Tag Archives: TSLC

Loss of Control

Throughout the Neapolitan Novels Lila experiences episodes, she calls dissolving boundaries. Figures and people spill over their outlines and become shapeless and Lila experiences this in 1958 on New Year’s Eve when her brother Rino and his friends battle with fireworks to show up the Solaras. The dissolving of boundaries is attached to a loss of control. This sensation terrifies Lila and she expresses, “All my life I’ve done nothing, Lenù, but hold back moments like those” (TSLC, 177). But, when an earthquake hits the neighborhood, Lila is enveloped in a situation far beyond her control as she feels her own boundaries and the boundaries of the neighborhood dissolve.

When the earthquake hits, Lila has no control over anything, and it terrifies her. Earlier in the novels whenever things would scare Lila, she would use the men in her life to hide behind: Marcello, Stefano, Michele, Nino, and Enzo. When she fears one man she moves to the next and in this cycle, she has control. Lila has this natural control over men. Lila used men as a tool to avoid the episodes of dissolving boundaries but when the earthquake hits, she has no one to hide behind because it’s all around her. The fear and sensation of smarginatura engulfs Lila and she is left as helpless as ever.  

Identity

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?