Though the novel confirms that the upper-class women she admires are also consummate actors, their kind of role playing is not accessible to Nana. Assuming that respectability is something she can achieve with the right performance-the right clothes, the right walk, the right home décor, she approaches her whole life as a performance. She fails to realize the utter impossibility of this dream. As an adult, her first tastes of luxury give her an insatiable appetite for conspicuous consumption, which in her mind puts her ever closer to her most elusive wish: to be mistaken for a highborn lady. In childhood, she dreamt of seemingly simple pleasures-a partner to love, a simple house in a pastoral setting-but even this fantasy betrays her longing for material comfort. The daughter of poor parents, one of whom died of alcoholism and the other of starvation, she has always yearned for more. As the novel’s protagonist and anti-hero, Nana is nuanced character who primarily represents unchecked female sexuality and the unquenchable power of desire.
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