Grdesic, Masa

In this paper, I would like to examine the relationship between class, gender and creativity in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels and the ways in which the creative practices of the two main characters, Lenù and Lila, coincide and diverge. As working class girls born after the Second World War in the poorest Neapolitan neighborhood, Lenù and Lila attempt to change their situation through studying and work, encouraging as well as competing with each other. At the start, they both believe that education and writing books will help them become wealthy, but their lives advance in different directions after Lila's parents stop her formal education.

Lenù continues along this path, and through education, marriage and a literary and academic career strives to become middle class, while encountering all the familiar obstacles standing in the way of women writers and female literary and artistic creativity (Gilbert & Gubar). On the other hand, Lila is mostly self-educated and her "everyday" creativity (Gauntlett) is more strongly tied to her working class origins. Everything she does – the shoe business, running the store, factory work, starting a computer programming company, even exploring her city's history – emerges from her desire to help and change her family and her community.

It can be argued that Lenù's creativity is expressed on an individual level and represents an disidentification of class (Skeggs) while Lila's is located in the collective, but they are both most successful when they work together or influence each other, directly or indirectly. Although in the end the results of Lenù's pursuit of class mobility and Lila's struggle for class transformation leave little room for hope, Ferrante's novel is nevertheless an invaluable testimony to the possibilities of female and working class collective creativity.

Masa Grdesic is an assistant professor at the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. She has obtained her PhD at the University of Zagreb in 2010 and have published three books in Croatian ("Cosmopolitics. Cultural studies, feminism, and women's magazines", 2013; "Introduction to Narratology", 2015; "The pitfalls of being polite. Essays on feminism and popular culture", 2020). She was one of the founders and editors of Muf, a Croatian feminist website (2014-2018).

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