I. A Literary-Philosophical Introduction

In Part 1 of this essay, I presented some main elements of the moral psychology of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, and I began to make the case that familiarity with the Collective's difference feminism is useful background for interpreters of The Neapolitan Novels. I was especially concerned to introduce readers to the relation of affidamento, or “entrustment,” and the picture of women's psychology that convinced the Milan Women of this relation's incomparable significance for generating female freedom. Part 2 of the essay advances this general interpretive vision by way of more detailed literary analysis. My focus is on Lila Cerullo's puzzling symbolization and its implications for the ideological framework of the novel. I begin by situating this symbolization within some broader traditions of feminist theory and literary fiction with which Elena Ferrante is more than conversant.

Adriana Cavarero's Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Cavarero Reference Cavarero and Kottman2000)Footnote ¹ is one of the most prominent works of modern feminist philosophy in Italian. Ferrante cites it as a major influence, and Cavarero has recently spoken about these connections (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2016, 330; Pinto, Milkova, and Cavarero Reference Pinto, Milkova and Cavarero2020).Footnote ² In a chapter titled “On the Outskirts of Milan,” Cavarero discusses the thought of the Milan Women by retelling a story that the Collective reported in Sexual Difference. Both the original story and Cavarero's invocation are evocative entry points into this essay's themes.

Here is the tale. In the 1970s, two friends named Emilia and Amalia attend, in Milan, la scuola delle 150 ore. (The “150-hour schools” were founded by the Italian left to provide supplementary education for workers and housewives.) Their story appears in the book as a report from Amalia after the premature death of her friend. Amalia relates that, in the early days of their acquaintance, she had judged Emilia boring. Eventually, however, she comes to see how burdened Emilia is (“My life has always been a no”). A desire to help her, as well as friendly affection, emerges. Amalia is, we learn, a “great storyteller.” The women grow closer, developing a trusting relationship that centers on the project of autobiographical writing. Emilia feels the need to “organise her thoughts” by writing them down; but she cannot seem to do so to her satisfaction. Reading Amalia's writing and appreciating her gifts of expression, Emilia is moved to tears: she too needs to express herself by telling someone about her life, but she isn't able to “connect any of it up, and so she let herself go.” At some point Amalia discovers a solution, which is to write up Emilia's life story herself. “Once I wrote the story of her life, because by then I knew it by heart, and she always carried it in her handbag and read it again and again, overcome by emotion” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 105–6; see also Cavarero Reference Cavarero and Kottman2000, 55–56). The Collective conclude their presentation with a key formulation, which Anglophone readers will know more from Cavarero's discussion (it is her chapter's epigraph) than from Sexual Difference: “The gift of the written story which connects thoughts and saves one from letting herself go is an exquisite image of what we have tried to explain, that is, that in women's struggle, the symbolic revolution—the representation of oneself and of one's fellow women in relation to the world—is fundamental and must come first” (Milan Women Reference Cicogna and Lauretis1990, 106).

The echo of this tale in The Neapolitan Novels goes beyond the alliterative tangling of women's names. Emilia's blockage prefigures that of Elena Greco, and of many other women in the narrative, who in their own ways exhibit the condition that sparked the Collective's theorizing.Footnote ³ But it just as clearly evokes the notion of frantumaglia that Ferrante claims to have inherited from her mother (indeed, from her mother's dialectFootnote ⁴)—a notion she repeatedly uses to characterize women's predicament, and which is widely understood to be the central plank in her work's system of metaphors (Milkova Reference Milkova2021, ch. 2). The frantumaglia is a “jumble of fragments,” a mental “disquiet,” a “mysterious” anguish rooted in the “miscellaneous crowd of things in [a woman's] head, debris in a muddy water of the brain” (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2016, 99–100).Footnote ⁵ This “unstable landscape” disorients in part because it “appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self” (100). A clear thread thus links the disconnected feelings of Emilia with the most foundational (and “slippery” [Milkova Reference Milkova2013, 95]) element in Ferrante's vision of female suffering.Footnote ⁶

The story offers hints of both diagnosis and cure. It is an organizational talent that Emilia recognizes to be necessary: her life feels shapeless, her ideas lack connectedness, and in despair at her unintegrated personality, she “lets herself go.” The Milan Women and Cavarero appear to understand the vital missing link in a similar way. It is the gift of the female storyteller, engaged in a project akin to literary biography: a talented female other “is the only one who can realize such a narration” (Cavarero Reference Cavarero and Kottman2000, 55). The story of Amalia's gift, in other words, links the cure for blockage to entrustment, and entrustment to the practice of storytelling itself. The “symbolic revolution” that is the precondition for female freedom is accomplished via narrative representation of one woman's life by another.Footnote ⁷

There is a curious feature of the idea, given my argument here. A main ambition of the remainder of this essay will be to present Lila as the primary potential entrustee of Ferrante's fictional world. Yet it is Elena Greco who writes Lila's story—as a response to a distinctive and symbolically rich form of letting go, that is, Lila's enigmatic disappearance. These mixed reverberations of the Amalia–Emilia background only add to its interest. Lila is the extraordinary figure whose original authorization gives Elena the confidence to “go ahead.”Footnote ⁸ (In its most succinct materialization: “You're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”) Yet both friends are exceptionally talented women who tell each other's tales in more ways than one. On the surface, Elena's narrative prowess reaches its pinnacle in the novel we are reading, whose aim is, on one charitable conception, to reconstitute the special nature of her friend. Whether this narration ultimately parallels Amalia's generous and liberating intervention depends, however, on the reasons for Elena's storytelling, and on our verdict about the novel's enigmatic conclusion.Footnote ⁹ Lila is, unlike Emilia, an apparently “unwilling and defiant subject of Elena's narration” (Ricciardi Reference Ricciardi2021, 103). Lila's “letting go” is intentional: her desire to eliminate the traces of her existence is a response to the traceless vanishing of her beloved child and the other heartbreaking losses she sustains.Footnote ¹⁰ Below I will try to articulate more precisely the moral character of Elena's largely illicit biography.

The Amalia–Emilia story is a vivid episode in the narrative of Italian feminism. Whether or not Ferrante had it in mind as she conceived The Neapolitan Novels, it does not seem excessively speculative to suggest that the symbolic associations of this scene, and its roots in the work of the Milan Women, were a part of her artistic formation. Something similar may be said about the following ideas, which introduce the motif of smarginatura (or, in the English translation, dissolving margins/dissolving boundaries) and hence the central argument of this part of the essay.Footnote ¹¹

For the purposes of historical framing, I begin the discussion of smarginatura by making two related points. The first concerns the ubiquity of certain metaphors in prevailing conceptualizations of femininity, and the significance, in certain strands of feminist theory, of oppositional traditions of re-symbolization. The second concerns a connection between Ferrante and Elsa Morante that I hope readers will agree is particularly striking.

There is wide agreement that a key desideratum for any interpretation of The Neapolitan Novels is an illuminating view about the import of Lila's dissolving margins. It is also generally accepted that an important aspect of this theme is its continuity with a longstanding conversation in feminist writing about patriarchal symbolizations of women and femininity. Consider this representative passage from Hélène Cixous:

Later we will analyze some examples that illustrate Ferrante's interest in gendered celestial images, as well as her interest in reductive conceptualizations of women as passive reproductive “vessels.” And no reader can forget the imprint of the “masculine footstep” on the lives of her two protagonists—particularly on the life of Lila Cerullo, who reconceives a man's shoe only to be stepped on more painfully.Footnote ¹² However, it is the association of women with the lack of form or integrity that seem to me most essentially engaged by smarginatura and related metaphors (see Wehling-Giorgi Reference Wehling-Giorgi2017, 11 and Reference Wehling-Giorgi2019, 74).Footnote ¹³ Further explicating these connections is one aim of what follows.Footnote ¹⁴

I will now note an Italian literary precedent that is especially significant for my account of dissolving margins. I am referring to a pattern of symbolization in the novels of Elsa Morante. It is particularly evidentFootnote ¹⁵ in her most famous work, La Storia (History: A Novel), whose protagonist Ida Mancuso suffers, in childhood, from a mysterious “unnamed” disease:

The description that follows appears to indicate that Ida is suffering from epileptic seizures. But after a subsequent medical investigation, she is pronounced entirely healthy. Her attacks are merely “temporary manifestations of precocious hysteria”; as the doctor predicts, they disappear as Ida ages (31).

Yet this is not the end of the story. Much later in the novel, the attacks are reborn in her son Useppe. Again, a physician declares that there is no “organic ailment” (446). Unlike Ida's childhood fits, however, Useppe's recur with increasing potency. These “grand mal” (619) attacks afflict the boy mercilessly, and eventually kill him. The death of Useppe—the hero of the book, a “poet of joy and innocence”—cements the tragedy of History.Footnote ¹⁶

I want to emphasize one aspect of Useppe's grand mal, critical for an understanding of Morante's work. The apparently physical condition is more fundamentally a marker of Useppe's accurate and indeed visionary moral perception. It represents his personification of goodness (moral innocence, contact with beauty, hopefulness)—and his congenital allergy to the horrors of war, fascism, anti-Semitism, and poverty, horrors that pervade his short life and, it might well be contended, cause his death.Footnote ¹⁷ As Lily Tuck says: “The tragedy of war is the actual protagonist of Elsa Morante's novel; it is the grand mal from which Useppe suffers and which affects us all” (Tuck Reference Tuck2008, 194). In sum, the distinctive “disease” of History's hero is in fact a symbol of his heroism.

The same can be said about Lila Cerullo's condition. The heroine of The Neapolitan Novels is a poet of creative destruction. Her smarginatura is in some sense a physiological malady. But it is more fundamentally an expression of her exceptional perceptiveness and strength.Footnote ¹⁸

II. Lila and Dissolving Margins

One worry about the analysis initiated in Part 1 of this work is that it may overstate the parallels between the Elena–Lila relationship and the entrustment relationship as outlined by the Milan Women. I will now attempt to more fully vindicate this connection. First, I systematize the many ways in which Lila is presented as unique—coded as a kind of archetype (or goddess-demon) of female excellence, with powers to remake dominant structures of symbolization and, as a result, individual psychologies. Next, I present a general puzzle about the symbolic content of her perplexing condition of dissolving boundaries, and a suggested resolution. Finally, I offer an extended interpretation of the earthquake speech—among the most interpretively challenging of Lila's many mysterious acts of communication. My interpretation clarifies some of the more subterranean meanings of dissolving margins, integrates these meanings into an overall conception of the work's aims, and solidifies the relevance of the preceding discussion of the Collective's moral psychology.

Various considerations can be offered in support of my claim that Lila is a singular figure in the eyes of Elena, and in the world of the novel, a figure with an intellectual-creative potential characteristic of the brilliant woman entrustee. One theme I discussed in some detail in Part 1: the powerful and permanent inferiority complex of the narrator, with its at times monomaniacal focus on Lila's uncharacterizable greatness. Another I have mentioned in passing: the resume of Lila's extraordinarily varied and unlikely accomplishments, as precocious student, child author, shoemaker, autodidact, artist, political organizer, tech entrepreneur, and historian of Naples. But these facts are obvious. What may be more useful is to recall some of the ways she is described, which are individually notable in the course of reading, yet seldom reproduced in their resounding totality. Here are some key examples, in the order they appear:

Lila is terrible and dazzling (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, I, 47); she has a dart, a hiss, a lethal bite (I, 48); her thoughts are brilliant, and her gaze is not very childlike or even very human (I, 48); she is a holy warrior (I, 52); a demanding ghost (I, 97); part child, part old woman (I, 118); possessed of a seductive, dangerous essence (I, 143); like a woman born from the head of Zeus (I, 227)Footnote ¹⁹; a disrupter, who throws things out of balance (I, 238); a falcon, with extraordinary powers of vision (I, 259); the neighborhood's incarnation of evil (I, 284); a witch of dark arts (I, 291); a good fairy (I, 292); home to an evil force, a poison that murders potential children inside her (Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, II, 85); capable of seeing the invisible, and of helping others to see it (II, 119); the Devil assuming the figure of a woman (II, 140); a witch-whore (II, 142); an unparalleled commander and inventor (II, 142); a star that might explode, leading everyone to try to grab a fragment (II, 151); a good devil, whose beauty makes men fearful of castration (II, 286); singularly unpredictable (II, 315); too brave, incapable of submitting to reality (Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, III, 36); made badly, especially when it comes to sex (III, 36); someone with the mind that no woman or man has, and the power to change shit into gold (III, 168); an eel who hasn't realized her limitations because she hasn't submitted to a man (III, 168); powerful in a way that makes you want to submit to her, go down on your knees, admit inferiority (III, 210); equipped with an organ for listening that nobody else has (III, 212); ungovernable (Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, IV, 126); a holy warrior who bathes the neighborhood in an avenging light, crushing the demonic camorrists, gaining strength from pregnancy (IV, 153); capable of governing the imagination of others, or setting it free, with just a few words (IV, 169); pursued by a legion of demons (IV, 181); a wielder of magical powers (IV, 210); the highest example of female intelligence (IV, 236); possessor of a mysterious substance, an energy that comforts, reinforces a purpose, solves problems (IV, 270); worse than the Solaras (IV, 350); a woman with a sort of farsightedness that strikes a creative spark in others (IV, 371); a prisoner inside the inferno of her unsatisfied mind (IV, 395); someone with an intelligence that's gratuitous, irreducible to any purpose or use (IV, 403); a prophetic seer of the future (IV, 444).

These descriptions confirm that Lila is consistently portrayed in a number of strange and seemingly contradictory ways. Here is a systematization. On the one hand, she is characterized as a formidable genius whose spirit is a beacon of liberation. On the other hand, she is represented as an evil force, a troublemaking agent whose darkness has a mystical cast.Footnote ²⁰ The natural resolution of this prima facie tension was intimated in Part 1. Those complicit with patriarchal structures and symbol systems interpret Lila's power demonically. They are right in attributing to her a special character, that is, and wrong in their evaluation of it.Footnote ²¹

Michele Solara's “tortured but chaste attachment” (Ricciardi Reference Ricciardi2021, 56) is emblematic. As Lila notes, his obsession with her is “like a superstition,” grounded not in sexual attraction but in the perception that she has incomparably productive powers (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, III, 167). By way of several dramatic monologues, the Camorrist paints his own revealing picture of Lila's gifts. In the speech he gives at Bruno Soccavo's factory, for instance, he offers this rapturous assessment: “she'll change shit into gold for you, she's capable of reorganizing this whole enterprise, taking it to levels you can't even imagine. Why? Because she has the type of mind that normally no woman has but also that not even we men have” (III, 168).

Though he recognizes Lila's greatness, Michele can only reach for objectifying and distorting capitalist metaphors in his attempts to express it. Similarly, his thesis about Lila's sexual difference seems reverential, but quickly transitions to a sexist lament about her insubordination. Lila is, according to Michele, an “eel”—slippery, serpentine, and devilish—who doesn't know her limits. Why? Because, he says, she's never submitted to a man.

The density of expression is even more remarkable in Michele's speech about women and the family:

We can recognize in Michele's worship of Carmela Solara the flip-side of the Milan Women's concerns about patriarchy's obliteration of the mother.Footnote ²² We may also find his insight into Elena's competitiveness insightful—though it is a manipulative and mean-spirited provocation, as he is rubbing salt in the wounds of the young writer's turbulent homecoming. But the core insight for the argument I'm advancing concerns Michele's vaguely theological interpretation of Lila's mental vivacity, and the reflexively dominating posture of his response to it.

It is no surprise, in other words, that one of the work's chief representatives of patriarchal capitalist oppression conceives of Lila's greatness in terms of an elusive, nonrational “aspect,” an untraceable feminine vital energy. It is likewise predictable that Michele's recognition of Lila's power is accompanied by a rapacious desire to possess it; and that he sees no difficulty in analogizing the possession of another person's mind to the possession of a precious gemstone. The appropriative impulse here epitomized by Michele is a ubiquitous marker of masculinized social-symbolic structures in The Neapolitan Novels. Lila's rebelliousness must be seen as targeting not only the material dominance of oppressive systems like Michele's—which she eventually dissolves in a number of ways, as we will see—but also, and more fundamentally, the psychology of appropriation that sustains them.Footnote ²³

Readers will remember another example of a similar psychic phenomenon. I am referring to Nino's alarming and initially perplexing assertion to Lenù about Lila's makeup: “Lina is brave, even too brave. But she doesn't know how to submit to reality, she's incapable of accepting others and herself . . . she's really made badly: in her mind and in everything, even when it comes to sex” (III, 36). We later learn that to be “made badly” when it comes to sex is, in the first instance, to derive insufficient pleasure from male penetration (III, 375). So the statement encodes multiple insights about Nino's sexism. It is a crude and cold dismissal of his former lover and friend, to her closest friend; a confirmation of Nino's anxious and vindictive masculinity; and a portent of manipulativeness in his dealings with Elena, whom he is here beginning to seduce by preying on her longstanding Lila-insecurity.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, it is an expression whose ambiguity encapsulates two levels of oppressive ideology. Lila is “made badly . . . when it comes to sex” both in the sense that she is uninterested in submitting to the expected sexual regime of penetrative intercourse, and in the sense that she is unwilling to submit to the expectations of her sex-based social roles.

The centrality of this passage supports the claim that Lila is systematically villainized by representatives of patriarchy, who are motivated by an overwhelming desire to possess her—and, failing that, to subordinate her, neutralizing her peculiarly threatening power.Footnote ²⁵ The narrative introduces these dynamics quite early. As Lila reaches puberty, Elena remarks on her friend's “seductive and dangerous essence” (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, I, 143) and proceeds to narrate two events incited by possessive male desire. The first is the pizza shop incident, in which a “professorial” man in his fifties declares, in front of his own wife and children, that “you have here a girl who will become more beautiful than a Botticelli Venus” (I, 146). His inability to keep this appraisal to himself leads to a violent confrontation with Rino, which further inscribes the scene's “patriarchal optics” (Milkova Reference Milkova2021, 109). The second event is Gigliola's name-day party, which is ruined when “four males, of various ages, each convinced in a different way of his own absolute power, reached out toward the figure of a fourteen-year-old girl” (I, 149–50). Significantly, it is Stefano, Marcello, Enzo, and Pasquale who here try to dance with Lila—and who will continue to treat her as, in her words, “merchandise to barter” (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, II, 112). The episode ends in tears and promises of future violence.

In short, it is fundamental to the complex magnetism of the fictional character of Lila Cerullo, and hence to the staggering popularity of The Neapolitan Novels, that Lila is perceived within the world of the novel as a powerful force with incommensurably valuable and specifically feminine capacities.Footnote ²⁶ But another feature of Lila's psychology deepens and complicates this story. The condition of smarginatura is for her a lifelong affliction. Most immediately, it is characterized by episodes of frightening dissociation in which the borders of people and objects appear to break or become undone. However, the ease of this phenomenological characterization can obscure the thorough yet confusing ways in which “dissolving margins” is positioned at the symbolic core of the novel.Footnote ²⁷

For example, although Lila both observes and experiences the condition throughout her life, we learn in the passage to be discussed below that it is a secret burden, communicated for the first time only (to Elena) in 1980. This detail is easily forgotten. We read about dissolving margins in very early stages of the work, both because Elena is writing the novel late in her life and, significantly, because she has long known about the condition as a result of her invasive examination of Lila's notebooks.Footnote ²⁸ It must be emphasized that the narrator's descriptions of Lila's experiences, and pathologizing of her mind, are infused by a secret knowledge obtained only through a blatant violation of trust—a violation that functions as microcosm for the one Elena commits by writing The Neapolitan Novels.Footnote ²⁹

Further, Lila's dissociative episodes constitute only a handful of the many events in the narrative described with related language. The named instances of dissolving margins appear, in other words, thematically continuous with many other significant events and processes. For example: Elena's childhood “tactile dysfunction,” an “enduring malaise” grounded in fears about the distension of bodies, especially her own (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, I, 57)Footnote ³⁰; Melina's dissociative “attacks of madness,” which Lila witnesses with great perturbation (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, II, 96); the “immolat[ion]” of the “tense, aggressive” Lila as she “disappear[s]” into her role as Stefano's trophy wife (I, 265)—“Cerullo goes toward Caracci, falls into it, is sucked up by it, is dissolved in it” (II, 124); Stefano's transformation during their honeymoon into an “unrecognizable being” and unrepentant rapist (“something in and around him had broken,” “the father was cracking his skin, changing his gaze, exploding out of his body”) (II, 37, 41); Elena's overshadowing by Lila, characterized as a struggle to “restore clear outlines and depth” to her own life (II, 467); the narrator's self-deceptive enthusiasm about her romantic liberation with Nino, which finds expression in the claim that “Something great is happening that will dissolve the old way of living entirely and I'm part of that dissolution” (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, III, 418); and Nino's metamorphosis into a more political version of the exploitative father he detests (“The fascists . . . aren't always wrong and we should learn to talk to each other”) (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, IV, 228). I discuss the more initially confounding example of Alfonso's identity transformation below.

Similarly, Lila's smarginatura is systematically related to other organizing symbols, making it hard to believe that dissolving margins is significant primarily as an isolated mental disorder. Consider these motifs: disappearing; crossing boundaries; being reduced. Consider these recurring images: liquids and solids; the moon and the sea; the magma of Vesuvius. Consider these objects, whose meanings are sources of intrigue: the exploding copper pot; the reinvented shoes; the doctored photograph in the Solara shoe shop; the erroneously labeled photograph of Elena and Tina in the newspaper. Finally, consider the evident connections between smarginatura and frantumaglia, which as I noted above sits at the core of Ferrante's conception of femininity and her overall artistic vision.Footnote ³¹

It seems undeniable that an analysis of dissolving margins is critical to an analysis of the work as a whole.Footnote ³² What is this secret, oddly characterized, intensely disruptive condition? What meanings does it express? How do these meanings relate to the overall ambitions of the work? The symbolic content of smarginatura presents a tantalizing puzzle for interpreters. Many readers liken Lila's episodes to panic attacks, with which they share some features.Footnote ³³ But to characterize the condition of dissolving boundaries as an anxiety disorder is to dismiss the puzzle rather than solve it. Some critics suggest that the condition represents the porousness of the borders of personality (see Bakopoulos Reference Bakopoulos2016; Lee Reference Lee2016), or, relatedly, Lila's quasi-religious access to facts about the social constitution of the self.Footnote ³⁴ There is something accurate about these ideas, but they must be developed in greater detail if they are to explain the rich significance of this network of symbols.

Above I began to articulate some links between smarginatura and various well-known images from twentieth-century feminist thought. In order to be made compelling, these ideas about Ferrante's preoccupations must be integrated into a more comprehensive reading of her work. In particular, any interpretation of Lila's condition should make it consonant with, and explanatory of, her unique status in the world of the fiction. I will now argue more directly that dissolving boundaries should be principally understood not as a disorder or curse, but as an expression of Lila's visionary abilities. In its most extreme episodes, it involves access to shadowy truths about the foundations of social-symbolic composition. It involves a unique capacity to grasp the instability of personality, and the concomitant precarity of social life—a precarity particularly evident in the violent transformation of persons that's accomplished by the process of masculinization. It involves, most remarkably, an ability to manipulate and remake persons via mysterious acts of female (that is, subversive) will. That Lila's condition is experienced and presented as a kind of metaphysical affliction is in fact positive evidence for this interpretation. It is consistent with her overall representation as a “good devil”—a prophet of liberation to sympathizers, a master of dark arts to opponents—and a foreseeable consequence of the burdens she faces as a “farsighted” “holy warrior.”

III. The Earthquake Speech

The earthquake speech is arguably Lila's most vulnerable and revelatory act of communication in The Neapolitan Novels.Footnote ³⁵ It assumes particular significance when we recall that the work is devoted to capturing her purportedly indefinable essence.Footnote ³⁶ Not coincidentally, the speech centers specifically on the phenomenon of dissolving boundaries.Footnote ³⁷ The passage in which it is transmitted is noteworthy for other reasons. Especially important are the complexities of the narrator's response. In this section, I give a close reading that illustrates the main elements of my interpretation. Here is the first key passage:

Several pieces of information come to us at the outset of this sequence. Lila names her condition, and speaks of it for the first time, only in a moment of terror, prompted by the shaking, cracking disruption of a massive earthquake. We take her confiding in Elena to be significant, and this is confirmed by her reversal of a physical gesture that early in the narrative represented her courage and guiding strength as the girls knocked on Don Achille's door to demand the return of their dolls.Footnote ³⁸ Lila wants to speak. But she also craves, in an unusually vulnerable way, to be understood, supported, and protected. The earthquake speech records an inversion in the typical (though not invariable) psychic dynamics of the friendship.

The passage introduces an intriguing image. In explaining the feeling of the episodes of dissolving, Lila says that the outlines of people and things are delicate, that they break like “cotton thread.”Footnote ³⁹ The cotton thread evokes feminine domestication, but also the power of feminine narration.Footnote ⁴⁰ Its rupture in Lila's episodes signals the breakdown of the outlines of objects and especially personalities, which is unsurprisingly experienced as alienating. The image thus links dissolving margins to some of Ferrante's most intriguing and uninhibited descriptions of her literary project—for example, as an exploration of the painful attempts of “daughter-dressmakers” to dissolve the shape of their mothers.Footnote ⁴¹

The speech continues with the most challenging sentence in the entire work: “She muttered that she mustn't ever become 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.” I remain perplexed by this passage but will offer a tentative proposal. The real things, which are violent and painful and terrifying, must be related to patriarchy, the (very real) sexist formation of persons and relationships and institutions.Footnote ⁴² The real things cause dissolving margins—both in the sense of dissolving the moral goodness of people like Stefano and Rino, and in the sense of causing Lila's dissociative episodes, which are ultimately related to her special vision into patriarchy's evils. So the unreal things, which fight against the real ones, must be antipatriarchal.

These unreal things pacify Lila with their physical and moral solidity, their resistance to physical and psychological oppression. But she must be vigilant: the power of the unreal things depends on her focus; if she becomes distracted, the real things will dominate, and she will lose the ability to define herself. What then are these unreal things? The as-yet largely fictitious or underdeveloped antipatriarchal movements, values, symbolic structures, and modes of self-interpretation that Lila glimpses through a glass darkly. In other words, it is communion with the unreal things that comprises Lila's peculiarly heroic substance: her “plus” or “something more”; her vigilant resistance, her avenging light, her unwillingness to submit; her contact with the female symbolic. It is only these unreal things that can give authentic, unsubordinated form to a woman's personality.

Though my overall reading does not depend on the controversial claims of the preceding two paragraphs, which concern only one difficult sentence (a sentence that has received little or no critical attention), it is worth highlighting how the final line of the above quotation supports the analysis. If the real things gain the upper hand, Lila says, everything will be washed away—in a “flood” of oppressive femininity. Smarginatura is here associated with the misogynistic conceptualization of the feminine as liquid, as lacking form and substantiality, oozing uncontrollably, melting into watery hysteria.Footnote ⁴³ But Lila's fear is additionally linked to the more specific elimination of women into their procreative capacity, in the images of menstrual blood, cancerous polyps on the reproductive organs, and pieces of yellowish fiber, perhaps from the mucus plug. (“Motherhood seems to me precisely one of those experiences which are ours alone and whose literary truth has yet to be explored” [Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2016, 347]). That the fear is appropriate could not be doubted by anyone familiar with the events of the narrative so far. The fear is also farsighted. Lila is pregnant with Tina, who will vanish without a trace in a moment of parental distraction. In fact, Lila's “premonition of her daughter's disappearance” (Ricciardi Reference Ricciardi2021, 136) long predates her speech. When she is having an affair with Nino, she writes in her notebooks of the “sensation of imminent death” (see note 41) and a nightmare of “crossing the stradone just as a truck was coming” and being hit and “dragged away.”Footnote ⁴⁴

As she continues speaking, Lila moves to a kind of embryonic self-diagnosis in which she discards her former view that dissolving margins is an episodic condition:

Her episodes are not merely “bad moments,” and this is not a “childhood illness.” More generally, dissolving is not only a feature of Lila's subjective phenomenology. In vocalizing her evolving understanding, Lila recalls two foundational experiences. An evaluation of them supports these conclusions.

The first episode is the frightening denouement of the New Year's Eve party, where she observes the adolescent Rino beginning to dissolve. The boy who was once a loving and supportive brother begins to transform before her eyes—into a violent copycat of the Solaras who seems destined to harm her. (“It is in fact the male body that displays the first symptoms of dissolving boundaries” [de Rogatis Reference de Rogatis2019, 205]). Lila's repulsion is insightful. Rino's incorporation into the misogynistic and crony-capitalist order of the Camorra will eventuate in horror for Lila, her family, and Rino himself. The second experience is of an evening conversation at Maronti beach on the island of Ischia. Nino and Elena are extolling the beauty of the sky, indulging in the exuberance of adolescent romanticism. But though Lila is in love with Nino, and in some sense happy, she is incapable of aping these common sentiments. Again, her disorientation and estrangement are perceptive. She inchoately grasps the rottenness of heterosexual romantic love for women and cannot be complicit in its adoring symbolization. She is transfixed not by the beauty of the heavens, but by the rotten smell of victimized “egg stars”: women whose light and generative potential is appropriated and spoiled.Footnote ⁴⁵ In both cases, the content of Lila's alarming perceptual experiences encodes an unusual prescience, distinguishing her from everyone else in a way that highlights her symbolic role—as a kind of otherworldly rebel against prevailing norms and the ideas and associations that sustain them.

After recalling these memories, Lila moves to a more startling, mystifying confession:

This passage again repudiates illness-centered interpretations of her condition. It again demonstrates why it is misleading to say that the phenomenon is primarily something that happens to Lila. It again reveals why it is more accurate to say that dissolving is a feature of reality about which Lila has special observational powers. And, more extraordinary, it suggests that Lila is herself a dissolver of boundaries. Indeed, she is so actively and powerfully disposed that she can't help doing it. The “disquiet” of her mind makes it inevitable that she will continually reinvent, uncover, break, dissolve the world around her—and its inhabitants.Footnote ⁴⁶

I pause to summarize one main conclusion of the argument so far. In giving shape to this special aspect of Lila, Ferrante employs interconnected metaphors that are staples of patriarchal symbolization, metaphors that express, in normal contexts, damaging associations of femininity with insubstantiality, hypersensitivity, liquidity, passivity, the lack of integrity and authority.Footnote ⁴⁷ But she reinvents Lila's condition as a powerful mode of imagination and narrative agency. The connection between this reconstructive account of smarginatura and the larger themes we have been pursuing is a virtue of the present interpretation.

As she recounts two important examples of her ability as dissolver, Lila mixes them together in a way that can be deceiving. We should bear in mind that these examples leave very different emotional residues.Footnote ⁴⁸ First, she notes that Alfonso has always seemed to her in danger of losing his form. Alfonso's official personality has concealed a repressed sexuality and/or gender identity whose nature Lila has long intuited. What Lila does not mention is that Alfonso credits her with the acceptance and development of his authentic being, with his evolution into an integrated person. His characterization of Lila's influence: she “forced” him to “take a little of her,” they got “mixed up,” and this allowed him to become who he is.Footnote ⁴⁹ Alfonso's descriptions of his liberation, and his evident reverence, reinforce the positioning of Lila as a borderline religious figure, a secular priestess whose experiments in dissolution and reconstitution call to mind transubstantiation as much as the Collective's hypotheses about the circulation of the female plus. As Elena says after Alfonso dies, “She must have looked at him as at a mirror and seen herself in him and had wanted to draw out of his body a part of herself” (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, IV, 305).Footnote ⁵⁰

Second, Lila refers to the creative destruction she has unleashed on Michele Solara, who now “runs after the shadow of [Lila's] shadow” (IV, 167). The arch-macho mob boss is carrying on a secret affair with Alfonso, which endangers his reputation and the security of the Solara organization. Her “tangling” with Alfonso becomes, in other words, part of Lila's strategy to humiliate and weaken the Camorra. Sadly, she is right to feel anxious about this potent use of her powers. Alfonso's brutalization at the hands of the Solaras is a catastrophic blow to Lila and her lifelong rebellion. It should be seen as part and parcel of the annihilation of her progeny which completes the tragedy of her life.Footnote ⁵¹ The monologue concludes with a sequence of self-deprecation and a plea for help:

Lila's self-criticism contains hyperbolic inaccuracies. She claims to be incapable of keeping friendship alive—in speaking to her intimate friend of several decades, who venerates her even when hating her and wishing her dead. She claims to know of her own moral depravity, agreeing with the old rebukes of Maestra Oliviero, a teacher and would-be mentor who treats the adolescent Lila with despicable resentment and immaturity.Footnote ⁵² She claims that Elena is full of “patience,” notwithstanding her habit of abandoning Lila for months and even years at a time, often for reasons that are at best questionable, and at worst vindictive and self-deceptive. There are a few moments of weakness in which the heroine of The Neapolitan Novels succumbs to the unflattering interpretations of others, particularly other women. The earthquake speech is one of these moments. Especially illustrative here is the (surely misguided) idea that Lila cannot “solidify” herself around any goodwill. The formulation appropriates both content and imagery from her critics.Footnote ⁵³ As I will now show, various features of the narrator's complicit response support this line of thought.

IV. Elena Greco

Lila's failures of insight indicate her extreme distress and uncharacteristic fragility in the earthquake's aftermath. But they also underscore the significance of her supplication. On a handful of occasions, Lila turns to Lenù for a kind of support nobody else can provide.Footnote ⁵⁴ In these moments the hierarchy between them appears to reverse. Since I think it is useful to understand the end of Lila's speech as a kind of forthright entrustment plea, I find it interesting to wonder about the possibility of reciprocal entrustment, especially in relations of friendship between talented contemporaries. This possibility is critical for any fuller elaboration and critical evaluation of the Milan Women's ideas.Footnote ⁵⁵

Setting that issue to the side, it is pivotal for an interpretation of the women's friendship, and thus the Quartet as a whole, to understand the impact of Lila's plea on the psychology of the narrator. Here is the heart of Elena's response:

This coda is one of the saddest passages in a constantly devastating book. In explaining how it crystallizes Elena's moral stagnation, I will tie up several threads of the preceding discussion.

I have argued that Lila's earthquake speech is a moment of unsurpassed thematic significance. Nevertheless, the narrator's reaction is just as important, and much easier to ignore. It is distinguished by self-absorption that produces deeply distorted vision. One sentiment overpowers all others: Lenù is proud. The object of her pride is not the special power of her friend. It is not the strength that the burden of this special power has required from her. It is not even the fact that she, Elena Greco, is the lone recipient of this remarkable woman's trust. Her pride's object is herself. The distortions of pride are evident in moral misapprehension—and in the flimsy mental transitions that result from it. For Elena, the episode's main takeaway is an unjustified conclusion about her own superiority as an autonomous subject.Footnote ⁵⁶

The narrator's effusive use of symbols confirms this depressing conclusion. Two facts are especially salient. First, Elena begins with a flowery description of an existential fear that seems plucked from a far less accomplished novel than the one she is composing (“the fiery stream of melting matter that I imagined inside the earthly globe”). In fact, she is unconsciously plagiarizing Lila's more memorable use of this Vesuvian imagery in a cutting putdown—a putdown whose formulation seems, in retrospect, a poem of foretelling. In response to Elena's boasting about her classical high school, which she couches as a theoretical worry about theology class and the definition of the Holy Spirit, Lila launches into her most extended and adversarial oration of volume I:

There is irony in the impotence of this literary thievery. The moral shortcomings of Elena's competitive narcissism are exposed by her inadvertent and self-undermining reliance on Lila's gifts.

Second, the narrator crams her response with masculine-coded metaphors of subjectivity and strength, applied fawningly to her own person. She is “orderly” and “harmonious”; she is the “center” of a “pavement of black stones” that resembles the streets of Naples (described by Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2016, 220 as a “male city”); she gives herself “weight,” whether or not anyone helps her to do it; she is “firm,” like the stable “needle of the compass,” whereas Lila is merely “a liquid” who struggles to “feel stable,” who must devote “all her efforts” to the project of “containing herself.” Elsewhere Elena says that “no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it” (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, III, 281). Alas, in spite of this general feminist consciousness, Lenù fails to appreciate how internalized misogyny imbues her reaction to Lila's confession and her retrospective analysis of Lila's condition.Footnote ⁵⁷

Setting aside my claim that we are here observing Elena's distressing complicity with oppressive systems of symbolization, her final conclusion is a remarkable non sequitur. Elena's enduring anxieties and feelings of blockage are conditioned by her psychologically primal contact with the exceptional powers and achievements of her friend. If all of Lila's efforts were devoted to the project of containing herself, then our narrator's lifelong inferiority complex could have no object.Footnote ⁵⁸

The narrative presents a fantasy of self-realization that is rooted in self-deception. It is destined to be short-lived. Lenù's tranquil confidence and self-esteem depend not on a recognition of her own independent virtues—substantial, unique, and varied—but on an obscure sort of triumph over her closest friend, whose status as unparalleled female agent has just been, unbeknownst to our narrator (or at least to her conscious narrating self) definitively confirmed. The illusion of overcoming is undermined by her exhibitionistic expressions and flimsy flights of reasoning, exemplifying a principal arc of the narrative, which is the arc of Elena Greco's unhappiness. One of the main aims of The Neapolitan Novels is to show us a brilliant woman, bursting with potential, who (with a bit of luck and help from her friend(s)) exceeds all expectations—but is nonetheless corrupted by her desire to be the best. Elena's anxieties about inferiority will return. Her amazing successes, her fame, her crossing of boundaries will do little to dispel her bitterness. She will end up in bourgeois solitude, consumed by doubts about life's meaning, ambivalent about her relationships, longing for Lila to reappear.Footnote ⁵⁹

The psychic trajectory of the narrator can be seen as the culmination of the ideas about female freedom that I have been pursuing. In relating The Neapolitan Novels to the work of the Milan Women, I have focused primarily on the puzzle of Lila's special status and her related condition of dissolving margins. But the evolution of Elena Greco is just as richly suggestive. The narrator never makes peace with Lila's brilliance, though she always depends on it. This is the crux of her struggle.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is also the core of a stimulating extension of the model of female relationships proposed by the Collective, in which the confrontation with female excellence is both the source of female freedom and a chief obstacle in its path. Ferrante may have something like this in mind when she says that “the drive toward equality has put us in a competition with men but also with each other, multiplying the ferocity of [our] relations” and that “competition between women is good only if it does not prevail” (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2016, 222 and 359).

I conclude this essay with a lingering question, whose answer completes my interpretive argument about Elena Greco's ambiguous development. The question: Is Lila's own competitiveness morally akin to the narrator's? As an adult she refuses to read Elena's writing, dismissing its importance; on the rare occasions that Lila does engage with Elena's mature work, she subjects it to searing criticism. Many readers see this as an uncharitable expression of resentment at Elena's opportunities and achievements. Lila does have a longstanding sourness that makes up part of her response to Elena's literary efforts.Footnote ⁶¹ She is, more generally, disposed to reactive emotional brutality. Yet an additional fact is relevant to her perspective on Elena's work. Her criticism expresses an anguished disappointment with Elena's literary career, a career that is grounded in steadily accelerating tendencies of artistic objectification.

The pinnacle is the story of the narrator's story On Friendship. Elena publishes this work in 2007, toward the end of the novel's events. Again, it contravenes a promise not to write, but this time in the starkest way: it describes Tina's disappearance in detail, with an “exaggerated” depiction of Lila and Elena's childhood loss of the dolls (their “pretend daughters”) that is intended to “accentuat[e] the trauma of the loss” of Lila's “real daughter” (Ferrante Reference Ferrante and Goldstein2012–2015, IV, 465). Here is an essential report:

In using loved ones and their stories as a means to fame and self-esteem, Elena reveals a further complicity with the oppressive forces she has ostensibly joined Lila in fighting. Lila is characterized by the gratuitousness of her intelligenceFootnote ⁶²—that is, by her refusal to submit her intellectual-creative gifts to any debasing use—and by her social-symbolic project of loving reconstitution, her holy war for the soul of the neighborhood (and its children, women, workers, and gender-bending men). Elena appears increasingly defined in opposition, as an instrumentalizer whose brilliance is channeled as a self-centered tool of flight.Footnote ⁶³ The tragedy of the tetralogy has many faces, but the appropriative literary gaze of Elena Greco is one of its most unsettling.Footnote ⁶⁴

Having revealed these facts at the end of her narrative, Elena begins her epilogue with a verdict on the work she is finishing. Her reflections concern two subjects: Lila Cerullo, and the accomplishments of Elena Greco.

Readers must judge the veracity of such claims to independence, and by extension the measure of Elena Ferrante's distance from Elena Greco. They are not without hints.Footnote ⁶⁵

The epic narrative of The Neapolitan Novels seems as if it will end with this detached opining about authorship. Then Lila inserts herself, producing an enigmatic coda of her own devising. The sending of the dolls is a rich and compelling bookend whose meanings I cannot adequately characterize here.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, we can be confident that in this reappearance, Lila reasserts her claim to being, like her childhood novel The Blue Fairy, the “secret heart,” the animating spirit, of Elena's literary work. Ferrante herself suggests this interpretation. Asked about her sympathies, she says: “I love Lila a lot; that is, I love the way in which Elena tells her story and the way in which Lila tells her own story through her friend.”Footnote ⁶⁷