Abstract
The present study aims to perform an analysis of the feminine typology in southeast European literature. We undertake a comparative study of productions depicting ancient times when women had to bear the burden of a sealed fate, but without overlooking succeeding literary works. Bovaric, frivolous, atypical characters or widows, the women portrayed reflect a kind of personality touched by a tragic dimension inherited from myths and folklore and that finds fulfillment through metamorphosis (a dominant literary motif when we refer to southeast European feminine typology). They illustrate femininity manifested against the background of historical realities that have ravaged this area, but connected to an inside world rather than to immediate reality.
Keywords: feminine typology, tragic essence, destiny, metamorphosis, southeast European literature
In southeast European literature, any contact with History has something of a retrieval, of a retrospection, and – beyond the dramatic side of events circumscribed to that geographical area –, the gesture of meeting with the past equals the “reason of being”, the “literary balkanism”. (Muthu, 1979, p. 214) Therefore, “we retrieve nothing except ourselves, endlessly. (…) Thus we retrieve ourselves primarily by remembering those who existed in sound, in word, in color.” (Muthu, 1979, pp 213-214) From the archaic beliefs and the richness of signs, to the folklore era that recovers a series of myths – by reinventing them – and, furthermore, to the defining literary fictions of later times, the southeast European culture went from invocation to evocation in the light of the concept of “unity in diversity”. (Muthu, 2002, p. 7)
The shared historical destiny and the rural mentality induced by the peasantry as the dominant social stratum lead to typological similarities in literar y fiction. The typological analogies are not, as Mircea Muthu states, the result of direct contacts, but rather a double consequence: both
in literature and in the common context that binds the literary productions of several countries experiencing the same political, economic and social issues. This is what led, in Mircea Muthu’s opinion, to relatively similar literary reactions. Thus, to the research into literary typologies, the Romanian literary balkanism contributes three axiomatic criteria that facilitate the understanding of esthetic values. The sociological, cultural mentality and human model criteria allow us to define a feminine typology representative for southeast European literature.
The sociological criterion, as a melting pot of historical, economic and political events, is reflected in the literary structures of this area. Structured as a field of ambivalence, southeast European culture becomes a confluence and “coexistence of romanticism and realism”. (Muthu,2002, p. 7) Furthermore, the literary folklorism that Mircea Muthu explains through the presence of peasantry as the dominant social stratum materializes into a rich paremiological production. Folk idiom will become, as shown by Zoran Konstantinović (apud Muthu, 2002, p. 7), the origin of literary language, while the ballad, with its historical and mythical charge, becomes a medium for a common destiny and a means of expression that compensates for the delay with which this part of the world sees the birth of the historical novel.