Original scientific paper
Women writing and catholic engagement in Sida Košutić’s work
Kornelija Kuvač-Levačić
orcid.org/0000-0001-7250-6383
; Odsjek za hrvatski jezik i književnost Sveučilišta u Zadru
Jelena Alfirević
; Odsjek za hrvatski jezik i književnost Sveučilišta u Zadru
Abstract
The paper explores the interaction between two ideologies (Catholic and prefeministic) in the texts of Sida Košutić through the aspect of constructing female characters in the romanesque trilogy From Our Fields (1944), composed of novels: Fruits of the Earth (1936), Mists (1937) and the White Silences (1940). Prefeminism and the movement of Croatian Catholic literature are developing in about the same time (the first decade of the 20th century), and in the contextualization of the subject of research one should not neglect the simultaneous representation of the Catholic women’s movement in Croatia.Therefore it is not unusual that Sida Košutić, besides the Christian, Catholic engagement, equally writes about the themes of the so called female letter. The research shows that the Catholic engagement of the writer does not diminish or relativize her engagement in women’s equality, nor does it deny her access to the problematic position of women in the Croatian society during the first decades of the 20th century, where the writer does not fall into the trap of double tendency that would violate the aesthetic level of the text.By including the evangelical prototext Sida Košutić resemanticizes the two most frequent female character in the Croatian literature (fatal type and fragile type of a woman, femme fatale and femme fragile) promoting the idea of the identity of a woman which is, according to Christian spirituality, rooted in its being created in God’s image and thus equivalent to man’s. Thus, we discover a new level of reception of the texts of Sida Košutić, which apparently has to include a deeper understanding of the relationship between the two ideologues (in her texts they are not antagonized), and hence the wider context of her creation that has equally built the 20th century Croatian literature and for ideological reasons has never been systematically and fully explored by diverse methodological and theoretical approaches.
Keywords
Catholicism; Prefeminism; Women’s Letter; Sida Košutić; From Our Plants
Hrčak ID:
192650
URI
Publication date:
21.12.2017.
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