Entre o ser mulher e o ser mãe: reflexões sobre o feminino nas obras de Elena Ferrante e Lygia Bojunga

Abstract

This paper analyzes the representations of women and motherhood in Elena Ferrante's A Filha Perdida (2006), Lygia Bojunga's Retratos de Carolina (2002) and Tchau (2007), from the perspective of the social and cultural constructions that shape female roles. Using a qualitative and comparative approach, it investigates how the authors portray the protagonists' conflicts of identity, autonomy and self-acceptance in the face of patriarchal pressures and social expectations. The study explores being a woman and being a mother as multifaceted and complex experiences, marked by tensions between individual freedom and culturally imposed duties. The narratives deconstruct romanticized ideals of motherhood, exposing the challenges, sacrifices and emotional ambivalences that permeate the maternal experience, at the same time as proposing reflections on the normative models attributed to the feminine. In view of this, literature is fundamental for questioning gender stereotypes, giving voice to silenced female experiences and broadening new ways of understanding the plurality and complexity of the female condition. To this end, the theoretical studies of Julia Kristeva (2007), Lúcia Osana Zolin (2009), Virginia Woolf (2014), Luiza Barros (2019), Elisabeth Badinter (2024), among other authors who are pertinent when dealing with the respective theme, will be mobilized. In this way, the research contributes to the debate on the deconstruction of hegemonic narratives about motherhood and female identity, highlighting literature as a space of resistance and re-signification of gender roles.