Female Friendship in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend

Female friendship as a literary subject that is both an end in itself and a vehicle for exploring social class, ambition, and cultural identity is the shared territory of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, and a comparative reading of these two novels reveals striking parallels in how both authors construct the dynamics of intellectual competition and emotional intimacy between women across different national contexts. This study examined how Ifemelu and Obinze's relationship and Lila and Elena's friendship are shaped by the social systems they inhabit, specifically the class structures of post-colonial Nigeria and working-class Naples, and how both friendships become the vehicle for each novel's larger social analysis. A feminist comparative methodology drawing on sociology of friendship and postcolonial gender theory was applied. Both novels foreground the paradox that the most intellectually formative relationships in their protagonists' lives are simultaneously the most painful and competitive. The analysis revealed that while Ferrante's friendship narrative is explicitly about class escape and academic aspiration within Italy's social hierarchies, Adichie's is more explicitly about racial and national identity in the context of Nigerian emigration to the United States. Both novels, however, use the female friendship as a way of making visible the social structures that shape women's possibilities. The study recommends this pairing for courses on women's fiction and global literature at universities in the South East and South West zones of Nigeria.

Keywords: female friendship, Adichie, Ferrante, social class, global women's fiction