“Lila listened without saying anything, or almost anything. We asked if she had blood like us and saw her hesitate, then reluctantly answer no. Suddenly she seemed small, smaller than I had ever seen her. She was three or four inches shorter, all skin and bones, very pale in spite of the days spent outside. And she had failed. And she didn’t know what the blood was. And no boy had ever made a declaration to her.” (94)
In the above passage Elena is starting to view Lila in a different light. The girls have drifted apart in the past year and neither has done well in school – Lila failed and Elena barely passed. Elena has also been jealous of the friendship between Lila and Carmela. Now that Elena has gotten her period, she has something to bond with Carmela over that Lila is not a part of. Elena notices that Lila is very small physically, and this gives Elena the idea that she is also better.
Bringing up her small physical stature, her lack of maturity when it came to boys, menstruation, and her failure from school invoke a sense of pity for Lila. I believe that there is a pettiness underlying Elena’s description. When she says that Lila, “Suddenly . . . seemed small, smaller than I had ever seen her,” Elena reveals not Lila’s actual size (Lila is a growing girl, she has to be taller or bigger than she was before) but how she sees Lila in comparison to herself. The sense image of small size summon feelings of pity. What Elena says next is mean. Bringing up that Lila failed school when Elena barely passed is cruel. To judge her based on her development in puberty, which Lila cannot control is cruel. To say that Lila was never asked out is just to show Elena’s dominance. Although Elena is thinking these mean thoughts, she is not saying them outloud. The reader, who is inside Elena’s head, witnesses the pettiness and jealousy going on that makes this an emotionally charged paragraph. But Lila is not witnessing that same pettiness. There is a contrast here between the feelings of the reader and Lila’s feelings. She may not be having the same emotionally charged thoughts of Elena. We do not know what Lila is thinking. It is interesting to note that because we are feeling what Elena is feeling, we are not necessarily having the same reaction as Lila, which is evident is this paragraph.
Shoshana, it is really true that this paragraph is intense. Elena’s thoughts are obviously very mean and if Lila could see what’s going on inside Elena’s head, she wouldn’t be very pleased. It seems to me that throughout the book, women are always competing with one another to see which one of them is better, something that not even the men do as often. Since Elena has been envy of Lila because of her capability of reading and writing when nobody else could do those things, when she found the opportunity to degrade Lila for not being “womanly enough”, that’s what she did.
Paraskevi, you point out that “Elena’s thoughts are obviously very mean.” Meanwhile, much later, Lenù accuses Lila of being mean (295). But both of them are, and Elena constantly compares herself to Lila.