Gender and Generation: Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux and the Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir’s novella La Femme rompue tells the tale of Monique, who is abandoned by her husband after twenty-two years of marriage. In a didactic style, Beauvoir represents Monique as a caricature of a woman dependent on a man. Several decades later, Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux published texts that explore the motif of a woman being abandoned by a man: Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono and Ernaux’s Passion simple. In this article, I examine these two texts and the ways in which they offer a riposte to Beauvoir’s novella. Reading their work through theories of diary fiction, I argue that these two writers depict women who are able to move beyond a narrative of abandonment and, in so doing, they stretch the boundaries of this genre to offer new approaches to the representation of female subjectivity.