ABSTRACT
Annie Ernaux belongs to a different generation of writers from that of Simone de Beauvoir and Violette Leduc. The passing of new laws and the evolution of social mores in the 1970s and 1980s gave French women, for the first time in the twentieth century, a degree of freedom in relation to their reproductivity. Ernaux's representation of motherhood thus differs in a number of important ways from that inscribed in the writings of Beauvoir and Leduc. In contrast, Annie Ernaux tends, in her fictional and autobiographical practice, to be concerned with writing her mother into rather than out of her life. Ernaux's project of grasping the 'truth' of her mother's existence, however, is shown to be not without its dangers. The process of education, for the heroine, involves an acceptance of the norms of bourgeois culture and, consequently, a rejection of the 'cultural capital' acquired during her childhood, which has no value in the context of her school.
