Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

The novel’s title, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, directly references Ferrante’s exploration of the methods and motivations of people who experience systemic poverty and structural violence to improve their lives. Elena desperately desires to escape the impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood she grew up in and achieve conventional success through wealth and education. Meanwhile, Lila returns the neighborhood after leaving in previous novels and achieves success of her own at home. To Elena, the neighborhood symbolizes the abuses and poverty of her youth; the intellectual, professional world she longs to inhabit has no relation to those things. To escape the neighborhood, therefore, is necessary to attain opportunity and a better life. Lila, by contrast, is well aware of the harmful effects of the neighborhood but feels drawn back to home in order to improve life for those who do not have the resources to leave for less violent or more affluent neighborhoods. Elena becomes one of the eponymous “those who leave,” while Lila chooses to stay within the community that raised them both.

As in previous novels in the series, Elena’s education represents a gateway to a more comfortable life. When Pietro insists on only having a civil marriage, Elena does not oppose him because “the essential thing was to get out of Naples” (51). Pietro symbolizes her entry into “a land of good reasons” where “grand ideals flourished, the cult of the reputation, matters of principle” (45). Although Elena’s feelings for Pietro are mild, and not nearly as passionate as her infatuation with Nino, the marriage is important to Elena because it will give her opportunities as a member of the influential Airota family. Education also symbolizes escape to Lila. Despite her limited schooling, Lila is drawn to the pursuit of knowledge and grows restless without intellectually stimulating work. Lila’s devotion to developing her son’s intelligence is a symbol of the opportunity she wants him to have, though she fears that she lacks adequate resources to help him. Lila “felt that the years she devoted to [Gennaro] had been in vain, now it seemed wrong to her that the quality of a person should depend on the quality of his childhood” (107). Lila’s limited ability to give her son more opportunities than her own parents gave her exacerbates her insecurity over her perceived intelligence and social status. Lila simultaneously resents the opportunities that Elena had and vicariously enjoys Elena’s success; after reading the draft of Elena’s second novel, Lila tells Elena that “I want you to do better, it’s what I want most, because who am I if you aren’t great, who am I?” (273). Just as Elena relies on Lila’s opinions to direct her sense of self, Lila also relies on Elena’s successes to validate her own intelligence. Unable to access education on her own, Lila sees Elena as a model of what she could have achieved with similar opportunities.

Lila’s return to the neighborhood is motivated by a desire to affect change in an environment whose workings she is familiar with, and whose mechanisms she knows she can manipulate (as she says she is doing with Michele Solara). Lila’s return to the neighborhood parallels her influence at the Soccavo factory, where she directed the union’s work in the factory. Back home, Lila takes control of her own education by learning about computers. She pursues a community leadership role by accepting a position at Michele’s factory. Lila’s new job allows her to exploit the Solara’s wealth for her personal gain and direct the employment and humane treatment of other workers from the neighborhood. Witnessing Lila transform the dynamics of their childhood, Elena feels that Lila has achieved a kind of personal liberation Elena has never managed; she feels that “[Lila’s] was a life in motion, mine was stopped” (346). Lila’s choice to stay in the neighborhood is essential to, rather than an obstacle in, Lila’s success, and Lila achieves a metaphorical escape from the inadequacies and pressures she feels in caring for her son, and movement towards crafting a better future for all those in the neighborhood. 

By contrast, Elena finds that despite her financially advantageous marriage, higher education, and geographical relocation, she cannot escape the influence of her childhood neighborhood. One of the most important understandings Elena comes to in the novel is that abuse, oppression, and violence are not confined to Naples, nor to the working class in general. She experiences the same sexual violence of her youth from educated men in the upper class, like Juan and Tarratano, and is forced into roles of mother and wife in her marriage with Pietro, just like the women of the neighborhood. In the final chapters of the novel, Elena’s affair with Nino represents her emotional liberation from these forces. With Nino, Elena feels she’s acknowledged the desires she’s suppressed her entire life, and that she at last is taking up the space to exist as an intelligent woman in her own right. However, the irony of this relationship is that Nino himself represents the neighborhood and Elena’s childhood. At the beginning of the novel, Elena reflects that Nino “came from childhood, he was constructed out of childish desires, he had no concreteness, he didn’t face the future” (45), and still denotes him as being “of the neighborhood, like me” (378) when he reappears in her life towards the end of the novel. His transformation into a symbol, then, of Elena’s liberation from the oppressive and emotionally stagnant nature of her marriage and upper-class life, is ironic. Because of Nino, Elena even finds herself drawn to the idea of moving back to Naples when she considers leaving Pietro in Chapter 112. The neighborhood whose influence Elena so desperately sought to escape transforms into a place where Elena might return to find liberation.