The Lost Daughter

“Once, twice, three times she threatened us, her daughters, that she would leave, you’ll wake up in the morning and won’t find me here. And every morning I woke trembling with fear. In reality she was always there, in her words she was constantly disappearing from home.”

Leda often thinks of her mother, particularly her threats to leave. Although she never followed through, Leda lived in fear of her mother’s disappearance, even suggesting that it would have been better if her mother had gone. These memories suggest that Leda understood what it was like growing up with an unhappy mother, and she didn’t want to subject her own daughters to the same trauma.

“I suspected that she was playing her role of beautiful young mother not for love of her daughter but for us, the crowd on the beach, all of us, male and female, young and old.”

This is the first moment where Leda’s admiration of Nina begins to change. Seeing her and Elena playing on the beach, Leda thinks that perhaps Nina is only pretending to be the perfect, beautiful mother to receive the admiration of beachgoers. Leda doubts that her devotion to Elena is real after all.

“A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein.

Your life wants to become another’s.”

Here, Leda reflects on ideas of motherhood and pregnancy. She thinks about all the things a woman’s body is capable of, and all the while another life is growing inside. She names the various contradictions of motherhood; it is joyful yet repellent, a poison that cannot be escaped. Finally, she suggests that the mother’s sole purpose is to give her own life to her child, forsaking all other possible uses of the female body.

“I told her to get up right away, she mustn’t ruin something that was dear to me from my childhood: she was really cruel and ungrateful. I called her ungrateful, and I yelled, I think I yelled that giving her the doll had been a mistake, she was my doll and I would take her back.”

When Leda steals Elena’s doll, she remembers her own childhood toy, Mina. She gave Mina to her young daughter, Bianca, who ruined the doll. Leda took Bianca’s mistreatment of Mina as a lack of respect for her own feelings and childishly took the doll back from her daughter. Leda’s reaction illustrates her own immaturity when dealing with her children, as well as her desire to be seen as more than just a mother.

“For a while I continued to think that the gazes of men on the street were directed at me, as had happened for twenty-five years; it had become habitual to receive them, to endure them. Then I realized that they slid lewdly from me to rest on the girls; I was alarmed, and gratified. Finally I said to myself with ironic wistfulness: a stage is about to end.”

Leda is a beautiful woman who is accustomed to having men look at her. When she notices that they are looking at her daughters’ bodies instead of hers, Leda worries this means she is less attractive, but she is also relieved, thinking perhaps she and her daughters are finally becoming equals. Leda doesn’t seem to have the more typical motherly reaction of trying to protect her daughters from the advances of men.

“Gradually I yielded. I taught myself to be present only if they wanted me present and to speak only if they asked me to speak. It was what they required of me and I gave it to them. What I wanted of them I never understood, I don’t know even now.”

Leda slowly taught herself to be a mother and put her daughters’ needs ahead of her own. It was a learning process that continued as the girls became teenagers. When she was overly flirtatious with one of Bianca’s boyfriends, Leda finally realized that she had crossed a line and that she would never be an equal to her daughters. She would give them what they needed and accept that she would get nothing from them in return.

“Even when I recognized in the two girls what I considered my own good qualities I felt that something wasn’t right. I had the impression that they didn’t know how to make good use of those qualities, that the best part of me ended up in their bodies as a mistaken graft, a parody, and I was angry, ashamed.”

This passage expresses the continued ambivalence that Leda feels toward her daughters. Seeing qualities they inherited from her makes her uncomfortable. She feels as if they have taken something that used to belong to her alone, diluting her individuality and stealing her identity. Like her doll, Mina, her good qualities are a gift that is lost on her daughters, to her disappointment and frustration.

“I placed the doll on my knees as if for company. Why had I taken her. She guarded the love of Nina and Elena, their bond, their reciprocal passion. She was the shining testimony of perfect motherhood.”

This quote illustrates the role Nani plays for Leda. She admires the reciprocity of Nina and Elena’s relationship, encapsulated in the loving way they played with the doll. Leda wishes she had this kind of relationship with her own mother and her daughters, and taking Nani brings her closer to that idealized bond while denying it to Nina and Elena.

“Already she wanted to enter the circle of us mothers. She thought that she had waited too long, but that by now she had learned the part completely. In fact she had decided to show immediately, especially to me, that she could soothe Elena better than her sister-in-law.”

In this quote, Leda describes Rosaria. The woman is eager to become a mother and she shows off by calming Elena when Nina cannot. Although she has never experienced the true responsibility of children, Rosaria thinks she knows best because of her age and maternal instinct. This attitude irks Leda, and she decides to shock Rosaria by telling her she left her daughters, thereby proving that the other woman knows nothing of real motherhood.

“Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die.”

Leda says this to Nina in the toy store after confessing to abandoning her daughters. She describes the act as leaving—or “escaping”—as not a choice but a necessity. Although Rosaria and other members of the family are there, Leda directs the sentence to Nina alone, hoping to impress her wisdom upon the young woman.

“What had I done that was so terrible, in the end. Years earlier, I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed, I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from. Missed opportunities. Ambition was still burning, fed by a young body, by an imagination full of plans, but I felt that my creative passion was cut off more and more thoroughly by the reality of dealings with the universities and the need to exploit opportunities for a possible career. I seemed to be imprisoned in my own head, without the chance to test myself, and I was frustrated.”

In this passage, Leda explains her reasons for leaving in more detail. She wonders if what she did was really so wrong, given the depth of her unhappiness and the breadth of her potential. She describes motherhood as destroying all other possibilities. She could do nothing but care for her children and this made her feel alone and wasted.

“A vacation at the beach, what does it amount to, in the rain: asphalt and puddles, clothes that are too light, wet feet in shoes that give no protection.”

Leda’s beach vacation ends up being far from relaxing. As she spends more time in proximity to the Neapolitan family, her memories become more oppressive, affecting her mood and ability to sleep. She lacks protection from her memories, much as she lacks protection from rain on the beach.

“The harm she did me in that period was enormous. Whether she was celebrating herself in the games, or becoming bitter when she was excluded from them, she led me to believe that I had done everything wrong, that I was too full of myself, that I wasn’t made to be a mother.”

In this passage, Leda refers to Lucilla, the wife of her husband’s friend who accompanied her family to the beach. Lucilla loved Leda’s daughters, and she spoiled them and played with them without the pressure of real responsibility. Because she didn’t have to worry about the realities of motherhood, Lucilla was free to judge Leda’s parenting and act like the perfect mother, becoming a source of endless frustration and shame for Leda.

“How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they’re at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function.”

This quote reveals one of the missing components from Leda’s relationship with her daughters. She wants her girls to see her as woman, not only a mother, but she slowly learns this isn’t possible. In fact, being a mother means that nearly everyone in Leda’s life sees her as a function rather than a person.

“She agreed, and at a certain point said something to this effect: we are obliged to do so many stupid things from childhood on, thinking they’re essential; what happened to us is the only thing that has happened to me since I was born that makes sense.”

Brenda says this to Leda when they meet briefly. She suggests that one is not bound to society’s expectations, which are often arbitrary and limiting. Her words make Leda think for the first time that she could become something other than a mother, and she begins to think about what freedom would feel like.

“The last thing she said to me, some time before she died, was, in a fractured dialect, I feel a little cold, Leda, and I’m shitting my pants.”

These are the crude last words that Leda’s mother speaks to her daughter. In Leda’s quest to be seen as a person rather than a mother, she often fails to give the same treatment to her own mother, not appreciating the struggles the woman faced as an individual. Ironically, these last words have nothing maternal in them. At her end, Leda’s mother is reduced to her most basic, a human with bodily functions, finally stripped of society’s labels.

“Certainly, it would take some doing; my mother could pass without interruption from the fiction of the petit bourgeois lady to the tormented surge of her unhappiness. I would have to work harder, but I could manage it. The two girls, on the other hand—they’ve gone far away. They belong to another time, I’ve lost them to the future.”

This passage reveals the changes in Leda’s family over three generations. Leda’s mother tried to behave like a refined lady, but returned to dialect and violence at a moment’s notice. Leda has made a more complete transformation; however, she reflects that she, too, could return to the customs of Naples without much difficulty. Her daughters, on the other hand, have finally broken the cycle and belong to the future of women.

“I imagine she’ll give birth without strain, in two hours she’ll expel herself and, at the same time, another just like her. The next day she’ll be on her feet, she’ll have plenty of milk, a river of nourishing milk, she’ll return to battle, vigilant and violent.”

Leda muses that Rosaria is the kind of woman who is meant to be a mother. Having the baby will be easy for her, and she will give up her needs for the child’s with no regret. She will embrace motherhood with a vigor that Leda finds both sad and compelling.

“The children stared at me. I felt their gazes longing to tame me, but more brilliant was the brightness of the life outside them, new colors, new bodies, new intelligence, a language to possess finally as if it were my true language, and nothing, nothing that seemed to me reconcilable with that domestic space from which they stared at me in expectation.”

This passage describes the moment that Leda leaves her children. She can find no justification to stay in her children’s gaze. The thought of life without them is far more compelling, full of growth and new experiences. Leda leaves for the opportunity to further explore herself.

“I went on talking and as other happy moments came to mind I felt a longing, not sad but pleasant, for their small bodies, their wish to touch, lick, kiss, hug.”

Despite her frustrations, Leda often thinks fondly of her daughters. She does care for them and, in the end, returned to dedicate her life to them. In conversation with Giovanni, she talks about them in detail and this pleasant longing arises as she remembers them as children.

“I loved them too much and it seemed to me that love for them would keep me from becoming myself.”

This is Leda’s explanation for leaving her daughters. She tells Nina it was not for lack of love, but rather fear of what this love would take away. Between her love for her daughters and the expectations of motherhood, Leda knew she would lose herself, so she left.

“‘Because I realized that I wasn’t capable of creating anything of my own that could truly equal them.’ She had a sudden contented smile.

‘So you returned for love of your daughters.’

‘No, I returned for the same reason I left: for love of myself.’”

Leda continues her conversation with Nina, this time explaining why she returned. In leaving, Leda hoped she would find herself and create a career she was proud of. However, she realized that her daughters were her greatest work, so she returned to them. Nina searches for the answer she wants to hear, that Leda discovered her maternal love, but Leda denies it. She argues that her return was just as selfish as her departure.

“I’m an unnatural mother.”

Leda describes herself as an unnatural mother when Nina confronts her about taking the doll. This is the justification she offers for her crime, and Nina accepts it without question, agreeing with Leda before stabbing her with the hatpin. Leda can think of no other reason for stealing the doll or for her maternal ambivalence, so she assumes she must be unnatural.