The Story of a New Name

“That night, the room, the bed, his kisses, his hands on her body, every sensation was absorbed by a single feeling: she hated Stefano Carracci, she hated his strength, she hated his weight on her, she hated his name and his surname.” 

This extract describes the visceral nature of Lila’s loathing for Stefano after he has taken her virginity on their wedding night. The catalogue of hated attributes begins with Lila’s repulsion by Stefano’s body and ends with his surname, which she, that very day has taken.

“No one, not even her mother, who was silent during the entire visit, seemed to notice her swollen, black right eye, the cut on her lower lip, the bruises on her arms.” 

The visible signs of domestic abuse that Lila suffers at Stefano’s hands are apparently ignored by her entire family, who come to visit the newlyweds. Lila’s mother’s silence symbolizes the larger community’s silence on domestic abuse; however, her refusal to talk and be convivial is also a sign of protest. 

“Everything about her—the hair, the earrings, the close-fitting blouse, the tight skirt, the way she walked—was unsuitable for the grey streets of the neighbourhood. Male gazes, at the sight of her, seemed to start, as if offended. The women […] stood watching her, with a laugh that was both amused and uneasy.” 

Lila’s ostentatiously stylish manner of dressing intimidates passersby in the grey neighborhood. While one might expect that men would admire beautiful Lila, given their own poverty, they find her exaggerated display of wealth galling. Meanwhile, the women’s uneasy and nervous laughter indicate that Lila’s presence is both comical and surreal. On Lila’s part, the outfit may function as armor that prevents people from getting too close to her.

“He said that he would not go down on his knees to anyone and that he would be a soldier not once but a hundred times, that in fact he would die in the Army rather than go and kiss the hand of Marcello Solara.” 

Antonio’s exaggerated pronouncement of preferring death multiple times to soliciting the help of the Solaras to avoid doing his military service displays his excitable state of mind and abrupt mood swings. Whereas it seemed to Elena that he would do anything to avoid military service to stay with her and ensure that he does not lose her to Nino Sarratore, he takes her approach to the Solaras as a betrayal and suddenly decides that he never wishes to see her again. 

“Rafaella Cerullo, overpowered, had lost her shape and had dissolved inside the outlines of Stefano, becoming a subsidiary emanation of him: Signora Carracci.” 

Lila feels that on taking her husband’s name, she has not only lost her former surname, Cerullo, but the shape of the girl she was. As Rafaella Cerullo, she was a solid person of her own, but as Signora Carracci, she can be only a “subsidiary” and therefore inessential version of Stefano and all that he represents

“He was absolutely the first person to show me in a practical sense how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment, and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation, that you don’t have to do anything to be accepted.” 

When Armando Galiani, Professor Galiani’s son, greets Elena by saying that she is already known in their household for her excellent essays, Elena’s sets aside her worries about fitting in at a party of middle-class educated people. She begins to experience what it is like to be appreciated for her talents. 

“She admitted that she had asked to go with me. She admitted she had thought she could for at least one evening get away from the grocery and be comfortable with me, share in the sudden widening of my world […] She admitted she thought she would find a way of making a good impression […] Instead she immediately felt voiceless, graceless, deprived of movement, of beauty.” 

In Lila’s notebooks, Elena reads how hurt Lila is by that evening at Professor Galiani’s, where her plan of escape from a night at the grocery, and perhaps from the persona of Signora Carracci, fails. In this world, where knowledge and a certain manner of speaking and behaving count more than natural intelligence and beauty, Lila feels hauntingly invisible.

“The sun was setting. I thought of Donato’s molestations and shuddered. From the violet sky came a chilly dampness.” 

When Elena, Lila and Pinuccia arrive on Ischia and the latter two praise Donato Sarratore (Nino’s father and the man who molested Elena on the evening of her fifteenth birthday, an incident recounted in “My Brilliant Friend), Elena is reduced to a sensation of coldness. Ferrante uses pathetic fallacy to show how as the sun sets and the sky turns a reflective violet color. Elena is left alone with her uncomfortable thoughts. 

“There were rarely, between Nino and Lila, words that were not mediated by me. Lila never addressed him directly, nor did Nino address her, they seemed embarrassed by one another.” 

While Elena might seem to be in a privileged position as mediator between Lila and Nino and therefore the person her two idealized objects address themselves to, the embarrassment Lila and Nino, who are both usually confident, feel around each other indicates that there is some strength of feeling between them.

“Finally she cried with rage and at the same time maternal pride, ‘What happened when I conceived you, an accident, a hiccup, a convulsion, the lights went out, a bulb blew, the basin of water fell off the night table? Certainly there must have been something, if you were born so intolerable, so different from the others.” 

At the point when Lila makes up a lie for why she needs to spend a night away from the house they are renting so that she can see Nino, Nunzia, who thinks that Lila demands too much to spend a night away, if only to see her schoolteacher, is both exasperated and in awe of Lila’s will. She imagines there must have been a supernatural intrusion during Lila’s conception, an event that could interfere in the expected passing on of genetic characteristics and make her an anomaly.

“When I 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, in my eyes old, and the labels by which he could be classified - father of Nino, railway worker-poet-journalist, Donato Sarratore - he was aware of it and penetrated me.” 

To go through with what she feels to be the necessary act of losing her virginity to Donato Sarratore, Elena needs to reach a state of egocentrism capable of cancelling out all of Donato’s objectionable associations—from his aging body to his being the womanizing father of the man Elena truly desires. Hungry for pleasure, Elena gives into an unknown entity rather than to Donato. 

“If she had confided it to me then, in the taxi, I would have suffered even more, because I would have recognised in her fulfillment the reverse of my emptiness. I would have understood that she had come to something that I thought I knew, that I had believed I felt for Nino, and that, instead, I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, except in a weak, muted form.” 

Elena does not know the exact state of Lila’s love and passion for Nino until she reads Lila’s notebooks, many years later. Elena the narrator retrospectively considers that, aware of Lila’s feelings, her eighteen-year-old self would have suffered because they were perhaps even stronger than her own for Nino.

“I, Elena Greco, the daughter of the porter, at nineteen years old was about to pull myself out of the neighbourhood, I was about to leave Naples. By myself.” 

Elena takes a moment to marvel at her unlikely and fabulous destiny. She has surmounted the circumstances of her birth to do what no-one in her family or neighborhood has done. The emphasis that she is doing this by herself indicates the rarity of her destiny and also alludes to the fact that she is advancing alone, without Lila. 

“When I said goodbye, wishing them well, I hoped for my sake that I wouldn’t see them again.” 

When Elena says goodbye to Lila and Nino, they are about to run away together and make a new life for themselves and their unborn child; Elena wishes to never see them again so that their happiness together will not distract her from her studies in Pisa. 

“I immediately realised 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; I became aware of other people’s embarrassment and tries to restrain myself.”  

On moving to Pisa, Elena sees herself as though for the first time, as an unrefined Neapolitan. Through the eyes of her sophisticated Pisan classmates, she observes and critiques herself for speaking a loud, effortful Italian and having poor table manners. 

“How easy it is to tell the story of my life without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at the airport […] It’s more complicated to recount what happens to her in these years. The belt slows down, accelerates, swerves abruptly, goes off the tracks. The suitcases fall off, fly open, their contents scatter here and there.” 

Without the chaotic contribution of Lila, Elena’s life seems to take a simpler, more chronological form that can be easily documented. Lila’s on the other hand, like the scattered suitcases, is more difficult to recount, as elements of her experience bubble up in unexpected places, challenge and compete with one another. 

“My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers.” 

Even though Elena is independent from Lila in the Pisa years, where the two women have very little contact, she cannot help thinking that their minds and destinies are linked and could have easily been reversed. Even though Lila gave up her formal education in elementary school, Elena can concretely imagine what Lila would have done had she moved to Pisa. 

“The phenomenal child of elementary school, the girl who had charmed Maestra Oliviero, who had written The Blue Fairy, had reappeared and was stirring with new energy. Nino had found her under the pile of dirt where she had ended up and pulled her out.” 

Lila’s relationship with Nino returns her to herself, to the prodigious student she had once been. Her marriage to Stefano, which has brought her riches would appear to have pulled her from “under the pile of dirt,” but that very marriage becomes the dirt which obscures and stifles Lila’s potential.

“‘You confused my ideas. Because you’re like a drop of water, ting ting ting. Until it’s done your way, you won’t stop.’” 

Nino blames Lila when “Il Mattino” will not publish his article. Unlike Elena, who is receptive and grateful for Lila’s influence in her writing, even if she is intimidated by her friend’s brilliance, Nino sees Lila’s intervention as something that confuses his ideas. Whereas Lila and Elena create from a place of collaboration, Nino creates from a place of ego.

“Lina isn’t right for me, Lina is pregnant, what’s in her womb scares me; so I must absolutely not return, I have to go to Bruno, borrow some money, leave Naples as Elena did, study somewhere else.” 

This passage gives the reader a rare, first-person peek into Nino’s thoughts after he walks out on Lila. Nino is beset by fears of entrapment surrounding Lila’s pregnancy. He thinks only of himself, imagining that he will do what Elena did to get away from Lila’s influence to study elsewhere. 

“As soon as the train entered the station I became nervous. I feared that some accident would prevent me from returning to the Normale at the end of the vacation.” 

Elena finds alighting in Naples stressful during her Normale years. She does not feel so far removed from Naples and the neighborhood and fears some trigger from her past may engulf her future. The “accident” she anticipates and dreads, is arguably the reverse of the other “accident” that allowed her to escape the neighborhood. 

“The money she had had and had wasted were all one, in her imagination, with the poverty of childhood, it was without substance when it was there and when it wasn’t.” 

Lila, who has married for material wealth, finds that she has few regrets about losing her fortune and luxury when her marriage ends and she is once again living in poverty with Gennaro and Enzo. She learns that money is an insubstantial thing that cannot truly contribute to her happiness. 

“I went away in great agitation. Inside was the struggle to leave her, the old conviction that without her nothing truly important would happen to me, and yet I felt the need to get away, to free my nostrils of that stink of fat.” 

When Elena turns to leave Lila in her humiliating position at the mortadella factory, she is overwhelmed by a mixture of emotions. On the one hand, Elena experiences a profound sense of loss when she loses sight of Lila, who she sees as the true author of the ideas that made her a writer. On the other hand, Elena is keen to escape the mortadella factory environment and the reminder of what a hand to mouth existence is.