goshhhh. from her very first description lila rejects both the romantic and the tragic extreme of her fate. she does not dream of running away and into the sunset, exploring everything she's never gotten to explore, adventurous heroine's dream of a better world waiting to unfold. the option of her committing suicide, like didone, is also quickly discarded. although seemingly opposite in nature, it's an equally common ending for a female character in a poetic setting. starting from her introduction, provided by elena, lila refuses to be in this book, lila refuses to be a myth. the desire to leave no physical evidence of her life is the desire to refuse the folk tale that surrounds it. now. realistically speaking, something had to happen to lila, she had to do something with the disappearance, but even if she did travel somewhere or even if she did take her own life, she's already managed to save those instances from being romanticised, specifically romanticised in a literary fashion. elena captures lila in a book, yes, but all while making it clear that lila existed beyond it.
one more thing i also enjoy in the juxtaposition of these two options is that taking your own life is a classic, epic and ancient ending for a woman in fiction while the dream of running away is the typically male counterpart in the same setting, a setting we can boldly perceive as characteristic to multiple literary eras. running away, for a woman, is a more modern concept, to be free of marriage and death both. lila's rejection of these roles, the ancient and the modern one, is an act against any and all entrapment, no matter its origin. it's also a declaration of the inherent similarity between opposites, a dissolving of boundaries if you will. lila is rejecting the archetype because, while one of them seems kinder, it's an illusion of freedom. it's still being told what to do!!!! even elena dreams of lila fighting heroic battles, leaving her hometown, choosing education. these are "the advanced" options and lila, as an individual with great intelligence, is expected to strive for them and choose them from the perspective of a 21st century audience. but she also continuously doesn't, being more firm in her refusal as she ages. to have lila reject the ancient and the modern ideal of a woman, in a story that's set at a time when the ideologies behind them started to clash globally and new ideas started to reshape old ones without erasing them, more quickly than ever before is remarkable. character in a novel whose presence is built around the absence of the same.