Shoes are a symbol of hope and financial progress, but also of the impossibility of success. When Lila’s parents, Fernando and Nunzia Cerullo, are unable to pay for her to continue her education into middle school, Lila goes to work in her father’s cobbler shop making and mending shoes for other families in the neighborhood. Lila, is obsessed with finding a way to make money for herself as a means of escaping the neighborhood, so she begins scheming with her brother Rino to design a line of fine shoes for men and women that will pull their family’s business up out of obscurity and allow them to make real money. In this way, shoes represent a hope for a better life, a wealthier future, and a happier existence. However, when Rino gives the prototype he and Lila make to Fernando, their father lashes out in anger, furious that his children would attempt to change his business model (and likely afraid of how the neighborhood loan sharks would react to their money-making attempt).
In the second half of the book, an older Lila realizes that in order to make her dreams a reality, she must rely on the wealth of men she at worst despises and at best tolerates. As such, the shoes become a symbol of the impossibility of true social mobility. Lila’s suitor Stefano Carracci becomes interested in the shoes. Though they are too small, he buys them for an astronomical sum directly from Fernando—and, in the same breath, he proposes to Lila and promises to invest a grand sum of money in the Cerullo shoes business so that Lila’s designs can be faithfully made. It seems that every move forward Lila makes has strings attached, and in order to make money for her family and establish social security for herself, she must sell herself (and her ideas) to the highest bidder. At the end of the novel, when the hated Marcello arrives at Lila and Stefano’s wedding wearing the very shoes Stefano purchased, Lila is full of rage and sadness—she realizes that even though marrying Stefano has given her the illusion of security, wealth and power will always rule her neighborhood. The implication is that Marcello has bought, extorted, or demanded from Stefano the shoes Lila made in order to free herself socially and financially. Ultimately, then, shoes represent Ferrante’s assertion that for women of Lila and Lenù’s time, there is little room for freedom, advancement, or recognition through work: everything is inextricably tied to men, money, and power.
Shoes Quotes in My Brilliant Friend
I tried to remind her of the old plan of writing novels… […] I was stuck there, it was important to me. I was learning Latin just for that, and deep inside I was convinced that she took so many books from Maestro Ferraro's circulating library only because, even though she wasn't going to school anymore, even though she was now obsessed with shoes, she still wanted to write a novel with me and make a lot of money. Instead, she shrugged… […] "Now," she explained, "to become truly rich you need a business."
I told her in a rush that I was going to the high school. […] I did it because I wanted her to realize that I was special, and that, even if she became rich making shoes with Rino, she couldn't do without me, as I couldn't do without her.
She looked at me perplexed.
"What is high school?" she asked.
"An important school that comes after middle school."
"And what are you going there to do?"
"Study."
"What?"
"Latin,"
"That's all?"
"And Greek."
[…]
She had the expression of someone at a loss, finding nothing to say. Finally she murmured, irrelevantly, "Last week I got my period."
[Rino] had always seemed to her only generously impetuous, sometimes aggressive, but not a braggart. Now, though, he posed as what he was not. He felt he was close to wealth. A boss. Someone who could give the neighborhood the first sign of the good fortune the new year would bring by setting off a lot of fireworks, more than the Solara brothers, who had become in his eyes the model of the young man to emulate and indeed to surpass, people whom he envied and considered enemies to be beaten, so that he could assume their role.
“What would it cost you to let him see them?” I asked, confused.
She shook her head energetically. “I don’t even want him to touch them.”
Punctually, three days later, he went to the store and bought the shoes, even though they were tight. The two Cerullos with much hesitation asked for twenty-five thousand lire, but were ready to go down to ten thousand. He didn't bat an eye and put down another twenty thousand in exchange for Lila's drawings, which—he said—he liked, he wanted to frame them.
Marcello sat down, loosened his tie, crossed his legs.
The unpredictable revealed itself only at that point. I saw Lila lose her color, become as pale as when she was a child, whiter than her wedding dress, and her eyes had that sudden contraction that turned them into cracks. […] She was looking at the shoes of Marcello Solara.
[…] Marcello had on his feet the shoes bought earlier by Stefano, her husband. It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.
Shoes Symbol Timeline in My Brilliant Friend
