All Literature is Childhood. About Elena Ferrante

Abstract

This article follows the path of the doll in the production of Elena Ferrante. Starting from The Lost Daughter, continuing with the tetralogy My Brilliant Friend and taking into consideration the only Ferrantian work addressed to the ‘minor’ children audience, The Beach at Night, the recurring element is investigated: the doll is fiction, representation, double, substitute, and its presence coincides with the ‘disappearance’ and the concealment of the author. Exploring this voluntary absence, the article goes in search of what the ‘apocryphal’ author leaves in its place, of what it returns: the literature itself, which is body, play, childhood, trial and rehearsal. Following the traces of the ferrantian fetish one plunges us into a metaphorical world, where play and sensuality, truth and fiction, childhood and maturity intersect each other without posing; an incessant metalepsis within a confused space of dolls and girls, women and mothers.