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The Lost Daughter (2006) is a uniquely non-idealized maternal narrative that centers on the mothering of adult daughters. Elwell argues that The Lost Daughter both evokes and departs from its "mother-text," A Woman. The implicit allusion to Aleramo's novel links the texts' protagonists in a project to break the ideological chain of sacrifice in mothering. In Ferrante's novel, the "crime" of the theft of a doll symbolizes the cultural crime of being a "madre snaturata," capable of non-apologetically abandoning one's children. Drawing on Luisa Muraro's theorizations of "affidamento" (entrustment), the author posits that the narrator's relationship to Nina, a young mother she meets on vacation, allows for a doubled mediation in which Nina serves simultaneously as both a symbolic mother and daughter for Leda, the narrator.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-57580-7_10

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