Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels begin with a promise. Similar to many of the promises made to the two protagonists, Lenù Greco and Lila Cerullo, this promise is broken. The promise is twofold. The first that Lenù tacitly observes: “right away, from the first day, school had seemed to me a much nicer place than home. It was the place in the neighborhood where I felt safest, I went there with excitement.” [1] Lenù explains how school is a site for pleasure, where pleasing her teachers eventually results in personal satisfaction (MBF 44). Therefore, the first promise is that education might be entirely separate and an escape from the rione, the Italian word for neighborhood, and the violent backdrop of Naples, Italy. The novels explore the effects of the Italian mafia on commerce, relationships, and even who the girls might marry. The quartet also explores the political clash between communist and fascist ideology after the fall of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, which shows itself to be more of a rhetorical end-point than a real one. For Lenù, school is at once attractive to her because it is the antithesis of violence. Beyond an escape from violence, the second promise is educational mobility. The two girls grow up discussing becoming authors and make the link between writing and wealth after they read Little Women:

We began to link school to wealth. We thought that if we studied hard we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich. Wealth was still the glitter of gold coins stored in countless chests, but to get there all you had to do was go to school and write a book. (MBF 70)

This idealistic notion—that school is entirely separate from the outside world, and that to move from violence to wealth, all Lenù must do is study and attend school—reveals itself to be false almost immediately following the moment the girls enter school. Despite both of their brilliance, only Lenù becomes a writer and makes money from writing. Only Lenù attends middle school, high school and university. And only Lenù has access to wealth made from knowledge-sharing, while Lila is reliant on money made by her husband in the mafia and later still by technical employment by another member of the mafia, Michele Solara, at his computer office. Rather than reading the upward-ascending escape from the girls’ violent upbringing as a question of merit and skill, as meritocratic notions suggest, readers might also understand how meritocracy insists on a singularity that also requires luck and circumstance. Furthermore, meritocracy only provides Lenù a provisional kind of authority—tokenized by the lower class and the upper class both as the girl who “made it.” Ferrante captures how Lenù’s existence, rather than challenging mythologies of meritocracy as it should, mistakenly reaffirms that meritocracy functions well and that education might be a great equalizer, despite literary and historical realities that suggest otherwise.

During the mid-1950s, Italy was rebuilding its education system after World War II and the fall of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Lenù and Lila were both born in the year 1944, and this time period was when “fifth grade signaled the great social divide” [2] in which the poor did not advance onward and the rich did. Many people from Lila and Lenù’s neighborhood left school prematurely to begin working in the same trade business as their parents. Italian educational reformers insisted on preserving existing class distinctions so that the upper class had access to further degrees and the lower class was either explicitly or implicitly barred from such a future. For example, members of the upper class accused the 1948 Gonella Plan of creating a “cohabitation” between different social classes and erasing “class faults” in the present school system. [3] Gender was another topical concern amongst educational reformers. The Italian school system was built upon the Casati Law of 1859, which did not prohibit coeducation but failed to establish a post-elementary school system for women in the way that it did for men. [4] As historian Victoria de Grazia writes about the 1923 fascist reforms: “so much emphasis has been placed on the class biases of the Gentile reform that its discrimination on the basis of gender is easily missed.” [5] These reforms take their title from Mussolini’s Minister of Public Instruction, Giovanni Gentile who believed that women were “outside of history” [6]—note, here, how this correlates with Ferrante’s neologism frantumaglia as defined by the sensation “without… history” [7]—and therefore Gentile’s educational policies reflected his sexist personal beliefs that women were unthinking, unconnected to religious spirit, and immoral. [8]

Lenù perceptively observes the gender divide throughout the quartet, specifically in higher education. Reflecting on her experience in high school, Lenù narrates, “There were few girls, and I didn’t know any of them. Gigliola, after much boasting (‘Yes, I’m going to high school, too, definitely, we’ll sit at the same desk’), ended up going to help her father in the Solaras’ pastry shop” (MBF 155). Lenù alludes to the lonesomeness of learning and not being able to identify with anyone in the classroom, in which socialization is a large part of education. This starkly opposes the beginning of the quartet, when Lenù lists social competition with Lila as her primary motivator for studying. After Lenù attends middle school without Lila, she becomes depressed and withdraws from engaging in schoolwork with the same intensity she applied to elementary school. [9] The gendered divide present in high school becomes even starker at the university level, with de Grazia writing about the decade directly preceding Lenù’s college years: “On average, only about one-third of the female students entering university finished their course of study.” [10] Even though female students were not technically barred from receiving a college diploma, an overwhelming majority found it difficult to make it through: “biases against women were numerous. Blatant and covert, they were the result of specific legislative measures [such as Gentile’s system], the idealist philosophy of education, and complex interactions between family strategies and opportunities in the labor market.” [11] For these historical reasons, the question of whether the narrator of Lenù succeeds is much larger than an interpersonal preoccupation—as often depicted by the sarcastic remarks of her mother, admirable remarks of other neighborhood residents, and encouraging remarks of Lila—but it is also a political preoccupation.

At the beginning of My Brilliant Friend, Lenù’s Maestra Oliviero asks the young Lenù, “Do you know what the plebs are, Greco?” Lenù gives a textbook definition for plebs referring to “the tribunes of the plebs are the Gracchi,” who are two brothers who lived during the Roman Empire and who sought reforms for the poor and rights for everyday citizens. By evoking the Roman origins of plebeians, Maestra Oliviero is alluding to degrees of power, and relatedly, to degrees of powerlessness based solely on occupation. The plebs were a rank above slaves, but they did not own property and were laborers and farmers. Lenù’s historical recitations demonstrate that she is unaware of Maestra Oliviero’s intentions to insult their own similar position in the social hierarchy as members of the poor, laboring class. Oliviero continues, “The plebs are quite a nasty thing… And if one wishes to remain a plebeian, he, his children, the children of his children deserve nothing. Forget [Lila] and think of yourself” (MBF 72). In this exchange, Lenù’s teacher instills the idea that a lower social position is a choice rather than an imposed status for Lenù’s friend and classmate Lila. This is apparent through her evocation of a politics of ‘deserving’ through the verdict “deserve nothing.” This commentary hints at self-hatred, since Maestra Oliviero herself comes from their impoverished neighborhood and inadvertently refers to herself when saying “plebs are quite a nasty thing.”

What’s interesting is the link that both Maestra Oliviero and Lenù draw between plebs and their lack of education or educational success. In Oliviero’s case, she quickly infers that Lila’s lack of education after elementary school (Lila’s father prevents Lila from further schooling), condemns her to the permanent status of plebeian. Although the teacher’s reference to “pleb” is at first lost on the young Lenù, she remembers and reinterprets this dialogue years later at Lila’s wedding to Stefano Carraci. Lenù’s schoolmate and longtime crush, Nino Sarrorte, offhandedly remarks to Lenù that the magazine he publishes with did not have room to accommodate the publication of her work. Lenù, during this moment marked by scholastic failure, realizes that “the plebs were us” (MBF 329). She determines that her failure to publish signals her own destiny to remain a pleb forever:

I discovered that I had considered the publication of those few lines, my name in print, as a sign that I really had a destiny, that the hard work of school would surely lead upward, somewhere, that Maestra Oliviero had been right to push me forward and to abandon Lila. “Do you know what the plebs are?” “Yes, Maestra.” At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better… The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder. (MBF 329)

Unknown to Lenù at the time, Nino reveals much later in their adulthood that he had read Lenù’s writing and found it so impressive that he was jealous and decided to sabotage her and never submit the piece to the magazine. Nino’s readiness to sabotage Lenù in their childhood—to “forget [Lenù] and think of [him]self,” to borrow the language of Maestra Oliviero—demonstrates the politically precarious position that lower class individuals operate inside, constantly made to feel that they are in direct competition with each other for a singular chance to rise from their position of poverty. When Lenù becomes a famous writer, she observes that Nino is the only one from her neighborhood who “made it” in the same way as her, their successes a true anomaly. [12] Lenù believes that her failure to publish banishes her to a permanent fate of plebeian status—this very belief requires that she believe in a meritocracy and her own failures of merit to achieve upward mobility. Lenù’s logic falls prey to Michael Sandel’s articulation in The Tyranny of Merit about the fallacies of educational meritocracy:

The suggestion that education is a universal social problem solver may increase the risk that groups with low levels of socioeconomic status will be especially negatively evaluated while strengthening the ideology of meritocracy. This makes people more willing to accept inequality and more likely to believe that success reflects merit. If education is regarded as an individual’s own responsibility, then people are likely to be less critical of social inequality that stems from differences in education… If educational outcomes are seen as largely deserved, then their consequences are too. [13]

Lenù and Lila’s stradone is at the very bottom of the city of Naples’s hierarchy. Their community is relegated to the impoverished outskirts of Naples, where people from richer neighborhoods refuse to interact with them: “The bourgeoisie does everything in its power to avoid mingling with the people with whom they have lived side by side for centuries.” [14] Beyond social hierarchies within the city of Naples, Naples itself is at the very bottom of the Italian hierarchy. Northern cities are richer and perceived as more cultured, intelligent, and refined than the southern cities like Naples. Ferrante depicts this external prejudice against Neapolitan dialect through the character of Giovanna Trada in her most recent work, The Lying Life of Adults. Giovanna, born in the generation after Lenù and Lila, is unlike Ferrante’s other characters because her parents are highly educated and teachers themselves. Unlike Lila and Lenù’s parents who discourage them from education, Giovanna learns by example to respect literature, history, and science, and she carries familial expectations to obtain top exam results. Giovanna’s father, Andrea, was raised in a poor neighborhood of Naples, similar to Lenù and Lila, and did everything to escape poverty. He passes down to his daughter a prejudice against the very neighborhood he was raised in, so that in childhood she observes of his birthplace:

Noise, heat, distracted kisses on the forehead, dialect voices, a bad smell that we probably all gave off out of fear. That climate had convinced me over the years that my father’s relatives—howling shapes of repulsive unseemliness, especially Aunt Vittoria, the blackest, the most unseemly—constituted a danger, even if it was difficult to understand what the danger was.” [15]

In this passage, Ferrante depicts how landscape is intertwined with soundscape. Neapolitan poverty is a “climate” that evokes the language of “howling,” “noise,” and “dialect”; that evokes a particular smell; and most importantly, evokes a kind of emotional response that is first repulsion and then transforms into fear.

Ferrante’s portrayal of Neapolitan dialect as the “language of violence” can be charted from her first novel, Troubling Love in 1992, to her last novel, The Lying Life of Adults in 2019. Even in the Neapolitan quartet, when Lenù escapes the linguistic terrain of dialect by learning formal Italian and Latin and then escapes the physical terrain of dialect by moving to Pisa for college and later to Milan as a young professional, Neapolitan dialect is still triggered when Lenù feels most angry and violent. Dialect is associated with shouting, insults, and often exists side-by-side with verbal and physical abuse. Naples is associated with Neapolitan dialect, which becomes associated with violence for both those who inhabit the regional dialect and outsiders who are prejudiced against the dialect. Historically, this created an educational anxiety to preserve oppression by disenfranchising Neapolitan people from formal Italian, and beyond that, by preventing Neapolitan residents from learning Latin in school. During the period following Italian fascism, one of the highly contested educational topics was the role that language should play in the classroom. The Rossi Plan proposed a divided school stratified by language teaching while the Domini Plan proposed the vision of a ‘unified’ school, unified by common language teaching practices. This debate occurred during the late 1950s, the time period during which the fictional Lenù would have been in intermediate school or the American equivalent of middle school. Following this were Medici’s two bills, in which both proposals featured the division between Latin and non-Latin courses of learning. [16] Beyond a question of language, the teaching of Latin was directly tied to educational mobility, since certain university courses such as law, biology, and surgery required prerequisite training in Greek or Latin. [17]

Ferrante herself reflects on the role of learning the Latin language not as something inherently knowledge-giving but as providing access to knowledge. As a literary scholar, knowledge of Greek and Latin means that Ferrante may “read the works of Euripides or Seneca in the language in which they were written… It wasn’t learning, but a continuous obedient exercise that led to a position high up in the hierarchy of cleverness.” [18] Through the word “hierarchy,” Ferrante points out the socialized link between knowing other languages and perceived degree of intellect. Ferrante understands Latin carries the connotation of a “clever” language, and conversely, Neapolitan dialect carries the connotation of a “plebeian” language. Throughout the novels, Lenù defines the violent streets of Naples as “home” and school as “an escape from home”; similarly, Lenù defines Neapolitan dialect as “home” and formal Italian and Latin as “an escape from home,” a place akin to school in how language-learning purports the promise of educational mobility but ultimately breaks that promise.

Even when Lenù does enter the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa that requires top entrance exam results and admits all students on full scholarship, her home language of Neapolitan dialect becomes an external place-marker of her status at the very bottom of Italian social life. This invalidates Lenù’s hard work to learn formal Italian and Latin in school. Lenù describes her first year at Scuola Normale Superiore:

I arrived at the university very timid and awkward. I immediately realized I spoke a bookish Italian that at times was almost absurd, especially when, right in the middle of a much too carefully composed sentence, I needed a word and transformed a dialect word into Italian to fill the gap: I began to struggle to correct myself… Once a girl from Rome…  parodied my inflections and everyone laughed. I felt wounded, but I laughed, too, and gaily emphasized the dialectal accent as if I were the one making fun of myself. [19]

Rather than giving her peer’s actual name, Lenù refers to the classmate insulting her as “a girl from Rome.” This suggests how place-of-origin becomes a short-hand for identification and also suggests that in return, Lenù is labeled by others as “the girl from Naples.” As a result of her classmates’ mockery and prejudice, Lenù describes how she “learned to subdue [her] voice and gestures. [She] assimilated to rules of behavior, written and unwritten.” [20] Again, through the word “unwritten,” Ferrante points to how only learning ‘proper’ language through books and school ultimately fails Lenù. There are customs within language that transcend the realm of the teachable and into the realm of the observable, accessible only through family life, friendships, socializing, and thinking—all modes of life Lenù was used to conducting in Neapolitan dialect. Lenù’s upbringing obscured her from an exposure to the colloquial usages of Italian, which is the reason why she only has access to a “bookish Italian.”

Lenù describes her assimilation to university—a school she attends based on the merit proven during her entrance examinations—as having the ultimate goal of conveying that she “deserv[es] of respect.” [21] Yet this demand for respect is challenged within the first few months of Lenù’s time in university:

The girl from Rome who had made fun of my accent assailed me one morning, yelling at me in front of other girls that money had disappeared from her purse, and I must give it back immediately or she would report me to the dean. I realized that I couldn’t respond with an accommodating smile. I slapped her violently and heaped insults on her in dialect. They were all frightened. I was classified as a person who always made the best of things, and my reaction disoriented them. The girl from Rome was speechless, she stopped up her nose, which was bleeding, a friend took her to the bathroom. (SNN 333)

Lenù here realizes that she cannot “prove” herself at their university by playing into new hierarchical understandings of composure and class, which she describes as the possibility of “respond[ing] with an accommodating smile.” Indeed, the still-nameless “girl from Rome” accuses Lenù because of Lenù’s social class. The girl from Rome assumes that Lenù’s impoverished background makes her a thief, driven either by necessity or by a lack of morality, which is a common prejudice against the lower class. I am inclined to argue the latter, that the girl from Rome was driven by prejudice against the lower class as being immoral because of how Lenù chooses to respond to the girl’s insult. Weighing her options of either shrugging the incident off or lashing out in violence, Lenù chooses violence. Lenù conforms to her classmates’ expectations. Conforms because as the “girl from Naples,” Lenù’s violent yet calculated outburst reinforces her classmates’ stereotypes about the lower class being an amalgamation of thievery, violence enacted through the slap, and vulgarity enacted through her verbal slippage into dialect. Though Lenù constantly attempts to abandon this dialect, she constantly finds herself returning to it. Lenù first understands dialect as a symptom of the violence of her hometown, apparent in the profanity of those around her and the verbal abuses exchanged at home. And while originally school presents itself as an escape from dialect and an escape from violence, instead, Lenù comes to understand dialect also as an object of violence, a method of marking her Neapolitan people as inferior. This occurs from the self-loathing of her elementary school teacher calling Lila a “pleb” because she will not be educated in formal Italian or Latin within the Italian school system up to the ridicule Lenù faces for her unnatural “bookish” Italian when she moves to Pisa.

Although readers of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet see Lenù’s success as almost inevitable—made apparent in her supportive teachers who recommend her to further her studies and provide her textbooks, Lila’s usage of the term “my brilliant friend” to describe her, and the scholar Jill C. Richards’s impression in The Ferrante Letters of “seemingly limitless social mobility” [22]—instead, readers should understand that Lenù’s success went against the social norms prescribed to people of her gender, class, and southern neighborhood so that it was anything but inevitable. Even when Lenù achieves success, there is a sense of surveillance imposed on the character of Lenù Greco within the Neapolitan quartet by teachers and by friends, but most importantly by the larger political forces that influence her internalized rhetoric about meritocracy and “modest assimilation of the deserving” (FR 371). During the time of Lenù’s upbringing, education was highly politicized, a point of tension among educational reformers as to whether or not social classes should be segregated in school, what language-learning options should be offered to students depending on their social class, and if gender should influence the education a student receives. Rather than education freeing and mobilizing Lenù, education instead became a place of heightened scrutiny and obsession over why, how, and how well a lower-class woman enters the domain of primarily upper-class men. As Ferrante responds to a question posed by Nicola Lagioia in Frantumaglia, “I would not reduce education to a mere tool of emancipation… In post-World War II Italy, education cemented old hierarchies” (FR 371). Lenù’s education is no exception, since her time in the Italian school system is haunted by the marks of her birth, neighborhood, and social class long after leaving Naples. Similar to how she experiences recurring paranoia in adulthood about developing her mother’s limp—where Lenù’s aging physical body might be marked by matrilineal deformity—Lenù experiences an anxiety about the more invisible mark of her unchangeable Neapolitan birth affecting her future life in the academy and her ability to succeed in a system that never favored her people, her gender, or her class.