Original scientific paper
TWO EXAMPLES OF GENDER-CONSTRUCT IN BALKAN LITERATURE: KOSTAS TACHTSIS, DRAGOSLAV MIHAJLOVIĆ
Svetlana Slapšak
; Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana
Abstract
Two male authors, in two different contexts, imagined their female
protagonists: Kostas Tachtsis, a prolific Greek author and himself a
homosexual, wrote a novel on a woman's endurance in the
challenging and dangerous Greek political urban context over a
period of some 50 years, under the title Third Wreath ("The Third
Wedding Wreath", 1962); Serbian author Dragoslav Mihajlović, a
former pro-soviet sympathizer and political prisoner on Goli Otok,
at the half-way point to his present-day nationalism, wrote the
novel Petria's Wreath (1975), in which a rural female protagonist is
a suffering icon – beaten, ill, poor, abandoned, widowed, a metaphor
for collective, people's suffering. In both cases, a feminine persona
is supposed to deconstruct, construct, or destabilize the
ruling/serving female prototype. In both inventions a shadow-male
is inscribed into the proposed female model. In both cases, the
female protagonist serves as a screen for criticism of the
correspondent local male-dominant model. Both authors voice a
kind of (male) de-centered gender position, or, put more simply, an
endangered sexuality: a sexually instable voyeur, a homosexual, a
traumatized/tortured former prisoner. Women's criticism of Balkan
men's attitudes does not correspond fully with this: in women's
writing men are usually accused of selfishness, inclination to war
and violence, and power-struggle. The quest for a similar de-centered
gender presentation could revive the debate on gender of the author,
somehow lost in the late 70s.
Keywords
Balkan 20th century literatures; gender; nation
Hrčak ID:
33092
URI
Publication date:
9.6.2003.
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