Social Status and Wealth Theme Analysis

Seventeen-year-old Josie is extremely caught up in the differences between people of different social classes. As someone of a lower social class (her single mother is a second-generation Italian immigrant) who nevertheless attends a prestigious high school on a scholarship, Josie fears that she’s never going to fit in with the popular, wealthy girls at her school. So Josie’s goal for much of the novel is to attain wealth and prestige once she’s an adult—she believes that’s the only guaranteed way to become happy and successful. But when Josie’s wealthy and successful friend John commits suicide, Josie is forced to reevaluate the relationship between wealth and happiness. Looking for Alibrandi proposes that wealth, popularity, and social status might make a person’s path to success easier, but that success by those metrics is no guarantee of happiness.

At the beginning of the novel, Josie believes that the most important things a person can have are wealth and connections—two things she doesn’t have. Josie and her mother, Mama, live a modest, middle-class life. Mama owns their home, but it’s small: Josie describes how their dining room and living room are one room. But by herself at home, this doesn’t bother Josie—she explains that it’s all the better to be able to watch TV while eating dinner or studying. While she’s around her classmates, though, Josie is plagued by the thought that she’s not as good as her wealthy, connected peers. In addition to her Italian heritage, her being at St. Martha’s on a scholarship is something that Josie believes marks her as being fundamentally different from her classmates and contributes to her self-consciousness. And Josie constantly makes comments about how different she is from her classmates. When she’s called to the office for breaking Carly Bishop’s nose, for instance, she wants to laugh when Mr. Bishop tells Josie to call her lawyer—she’s not wealthy enough to have a lawyer, let alone have one who’s on call. Similarly, as she thinks of her crush on her wealthy friend John Barton, she imagines Mama and Nonna having dinner with John’s parents—and believing their families have nothing in common, Josie can’t come up with anything that the adults might talk about. Wealth, in Josie’s mind, is an insurmountable difference between her working-class family and wealthy families like John’s.

Josie aspires to be wealthy and connected because she believes wealthy people are happier and have more freedom. This is part of the reason why Josie wants to become a barrister: she sees a career in law as catapulting her away from her working-class origins and giving her the opportunity to choose what she’d like to do with her life. In her understanding, working-class adults are constrained by the unskilled or low-level jobs available to them. Josie doesn’t consider those jobs shameful, but she does imply—at least in the first half of the novel—that they’re not as meaningful, important, or fulfilling as a professional career. So when Josie looks at her friend John, for instance, she sees someone who has it all. John’s father is in Parliament, and his family is extremely wealthy and well-connected. John’s life is all laid out for him: he’s going to study law with Josie, he’s going to go into politics, and according to his grandfather, he could become the first Premier in the family. To Josie, it seems as though John shouldn’t have any cares in the world. He can afford fancy clothes, he fits in wherever he goes, and entering a skilled, white-collar profession after college is guaranteed.

But as John’s worsening mental health and suicide ultimately show, having wealth isn’t a guarantee of happiness. Indeed, Josie’s early interactions with John, in which his mental health is worsening and he expresses suicidal ideation and bitterness about his future, shows that John isn’t happy. To him, his family’s prestige and their expectation that he enter politics is stifling, not freeing. And this, Josie believes and John implies, is why John chooses to commit suicide. He feels so constricted by the expectation that he follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, go into law and then politics, and continue to live a life of wealth and prestige that in his mind, the only way to escape is by killing himself. John’s suicide forces Josie to see that wealth isn’t an indicator of a person’s happiness. Wealth wasn’t enough to keep John alive—and, Josie realizes, becoming a wealthy barrister and breaking into the upper echelons of society isn’t going to guarantee that she’ll be happy, either. Rather, Looking for Alibrandi suggests that what’s far more likely to influence a person’s happiness is whether or not their family is supportive of a person’s dreams and desires—no matter how much money that family makes.