Envy and Jealousy in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend: A Psychoanalytic Study

Abstract

Envy and Jealousy are dangerous phenomena that obsess many people all over the world in the past and the present. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend presents these concerns through the prototypical pattern of friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, the protagonists of the novel. This research deals with the two concerns of envy and of jealousy and their manifestations in the novel. It aims at defining them and highlighting the way they are presented. By contrasting Elena and Lila, the writer shows the subtle difference between a covetous girl and her better-lucked peer, and vice versa. The research adopts a psychoanalytic approach to the novel in order to examine and to have a better understanding of these two concepts and the way they turn from spontaneity and being a motivation to pure competitiveness to be pathological, destructive and lethal, leading to destroy people’s lives, ruining social relationships and thus affecting society. Finally, the serious consequences of both concerns in the novel are shown and an attempt to determine whom is more involved and why, is made. The destructive sides these concerns have and how they function in the context of the lives of people, in general, and in the novel in particular, are indicated.