The Streetcar Called Adolescence In Elena Ferrante’s Novels

No one captures the moral violence, the ugliness and the yearning of adolescence as profoundly as Ferrante. Written in the first-person, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, set in different periods yet united by their aching portraits of growing up in the cacophonous working-class neighbourhoods of Naples, offer a rare window into the wildly imaginative adolescent mind. So what if Ferrante’s characters were growing up at a time with no internet and iPhones? The dilemmas of adolescence are still harrowing: replete with resentment, shame and desire. The timelessness of certain experiences persists despite the disruptive dramas of technology and algorithms. In fact, even without inhabiting a world of surveillance and comparison (think TikTok, Instagram, dating apps and smartphones), Ferrante’s adolescents carry the burden of an emotional architecture that is pregnant with status competition, self-doubt and peer validation.

Her seminal novels, My Brilliant Friend (the first part of her Neapolitan quartet) and The Lying Lives of Adults, best show the rebellious energy of this pre-adult stage of life. My Brilliant Friend (set in the early 1950s) slowly uncovers the torment and the joy of the protagonist and narrator, Elena “Lenu,” and her devoted relationship with her brilliantly erratic friend, Lila. When the story begins, they are young children, but their temperamental differences are already clear: Lila is volatile, vengeful and brilliant; Elena is sincere, frightened and gentle. What they share is an ennui with the familiarity and casual violence of working-class Naples. Cheating husbands, battered wives, petty fights, loud banter and class-based resentment seep through the neighbourhoods and alleys of Ferrante’s Naples. At first, their social lives look very similar, and they share friends, foes, books and giggles as they discover desire and disappointment.

But adolescence begins to pull their lives in radically different directions. Lila, despite her indomitable intelligence and almost cruel confidence, finds solace in designing shoes in her father’s tiny leather shop, while Elena, always suffering from self-doubt, spends more time pursuing an education. She moves from her local school to a high school in a nearby town and becomes acutely aware of how different her life is from that of the sophisticated vacationing women in Ischia, the seaside town where she happens to spend her summer. She falls in love only to be ignored, reinforcing her self-loathing about her looks, body and intelligence.

Lila, on the other hand, is pursued relentlessly by young men whom she rejects with ruthless disdain. Her life changes from the exhaustion of everyday negotiations with poverty to a glittering world of flashy clothes, expensive cars and the devoted male attention of her fiancé, the wealthiest grocer in the neighbourhood. Lila’s life looks visibly enviable, drawing awe and shame in equal measure. Elena is torn between her growing intellectual freedom, Lila’s general apathy toward her academic progress, and her diminishing self-esteem. Ferrante brilliantly captures the young girls’ fantasies of escape, their ability to imagine another life, and the impossibility of dreaming those dreams. Ultimately, Ferrante’s dense, hypnotic plot overwhelms the reader: “brilliance” becomes both a metaphor and a character, embodying the messiness of growing up poor, angry and young.

In The Lying Life of Adults, adolescence is seductively ugly. Set in a much later period of the 1990s, the novel opens with the unusual line, “Two years before leaving home, my father said to my mother that I was ugly.” This is the narrator speaking; Giovanna, 13, raised in a bourgeois neighbourhood by intellectual parents. Sarah Chihaya, in her review in the LA Review of Books, notes the sublime quality of this adolescent ugliness. According to her, Ferrante’s description of coming-of-age ugliness is deviously unpredictable and yet, expansive in its interpretive scope. The frequent use of the term in the novel may puzzle the reader. Giovanna drowns in self-loathing and becomes convinced of her “ugliness,” while at the same time, she is surprised by her first encounter with her vengeful, and seemingly working-class aunt, Vittoria. The young narrator notes, “Vittoria seemed to me to have a beauty so unbearable that to consider her ugly became a necessity.” Giovanna’s father’s comparison of her face to that of his long-estranged sister fortifies ugliness with a vitality that is at once boundless and dangerous.

As Giovanna descends the hill to the lively yet “ugly” industrial zone of Pascone, with its cemeteries, churches and abandoned buildings, to meet her aunt, she moves between her two selves: one that is middle- to upper-class, refined and polite, and another in which she feels a violent need for degradation, “a yearning to feel heroically vile”. This movement, spatial, bodily and psychological, captures the shifting realities of growing up young in an intensely unequal world.

In the end, Giovannia’s emotional conflicts about lies, deceit and the pretense of adult lives find their way to a path of sexual awakening that is most unremarkable. Her sex is less about pleasure than about experimenting with adulthood, desire and self-definition. Its very ordinariness underscores that growing up does not necessarily produce the self-knowledge Giovanna imagines adulthood will bring. Adolescence in Ferrante’s world remains trapped in the suffocating fever dream of desire and delusion.

Much like Ferrante’s pre-internet world, contemporary adolescence is uncertain and anxious. Heavy reliance on digital technology for information, education and self-definition has been linked to poor mental health and wellbeing of young people globally. In one estimate, adolescents in the United States spend about 4.8 hours daily on social media with girls spending more time on it than boys. While the internet has opened up spaces for experimentation with identities and sexualities, it has made comparison and validation central to young people’s self-worth and identity formation. What Ferrante’s adolescents reveal, then, is not that technology has invented these anxieties, but that it has changed their scale, speed and visibility. Platforms may change, and the speed and scale of comparison may be new, but the destination remains elusive: the difficult, unfinished work of figuring out who one is in relation to others.

The streetcar of adolescence keeps moving, even as the city outside changes: from neighbourhood streets to screens, from raucous fights to online trolling, from face-to-face comparison to algorithmic visibility. The scenery changes. The fever does not.

(Tannistha Samanta is an academic based in Pune. Her research spans the sociology of the family, techno-medical futures and the life-course.)