Conflict motherhood in Anne Enright’s The Gathering and Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter

Abstract

This paper intends to review the representations of motherhood in two novels by contemporary authors, The Gathering by the Irish Anne Enright and The Lost Daughter by the Italian writer, Elena Ferrante. The need to refute and debate patriarchal discourses on motherhood is not the sole heritage of feminist intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first century, but it becomes evident in the work of different writers. This paper seeks to investigate some of the links between the construction of motherhood as a social relationship and literature, as a space of confluence of various social discourses that are resignified in the different fields in which they circulate. This work is not intended to be exhaustive but a reflection on the relationship between narrative and motherhood in the works cited, paving the way for a potential corpus to be analyzed in the future.