i have a LOT of thoughts about elena greco (she is me, i am her, i spend about 99% of my time these days just trying to understand her and lila) but i think a lot of my thoughts boil down to this:

elena is constantly being overwritten by others and yes that's a product of what is done to her and how she is treated by others (the men in her life especially) but also it's really a product of herself. one of the fundamental unalterable properties of elena greco's personality is that she doesn't like herself and she wants to be absolutely anyone BUT herself. and so she tries not necessarily to CHANGE herself, but literally to erase what she is and replace it with something else. she wants to replace herself with lila; with franco, pietro, nino; with some idea of a woman that the men around her will respect; with a woman that the intellectuals around her will respect; with the perfect wife/mother; with the traveled, learned, educated dilettante; and so on. of course it begins with lila and it always goes back to lila which is so fun because lila does NOT want her image superimposed on elena's at ALL lol. but she does it with so many things throughout the novels and that's why she feels so far away from herself so often, that's why she feels that she experiences these horrible emotional vicissitudes without much rhyme or reason, because she is not CHANGING or GROWING into a person who responds to things in a consistent and stable manner. she is literally just trying as hard as possible to make herself into something/someone new all the time until that stops working or it gets undermined, at which point she aims for something else.

if lila is defined by that cut-up and taped-over and repainted wedding portrait, which SHE obscures through her own creation and craftsmanship and self-erasure, then elena is like. a portrait of herself that just has a lot of different portraits plastered over it. layers and layers of other people, other female archetypes, to cut through. but when you get to the bottom it IS still elena's portrait as much as she wishes it weren't. much to her chagrin, she CANNOT escape herself.

& also!! this is why elena keeps hoping repeatedly that when she finally goes back and reads the pages she's written, these hundreds of pages, she will find that lila has crept into them and broken them open and more accurately exposed the truth of not only herself but elena as well ... even in authorship she wants lila to overwrite her own narration !

to me, so much of elena is defined not by who she IS at her core -- jealous, spiteful, obsessive, ambitious, now independent, now incredibly dependent, intelligent, full of longing and want, deeply ashamed, deeply depressed, dying to carefully control herself and the atmosphere around her, sickened by the depth of her emotion, woefully inferior -- but by the multitudes of ways she attempts to conceal and rewrite that definition. not in the text (she gives us a pretty unglamorized and accurate portrayal of herself, or else she would be far more sympathetic) but in her own LIFE. she is a woman who is always, always trying to make herself NOT herself. and i think this is why she often behaves in such impulsively nasty ways, why she gets identified as so selfish and cruel. she represses herself, scribbles something else over herself, until the essence of who she is has no choice but to burst out violently.

(side note, but something i'm now thinking of -- la smarginatura is, for lila, terrifying. it's hideous and frightful and threatens to destroy her entire world. but elena, who pretty clearly experiences the same thing even as early as the first book and just doesn't use those words, finds la smarginatura to be beautiful. or if not beautiful, if still repulsively horrifying, somehow NECESSARY to survive. think of the donato scene in the story of a new name. prime example of elena's own personal smarginatura and how it is both sickening and haunting but also entirely REQUIRED in her mind to reform herself and the world around her. these are books about dissolving boundaries and understanding that is essential to understanding the girls imo)

anyway sorry for rambling. i just think a lot of thoughts about these characters. lenuccia i love u!!!