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.
Themes
Money, Taste, and Class
Whereas in My Brilliant Friend, Lila and Elena thought that the opposite of their poor, working class origins was wealth, in The Story of a New Name, Elena realizes that there are certain privileges that are not “‘just a matter of money”’ (125). She discovers that people who have grown up in a middle-class home with educated parents have automatic advantages because of the ways they speak and present themselves; advantages that no money or school education can buy. Although Elena is galled that Nino has a girlfriend, Elena reasons that Nadia, Professor Galiani’s daughter, is a fitting choice for him because her middle class background makes her “superior to us, just as she was, unwittingly” (125). Whereas Lila, the other beauty Elena admires, takes advantage of the new money she has acquired through her marriage to dress showily, like a fashion mannequin, “every item” of Nadia’s “spring outfit has a deliberate restraint” (69). Nadia, who has never experienced scarcity, has no need to show off her wealth. Instead, she displays her elegance with a seasonal outfit whose components harmonize rather than draw attention.
When Elena goes to Pisa and is for the first time in her life surrounded by middle-class Northern Italians, she learns that while she can match them in their academic success, she lacks their ease and refined manners. “I immediately realized I spoke a bookish Italian that at times was almost absurd […] I began to struggle to correct myself. I knew almost nothing about etiquette, I spoke in a loud voice, I chewed noisily […] assumed manners that were too familiar” (332). In order to fit in, Elena learns to be “polite and distant” and then begins to distinguish herself within her new persona and considers that her efforts to change “might have appeared effortless” (332). Nevertheless, Elena’s new self is fragile and when her influential, popular boyfriend, Franco Mari, leaves the Pisa Normale, she again feels isolated from her peers and like she will never fit in.
Educated Elena is not the only character in Ferrante’s novel who aspires to middle-class status. Stefano and Lila also do so when, for the first time in their lives, they go to a hotel on their honeymoon. “Neither had ever been to a hotel, and they were embarrassed and ill at ease” (34). Stefano’s discomfort is evident when he is intimidated by the receptionist’s “vaguely mocking tones” and so “assumed a subservient attitude” (34). He then performs a succession of gestures that oscillate between assertiveness and subservience, the most absurd of which is generously tipping the porter for the suitcases that he himself carries to their room. Without meaning to, Stefano is discovering that his money cannot buy him ease in unfamiliar situations, where a certain kind of manners and education count. On another occasion, Stefano drives Lila and Elena to the party at Professor Galiani’s, “dressed up, with a lot of gold, and a strong odor of shaving soap, as if he expected that at the last moment we would say to him: You come too” (153). When the girls do not invite him to join them, despite the efforts he has made to be presentable to the middle-class hosts, he is unaware why he has failed to be acceptable. He expresses his distress by driving away “with a painful screeching of tires” (153).
Lila, who is also largely ignored in the party’s middle class atmosphere, feels “voiceless, graceless, deprived of movement, of beauty” (161). However, she channels her insecurity into an attack of everyone at the party and later, when she has her sights set on Nino, she jealously lashes out at the mention of Nadia, calling her “that whore from a good family” (254). Lila’s bitter comment suggests that she is acutely aware of her own inferior education and working-class origins. But unlike Elena, she will not let class insecurity get in the way of what she feels she is entitled to.
Sexual Awakening, Repulsion, and Romanticism
In this novel, both Lila and Elena lose their virginity and begin to explore their sexuality, although in different ways.
Elena is hungry for sexual experience so that she will not be left behind in a state of girlhood as Lila is getting married. On the eve of Lila’s wedding, Elena acutely feels that Lila will be having sex with her new husband and is eager to “tell Lila when she returned: I’m not a virgin, either, what you do I do, you can’t leave me behind” (27). However, Antonio frustrates Elena’s desire to be penetrated, with a speech about how he respects her and will not have sex with her at the ponds because it is “dirty and careless” (28). Antonio does however, ask Elena to masturbate him and she “resigned” herself to obliging him, stilted because she cannot express the urgency of her own desires (27).
Elena, who is still a virgin, once again feels the need to sexually compete with Lila, when the latter plans a night with Nino. Although Elena loathes Nino’s father Donato, the man who molested her when she was fifteen and sexually inexperienced, she sees him as adequate for the task of taking her virginity. At nighttime on the beach, Elena is aware of Donato’s desire to touch her and knows that all she has to do to stop his speechifying and initiate the action is to lean her head on his shoulder. Elena “was overwhelmed by a need for pleasure so demanding and so egocentric that it canceled out not only the entire world of sensation but also his body […] the labels by which he could be classified” (292). Elena is able to enjoy the sexual experience because she can focus on the sensations she experiences in her body, rather than on her unideal partner, Donato.
When the job is done, Elena feels a need to sever herself from Donato and protects herself by addressing him in “self-assured” Italian, saying that if he ever tries to follow her, she will send the Camorrist Michele Solara after him (292). At the time, Elena is proud of her sexual experience, although she keeps it secret; it is only later, when she is writing her novel, that she finds “that that first experience of penetration […] with that banal man who was the father of the person I loved had been degrading” (431). The only way Elena can deal with the secret “shame” that has crept over her, after the incident, is to write about it (431).
Lila’s first sexual experience, on her wedding night with Stefano, is one of repulsion. The repulsion with Stefano’s physique begins while he is still dressed. After Stefano gives her handmade shoes to Marcello Solara, Lila wonders “was Stefano really so broad, his legs short and fat, his arms long, his knuckles white?” (35). Later, when Stefano initiates sex and has pinned Lila down on the bed, so she finds the act not only unpleasant, but absurd, seeing Stefano’s penis as “a puppet without arms or legs, congested by mute stirrings, in a frenzy to uproot itself from that other, bigger puppet”— Stefano (42). The puppet analogy suggests a falseness: that Lila does not recognize Stefano as the elegant human being whom she married that morning. The puppet analogy also expresses the idea that Stefano is not master of himself, that both in his betrayal of her shoes and in sex, he is pulled by invisible strings, perhaps the Solaras, or his own animal leanings.
As her marriage progresses, while Lila learns that she can gain favors from Stefano by acting “a little like a whore” (152). Sex with him provokes “revulsion” and worst of all, self-disgust (152). The whore analogy indicates Lila’s realization that she has sold herself and has to trade sex for promotion. For Lila, unlike Elena, the person she is having sex with is essential to her satisfaction. She loves Nino completely and wants to experience “staying in bed with him for a whole night and a whole day” (273). Elena is surprised that, when she reads the diary entry written after the first night Lila spent with Nino, there is no mention of sexual pleasure, but only “love” and Nino’s awakening of the sense of her old self (295).
Throughout their affair, Nino intoxicates Lila body and mind and her desire for his body is inseparable from her desire for him as a person. Following Nino’s departure and on her temporary return to Stefano’s forced sexual advances, Lila’s sexuality shuts down. She is almost relieved to find that Stefano has a mistress, as she hopes that it will end his own infringements on her person. Hauntingly, she tells Enzo that she wants no relations with him, because she has the desire of an inanimate object, “this wall or that table” (441). Rather, than pursuing a romantic relationship with Enzo, which feels inaccessible to her, Lila is excited by the possibility of an intellectual friendship, in which they advance each other’s knowledge of mathematics and binary code.
Reinforcing and Subverting the Patriarchy
Elena and Lila both confront entrenched patriarchal norms as they pursue their wishes and desires. Most obviously, Lila agrees to become Signora Carracci so that she can enter into partnership with a man who loves her and promotes her talents. However, when Stefano gives her nemesis, Marcello Solara, the shoes that she labored over as a child, to ensure that he retains favor with the Solaras and so does not jeopardize his business interests, Lila learns that she is a pawn in a system that reinforces the interests of wealthy men. The Solaras, spearheaded this time by Michele, who emerges as the dominant brother, recognize Lila’s beauty and desirability and seek to claim her away from her husband. Their first gesture is to demand that Lila’s wedding portrait be displayed in the new Piazza dei Martiri store, ostensibly as a means of advertising the Cerullo shoes on Lila’s feet.
Lila, however, who continues to seek self-definition and abhors anything that reminds her of her legal bond and subservience to Stefano, takes the scissors to the picture and, together with Elena, erases Signora Carracci. Michele Solara praises Lila’s efforts (even as others are disgusted) and puts a chauvinistic spin on the image: “You’ve erased yourself […] to show how well a woman’s thigh goes with those shoes” (121). As Lila’s marriage to Stefano deteriorates and she returns from her affair with Nino pregnant with a child of uncertain paternity, Michele continues to admire Lila and desires to possess her. He gives her a promise similar to Stefano’s: that he will provide a contained environment where Lila can “do what you like” (427). He is interested only in being “able to look at you and listen to you” (427). Even though Lila refuses this proposal, as she did Michele’s brother Marcello in My Brilliant Friend, she finds that Stefano plays her into the Solaras’ clutches when he chooses his mistress, Ada, over her and says that she is to go to the apartment that Michele has provided for her.
Lila’s only option to escape the repressive patriarchy of her marriage and the neighborhood’s power structure is to truant from it. She does this first through her affair with Nino and secondly, when she leaves with Enzo and Gennaro. There is the sense that, although she enters another patriarchy, in the form of Bruno Soccavo’s mortadella factory, where he sees it fit to sleep with any female employee who takes his fancy. She is creating a more egalitarian system at home, with Enzo, who respects her space and shares his learnings with her. Though she is “wearing a blue smock, her hands cut, disheveled” and far from being either the wealthy Signora Carracci or the passionate lover of Nino, she regains “life and energy” when she talks about Enzo and their shared passion for technology and mathematics (465).
Intellectually, both Lila and Elena suffer as a result of patriarchal norms that reinforce the scholastic talents of men and subdue their own. This happens on an interpersonal level, in both women’s conversations with Nino. Elena realizes that Nino’s tendency is to “compulsively display what he knew […] He felt strong if he took the lead and weak if he lacked words” (195). He cannot bear Elena knowing more than him, “darkened, in fact he stopped me almost immediately” and changed the topic (195). Nino’s feeling of intellectual entitlement, also leads him to desert Lila, when her own, unbounded intellectual energy threatens him. After lecturing her on her outspokenness at the meetings they attend, Nino warns, “Don’t desire to be something you’re not by ruining me” (360).
Elena experiences a more standard sexism in the Pisan intellectual milieu, when “I soon grasped that Pietro Airota had a future and I didn’t” (431). Whereas the assistant professor treats Pietro, son of the famous classicist Airota “as if he already had a professorship,” Elena is “a student of great sensitivity” whom he considers capable only of teaching school (431). Elena feels ashamed at the “overconfidence that had grown in me, this ambition to be like Pietro” (432). Struck by imposter syndrome, she goes back to Naples and waits for her marriage to Pietro (432). Still, in writing and publishing her novel, Elena seeks definition, to be as renowned as Pietro, but on her own terms.
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By Elena Ferrante
