Maternity and subversion: the representation of being a mother and being a woman in The Lost Daughter, from Elena Ferrante.
Elena Ferrante; Maternity; Character; Woman.
With the purpose of discussing the representation of women in Elena Ferrante's work, The Lost Daughter, this work adopted the character as a category of analysis, from which it sought to identify the forms of maternity representation in the novel. This approach was guided by the dialectical approach and by theoretical assumptions established by Lukács (2000), anchored in the discussion of the problematic hero, and Bakhtin (2002), based on the concepts of dialogism, ideologism, polyphony, and carnivalization. The reflection on maternity was based on the theoretical foundations of Simone de Beauvoir (2006), who distinguishes being a woman from being a mother, and Elisabeth Badinter (1985), who problematizes the idea of maternal instinct and love as intrinsic conditions to female subjectivity. Through the analysis carried out, it was possible to understand maternity as a social construct, in which women are predetermined for reproduction, masking their negative aspects, such as loss of identity, exhaustion, submission and oppression.