Feeling Like an Outsider
One of the first themes to appear in Looking for Alibrandi is feeling like an outsider. Central to Josie’s school experience is the sensation of feeling disadvantaged and excluded from the society of her classmates. The principal roots of Josie’s insecurities are her poorer background and Italian-Australian heritage. As a scholarship student, she feels overwhelmed in “a school dominated by rich people” (Marchetta 14). And as an “ethnic” or “new” Australian, as her classmate Poison Ivy calls her, she feels as if she’ll never truly be able to claim Australia as “her country” like her classmates do (Marchetta 236, 239).
Josie also feels like an outsider in her Italian community. As a second-generation Italian-Australian, a person of Italian descent who was born in Australia but whose grandparents were born in Italy, she thinks her community doesn’t completely accept her. Furthermore, Josie being the product of a teenage pregnancy and her mother having her out of wedlock further distance her from the traditional and conservative Italian community. It doesn’t help that Josie is an independent, free-spirited, and free-thinking young woman who shirks the expectations of her community.
All of these factors coalesce into Josie feeling like she doesn’t belong to either the Italian or the Australian communities. She grapples with these feelings for most of the novel, but by the end she realizes her place is somewhere in between. She no longer feels like she’s an outsider, and understands that the multiculturalism that defines her life is central to Australian culture.
Pressure
Pressure comes in various forms and from various places in Looking for Alibrandi. Almost all of the book’s key characters deal with some type of pressure as the story unfolds. Josie feels the pressure from her Italian society acutely as she navigates the difficult years of adolescence. She feels stifled by the “ridiculous rules and regulations” her relatives and acquaintances brought with them from Europe, and longs to one day “run to be emancipated” (Marchetta 61).
Like her daughter, Christina Alibrandi also experiences pressure from the Italian community. As a single mother, she had to endure gossip and hate not only when she was pregnant with Josie, but also now that she’s raising Josie on her own. A great deal of this pressure comes from her mother, Nonna Katia, who questions whether Christina is raising Josie the correct way. Ironically, Katia dealt with societal pressure too when she was a young woman newly emigrated from Italy. To the confusion of her Italian community she became good friends with an Australian man, and was eventually pressured to abandon her love for him. One of the major conflicts of Marchetta’s book is whether the the generations of Alibrandi women can set aside their differences and stop criticizing one another.
The Alibrandi women are not the only ones to experience pressure in the novel. Another notable character is John Barton, who cannot bear the pressure to succeed that his family impresses on him. From a long line of affluent politicians, John was pushed to be the best and to win whenever he could. When he failed, his father’s disappointment would feel like hatred (Marchetta 192). As the novel progresses, John finds it impossible to deal with the pressures of society and his parents, and commits suicide. His story is tragic and a cautionary tale to not let others’ expectations of you rule your life.
Immigration
While touted as a bildungsroman and the story of Josie’s self-discovery, Looking for Alibrandi is also a story about immigration. It’s particularly the story of one family’s immigration to Australia, and how life unfolded for them across generations as they navigated a new world and culture. Nonno Francesco’s decision to immigrate to Australia and bring Nonna Katia with him had reverberating effects for Katia and her entire line of children. If they hadn’t moved, Katia would have never met Marcus Sandford, and neither Christina or Josie would have been born. This is what immigration does. It causes people from vastly different worlds and backgrounds to collide, and creates a million new possibilities. The importance of immigration to the story is evident in the way Marchetta details Nonna Katia’s experiences as a new immigrant in Australia. Katia’s trials, tribulations, and triumphs, such as learning English and dealing with the snakes that slithered into her first house, are all illustrated to help paint a clear picture of what immigration looks like from the eyes of an immigrant. This really solidifies the idea that while Looking for Alibrandi is Josie’s story, it’s her family’s story as well.
Family Ties
Family ties are another key theme in the novel. For Josie, despite the differences between herself, her mother, and her grandmother, they are her world. She may argue and disagree with their ways, but at the end of the day they are a unit and a team. Thus, when her birth father arrives on the scene after being absent for 17 years, Josie’s family ties, the bedrock of her existence, are deeply shaken. Initially Josie rejects her father and wants nothing to do with him, but when he comes to her rescue after she breaks Carly Bishop’s nose, the two embark on a path of reconciliation and love. Josie’s family ties are shaken again when she discovers Nonna Katia’s earth-shattering secret about Christina’s actual father. At first she swears to never forgive her grandmother, but the lessons she’s learned over the course of the year make her realize that life isn’t so black and white. When the novel ends, Josie and her family are the closest they’ve ever been.
Josie’s friends also have fraught yet important family ties. Lee Taylor, for example, loves her father, but as a raging alcoholic he becomes a different person when he drinks. This causes a chasm in her family. Jacob Coote has a strong bond with his father, but deeply misses his mother who died from cancer. He cautions Josie against taking her family and their presence in her life for granted. Finally, for John Barton family ties are even more constraining than they are for Josie. His family loves him, but in John’s opinion they love success even more, and he buckles under the weight of their expectations. In the end, he commits suicide to escape his family ties.
Community and Tradition
Community and tradition go hand in hand in the novel. As Nonna Katia explains when describing her first few months in Australia, community was one way to keep her Italian traditions alive in her new country. The Italian immigrants lived in their own little world, and as more Italians immigrated to Australia, the community grew to where the Italians didn’t need to make friends with Australians or assimilate to Australian culture. Within their community, traditions such as making tomato sauce from scratch and reporting everyone’s movements to their relatives thrived. At first, Josie rejects her Italian community and its traditions because she finds them restrictive and antiquated. For example, she refuses to learn certain jobs all good Italian girls should learn in order to take care of their husbands, because she finds this chauvinistic (Marchetta 61). Eventually, Josie realizes there’s no escaping her community or its traditions, but she can forge her own path. She can pick which traditions she wants to keep, like making tomato sauce from scratch, and which she wants to let go of.
Cultural Differences and Racism
Although Josie, as a second-generation Italian-Australian, is mostly assimilated to Australian culture, she still feels the cultural differences between her and her peers. These differences come up most often with her boyfriend Jacob Coote, who at times finds Italian cultural moores baffling. For example, when Josie says he must meet her mother before going on their first date, Jacob is taken aback. He’s never had to do that with an Australian girl before. Similarly, he doesn’t understand why Josie is wary of introducing him to her grandmother without giving her grandmother advance notice. For Josie these things are common sense, but for Jacob they’re illogical. However, although an angry Jacob may say offensive things about Josie’s culture, he immediately apologizes.
This is different from some of Josie’s classmates, like Carly Bishop and Ivy Lloyd, who take their cultural differences from Josie and turn them into racist fodder. For example, when Ivy sees a photo of an Italian funeral, she makes the generalization that “new” or “ethnic” Australians like Josie wear a lot of black. This sets Josie off, and the two school captains go back and forth until Ivy accuses Josie’s ancestors of killing her ancestors during World War II. Very quickly, a simple cultural stereotype devolves into nationalistic and racist propaganda. Moments like this one regarding her culture make Josie feel like an outsider among her peers.
Self-discovery
Vital to any bildungsroman, or a novel dealing with a main character’s formative years, is self-discovery. From the opening pages of Looking for Alibrandi, when Josie is caught taking a teen magazine quiz designed to inform her “what kind of friend are you,” it’s clear that this is the story of Josie’s journey to self-discovery. Though certainly a humorous way of introducing the novel’s central conflict, the teen magazine quiz effectively demonstrates that Josie is looking for anything and everything to help her figure out who she is.
As various good and bad events in the novel transpire, each one takes Josie further on her path of self-discovery. For example, the appearance of her father in her life teaches Josie how to forgive and give people second chances. John Barton’s suicide shows her that everyone has their demons, and that money, affluence, and success don’t always equal happiness. Finally, her romance and heartbreak with Jacob Coote teaches Josie that life doesn’t always go as planned, but you enjoy things while you have them. These events, along with several others, teach Josie lessons about life and help her realize who she truly is.
