75 pages • 2 hours read
Elena FerranteThe Story of a New Name
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Blue Fairy and Other Shared Texts
The texts Elena and Lila write and collaborate on, whether intentionally or unintentionally, are an important symbol of the women’s influence on each other. The Blue Fairy is the childish novel Lila wrote while Elena studied for the middle school exam. Although Maestra Oliviero privately marked Lila’s text with the epithet “beautiful,” she withheld her praise and thus discouraged Lila from pursuing a formal education (454). Elena gets queasy reading the book, feeling that Lila’s “childish pages were the secret heart of my book […] anyone who wanted to know what had given it warmth and what the origin was of the strong but invisible thread that joined the sentences would have had to go back to that child’s packet, ten notebook pages” (454). When she resolves to return the treasure to Lila, along with sharing the news of her own book’s publication, Lila responds by burning the book as soon as she thinks Elena’s back is turned—either as a means of purifying herself from the past, or of expressing resentment that Elena has somehow stolen her own destiny as a writer.
The Story of a New Name begins with Elena’s analysis of the notebooks Lila gave her in 1966–things she wanted to keep away from her suspicious husband. When Elena violates Lila’s prohibition and reads the notebooks, she is “devoted […] to those pages […] I studied them. I ended up learning by heart the passages I liked, the ones that thrilled me, the ones that hypnotized me, the ones that humiliated me” (17-18). She is both admiring and jealous of Lila’s writing style, which has a “naturalness” with no obvious artifice. Elena feels that all her scholarly work and the protected environment of the Pisa Normale has been for nothing if she cannot write like that” (18). Even though Elena feels Lila’s words “diminished me” in a way that obliterates her own writing style, they also answer her creativity and desire to be excellent (401). In her novel, which is also praised for its naturalness, Elena herself returns to “that tempestuous world” of the neighborhood and Southern Italy (401).
When Elena sees that one of Nino’s articles has been published in Il Mattino, she realizes that “the tonality of the writing in particular,” which connects concepts “that were very distant from one another,” was Lila’s (349). Elena surmises that Nino “had never been able to write in such a fashion […] only she and I could write like that” (349). In this instance, Elena identifies that a particular style of writing belongs to both her and Lila, that their unique voice is in fact a collaboration of their thoughts and expressions. The fact that scholarly, erudite Nino cannot approximate this style indicates that it is has developed outside of the academy and formal learning; instead, it reflects the manner of the streets and women’s conversations.
The Devil
The motif of Lila as the devil is recurrent throughout The Story of a New Name. Lila’s brother, Rino, initiates the idea at Lila’s wedding, when she will not greet him for his betrayal of her shoes to the Solaras. Rino bitterly warns her new husband that “she was born twisted” and therefore has been somehow unnatural and diabolical from birth (21). Stefano, having witnessed the extent of his wife’s fury, does not deny the fact, but answers that “twisted things get straightened out” (21). Stefano makes it his mission to coax and beat Lila into submission.
Lila’s subversion of the patriarchal expectations of a wife further cause her to be suspected of being in league with an unnatural, destructive force. When Lila shows no inclination to rush to have children and does not get pregnant, Stefano suspects there is an “an evil force” in her that murders the children inside and seeks to castrate him by showing the neighborhood that he does not “know how to be a man (85-86). Pinuccia, who is jealous of the attention her sister-in-law receives, claims that Lila has a supernatural ability “not to stay pregnant” and if she happened to “would let the child drain out, rejecting the gifts of the Lord” (140). While this prediction of Lila’s evil helps to point blame at her, it also speaks to the fearful uncertainties surrounding conception and pregnancy. Lila’s behavior is a convenient scapegoat for Stefano’s fears that they will never be able to conceive, whereas the doctor, a man of science, draws attention to her extreme youth and lack of strength.
Gigliola, who is jealous of Lila because her fiancé, Michele Solara, prefers Lila to her and diminishes her in front of Lila, claims that even from a distance, Lila was able to cause the mural of her cut-up wedding photograph to burst into flames. Gigliola “blamed the disfigured image, which had caught fire spontaneously, like the Devil, who, attempting to corrupt the saints, assumed the features of a woman, but the saints called on Jesus, and the demon was transformed into flames” (140). While even in Catholic Southern Italy, Gigliola’s interpretation is unlikely to be taken seriously, it displays the feeling that she and the other neighborhood women have about Lila: that she hides her true nature from their men and is able to deceive and influence them.
Interestingly, Nino, who is infatuated with Lila, also comes to feel that she is some sort of diabolical usurper who takes the form of an intellectual in order to confuse and ruin him. Threatened by her power, he must criticize her in the severest terms, put her down, and leave her.
Italian vs. Dialect
The motif of complementary registers of speech, the standard Italian of schools, and publications on the one hand and the Neapolitan dialect of the streets on the other, are continuing motifs in The Story of a New Name. In My Brilliant Friend, Elena was learning to speak Italian rather than dialect. By the sequel, she finds that Italian is second nature, especially when she wishes to assert herself. After Lila’s wedding, when Antonio reproaches Elena for the hours she has spent with Nino, ignoring him, Elena furiously tells him that she is risking her mother’s wrath by being with Antonio now, instead of going home. While she intends to win Antonio over with her speech, Elena’s use of “scarcely any dialect,” a long sentence, and “subjunctives,” makes him feel his own inadequacy as an uneducated auto-mechanic, fanning his jealousy of Nino (22). Elena’s use of Italian and sophisticated sentence constructions signals how different she has become from the peers in her working-class neighborhood and that she does not really fit in with them anymore.
However, when she goes to Pisa, Elena discovers that her Italian has a comical, “bookish” sound to it, as though it is too formal and lacks the ease of her middle-class peers (332). In order to fit in, Elena has to learn to speak a different sort of Italian and modify what she now notices is her Neapolitan accent. Whereas in Pisa she still sounds distinctively Neapolitan, back in Naples, the sound of her “‘voice has changed”’ (377). Elena’s speech, therefore, hovers between the Neapolitan dialect and intonation of her origins and the Italian of her education and Pisan counterparts. Her concerns about her speech reflect her anxieties about escaping the neighborhood and fitting in elsewhere.
Whereas Elena sees Italian as advantageous, Lila, who sits on the beach with her and Nino, makes a point of speaking “dialect most of the time, as if to indicate modestly: I don’t use tricks, I speak as I am” (203). Her choice of dialect over Italian to assert her original opinions, which come from her observations of the world rather than from reading, is consistent with her strikingly unique writing style, which captures the chaotic tempo of the neighborhood that she spends her life in. Unlike Nino, the erudite student of formal Italian, Lila admires James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel about “prosaic life is today” that is written in several dialects of its own invention (381). She enjoys the book’s difficulty and unconventional style and it forms part of the many things she seeks to understand as a self-taught student.
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