The Female Best-Friend Novel: Narration and the Reconsideration of the Political Act

In her article “The Female Best-Friend Novel: Narration and the Reconsideration of the Political Act,” Neta Stahl argues that twentieth- and twenty-first-century women novelists borrowed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century best-friend narrative, reintroducing it for the purpose of challenging the very concept of the political act, namely, what modern, liberal society considers as a political action and what stands behind it. The article focuses on four novels written by novelists from four different countries: the American novelist Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973); the Israeli novelist Ronit Matalon’s Sarah, Sarah (2000); the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale: Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (Book 3 of The Neapolitan Novels: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2013); and the British novelist Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016). It demonstrates that in these novels, the political act is reconsidered, against the gaze of the best-friend and against the role of a supposedly female ‘prince charming’. Further, Stahl argues that the modern female best-friend novel is not a ‘female counterpart’ to the male best-friend novel, but rather a new take on a female literary tradition associated with a genre that is often dismissed by the intellectual elite as popular literature, thanks to its use of low-brow devices borrowed from the nineteenth-century novel.