The ‘dishonesty’ of culture and the feminist ‘honesty’ in Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

Abstract

The article discusses the latest novel by one of the most celebrated contemporary writers (who may have been intentionally mystifying their audiences): Elena Ferrante. In her analysis of The Lying Life of Adults [La vita bugiarda degli adulti], the critic offers a consecutive examination of Ferrante’s take on such problems as coming of age, national identity, socio-cultural stratification and, finally, the problem of falsehood, treatment of which defines the novel’s narrative. In Ferrante’s interpretation, the story of the protagonist Giovanna logically follows from the dishonesty of culture and religion. However, the critic argues that this ideological charge kills the novel, turning an overall masterly psychological tale of a teenage girl’s coming of age into a platform for a feminist jab at culture. The only redeeming quality that balances off the plot’s ideological dictate, something immediately associated with the literature of social realism in the mind of a Russian reader, is the image of the narrator, whose consciousness is depicted by Ferrante to be more nuanced and psychologically convincing than the heroine’s radicalism.