Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“How can I explain to this woman–I thought–that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?”

Elena lacks a stable sense of self, staking her identity on external validation achieved through educational achievement. The power the fear of failure has over Elena is demonstrated in this moment, when her mood is dictated by the reviews her novel receives.

“Fascists, mostly from the neighborhood, Lila knew some of them. Fascists, as Stefano’s father, Don Achille, had been, as Stefano turned out to be, as the Solaras were, grandfather, father, grandsons [...] she had discovered there was no way to be free of them, to clear everything away. The connection between past and present had never really broken down [...]”

Lila’s observation during this moment reinforces the theme of generational cycles of abuse. The motif of political ideologies conveys this theme here and signifies the role individual characters take within these cycles; the neighborhood becomes a microcosm of the larger political scene in Italy during the 1970s.

“I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.”

This thought from Elena reinforces the notion of the two women as foils and demonstrates the complex nature of their relationship. While she admires Lila, Lila’s deeds never fail to trigger a deep sense of inadequacy in Elena. It’s an ironic moment for Elena in which she feels acutely that Lila has outshone her despite having none of the education or successes Elena has had.

“I hoped that Pietro was right: was I really acquiring Adele’s tone, was I learning, without realizing it, her way of being in the world?”

Even once she’s escaped the neighborhood and into upper-class society, Elena still models her identity on others and wants their approval. Here, Elena hopes she has unconsciously adopted her wealthy mother-in-law’s habits because this would confirm her successful transformation. Elena is trying to escape from the fear that her roots may determine her identity forever.

“Do you think I exist? Look at me, do you think I exist? [Gigliola] hit her full breasts with her open hand, but she did it as if to demonstrate physically that the hand went right through her, that her body, because of Michele, wasn’t there. He had taken everything of her, immediately, when she was almost a child. He had consumed her, crumpled her, and now that she was twenty-five he was used to her, he didn’t even look at her anymore.”

Gigliola’s questions demonstrate the visceral effects of abuse on one’s sense of presence and self: Michele has taken everything from Gigliola, using her as though she were a possession that belonged to him, erasing her own autonomy. This moment connects Elena and Gigliola because both have experienced erasure at the hands of their husbands. This moment also establishes a facet of the women’s oppression theme, which Elena later develops in her essay: that man sees woman as part of himself.

“I realized then that [Lila] wasn’t capable of thinking that she was her self and I was my self; it seemed to her inconceivable that I could have a pregnancy different from hers, and a different feeling about children. She so took it for granted that I would have the same troubles that she seemed ready to consider any possible joy I found in motherhood a betrayal.”

This moment demonstrates the entanglement of Lila and Elena’s bond. This quote is significant because it adds a dimension to the girls’ friendship that has Elena has previously unrealized: Lila’s identity is just as dependent on the friendship as Elena’s is.

“She answered: ‘Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.’”

This incisive observation of Lila’s calls Elena’s own reliability as a narrator into question. It prompts the reader to consider alternate dimensions to Elena’s first-person perspective and her idealizations of Lila. This moment also indicates Lila’s self-awareness; Lila knowingly manipulates the narrative of her life to suit her ambitions.

“But the truth was that she liked saving me more than she liked listening to me.”

Elena’s experience with Adele demonstrates Elena’s developing disillusionment with wealth. The upper class is not as much of an escape as Elena thought it would be, and not just because of Pietro. Despite helping Elena in her career, Adele doesn’t see Elena as capable in her own right and confines Elena to a pre-conceived construction to feed her own ego.

“She said that the disgusting face of things alone was not enough for writing a novel: without imagination it would seem not a true face but a mask.”

Just like Lila’s prior comment on narrating one’s life as it suits them, this comment reflects on how the narrative itself is being told. It prompts the reader to consider how Elena may be embellishing her own and Lila’s story. It also points to Lila’s need for escape—her imagination is a defining feature of her brilliance, and it’s what she uses to escape the restlessness and horror she experiences in her life.

“Also, I had been forced by the powerful presence of Lila to imagine myself as I was not. I was added to her, and I felt mutilated as soon as I removed myself. Not an idea, without Lila. Not a thought I trusted, without the support of her thoughts.”

Elena has no sense of self or confidence in her ideas without Lila to rely on for direction.

This shows that Elena’s dependence on Lila is not merely a desire for collaboration with her; Elena is unable to define herself outside of Lila, despite the fact that Elena critiqued that very same sentiment in Lila not too long ago.

“The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.”

Elena realizes how pervasive cycles of abuse are and her own role in perpetuating them as Dede re-enacts the violence she’s witnessed between her mother and her father. These realizations not only denote the cycle of abuse as occurring both within families and on a systemic level, but also examine the individual’s unconscious role in perpetuating it.

“[Whereas] my husband never praised me, but, rather, reduced me to the mother of his children; even though I had an education he did not want me to be capable of independent thought, he demeaned me by demeaning what I read, what interested me, what I said, and he appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness.”

Elena’s realization about the way Pietro sees her demonstrates how Elena’s marriage is oppressive. Even though Pietro is not a generally violent man, he still upholds the traditional values of the patriarchy by expecting Elena to be subjugated to him, feeling threatened by her independence and intelligence. 

“Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.”

This quote reinforces the demeaning and constraining nature of Elena’s marriage. Even though sex with Pietro isn’t degrading or non-consensual, Elena still likens it to a de-humanizing experience because of how mechanical and unpleasurable it is for her. It’s a symbol of her marriage in general—without passion or feeling, merely upholding the traditional way of things is deeply unfulfilling for Elena.

“Lila, as usual: Lila who doesn’t say things, she does them; […] Lila who moves people like characters in a story; Lila who has connected, is connecting, our personal knowledge of poverty and abuse to the armed struggle against the fascists, against the owners, against capital.”

Elena and others ascribe Lila with an almost superhuman energy or power. Here, Elena wonders if Lila was involved in the murder of Soccavo, reinforcing Lila’s role as an avatar of the world’s chaos as well as a driving force of it, and attributes her with the power to break traditional structures.

“And I realized that my voice was taking on the tones of the dialect, out of nervousness, that words were coming to me in the Neapolitan of the neighborhood, that the neighborhood–from the courtyard to the stradone and the tunnel–was imposing its language on me, its mode of acting and reacting, its figures, those which in Florence seemed faded images and here were flesh and blood.”

The Neapolitan dialect is a symbol not just of Elena’s lower-class roots, but of the general violence from her childhood. Elena’s true fear is that she’s just like those she left behind, and that her transformation has been superficial.

“Pietro shook his head energetically, he explained, surprisingly, that Lila had seemed to him the worst person. He said that she wasn’t at all my friend, that she hated me, that she was extraordinarily intelligent, that she was very fascinating, but her intelligence had been put to bad use–it was the evil intelligence that sows discord and hates life–and her fascination was the more intolerable, the fascination that enslaves and drives a person to ruin.”

Pietro’s observation challenges Elena’s idealization of Lila. Pietro doesn’t speak of Lila as being affected with a supernatural or ‘demonic’ power, as others have; instead, the only ‘dark energy’ about her is the very human hatred she herself chooses. She manipulates people and situations not with demonic power, but with her own myriad hatreds.

“All right, I said, we’re friends, but get out of your mind that you can be a woman like me, all you’d succeed in being is what a woman is according to you men.”

This conversation between Alfonso and Lila parallels Elena’s own realizations just a few chapters later about how man constructs his idea of woman. It reinforces the theme of women’s struggle to establish a separate identity from the roles imposed on them by traditional patriarchal structures.

“You understand, Lenù, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us. […] Ah, Lenù, what happens to us all, we’re like pipes when the water freezes, what a terrible thing a dissatisfied mind is.”

Here, Lila is speaking generally, but her statement alludes more specifically to both herself and Alfonso. Lila has previously attributed her dissolving margins episodes to the eternal “dissatisfaction” of her mind; Alfonso is dissatisfied in his own identity as a man. This remark also foreshadows the disorder that Elena will undergo in her own life in the final act of the novel, developing the theme of upheaval and transformation in individual lives and the world at large.

“Who knows how much I had lost by leaving, believing I was destined for who knows what. Lila, who had remained, had a very new job, she earned a lot of money, she acted in absolute freedom and according to schemes that were indecipherable.”

Elena’s reflection after hearing how successful Lila is in the neighborhood develops the theme of escape, conveyed here through the foil between Elena and Lila’s lives. Lila has found her escape from helplessness and inadequacy by returning to the neighborhood and finding power there. Ironically, Elena, who once wanted nothing more than to escape the neighborhood, now envies the freedom and success Lila has there. Lila’s transformed relationship to the neighborhood foreshadows the neighborhood becoming a symbol of liberation and escape for Elena in the final act of the novel, via her affair with Nino.

“Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something–here was the point–only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.”

This quote develops the theme of transformation and cycle-breaking, and positions Elena for the final stage of her character arc in the novel. Elena not only needs to break the cycle of oppression in her marriage, but also her personal cycle of relying on others (most particularly Lila) to supply her sense of self. The explicit use of the verb “become” reinforces this theme of transformation; it also foreshadows Elena’s transformation and self-liberation in the final act of the novel.

“For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed.”

The thesis of Elena’s nascent essay relates to her own life, and to the narrative’s theme of women’s oppression by traditional patriarchal structures. It highlights in particular how Pietro has subjugated Elena for the past several years—he has seen her only as part of himself, i.e. his wife and mother of his children, an object of their marriage. Elena’s essay develops this theme in an explicit way and prompts the reader to consider how other men in the novel try to possess women or see them only as a part of themselves.

“His project was to liberate me by disparaging him, restore me to myself by demolishing him. But in doing so did he realize that he had proposed himself, like it or not, as an alternative model of virility?”

Ironically, Elena doesn’t see that Nino is pulling her back into the same cycle that she’s already identified: that of man imposing his views on woman. The same thing she complained about with Pietro is happening with Nino, but because of her idealizations of Nino, Elena ignores this. The very relationship she thought to break a cycle with (that of the traditional family structure) is but another cycle.

“And yet my head led me to Naples.”

When she is considering how she might leave Pietro, Elena finds herself drawn towards Naples, the very place she once feared returning to. The neighborhood’s ironic transformation into a symbol of liberation rather than of constraint develops the theme of escapes and returns.