Imagined spinster. Cultural representations of unmarried women in Dragojla Jarnević's Diary and Dezső Kosztolányi's Skylark
| Autor: | Kristina Peternai Andrić, Ivana Žužul |
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| Jazyk: | chorvatština |
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Književna smotra : Časopis za svjetsku književnost Volume 50 Issue 187(1) |
| ISSN: | 2459-6329 0455-0463 |
| Popis: | The essay presents an analysis of the social role of spinsters in Diary (Dnevnik ) by Dragojla Jarnević and in Dezső Kosztolányi’s novel Skylark (Ševa), incorporating the modalities of social formation and cultural representation of unmarried women. It pertains to an attitude that a female, while failing to realize her maternity as a natural mission, also betrays her own gender and nation. This is a dominant cultural construct of a woman in a symbolic reproduction of a community. The figure of spinster, of an unmarried single woman, is depicted as otherness in both prose works. In that sense, both the narrative subject of Diary and the persona in the novel Skylark are spinsters whose representations are characterized by numerous ambivalences, indeterminants, conflicts and tensions connected with an instability of gender-, age-, and sex-based boundaries of personal identities. The formation of an autonomous female self simultaneously implies its deformation, bearing in mind the fact of a necessary assumption of the dominant cultural notions of a spinster’s role as a type of a non-woman. The texts analyzed represent an experience and a societal status of a spinster, maladjusted to the conventions and norms of patriarchal projections of their roles in public and private lives. Hereby, inter alia, we will explore to which extent both literary representations of a spinster signify a (dis)continuity of mythological representations of women in two different sociocultural and temporal-spatial contexts. Additionally, the analysis will also problematize a necessarily liminal position of a spinster, sentenced to a life marginal to the values and norms of a dominant social order and a political-ethical impact of her struggle against the stereotypes, stigmatization, and consequences of such a lifestyle. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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