Narrative Friendships in Elisabetta Rasy's Posillipo and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels

Abstract Female friendship has long been a popular theme in modern Italian literature, one that became especially prominent during the 1970s when women's bonds became a catalyst for female liberation and emancipation. However, representations of women's friendships have changed since then, with portrayals that are more complex and nuanced than had been previously seen. This article showcases how Elisabetta Rasy and Elena Ferrante expand on Adriana Cavarero's theory of amicizia narrativa or narrative friendship to accommodate their own ideas about friendship among women. While Cavarero argues that amicizia narrativa is predicated upon the act of listening to a friend's story and then narrating it back to her to allow for the friend's self-validation, Rasy and Ferrante demonstrate how the friend's story is instead used for the narrator's own benefit. Using Cavarero's theory as a critical framework, this article offers a comparative reading of Rasy's and Ferrante's portrayals of female friendship in their respective works, Posillipo and the Neapolitan novels, to argue how these two contemporary authors illustrate the complications that may arise in women's friendships such as ambivalence and competition.