In “Naples,” Benjamin writes of the porosity of private life there: “Similarly dispersed, porous, and commingled is private life” (174). For Benjamin, an upper class Jew from Berlin, the lack of boundaries between the public and the private in Naples must have been stark. Ferrante writes about the porosity of the private and public existence of the families of the neighborhood but goes a step further, writing from the inside–unlike Benjamin, who writes as an observer–about the porosity of the girls’ lives and bodies:

​”I looked at her from the window, and I felt that her earlier shape had broken, and I thought again of that wonderful passage of the letter, of the cracked and crumpled copper [229]. It was an image that I used all the time, whenever I noticed a fracture in her or in me. I knew–perhaps I hoped–that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again” (Ferrante, 265-6).

Containment and porosity run through the book: Lenù watches Lila from an interior, through the window; the copper pot inexplicably explodes; Lila is a young woman who cannot be contained (though we will see just who tries to do so); women’s lives and bodies are by nature fragmented; their efforts to hold themselves together by controlling and directing outside events, through consulting, scheming, strategizing with each other, are futile. Lenù struggles to simultaneously contain herself and control events by holding in her emotions (joy, moroseness, depression, disappointment) and by ordering and directing events with Lila. Lenù is constrained from acting true to herself, whereas Lila shows her violent emotions. Both are trying to survive but use opposite tactics.

A little later in his observations regarding private life, Benjamin claims, “each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life,” (174) which contrasts starkly with the Northern European custom of dividing public and private. I’ve been thinking that, as a product of an ordered and rigid society, he is idealizing the Neapolitan porosity of the domestic and the street: “Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought” (175), but when I did a little research, I found that he is on the side of experiential knowledge, so he is writing a kind of love letter to Naples (as Paul writes in his Post 3), so now I think he’s willingly giving himself up to his direct experience of Naples and sees the Neapolitans as able to live something that is “radiant,” something he cannot do. Ferrante’s view, on the other hand, is pretty tarnished.
There is some research on the history of privacy in Northern Europe, but I have found nothing on the subject re Southern Europe. Privacy is a way of controlling others’ access to you. Privacy was and is a privilege of the wealthy, the middle class. Working class and poor people, who inhabit smaller spaces and typically live close to their neighbors, have it to a much lesser extent. In the Naples of Ferrante, neither Lenù nor hardly anyone she knows has the luxury of privacy; perhaps Maestra Oliviera is the exception. The whole neighborhood knows when a family explodes into a quarrel. Arguments, beatings, and worse happen in public spaces. And to take it further, to the body: a body cannot be separate from the state of things, and certainly not a female body, which by its nature is open to penetration.