Our culture is currently full of stories of female friendship. What can this teach us about the complexities of living together?
A fascinating article from Aeon by the curator and writer Susan Bright on female friendship - very much abroad in the culture at the moment (in TV series like Fleabag, movies like Booksmart and the novels of Elena Ferrante), but perhaps with something to teach more widely about how societies can hang together across differences.
Bright cites Vera Brittain, In her autobiographical book Testament of Friendship (1940), that “from the days of Homer the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women … have usually been not merely unsung but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted”.
Bright begins her own revelation about the power of female friendship in this way:
A few years ago, a curator I know professionally invited me to Arizona to give a lecture. The talk would be in Phoenix and we would stay at her house in Tucson. The invitation made me nervous – not due to the public speaking, or the fact I was travelling to a part of the United States that I had not been to before, but because it would involve several two-hour car journeys with somebody I didn’t know well.
Living my whole adult life in major cities – London, New York, and now Paris – I rarely get into a car, apart from short cab rides. Moreover, I hardly ever spend two hours in the company of someone without being able to leave. My fellow curator’s professional interests are quite different – she is a scholar of American mid-20th-century photography, and my specialism leans more toward contemporary art.
So, as harsh as this sounds, I inwardly sighed with relief when she told me that she was recently divorced. Love, kids, hurt, rejection, self-preservation and future desires are universal subjects I can talk about with anyone.
I think about those two-hour drives now, and consider how lucky we were to have that time together. I can’t recall exactly what we talked about but – to paraphrase Carol Shields in her novel Unless (2002) – when we talked, we never thought about the aboutness of talk; we just talked. In that confined space, driving along a completely unmemorable highway, a friendship was formed.
This ease is something I share with most of my female friends. I would say it’s different from the way I connect to my male friends. The talking is what makes it different. Again, Shields’s novels are excellent on the importance of female friends, without making them the centre story or narrative arc. In Unless, the protagonist’s husband asks her what she talks about during a regular friends’ meet-up. She replies: ‘It’s too rich to describe, and too uneven. Chit-chat, some people call it.’
The term ‘chit-chat’ reduces the talking between female friends to something superficial and unimportant, and sometimes it can be, but other times it is deeply profound and essential. It’s hard to put into words a process of sharing that can meander between desires, vanities, failures and destinies.
In a wide-ranging piece, Bright focuses on the friendships display in the recent BBC tv series Fleabag, and the Neapolitan Novels quartet (2012-15) by Elena Ferrante. Her close reading is fascinating, but it’s the summation that interests us:
What makes both these examples of friendship resonate is their intimacy and vulnerability, not only between the two women, but within the main characters themselves.
These women are flawed but honest. Their fallibility, loneliness and insecurity might not make them likeable, but they are totally relatable. In short, seeing ourselves reflected in fiction makes us feel less alone. And so it seems that the most compelling stories are not really about friendship at all, but about self-awareness, self-deception, loneliness and self-confidence (or its lack).
These stories focus on female friendship to show that there can be competitiveness and jealousy, transgression and guilt, but also genuine love; the relationships between women can be acutely observant and thought-provoking guides to deep emotions of the self.