Elena continues to form her ideas on feminism into her years of “maturity,” as this section of book four is titled. An idea that Elena expresses on her book tour that struck me was when she states:

 “I talked about how, to assert myself, I had always sought to be male in intelligence—I started off every evening saying I felt that I had been invented by men, colonized by their imagination—and I told how I had recently seen a male childhood friend of mine make every effort possible to subvert himself, extracting from himself a female”(TSLC, 57).

Elena talks about her relationship to men and how she realizes the impact men have on her identity as a woman. This idea that Elena strives to be “male in intelligence” makes a lot of sense since many of the intellectuals she looks up to throughout life are male such as Nino, Franco, and Pietro.  Elena starts with an intellectual model as a woman, Lila, but that image of Lila fades with time and is replaced by the men in her life. The most puzzling part of this quote must be when Elena refers to the encounter with her male childhood friend, Alfonso, and how he is “extracting from himself a female.” I see how this is relevant to the idea of male and female identities influencing one another but I’m not entirely sure why in the previous chapter Lila is mentioned in relation to Alfonso’s new appearance. Elena states, “Now, mysteriously, with that long hair in a ponytail, he resembled Lila” (TSLC, 55). Elena describes Alfonso’s look as more female but not just any female, female like Lila. What does this comparison mean?