74 pages • 2 hours read
Elena FerranteThe Story of the Lost Child
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Lost Child
The idea of the lost child is a consistent motif. On a literal level, the titular lost child refers to Tina, Lila’s daughter who disappears on a day dedicated to her diffident friend Imma. The ambiguous word “lost” is appropriate for describing Tina’s absence, as there is no lasting rational descriptor for how she vanished, even as theories of kidnap and complete obliteration are considered. The word lost also allows the absent Tina to hover in a space between the dead and the living, as she leaves behind no material trace of her body. For Elena, who suspects that Lila named Tina after the precious doll that Lila threw into a cellar, the disappearance of the live Tina is connected to this first loss of something precious. Elena believes that “under the most insignificant coincidences expanses of quicksand lie hidden” (451). The disappearance of the doll Tina in the first novel is a prelude to the real girl’s absence in the final text.
While Tina is the literal lost child of the novel, the motif metaphorically refers to the loss of a child’s early potential. Tina’s loss is doubly painful for Lila because it encompasses the lost potential of other promising children, including herself and her son Gennaro. Arguably, if Tina had been able to survive and resist the corrupting force of a neighborhood steeped in patriarchal traditions, she would have redeemed the losses that prevented Lila and Gennaro from fulfilling their potential. Although Gennaro survives into adulthood, he shows many symptoms of being a lost child himself, both in his drug addiction and in his inability to employ himself in school or in a job. Thus, Lila ends up with two lost children, in sharp contrast to Elena who uses her connections outside of the neighborhood to ensure that her daughters prosper.
However, prior to Tina’s disappearance, Imma is also a type of lost child. While she inquires after Tina’s whereabouts, in the long-term she grows in presence from Tina’s loss, benefiting from both Nino and Lila’s sporadic attention and becoming a lively and pretty teenager. The idea of one child benefiting by the loss of another exemplifies Ferrante’s unsentimental viewpoint regarding childhood development, as allegiances can be ruthlessly sacrificed to develop the self.
The Opposition Between Northern and Southern Italy
The opposition between Northern and Southern Italy is a crucial motif, given Elena’s removal from her marital home and her husband’s relatives in the North of Italy to the Naples of her youth. The North, which is presided over by the Airotas, represents modernity, progress, and a theoretical distance from Italy’s struggles. While she resides in Northern cities, Elena manages to contain her overwhelming childhood experiences in the South and write about them from a safe distance. This is the case with her seminal work about Naples and the corruption in the neighborhood, in addition to the text A Friendship, which describes her intimacy with Lila. However, as Elena leaves Pietro and begins her life in transit between the Northern Italy of her daughters and her life as Nino’s lover in the South, she realizes that the North represents hypocrisy in its preference for appearances over reality. She realizes the full extent of her mother-in-law Adele’s opposition to her, because of what Elena did to Pietro and because she has proved “unreliable” in not fully giving up her Southern roots (64). When Elena concludes that her own mother is better than Adele, she voices her preference for authenticity over falsehood.
The South of Italy, which invades the North like a wind on Elena’s mother’s visit, indicates a more fragmentary, less controlled state of being. A place where feelings are closer to the surface and more freely expressed, Naples is literally fragile, in being liable to earthquakes and presided over by a volcano. Elena’s mother expresses this sensibility when she imagines that her life has been made up of fragments, and that on her death she will turn into “little bits and pieces,” which are the opposite of the monuments and contained structures of the North (208). As Lila finds in her historical research on the city, even those who attempt to build monuments in Naples are faced with the threat of destruction. This is evident when the fortunes of Neapolitans like Nino and the Solaras rise and fall. However, given that Pietro’s father, Guido Airota, is also on the list of corrupters, Ferrante shows that the ills of Italy are endemic and confined to no single place.
Words as Weapons
Words, especially those belonging to women, are an important motif. They are a counter-weapon to the more masculine brute force imposed by the Solaras. As an author, Elena draws on book-learning to make a place for herself in the world. However, as The Blue Fairy, the text ten-year-old Lila wrote, was the kernel of Elena’s first novel, she imagines that Lila is the secret force behind her talent as a novelist; their rivalry motivates her work. Although Lila has since applied her intelligence to other projects, such as Basic Sight, Elena continues to be haunted by the possibility that Lila will write a text that eclipses her. She imagines that the one she is researching and redacting to Imma about Naples is going to be so magnificent that it will be “proof of my failure, and reading it I would understand how I should have written but had been unable to” (459). The absence of this text gives it the same potential as Lila’s fragmentarily applied intelligence; both have the possibility of unparalleled greatness, making Elena’s work insubstantial. Interestingly, Elena’s written work brings her closer to numerous readers but distances her from Lila. Lila is unimpressed with everything Elena writes and cuts her off completely when Elena transgresses the final boundary and writes about her. Now that Elena has seemingly fixed her, Lila responds with the ultimate text in absence—her own disappearance—from Elena’s life and everyone else’s. Other people in the novel who wish to contain Elena’s words include Adele and the Solaras. While the Solaras want to silence Elena to safeguard their reputation, Adele wants to stop Elena’s work from being published to punish her and return her to the same state of irrelevance that she was in before she married Pietro.
The unpublished speech of women like Lila and Elena’s mother, who have been schooled only to a rudimentary level and do not have a public platform for their words, is also transformative. Immacolata’s deathbed words ensure that her children live out the legacy of her values, as she persuades Lila to employ her sons instead of the Solaras and ensures that Marcello Solara marries Elisa. Similarly, Lila’s uses her words both to wound and to encourage; for example, in a single speech she salvages the selfishness of Elsa’s character and devastates Elena’s hopes of building a life with Nino by revealing that he has not left his wife.
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By Elena Ferrante
