74 pages • 2 hours read
Elena FerranteThe Story of the Lost Child
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Intelligent Women Navigating a Patriarchal Society
As Lila and Elena mature and reach the height of their intellectual and social power, they present a brand of intelligence that eludes the men in their lives. The last Neapolitan novel shows how this type of intelligence contends with the norms and expectations of the patriarchal society the women continue to exist in.
Eminent academic Nino has always envied Lila and Elena’s intellect, which seems to stem from a natural brilliance, rather than schooling. He especially covets Elena’s ability to put her ideas into words and confesses that he discarded the article she wrote in high school for a student magazine because “he couldn’t believe that someone could write in such a pleasing and intelligent way” (68). Here, “someone” is a cover for Nino’s astonishment that a woman could write well enough to outshine him. Still, as Nino matures, he accepts that many women are smarter than him and instead uses his charm to parasitically rise on their successes and advance his career.
Meanwhile, Elena also draws upon a particular type of feminine intelligence for her success: that of Lila who, although she has a fifth grade education, is capable of astonishing eloquence and originality of thought. While Lila assisted Elena with that early destroyed article, Elena’s interactions with her friend remain a constant for her writing, and as the final novel advances, she acknowledges that Lila’s influence and that of the neighborhood prevents her from being purely derivative. Given that Elena views herself as Lila’s satellite and remembers that Nino was attracted to Lila first, she worries that Lila is continually on the cusp of re-enchanting Nino and that he will leave her for her friend. Her fears appear to be founded when she learns that Nino’s sexual advances on Lila continued both before and after his relationship with Elena; Elena also learns that Nino was reportedly only with Elena to be close to Lila. Elena realizes that while her intelligence is a hybrid of the educated and the original, Lila’s is more fascinating and chameleonic; it does not submit “to any training, to any use, or to any purpose” (402). Elena believes that the application of intelligence to a particular field, whether writing or politics, “reduce(s)” a person, whereas Lila’s “qualities” “remain intact, maybe […] magnified” (403). Thus, Lila’s unapplied intelligence is the opposite of what is portrayed as the masculine idea of using one’s intelligence solely in a professional context. Lila becomes the object of envy and fascination for those who are limited by a particular discipline.
Elena and Lila also apply their intelligence and subtlety to redress the imbalance of power in the neighborhood by undermining the macho, violent regime imposed by the Camorrist Solaras. While the Solaras are threatened by Elena’s publications and attempt to remove them from circulation, they are far more fearful of the power Lila exerts in the neighborhood, in acts such as helping Alfonso to look like her and taking Antonio and Elena’s brothers into her employ. While both Solara brothers have been attracted to Lila and tried to get her on their side, by the middle of the fourth novel, with the destruction of her double Alfonso and the punch at the funeral, they indicate that they have become the enemies of her crusade to remake the neighborhood in her own image. Although the Solaras’ ascent to power differs from Nino’s in relying on brute force and intimidation rather than intellect, they too are afraid of the unapplied nature of Lila’s intelligence, as Michele tells his sons it is better to read, study, and become benignly intelligent like Elena, whereas “if you don’t read and you don’t study, which is what happened to Lina […] you stay malicious, and malice is ugly” (366). While Elena’s book-learning and ability to put down her thoughts and observations intimidates the lesser educated Solaras, they consider it anodyne compared to the mysterious source of Lila’s strength, which treads on the territory they would like to keep for themselves.
Finally, the legacy of Elena and Lila’s intelligence appears in their daughters. While Tina and Imma engage in a game of mutual influence much like their mothers, Lila’s daughter Tina is the chief influencer and Imma the follower. From a very early age, Tina’s intelligence promises to be disruptive, given her persistent curiosity and need to command attention. On the day of Nino’s visit to Imma, when Tina will not follow the status quo and tone down her vivacity, she ends up vanishing. Her punishment symbolizes how rebellious females are treated in a patriarchal world. Following Tina’s disappearance, Lila’s hope of extending her legacy fails, and she gives up work entirely, diffusing her intelligence in grief. When she begins her text on Naples, she concentrates not so much on the monuments of the male city’s founders, but on the cycles of destruction and rebirth that underpin them. The elemental and unfixed essence of these cycles echoes the nature of Lila’s intelligence and makes her seem more relevant than the people who force their talents to assume a certain form.
The Limitations of Conventional Love Stories
The novel begins with Elena wanting to live in a love story, as she reorients her life to be with Nino, the man she has desired ever since childhood. She makes substantial sacrifices by breaking up the family she created with Pietro and jeopardizing her career. Elena clings to the idea that the obstacles between her and Nino are being removed one by one. However, despite his passionate declarations, Nino does not inhabit the same love story, and he will not give up any of his worldly advantages or pleasures to be exclusively with Elena. Even before Elena learns that Nino is still living with his wife Eleonora, she is aware of his constant flirtation with other women. The visceral shock of discovering Nino having sex with Silvana, the motherly woman who looks after Elena’s children, makes the abstract observation of Nino’s flirtatiousness into concrete fact. When Elena challenges Antonio, the old boyfriend whom Lila sent to spy on Nino, to explain why he did not tell her about Nino’s infidelity, he replies, “For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first” (248). Thus, Antonio alludes to the fact that Elena had to become disillusioned with Nino before she could see the truth about him. Her immediate decision to sleep with Antonio, combined with the lovers she casually embraces thereafter, indicates her lack of faith in conventional love stories, as she tempers the sexual desire that dominated her at the beginning of the book.
Lila also has little faith in conventional love stories, as her relationship with her partner and co-parent Enzo is chiefly that of two companions. However, while she abuses and insults Nino to anyone who will listen and refuses his sexual advances, she still cherishes a flame for the man who broke up her first marriage, as shown during the times when she imagined that Gennaro, a child of uncertain paternity, could have been Nino’s child. Interestingly, this fantasy takes on a supernatural form when she contemplates that little Gennaro, who showed every intellectual promise, began as Nino’s child and only transformed into Stefano’s at a later stage. Her enduring attraction to Nino is evident on the day of Nino’s visit to Imma, when she makes herself beautiful and monopolizes Nino’s attention, to the extent that she loses sight of her beloved daughter Tina. The ultimate sacrifice of Tina to the distraction of Nino gives Lila’s long-extinguished love affair extra gravity. Additionally, the fact that Lila was the only woman for whom Nino “put at risk his own ambitions”, makes her the romantic exception in the long line of women Nino exploited to climb socially (402). Still, Lila’s overwhelming loss of Tina, the child who symbolizes the renaissance of her mother’s youthful promise, diminishes the potential of the revived romance with Nino. Ferrante shows that while the women’s friendship is a life-long affair, their relationships with men are episodic distractions.
Dissolving Boundaries and Political Upheaval
Lila is continually threatened by natural phenomena she cannot control, such as the earthquake that rips through Naples while she is struggling to accept the changes that pregnancy engenders. During such moments, Lila is in the presence of “dissolving boundaries,” a state in which sensory perceptions meld together, and she feels that “the outlines of things and people were delicate, they broke like cotton thread” (175). During the earthquake and later in childbirth, which she experiences as an equally unnatural rupture, Lila is overwhelmed by the fragility of existing human structures and feels that she may be engulfed in such transitions.
While Elena is the outwardly calm one who accepts both childbearing and earthquakes with equanimity, she is also wary of dissolving boundaries. When she moves back to Naples to be with Nino, she keeps her distance from the old neighborhood where Lila and her mother reside, fearing that their unpredictable influence will wreck her plans and dissolve some of the selfhood she built up in more organized Northern Italy. Thus, in embarking on a love story with Nino, Elena needs to feel that she is not returning to the Naples she left, a place dominated by her mother and Lila, in merely an ancillary role. She does this by setting up in the Via Tasso and entertaining Nino’s intellectual circles in her home. However, as Nino’s failure to meet Elena’s expectations coincides with her pregnancy and her mother’s death, Elena finds that she is willing to let the former boundaries dissolve. She feels at one with her mother’s body, which she previously loathed, and hands over her domestic situation to Lila. Elena gains renewed resilience and creative vigor from allowing the boundary between herself and the old neighborhood to fade. She even imagines that she and Lila can be revolutionaries and erode at the old patriarchal structure that dominates the neighborhood.
However, the climate of political upheaval which presides over the numerous murders, Pasquale Peluso’s enforced exile, and Tina’s disappearance also threatens to destroy the women and the values they hold dear. The novel exhibits a motif, whereby crimes or disruptions with two accomplices see one severely punished, while the other is protected. In the case of Pasquale Peluso and Nadia Galiani, who undertook a violent antifascist crusade, middle-class Nadia is afforded the protection of her family and the sympathy of the police, while Pasquale, the son of a convicted Communist, must fear for his life and endure a lengthy jail sentence. Similarly, while both Elena and Lila challenge the Solaras’ rule and go public with their dissent to the corrupted state of their city, Elena’s family remains unscathed, while Lila loses her daughter. Lila is obsessed with the fact that Tina’s kidnappers mistook her for Elena’s daughter, owing to the false newspaper caption. Thus, while Elena’s presence grows more substantial with her increased fame, Lila’s world disappears before her eyes. Although Elena attempts to give Lila some of her substance by writing about her, Lila responds by disappearing, thus allowing herself to fully dissolve into the fabric of the city she is obsessed with. No longer able to be observed, Lila forces Elena to close their saga and takes away a key facet of Elena’s identity.
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By Elena Ferrante
