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Elena Ferrante's complex novel The Lost Daughter tells the story of Leda, a woman in her late forties, who, while on an ostensibly harmless vacation, commits an act that shocks her own inner world as well as her surroundings. I draw on a close reading of this book to examine the vicissitudes of envy in mother-daughter relations, including the psychotic potential of resurrecting archaic fantasies of appropriation and domination.
This novel lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation. About mothers and daughters, envy and love, this story also touches on general themes of femininity and possibly even psychosis. Leda, the protagonist, is the mother of two adult daughters who live with their father. Since they no longer need her care, she decides to take a vacation on the beach, but immediately grows anxious. For many years, all her vacations had been planned with her daughters in mind, and later, when they started going on vacations of their own, she would stay home just in case they needed her. As her vacation continues, Leda realizes that she knows everything about her daughters and nothing about herself. Everything she experiences, she observes through their eyes, revealing her profound alienation from herself.
Into this psychological territory barge another mother and her young daughter, part of a large Neapolitan family who are vacationing nearby. In many ways, this family reminds Leda of her own: she notices the same jokes, the same sticky sweetness, the same arguments. The young mother, Nina, is barely twenty, and she and her daughter, Elena, appear to Leda to be living in a perfect world of their own. Leda envies the easygoing relations between them, comparing Nina both to herself as a mother to her daughters, and to her own mother when Leda was a child.
Much of Nina and Elena's play happens with and around the child's doll,
Nani, whose name significantly resembles that of Leda's mother. We are encouraged to think of the doll