IB English HL I

Malashewski

Feminist Literary Criticism:

The Lying Life of Adults

Directions
Break into small groups of 3-4. Make a copy of this doc and share with your group. Discuss
these questions as a group, working through your annotations and sharing your insights.

Aim to find 3-4 examples for each question (page references / short quotes are fine). Focus on
elements of fiction, diction, and figurative language when considering the following questions.

1. How is Vittoria viewed by Giovanna’s parents, and why is it significant?

“They smiled, amused, as soon as I started describing how badly Vittoria drove.” (76)
- Giovanna’s parents take pleasure in hearing of Aunt Vittoria's struggle.
“The advancing guard of my aunt, her, in all her horror” (23)
“Your father’s sister is an envious woman” (33)
- Because she isn’t ideal to them means that she is jealous of what they have
“She was in love with a married man who already had three children, a criminal. Well, your
father, as the older brother, intervened” (34)
- Since she is the younger sibling, and female, she does not know what is good for her,
and so it is up to her brother to “fix” her problems.
“Put wax in my ears like Odysseus”

2. How is Vittoria portrayed in the novel?

a. To what extent does she uphold or subvert feminine ideals?

“aunt-witch” (132)
- An ugly female creature associated with “horrible” women
“She’s a maid, what should she do, she left school in the fifth grade. Not that there’s anything
bad about being a maid, you know how good the woman is who helps Costanza in the house.”
(33)

3. How does Giovanna see herself? How is she seen by others?

a. Does Ferrante’s portrayal of Giovanna adhere to or subvert the status quo?

“I felt like a failure, like a cake made with the wrong ingredients” (115)
- She is, as all young girls are when entering adolescence, lost and confused.
“I was grim, grim, grim, and just seeing me there are the table kept them from feeling happy”
(28)
- Giovanna sees herself in the way she believes others do, even using certain words they
were quick to associate with her such as “grim”. Because she cares so much about what
others think, she believes that everything they do, good or bad, is her fault.
“I loved being like them” (12)
- wants to be just like her parents

b. What kinds of freedoms or constraints does she experience?

“I was glad that from the start she had abandoned the treatment proper way to speak to a girl of
thirteen.” (75)
- When speaking to someone who had once experienced the same struggles of her
feminine journey through adolescence, she is able to learn what life will be or is
becoming.

“My mother had gone to talk to the teachers” (13)

- Her mother and her are two very different people who went through two very different
journeys, and their separations causes Giovanna to struggle under her rules.

4. How is her mother Nella portrayed?

a. To what extent does she uphold or subvert feminine ideals?
“ my mother is that had been betrayed in the vilest way, and yet she had managed to hold on to
her feelings intact”(Ferrante 190).
“She was neither able nor willing to think of herself without her ex-husband, in fact it seemed to
her that her life still had meaning only if my father designed to be in touch by phone and bestow
it”(190).
- Both quotes display Giovanna's mother as she remains composed even through her
husband's affair. She still thinks about him in a high regard even through his betrayal and
immoral deeds that have affected her. Insights us as readers how she still prioritizes and
values how others view her as she wants to be seen as feminine, elegant, and collected.
b. What kinds of freedoms or constraints does she experience?
“It’s his fault, he left, he’s the one who should have been keeping an eye on you, helping and
encouraging you”(Ferrante 138).
A constraint she Nella faces is Giovanna's educational success as she is her primary guardian
after Giovanna's father moves out. Nella blames him for down fall in school however she blames
him because she feels the weight of responsibility on herself.

5. How does her father uphold patriarchal values and/or attitudes?

”For him, only if you show up with a book in your hand you deserve to stay on the face of the
earth, for him if you haven’t gone to school you’re nobody”(Ferrante 54).
- He only cares about education and doesn’t support loved ones to pursue their happiness
if it isn’t beneficial to their intelligence. Believes the development of intelligence is the
only way to become successful.