Violence In Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend

In My Brilliant Friend, a fictional book by Elena Ferrante, Elena and Lila grow up in a poor neighborhood overrun by the violent crimes of their corrupt neighbors. Affected by the legacies of their poor parents, prosperity and love troubles are constant struggles for the younger generation of the neighborhood. These struggles trigger emotional reactions from both the parents and their children, prompting more violent actions in the neighborhood. Ferrante expresses the theme that anger, greed, and jealousy cause uncontrollable violence.
Ferrante supports her theme through characters because characters demonstrate the effects of dangerous desires. In My Brilliant Friend, there are many characters that are prone to violence. For example, Melina,
She also shows how uncontrollable these emotions are through the motifs of heat and fever, which represent uncontrollable anger. In her book, Ferrante uses heat and fever to show the presence overwhelming emotions during times of violence. Rino, for example, captivated by the illusion of becoming rich, becomes very mean towards his friends and family. At Stefano’s New Year’s Eve celebration, Rino lights off fireworks to compete with the Solaras, “people who he envie[s] and consider[s] enemies to be beaten, so that he can assume their role” (166). Furthermore, Rino progressively gets more aggressive as the firework competition goes on, just like how the firework display intensifies in the sky. The fireworks are an example of Ferrante’s motif of heat. They are a representation of Rino’s anger that everybody can see throughout the neighborhood. Like fireworks, violence is an emotional outburst. The conflict and anger between Rino and the Solaras displays visibly in the sky. As the fireworks display becomes bigger, so does the violent commotion of the party. At the end, Ferrante marks the destructiveness of violence with the Solaras shooting a gun at the kids. Thus, through Rino’s fireworks display, Ferrante expresses that “money could be transformed into fiery trails, sparks, explosions, smoke for the pure satisfaction of winning” (177). The desire to make money becomes greed and
In the Epigraph, Ferrante includes a piece of dialogue from Faust between Mephistopheles and God. This piece of dialogue supports Ferrante’s view on violence. Like one’s greed and jealousy, Mephistopheles tries to sway “[m]an’s active nature, flagging,” (7) from of the “[u]nqualified repose he learns to crave” (7). Because people believe that they deserve something they don’t, they abandon who they once were and become violent people “[w]ho works, excites, and must create, as Devil” (7). To continue, Ferrante notes that material desires are causes for violence through the Epigraph, and she even exemplifies this through the plebeians she brings up at the end of Childhood and Adolescence. “The plebs are quite a nasty thing” (71) because they are people who feel they deserve something they don’t. They are “that quarrel over who should be served first and better” (329). Ferrante reveals that unhealthy desires lead to violence, and the violent person they become is “a nasty