The Weight of the Paternal: Authorship and Gustave Flaubert’s Legacy in Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the metanarrative aspect of Elena Ferrante’s La vita bugiarda degli adulti (2019, The Lying Life of Adults 2020) as it relates to the legacy of fathers and at least one literary father, Gustave Flaubert as the author of Madame Bovary. The paternal in Ferrante’s novels is not an aspect that critical literature normally takes into consideration, given the themes in her work. However, an analysis of Ferrante’s appropriations of the language of great male literary figures will demonstrate that language enhances an understanding of her work’s feminist aspect. To unravel Ferrante’s self-reflexive literary discourse, I take into consideration three aspects outlined in the opening of the novel: 1) the traumatic experience with which the story begins; 2) the programmatic and fictionalized separation of the authorial aspect of storytelling from the narrating voice and the narrated experience; and 3) the significance of Naples’ ‘fixed’ spaces. These aspects channel Ferrante’s discourse about an authorial coming-of-age that sees the writer successfully re-elaborating the traumatic experience she identifies as her first reckoning with herself as a reader and writer: the reading of Madame Bovary. The traumatic roots of this metanarrative discourse can be found in Frantumaglia.