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.
Social Status and Wealth ThemeTracker
Social Status and Wealth Quotes in Looking for Alibrandi
I think things got worse when I started at St. Martha’s because I began to understand what the absence of a father meant. Also there were no Europeans like me. No Europeans who didn’t have money to back them up. The ones like me didn’t belong in the eastern and northern suburbs.
Even though the girls at St. Martha’s don’t mention it, I bet you they’re talking about me behind my back. I can feel it in my bones. It makes me feel I will never be a part of their society and I hate that because I’m just as smart as they are.
We weren’t on the news that night. Poison Ivy was, because she was in the group that threw questions at the Premier. As usual she was there in Technicolor, sitting on top of the world. No matter how much I hate Poison Ivy, I want to belong to her world. The world of sleek haircuts and upper-class privileges. People who know famous people and lead educated lives. A world where I can be accepted.
“It’s not the youth of today, Nonna,” I said angrily. “It’s you and people like you. Always worrying about what other people think. Always talking about other people. Well, we get spoken about as well, Nonna, and that’s your fault because you have no respect for other people’s privacy, including your daughter’s and granddaughter’s.”
I could picture [Ivy’s] parents at dinner with [John’s]. They’d talk about politics, the arts and world affairs. Then I tried to picture them at dinner with Nonna and Mama. Not that I have ever been ashamed of them, by any means. But what would they talk about? The best way of making lasagna? Our families had nothing in common.
“It’s different for you,” he sighed. “You haven’t got any pressures in life. I’ve always had to be the best because it’s been expected of me. […]”
I was surprised at his bitterness and tried to cut the mood.
“I haven’t got any pressures?” I asked, grabbing his sleeves dramatically. “I could write a book about them.”
“You always seem so in control.”
“And you don’t?”
I felt guilty in a way. Because I go on so much about my problems, but compared to John and all the other lonely people out there, I’m the luckiest person in the world.
I just ignored her. I’m getting good that way. Things that worried me a few months ago no longer worry me as much. I can’t say that I’m completely oblivious. The gossiping of the Italian community might not matter to some, but I belong to that community.
Sometimes I feel that no matter how smart or how beautiful I could be they would still remember me for the wrong things.
That’s why I want to be rich and influential. I want to flaunt my status in front of those people and say, “See, look who I can become.”
I wonder about life if Nonna had married Marcus Sandford. If Mama had been Christina Sandford, daughter of Marcus Sandford, and not Christina Alibrandi, daughter of an Italian immigrant. Would life have been different for her? Would she have depended on Michael so much and would she have slept with him like she did, which was more out of loneliness caused by her parents than pressured sex?
“Oh, Jozzie, you still do not understand,” she sighed. “Could you imagine how life would be for me if I married Marcus? Could you imagine what life would be for my sister? People are cruel. They would make our lives hell. But mostly, Jozzie, tink of Christina. Back then, tink of the way my darling Christina would be treated. It is not like these times, Jozzie. She would have no one. No Australians, no Italians. People would spit at her and say she was nuting.”
“How dare he kill himself when he’s never had any worries! He’s not a wog. People don’t get offended when they see him and his friends. He had wealth and breeding. No one ever spoke about his family. Nobody ever needed to because everyone knew that his father was the man they wanted down in Canberra. Nobody ever told their kids they weren’t allowed to play over at his place. Yet he killed himself. How could somebody with so much going for him do that?”
Ivy was valedictorian, but then I never doubted that. Simply because I guess she deserved it more than me.
I met her at one stage in the ladies’ and I realized that she wasn’t Poison Ivy anymore. She was just Ivy. As scared as I was of what it meant to be out of our uniform. She smiled hesitantly and I smiled back, and I saw tears in her eyes.