An Effort To Understand A Mother’s Burden: A Matrıcentrıc Femınıst Approach To The Lost Daughter (2021)

Yıl 2024, Cilt: 2 Sayı: 2, 215 - 239, 31.12.2024

Rabia Erdem

Öz

It is hard to imagine a mother as a woman who goes on holiday alone, loves to chat and dance with strangers, and most sensitively has an affair and abandons her children. Leda Caruso, who is the main character of the film, does all these things. She is the opposite of a ‘natural mother’. Adapted from Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same title, The Lost Daughter is a psychological drama written and directed by American filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal. The work, which aims to approach the unspoken aspects of motherhood, develops around Leda’s life story. Leda is a forty-eight-year-old academician who has suffered from institutional motherhood throughout her mothering and faced the problem of losing her identity. Employing matricentric feminism as its theoretical framework, the present study aims to provide an analysis of the film The Lost Daughter by looking at the main character Leda Caruso’s motherhood experience and perception. Matricentric feminism is a groundbreaking and enriching theory that consolidates feminists’ arguments about motherhood into a single framework. Introduced by Andrea O’Reilly, matricentric feminism is important because it challenges patriarchal perspective and sustains the discussion about motherhood under a certain feminist title.

Anahtar Kelimeler

identity, Maggie Gyllenhaal, matricentric feminism, motherhood, The Lost Daughter

Kaynakça

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