Women’s Bodies and Children’s Homes in Liliana Lazar’s Enfants du Diable [The Devil’s Children] Cover Image

Corps de Femmes ET Maisons D’Enfants Dans Enfants du Diable de Liliana Lazar
Women’s Bodies and Children’s Homes in Liliana Lazar’s Enfants du Diable [The Devil’s Children]

Author(s): Andreea Bugiac
Subject(s): History, Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Special Historiographies:, Other Language Literature, History of Communism
Published by: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai
Keywords: communism; totalitarian regime; women’s body; orphanage; carceral system; Liliana Lazar; Nicolae Ceaușescu;

Summary/Abstract: Women’s Bodies and Children’s Homes in Liliana Lazar’s Enfants du diable [The Devil’s Children]. Many contemporary Romanian writers who chose French as a literary language seem to share a common interest in revisiting through fiction Romania’s relatively recent communist past, thus exposing the dysfunctionalities of the ‘multilaterally developed socialist society’ during the last years of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In her novel, Enfants du diable (2016), Liliana Lazar’s merit is to emphasize the abusive nature of the Romanian totalitarian regime by exploring a topic which is normally less taken into account by post-communist Romanian fiction, namely the private body of women transformed into a public, even political body after the implementation of the Anti-abortion Decree 770/1966. Our aim is to examine the way in which Lazar’s book deals with this topic and its social and personal consequences, as well as its denunciation of a less evident form of the communist carceral system, namely the institutionalization of orphaned children.

  • Issue Year: 66/2021
  • Issue No: 4
  • Page Range: 299-318
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: French