prima di ogni risposta brillante, c’era uno
sguardo che pareva non solo poco infantile, ma forse non umano” (in Goldstein’s translation: “Her large, bright
eyes could become cracks behind which, before every brilliant response, there was a gaze that appeared not very
childlike and perhaps not even human,” 48).
51
Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, 90.
52
Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, 90.
 14

above them, which she begins as a teenager.53 Though all these transformations end tragically

in one way or another, overpowered by forces beyond Lila’s control, the potentiality of her

power remains. In Frantumaglia, Ferrante writes: “What counts in the end is the collective

flow of generations. Even when there is both merit and luck, the efforts of a single individual

are unsatisfying.”54 Without the support of the community – and in the end, without Lenù –

Lila cannot save the rione from the storm of domination disguised as progress. When Lenù

returns to the rione some years after Lila’s disappearance, Lila’s powerful personality has faded

from the memory of the people – her name and acts forgotten by history.55

While Ferrante is an avowed atheist, she has an enduring interest in religious

symbology. When asked by the art magazine Frieze if she could only live with one artwork for

the rest of her life, she responded that would choose the folder where she keeps “all the versions

of the Annunciation I’ve ever been able to find.”56 What in the image of angel Gabriel

announcing to Mary that she will be the mother of the Messiah so compels Ferrante? She

explains this surprising choice through her abiding interest “in the way in which the moment

Mary is forced to put aside the book she’s reading has been imagined. When she opens it again,

it will be her son who tells her how to read.”57 Any reader of the French and Italian feminists

that Ferrante cites will immediately identify her interest with their unique conceptualisation of

the mother/child relationship. Luisa Muraro, who, in The Symbolic Order of the Mother (1992),

argues that, to overturn the patriarchal symbolic order, we must return to the mother, the first

person who mediated the world for us.58 Her argument is founded on the premise that the

patriarchal symbolic system, sustained by language and philosophical traditions which refuse

53
Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, 178: “You remember when Stefano and I wanted to start again from the
beginning, to be only beautiful things, the ugliness of before was not supposed to be there anymore.”
54
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 242.
55
Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, 470.
56
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 319-320.
57
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 319-320.
58
Luisa Muraro, The Symbolic Order of the Mother (New York, USA: State University of New York Press,
2018). Ebook.
 15

to take anything as a given, becomes set against, or abstracted from, our immediate experience

and reality with which we first experience the world.59 While the mother, too, cannot mediate

the world in a way that perfectly maps onto it, her power can return us to that state of emerging

meaning. Muraro’s concept of the mother/child dynamic shares deep similarities with

Scholem’s concept of the mystic as returning the community to an immediate reality that

traditional forms have become disconnected from.60 Ferrante’s fascination with the moment of

the Annunciation gives rise to the alternative history of an antipatriarchal symbolic order she

imagines through Lila. While names such as Nunzia (a derivation of the Annunciation) are

common in the South of Italy, it is no coincidence that Ferrante gives it to Lila’s mother. The

special name that Lenù always calls her friend, Lila, a variant of the word for night in both

Hebrew and Arabic,61 references the night of the Annunciation, a meaning which Ferrante

emphasises by her characterisation of Lila herself as dark.62 Ferrante gestures towards an

alternative history of a female messianic figure, someone who can strip down the layers of the

patriarchal system to reveal a more immediate reality. Lila is endowed with the potential to

transform the tradition, teaching her mother how to interpret anew, in a particularly female way

– challenging the tradition of men absorbing women into their teaching. However, this remains

mere potentiality – in the state of a message rather than a fully-formed transformation. Indeed,

Ferrante’s reversal of the mother/daughter roles between Nunzia and Lila, accentuated by

Lila’s naming of her own daughter after her mother, shows the necessity of women’s

engagement with each other – the ongoing reciprocity of meaning exchanges – for this female

59
Luisa Muraro, “Knowing How to Love the Mother as a Sense of Being,” in The Symbolic Order of the Mother.
60
Interestingly, Muraro expresses interest in the mystical tradition for this reason. See Giusi Brega, “Intervista a
Luisa Muraro,” Nea, aprile 2009, pp. 261-263. Muraro states: “si può riassumere nella proposta di una teologia
in lingua materna, che vuol dire fare conto sulla mediazione vivente e non sulle dottrine costruite” (in my
translation: “one can take up the proposal of a theology in a maternal language, that means to count the living
mediation and not the constructed doctrines.”)
61
“The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon.” Accessed November 16, 2022.
https://cal.huc.edu/oneentry.php?lemma=lyly+N&cits=all.
62
Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, 40.
 16

tradition to emerge. While Lila’s power (and perhaps also that of her daughter’s) ends

tragically, Ferrante’s aim is to offer a gesture which reveals how unprepared society is for

breaking with the patriarchal capitalist order.

In smarginatura, Lila reappropriates the distinctly feminine imagery of liquid, eggs,

and menstrual blood to both suggest the special role women may have in overturning the

patriarchal symbolic system as well as a generalised fragility in which we all partake, men and

women alike. The longest description we have of smarginatura comes when Lila is heavily

pregnant with her daughter when the 1980 Irpinia earthquake hits. This time it is not patriarchal

violence that triggers the episode, but a natural event, exposing the innate fragility of human

beings outside of any social system they create. Indeed, however much we may try to control

and dominate, creating forms that seem to secure us from catastrophe, there is nonetheless

always the possibility of breakdown, even for the most powerful, the most “protected.” An

earthquake brings this most clearly into focus because deaths are most likely to come not from

the shaking of the earth itself, but the toppling of buildings – our source of “protection” – which

crush the living subjects beneath them. Lila experiences herself as a kind of “insufficient”

guardian over the fragility of these subjects, unable to protect them from dominant forms which

bring with them destruction:

She whispered that for her it had always been that way, an object lost its edges and
poured into another, into a solution of heterogeneous materials, a merging and mixing.
… She muttered that she mustn’t ever be distracted: if she became distracted real things,
which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand
over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her; she
would be plunged into a sticky, jumbled reality and would never again be able to give
sensations clear outlines… And so if she didn’t stay alert, if she didn’t pay attention to
the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything
off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber….63

As Shpall maintains, Lila’s distinction between the “real things… with their violent, painful

contortions” and the “unreal ones… with their moral solidity” is key to interpreting this

63
Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, 175-176.
 17

complex and important passage. He interprets the “real things” to refer to the patriarchal

structures which “dissolve the moral goodness” of the male characters in the novel and the

unreal things to refer to “the as-yet largely fictitious or underdeveloped antipatriarchal

movements, values, symbolic structures, and modes of self-interpretation that Lila glimpses

through a glass darkly.”64 In Shpall’s interpretation of smarginatura, which concerns female

freedom as a relational activity between women, he argues that “it is only these unreal things

that can give authentic, unsubordinated form to a woman’s personality.”65 This formulation

shares many similarities with my own. However, Scholem and Benjamin’s mystical thought

promotes a slight reformulation. In my view, key to Lila’s distinction here is the way “unreal

forms,” including the patriarchal symbolic system, impose themselves on the real, the formless

essence of her mystical vision, which is fundamentally beyond structures of human meaning.

Her desperation to build up new forms, to make ones that are grounded in an understanding of

the fragility of all human beings, is at the heart of the struggle between the real and the unreal.

As I have been arguing, Lila’s metaphysical revelation in smarginatura concerns the separation

between the material world and social structures, which become indistinguishable from each

other, perpetuating cycles of domination. In this sense, the real does indeed come to be

associated with patriarchy, as Shpall suggests, though Lila’s fundamental struggle is to separate

them to make room for new forms to develop.

For these forms to develop, they require community and collaboration – something

which Lila reaches for in her friendship with Lenù. As she describes her terrifying experience

of smarginatura, Lila begs Lenù to help her avoid falling into the void created by “a solvent

that acts slowly, with a gentle heat, and undoes everything, even when there’s no earthquake.”66

However, Lenù does not interpret Lila’s confession in all its metaphysical and moral

64
Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2),” 120.
65
Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2),” 120.
66
Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, 178.
 18

complexity, but rather as a sign of her personal vulnerability – a vulnerability that makes Lenù

feel strong, proud. Her misinterpretation is worth quoting at length:

But, even now as I pondered the wave of Lila’s distraught words, I felt that in me fear
could not put down roots, and even the lava, the fiery stream of melting matter that I
imagined inside the earthly globe, and the fear it provoked in me, settled in my mind in
orderly sentences, in harmonious images, became a pavement of black stones like the
streets of Naples, a pavement where I was always and no matter what the center… I
would remain firm, I was the needle of the compass that stays fixed while the lead traces
circles around it. Lila on the other hand—it seemed clear to me now, and it made me
proud, it calmed me, touched me…However much she had always dominated all of us
and had imposed and was still imposing a way of being, on pain of her resentment and
her fury, she perceived herself as a liquid and all her efforts were, in the end, directed
only at containing herself. When, in spite of her defensive manipulation of persons and
things, the liquid prevailed, Lila lost Lila, chaos seemed the only truth, and she—so
active, so courageous—erased herself and, terrified, became nothing.67

In the face of Lila’s chaotic and vulnerable but powerful mystical vision, Lenù remains “firm,”

impenetrable, refusing to support, acknowledge, embrace her friend. Lenù’s reduction of Lila’s

deeply felt perception of fragility to a kind of mental illness leads Shpall to claim that their

relationship is a kind of failed entrustment – a claim also made by Ricciardi.68 Entrustment is

a distinctive contribution of Italian feminist thought, which the Milan Women’s Bookstore

Collective – led by Muraro – claims is essential for women’s development and feminist

politics.69 The central idea is that an inferior woman places herself under the tutelage of a

superior woman, allowing her to develop an understanding of herself “outside” of the dominant

culture of patriarchy. On this view, the formation of a feminist perspective is a struggle –

without guarantees, ongoing – that requires women to collaborate to produce it. However, with

her absorption into patriarchal logic, Lenù conceives of strength as necessarily tied to

independence, rejecting collaboration as a necessity for developing new sites of meaning

67
Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, 179.
68
Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2),” 123-127; and Ricciardi, 210.
69
For a discussion of how entrustment plays out in MBF, see Shpall, “Female Freedom and The Neapolitan
Novels (Part 1),” 676-701.
 19

outside of those already developed. Without collaboration, Lila’s reshaping potential goes to

waste, catalysing her disappearance, her rejection of the world.70

While Ferrante has enchanted readers across the globe, some are sceptical about the

literary merits of MBF. Elena Porciani, for example, criticises the overly planned feeling of the

novel, which sometimes lacks the vivid quality we generally associate with great literary

works.71 However, Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar argues that this is precisely Ferrante’s point:

part of her project is to bring us into a sceptical position on the relationship between plot and

life. It is this quality in Ferrante’s writing that “makes her one of today’s most important

novelists; a cutting commentary on our human reliance on plot inheres in her novels.”72 As

Lenù tries to separate herself from Lila, declaring herself strong, solidified, she perpetuates a

sense of artifice in her language, refusing the productive dialectic between Lila’s connection

to the raw life outside of the tradition and Lenù’s tendency towards order.73 The result is that,

while Lila makes her way into Lenù’s prose to an extent (particularly in the descriptions of

smarginatura, we might presume), it never entirely transforms it. At the end of the novel, Lila

becomes like one of Scholem’s nihilist mystics, erased from history, leaving no relic, no mark.

As much as Lenù may desire for Lila to enter her text, rescuing it from its fabrication, her desire

to remain solid – to not fall into the emergency of Lila’s perceptions – blocks her.

IV. The Glimmer of Hope

70
Ferrante compares disappearance to rejecting the dominating forces of the world in Frantumaglia, 327: “The
disappearance of women should be interpreted not only as giving up the fight against the violence of the world
but also as clear rejection. There is an expression in Italian whose double meaning is untranslatable: “Io non ci
sto.” Literally it means: I’m not here, in this place, before what you’re suggesting. In common usage, it means,
instead: I don’t agree, I don’t want to. Rejection means shunning the games of those who crush the weak.”
71
Elena Porciani, "Da Napoli al cliché. Note sull'Amica geniale di Elena Ferrante," Allegoria 73, 174-178.
72
Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar, “Bumping into the Novelistic Scaffolding: Narrative Structure in Elena
Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 13, no. 2 (December 31, 2019), 188.
73
Ricciardi, 45, highlights the powerful restructuring potential of smarginatura, as the antithesis of plot:
“Smarginatura in this light seems to represent the very antithesis of a well-organized story, which is to say an
unstable “form” whose outlines inevitably will dissolve or disintegrate, thus necessitating the asymmetrical,
conflicted, yet ultimately structuring exchange of language between women.”
 20

MBF begins just before the arrival of the Italy’s “economic miracle,” which took off at the end

of the 1950s, around the time of Lila’s first intense episode of smarginatura. While these years

are often considered a time of increased hopes, Ferrante responds that these years “were in

reality very difficult and painful for those who started from a position of disadvantage…

particularly women.”74 Moreover, the results of this economic “progress,” she claims, have

closed off the possibility for the poor to find forms of redemption outside of capitalism or

religion, and increased inequalities overall.75 It is easy to see Benjamin’s “Theses” reflected in

Ferrante’s view here: its image of the horrors of the past swept under the carpet as we invest in

the idea of progress, cutting us off from real redemption. Elsewhere Ferrante claims that the

moral failure of economic progress is particularly evident in Naples, where “progress is always

the progress of the few to the detriment of the many.”76 Indeed, in Ferrante’s Naples, we do

not see these economic gains widely distributed, but rather primarily used by those already at

an advantage from the beginning, such as the Solara brothers, to further their domination.

Moreover, while some – such as Lenù – successfully climb the ladder, they also become dogged

by the individualistic values of the system, its promise of independence and solidity, closing

them off from forms of redemption outside of the patriarchal capitalist system.

However, Ferrante’s Naples is also imbued with the sense of hope we get in Benjamin’s

depictions of the city as porous, a place of improvisation and creativity, embodied most

powerfully by Lila and her smarginatura.77 Blessed with some of the most magnificent natural

beauty alongside its history of violence and domination, civilisations born and then destroyed

by both natural and human disasters, it is the perfect setting for Benjamin’s angel of history.

74
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 376.
75
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 377.
76
Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 242.
77
For a discussion of Lila’s deep relationship to Naples which models itself on Benjamin’s, see Ricciardi, 278-
210. The Benjamin essay on Naples I am referring to is jointed authored with Asja Lacis. See Walter Benjamin,
"Naples" in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff
Book, 1978), 163-173.
 21

At the end of Lila’s life, as she is writing her own history of Naples, it is this dual possibility

that most inspires the work of genius Lenù believes she is writing: “Naples where everything

was marvelous and everything became gray and irrational and everything sparkled again, as

when a cloud passes over the sun and the sun appears to flee, a timid, pale disk, near extinction,

but now look, once the cloud dissolves it’s suddenly dazzling again, so bright you have to

shield your eyes with your hand.”78 This final image gestures towards the hope that comes

through Lila special role, her messianic power to restore from the rubble (the gray and

irrational) the beauty and goodness of the city, gleaming all the while.

Through reappropriating imagery of the female body as passive and porous and applying it

to all beings, men and women alike, Ferrante gestures towards a female symbolic that

challenges capitalist-patriarchal narratives of individual strength and triumph which perpetuate

domination. Smarginatura exemplifies this best, as the raw material of human beings are

revealed as liquid and fragile beneath the constraints and systems governing them. While Lila

is given the potential to reimagine these systems anew, she is ultimately lost, forgotten to

history. Lenù tries to recover her, and does so to an extent, but in the end, we are left with a

void, a sense of artifice in the face of the real. However, in a contradictory manner, this gap

between the confected and the real, or the frame (Lenù) and what is outside of it (Lila) – serves

to intensify our awareness of the poverty of our forms.

Word Count: 6460 (excluding the bibliography and references)

78
Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, 440.
 22

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