Posted November 18, I was a teacher and a scholar, eager to complete my first book. I did not change in this way. What happened is that I split in two, divided between personal and professional identities. Splitting in psychoanalytic terms means that one views good and bad aspects of oneself or of others in polarized terms, as in borderline personality disorder. But the term aptly applies to other forms of dissociation, such as the fracturing of identity I experienced.
Leda had married another academic, and while his career forged ahead brilliantly, she was sequestered at home with two young daughters, trying to write in the interstices of child care. Leda attends a conference where her one published article receives abundant praise from a renowned scholar. She meets this man, and they begin an affair. Soon after, she decides to leave her husband and her children, ages 4 and 6, cutting off all contact for three years in order to pursue her career and her romance.
Really, these two are the same because her lover represents academia; her erotic fervor is as much a displacement as a passion. Leda literalizes the split in her identity, not reconciling her two selves but actually taking off into her other life and her other identity.
She leaves to find what the great 20th-century psychiatrist D. Leda narrates The Lost Daughter , interweaving her account of the past with that of a recent vacation by the seaside. Leda finds this particularly annoying. She becomes obsessed with Nina, Elena, and the doll, fascinated and exasperated because they represent a harmonious motherhood she failed to achieve. With a touch of magical realism, her attack succeeds.
The child becomes ornery, driving Nina to express the kind of discontent that Leda experienced as a young mother. Leda discovers Nina kissing a boy her own age. A girl—free of the responsibilities of motherhood. The doll has functioned as a fetish for Nina and Elena. In anthropology, the fetish refers to an object that is worshipped for magical powers and indeed, the doll creates harmony that vanishes with its absence. When Nina asks Leda why she returned to her children.
