The boundary between vulgarity and refinement

The boundary between vulgarity and refinement is one of the unstable measures by which Giovanna learns to judge people and herself. It first appears as a family and social distinction, expressed through education, manners, language, and taste; the bracelet then makes those categories collide. What her parents call vulgar can possess beauty and warmth, while people she had considered refined can act with selfishness and cause suffering. The confusion is not merely about taste: it unsettles Giovanna’s sense of family, inheritance, and her own resemblance to Vittoria and her father.

Standards of Taste and Belonging

The distinction is visible in the contrast between the households Giovanna knows. Vittoria’s relatives live in small, drab apartments, furnished with objects Giovanna has been brought up to judge crude or vulgar; books are scarce, and only Aunt Anna has some mysteries. Yet the relatives welcome Giovanna warmly. They speak in a cordial mixture of dialect and Italian, and she tries to answer in kind, making room in her hypercorrect Italian for Neapolitan cadences. Although their hostility toward her father is evident in their silence about him, they take care to show that they are not angry with her. They call her Giannina, a name her parents never use, and she feels more open to affection among them than she has elsewhere. The apparent signs of refinement and respectability do not account for the tenderness she receives.

Speech, too, carries the weight of a boundary. Giovanna’s parents forbid their daughters both to swear and to utter even a syllable in Neapolitan, though the prohibition is softened by their general indulgence. Mariano, her father’s university friend, speaks differently: he teaches history, contributes to a prestigious Neapolitan journal, and rails loudly, often in dialect, against people he considers enemies of his work. The girls repeat the obscene epithets they hear from him under their breath, treating the forbidden language as a game; Giovanna, however, cannot separate it from an impression of spite. The same words that amuse Angela and Ida sharpen Giovanna’s suspicion that social polish and moral character do not necessarily coincide.

Vittoria makes the act of looking into a lesson. During visits to the paternal relatives, she tells Giovanna to compare what they are like with what her father and mother are like, and insists that Giovanna has blinders: she looks without seeing what might disturb her. The relatives’ hospitality complicates the judgments she has been taught to make. In Vittoria’s company, moreover, Giovanna becomes relaxed and funny; she wonders whether the name Giannina has brought forth a different person from within her. Refinement and vulgarity are therefore not just labels applied to houses or objects. They influence which forms of welcome Giovanna recognizes and which version of herself can emerge.

The Bracelet Reverses the Categories

The bracelet concentrates the conflict because its history joins women whom Giovanna regards as opposites. Vittoria is uneducated, vulgar, and poor; Costanza is cultivated, refined, and wealthy. Yet Costanza has worn and valued for thirteen years a bracelet that belonged to Vittoria and was meant for Giovanna. The object makes their difference impossible to keep cleanly intact: the taste represented by the bracelet crosses the divide that the women’s reputations seem to establish. Giovanna also has to reckon with her father’s role in its passage to Costanza, his elegant second wife, who had no need of jewelry. A possession associated with the aunt he despises has proved suitable to the woman he loves.

The evidence of the bracelet reaches Giovanna’s mother through a photograph kept in a dictionary. Nella had repeatedly seen the image but noticed only her young husband, the man she loved; she had not recognized the bracelet on the arm of her mother-in-law. When Giovanna shows her the connection, Nella suffers, but controls her reaction and tries to divert her daughter’s gaze with sentimental stories. She returns to the idea of Andrea as good, honest, and faithful, and of Costanza as the great love and true wife. Giovanna interprets this retreat into the cult of her former husband as a way Nella fills the void he left, but finds it more offensive than facing what the photograph reveals. The contrast between refinement and vulgarity now reaches beyond taste: it is implicated in the stories adults tell to preserve their attachments.

Giovanna initially tries to explain the bracelet through magic. She imagines that Andrea might have removed it from the house to protect her from Vittoria’s malice, or that the object enchanted him and bound him to Costanza. Such fairy-tale explanations offer a way to reduce both her father’s responsibility and her own: if Vittoria’s magic caused the family’s misfortunes, Giovanna can be innocent of having sought out her aunt. But the imagined explanation cannot contain what the bracelet signifies. Whether or not there was a curse, Andrea had judged beautiful the object Vittoria gave Giovanna, and Costanza’s pleasure in it confirmed that judgment across the very divide of taste and class that seemed to separate them.

Reversal and Self-Recognition

As the fairy-tale account falters, Giovanna sees the moral categories reverse. Vittoria, whom she had been taught to regard as vulgar, becomes a woman of taste; Andrea and Costanza, people of taste, appear vulgar in light of the wrongs they have done Nella. Mariano’s conduct further disrupts the idea that education or cultural standing guarantees refinement. Giovanna imagines an underground tunnel linking Andrea, Costanza, and Vittoria despite their claims to difference, as if they were made of the same clay. She associates Andrea’s desire for Costanza with Enzo’s past treatment of Vittoria and Margherita, and imagines her mother weeping until she loses her reason. In this fantasy, shared conduct matters more than the social distinctions that supposedly separate the adults.

When Nella finds the bracelet in Giovanna’s room, its meaning becomes painfully immediate. She takes it from the drawer and stares at it; Giovanna sees that her mother has grown thin and hunched, and later comforts her as she lies on the bed sobbing. The object no longer supports a simple account in which a loving father has merely protected his daughter, or an enchanted gift has independently caused harm. Giovanna concludes that Andrea’s objective had been to fasten the bracelet around Costanza’s wrist. To her, it shows that people’s bodies, moved by life within them, can do foolish things, even people as intellectually capable as Andrea and Costanza. The shock is that refinement does not exempt anyone from bodily desire or its consequences.

The distinction finally enters Giovanna’s own claim to the bracelet. After recognizing it in the photograph, she resolves not to return it to Vittoria. She builds a deliberately tangled case: it belonged to her grandmother; Vittoria took it against Andrea’s will; Andrea took it against Vittoria’s; Costanza returned it to her; and Giovanna herself recognized what Nella had missed. Her reasoning turns the act of seeing into a claim to possess and endure knowledge, even when that knowledge causes pain. She says inwardly that she can face pain and cause it, unlike her mother, and concludes that she is like Vittoria and Andrea, who were physically similar in the photograph. The bracelet does not settle who is refined or vulgar. It leaves Giovanna with a more troubling inheritance: the possibility that the supposedly opposed adults, and she herself, are bound together beneath the labels by which the family tried to distinguish them.