Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“I thought of that face in profile on the dirt, of how thin the long hair was, of the whitish patches of skull. How many who had been girls with us were no longer alive, had disappeared from the face of the earth because of illness, because their nervous systems had been unable to endure the sandpaper of torments, because their blood had been spilled.”

This moment at the beginning of the novel is a grim foreshadowing of the gendered violence that Elena, Lila, and the other women will confront in the novel. This moment establishes the theme of women’s oppression within traditional patriarchal structures, perpetuated by generational cycles of abuse.

“How can I explain to this woman–I thought–that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?”

Elena lacks a stable sense of self, staking her identity on external validation achieved through educational achievement. The power the fear of failure has over Elena is demonstrated in this moment, when her mood is dictated by the reviews her novel receives.

“Fascists, mostly from the neighborhood, Lila knew some of them. Fascists, as Stefano’s father, Don Achille, had been, as Stefano turned out to be, as the Solaras were, grandfather, father, grandsons [...] she had discovered there was no way to be free of them, to clear everything away. The connection between past and present had never really broken down [...]”

Lila’s observation during this moment reinforces the theme of generational cycles of abuse. The motif of political ideologies conveys this theme here and signifies the role individual characters take within these cycles; the neighborhood becomes a microcosm of the larger political scene in Italy during the 1970s.