Stefania Lucamente compares Elena’s use of Lila to ameliorate her life and career to Ferrante using other female authors without crediting them in order to establish herself. Moreover, Lucamente labels Ferrante and her work as not feminist. 

First, Lucamente critiques that Elena Ferrante, if she is Anita Raja, lived through the second-wave feminism and Italian Women’s Movement of the 1970s. But, Ferrante does not “overtly recognize the merit of Morante and Ramondino as her most direct sources,” just as it “pains Elena to acknowledge the merits of Lila for her individual success” (33). 

Next, Lucamente argues that Elena’s narration portrays Lila as a “hysterical woman constantly on the brink of a nervous breakdown (or smarginatura)” and this doesn’t allow Lila to become neither a “full-fledged feminist nor a postfeminist character” (36). 

Furthermore, Lucamente disagrees that Elena’s soul seems to ache for Lila. I don’t agree with this because it always seems as though Lila is a component of all of Elena’s thoughts and actions. Lucamente continues her critique by stating that for Ferrante narrating is only possible at the moment of the disappearance of the most important woman from another woman’s life. She then adds, “a woman’s autonomy becomes possible only at the expense of the sisterhood; it undoes feminism” (39). I think that Lucamente’s argument is problematic. 

I don’t think that Ferrante is “undoing feminism” but instead simply expressing how life works sometimes. I find the fact that her writing shows the autonomy of one woman at the expense of so much does not undo feminism, but in fact, displays the honest difficulties that arise for women and between women. I found a compelling quote in a Vox article that pertains to My Brilliant Friend: “What Elena Ferrante has done is to create characters who are hateable — who sometimes hate each other and sometimes deserve to be hated — and to remind us that women are worthy of depiction in art not because they are better than men but because they, too, are human.”  Ferrante highlights the complexities and various layers of women, which is not unfeminist, but realistic.