Letiția Branea – un personaj problematic între identitate și alteritate

Abstract

The present article seeks to retrace the journey of Letiția Branea, the recurring protagonist in the literary prose of Romanian novelist Gabriela Adameșteanu. By focusing on the balance between a personal identity and a fictitious one, between identity and alterity, we are critically delving into the processes of identity-making employed by Adameșteanu. These processes are bounded by the social realm and the personal one. Indeed, the heroine is revealed to the reader with the tribulations typical of transitional periods: from childhood to adolescence and then to the role of young woman in society. This transitional journey is conditioned, to a certain extent, by the social position, the material condition, as well as the heroine’s own sensibilities which collectively bear the pressure of trauma, guilt, and a pervasive feeling of fatality. Although the discursive mechanisms are not built according to autobiographical patterns, Adameșteanu’s novel can also be read as a paradoxical parable of the individual lacking individuality, of the human being suppressed by the uniformising state apparatuses before 1989. In this manner, the novel maintains an enhanced realistic dimension, being widely considered a tool of resistance in contemporary Romanian fiction.