The concept of intimacy has always been associated with the concept of virtue. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of the women’s emancipation movements, this topic became one of the most frequent in the discourse about the role of women in society. Feminists, especially women writers, questioned and contested the concept of romantic love and expressed delusions about the possibilities of its realization. They showed that love relationships were often sites of tyranny (Langford). The double moral standards clearly set limits for women of all social classes, but there had been differences among them (Hobsbawm 200). While peasant and working-class women enjoyed almost no
The male citizen was perceived as a successful member of society if he performed his role in the public sphere but also as a father and a husband. Consequently, his position and reputation were directly related to the extent to which his wife fulfilled her social role: “with her body, with her beauty and elegance, and last but not least with her ability to converse, she did not represent herself above all, but the professional success of her husband” (Sieder 135). Moreover, “the domestic woman executes her role in the household by regulating her own desire. On her ‘feeling and principle’ depends the economic behaviour that alone ensures prosperity” (Armstrong, 81). Middle-class marriage is thus both a space of the intimate and a space of the public, whereby the intimate world of a man could also be realized outside the marital relationship, since the society had double moral standards as far as male sexuality was concerned: “[F]or men the tensions between romantic love and amour passion were dealt with by separating the comfort of the domestic environment from the sexuality of the mistress or whore” (Giddens, 43). While for a man a middle-class marriage was only one of the institutions within which he realized himself as an active subject, for a woman, it is the space where she was expected to experience confirmation and satisfaction as a sexual and a social being (with regard to the public space, middle-class women were often very active in the charity field). An unmarried woman, however, would occupy only the margins of society (Sieder 133).
For a woman, intimacy was a space where tensions and personal distresses took place, where traumas could gradually be formed. In the canonical works of literature in the second half of the nineteenth century (Madame Bovary, Effi Briest, Anna Karenina), adultery as an escape from an unhappy marriage became one of the most common motifs. Hence, a novel of female adultery “is a project peculiar to male writers” (Overton 97). While the novel of adultery
This period also records an incomparably greater entry of female authors into the cultural field than previous centuries. Women writers established networks that are particularly interesting in the Habsburg monarchy (Jensterle Doležal 271), a multiethnic and multilingual state that had a common horizon of moral values and a family law that defined the position of women (Zimmermann 42). Within the Habsburg monarchy, the authors wrote in their national languages (many of them were at least bicultural), but at the same time they also closely monitored the activities of their contemporaries. Many magazines, e.g. Viennese Dokumente der Frauen [Women’s documents] published translations from Slavic languages. Consequently, rich transnational exchanges took place between the authors, as will be highlighted in this chapter which investigates four short stories written by four writers (Růžena Svobodová (1868–1920), Zofka Kveder (1878–1926), Adela Milčinović (1878–1968), and Grete Meisel-Hess (1879–1922)) from the turn of the twentieth century. In the present chapter, I also aim to show that all four authors used spatial metaphors to render the contrast between the protagonist’s inner, intimate life and the double sexual morals of the middle-class they belonged to. Moreover, I will illustrate how the aestheticism of all four stories is intertwined with harsh social criticism of the middle-class restrictions imposed on women. By combining fin-de-siècle aestheticism (especially the rhetoric of space) with social criticism and realism, Central European writers joined their English contemporaries whose short fiction “bears traces of both concerns: the dedication to art and literature as well as more political and ethical concerns about society and women’s roles in it” (D’hoker 305).
Another aim of the present chapter is to reveal how transnational contacts between women impacted their literary writing in the sense that their works display common traits because the writers read each other’s work and further discussed it in personal encounters or in letters. To start with, Zofka Kveder was acquainted with Milčinović and Svobodová: she wrote about their work and appreciated them; she was a frequent guest in Svobodová’s literary salon (Jensterle Doležal 273) and when in Croatia, she paid visits to Milčinović and her husband before they migrated to Germany (Mihurko Poniž, “Stičišča v literarnih” 57–58).
It can be assumed that Kveder read writings by Meisel-Hess, but there is no evidence that she had known her personally. However, she discussed
Even though these four authors wrote in different languages (German, Croatian, Czech, and Slovenian), they belong to a common political and cultural space which during that time could be referred to as Central Europe. Under the term Central Europe, I understand a cultural concept that is based on a common historical, social, and cultural identity, and within which the area of Central European literature, as noted by the Slovenian literary historian Janko Kos (1991), covers neither the geographical area of Central Europe nor the political concept of Central Europe, as shaped by political changes from the First World War onwards. From the point of view of literary history, a relation to Western European, Nordic, and Eastern European literature is relevant. The Central European literary space lacks the mutual, internal, and, at the same time, lasting cohesiveness that was essential for Western European literatures. Kos explains that what unites them into a regional unit is primarily their typological similarity. Typological structural similarities stem mainly from the similarity of non-literary bases, i.e., a similar geopolitical situation, socio-political situation, national development, related languages and ethnic origins, social structures, and, of course, from the same religious, moral, and cultural traditions. For Austria was a centre around which Central European territories, including part of Poland, were united into a larger unit of state law. In this centre, Latinism inhibited the development of vernacular languages and their national literatures as there was a complete dominance of Roman Catholicism from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as a strong national revival and emancipation of national literatures. Most of the Central European literatures were not fully developed and completed until the nineteenth century. The novel was formed in almost all Central European literatures late in the eighteenth century or even later – in the nineteenth century, moreover, short prose started to flourish only in the middle of the nineteenth century or later (Kos 48–50). Another Slovenian literary historian, France Bernik, states that the “general orientation of Slovene literature in the second half of the nineteenth
In all four literary systems women writers entered the public space as a group quite late: in all three Slavic literatures (Hawkesworth) but also in the Austrian literary space this happened no earlier than in the second half of the nineteenth century. The timeline between 1890 and 1910 (in Slovenian literature up to 1918) covers the period of modernism (in German: Moderne, in Slovenian, Croatian and Czech: Moderna). The common features in terms of the content and form of literature in this period are “the fragmentation of the self, the ambiguity of the subject as a point of reference, and the disconnectedness and randomness of individual thoughts and experiences” (Thorson 19). However, as A. Schwartz and H. Thorson put it, “literary modernism should be viewed more in terms of a ‘geography of mobility and interculturality’ (Friedman 428) rather than as a unified movement or even as a set of literary movements based solely on formal experimental attributes” (Schwartz and Thorson 28). In their insightful study Schwartz and Thorson place “gender and geography at the forefront by addressing the role women writers played in shaping literary modernism throughout the ethnically and linguistically diverse regions of monarchy” (Schwartz and Thorson 29). Schwartz and Thorson rely on the concept of geomodernisms which proves “crucial for understanding the inner workings of modernisms within the vast territory ruled by the House of Habsburg and whether an author or literary protagonist portrays ‘a sense of speaking from outside or inside or both at once, of orientating towards and away from the metropole, of existing somewhere between belonging and dispersion (Doyle and Winkiel, 4)’” (Schwartz and Thorson 29).
1 Suffocating Intimacy
All four short stories introduce as the protagonist an unhappily married woman. The eponymous protagonist of Kveder’s Vera (1898) is a sensitive and intelligent person who feels trapped in the marriage of convenience with a brutal husband who perceives her as an object that he parades with in front of his business partners. The intimate relationship between them is mediated to the reader through Vera’s words to her friend (who is also the narrator of the story); she complains that she has to bear his sexual abuses when he approaches her drunk and after being intimate with some waitress. She feels like a slave to his carnality. Viviane, the protagonist of Grete Meisel-Hess’s story Libelle [A dragonfly; 1905] is married to an older man and she perfectly performs her role of the wife of a respected psychiatrist. However, she expresses her suppressed
Vera finds a counterpart to her husband in a sensitive man and plans to elope with him. Viviane also falls in love with a man who, as seen from her perspective, has a completely different personality from her husband. Hence, the life of both women ends tragically: Vera commits suicide when she realizes that that she would not be happy with her lover either, because she would suffer from slander. Furthermore, talking to the narrator of the story Vera comprehends that even her lover will not be able to give her the happiness she longs for. An inconsolable longing and yearning are typical features of the Slovenian Moderna, where sensitive literary figures are perceived as special beings, superior to others, with a special connection to the invisible spheres which they perceive through their souls (Bernik 167). Vera is presented not just as a sensual person who wants to be loved but also as a person who wants to establish a relationship that would fill the emptiness in her life.
Viviane, on the other hand, elopes with her lover to Basel where she realizes how egoistic and cruel a person he is, and the story ends with her nervous breakdown. She spends the rest of her life confined in her house, with her husband taking care of her when she suffers from her nervous crisis. The short story O věrné paní [About a faithful lady] (from the collection Pěšinky srdce [Trails of the heart], 1902) by Růžena Svobodová ends with the resignation of the protagonist. The story takes place on Christmas Eve. Viktoria, a bourgeois wife, hosts the company as a great and much-admired hostess. The conversation at the party revolves around everyday topics, love and affection. The reader learns that Viktoria had many plans in her life, but she gave them up because she wanted to have a comfortable life. She has never loved her husband and he does not love her, clearly this is a marriage of convenience, where she denies her sexuality, whereas he has an extramarital affair. Viktoria accepts this situation, since she believes that one day she will unite with the love from her youth; in her eyes, he is the ideal man. The story takes place in the evening when Viktoria’s friend Irena reveals to her that she met this man and that he
Adela Milčinović’s story Neddina povijest [Nedda’s story; 1903] (published in the collection Ivka, 1905) also introduces a literary protagonist who realizes the emptiness of her marriage. The first-person narrator begins her story with a retrospective. She remembers her childhood which was darkened by her missing her mother and father. Her mother had died early, and Nedda knows nothing about her father, obviously, as she is an illegitimate child. She was raised by her grandmother and aunt, who forbade her to have any social contacts with boys. Nedda feels resistance and even disgust towards her own body. She becomes a teacher and marries a physician. Nedda and her husband Pavle live in the countryside. She acts possessively and the realization that she is pregnant does not make her happy, as she sees the child as a rival in love. When a dead child is born, the husband begins to treat her differently. Nedda finds out that this is the love of a placid man, that she is no longer able to satisfy him, and therefore, he wants to move to the city. They become more and more estranged. For Nedda, the city and the obligations of a bourgeois wife represent nothing but sheer dread, but she has no choice. The story ends with their departure from the village.
All four stories feature a middle-class marriage as an institution that cannot bring long-term happiness and satisfaction to the female protagonists. Middle-class wives must act as objects of representation, as their husbands’ status symbols. Their appearance is important, they fulfil their role mostly flawlessly, but at the same time, they have an inner life that at some point experiences a turning point, an epiphany. It is also characteristic of the female characters in Vera, O věrné paní and in Libelle they see the only possibility for a different life in a new sexual relationship and experience a psychological crisis because a man cannot fill the void in their lives. In Neddina povijest, the female
2 Narrating Intimacy and Spatiality
All four stories focus on the moment of the heroines’ realization of the emptiness or factitiousness of their marriage, or of the fact that adulterous relationships will not fill the emptiness nor bring peace and happiness into their lives. The focus on one moment or one slice of life, an epiphany as a moment of insight and the use of narrative techniques that foreground individual consciousness and subjective perspective, are the hallmarks of the modernist short story (D’hoker 292). All the selected stories except Neddina povijest transmit only an excerpt from the life of the protagonist. The past is revealed through retrospectives, mostly taking place in conversations or through mediation of memories. In all four stories, the emphasis is on the moment when the emptiness of their lives is revealed, causing a turnaround in their emotions and actions.
Mrs Viktoria did not think about what the corrupt man was saying in Vienna. Now, her memories were wandering far away, outside, past the snowy plains, past the woods collapsing under the white burden, past her home park, besieged by starving hares, round the old small dilapidating mansion, they were crawling along the snowbound paths by the pond, along the unploughed road, under the windows of the neighbouring manor house, along its garden disfigured by snow, under the muffled acacias and elders, under the lit Renaissance windows, resembling white eyebrows, to the door of the cold stone château which she could have owned. “Oh,” she interrupted this memory, and thought, “what immense silence there must be on those plains, and what a terrible sense of orphanhood!” And, in her soul, she heard languid, monotonous, tiring
svobodová 218–219jingle bells getting closer and disappearing on the endless roads under the high, lonely stars, under the breathtaking, immense heavens.4
Sunday in October.
Yellowed leaves, grey sky, humid atmosphere … Fogs drag on the hills and spread ragged into the valley. Rain pours from under the sky and rustles monotonously on the roofs. Autumn fills the air, sways in the dim yellowish, uncertain dawn of the afternoon and fills the soul with all that emptiness and desolation with which it has veiled nature.
The unspeakable desert lies in my soul. I once saw a painting called “Grey on Grey”: The big plain spread, sprinkled with formation of rocks and stones, but above it hung fantastic piles of fog, some yellowish light coming from somewhere and embracing things with its dull corpse. The whole picture breathed a terrible sadness and abandonment, it was as if the faces of the patients were staring at me through the fog, as if the bones of corpses were scattered across the plain …5
kveder 72
Viktoria bit with her white teeth into the crimson silk pillow, and tore the gentle cloth. A tortured, stray heart trembled beneath the cushion, tears pouring on the silk.
In the dining room, the servant served fruit, stored on Delphic majolica and interspersed with holly twigs.
The white lilacs, artificially cultivated for this day from a silent devotee, quickly withered and died.6
svobodová 226
In Grete Meisel-Hess’s story Libelle the whole narrative is built on the comparison between the insect which was a very popular object in fin-de-siècle art and a middle-class wife. Meissel-Hess, biologist by profession, skilfully compares a beautiful woman who has no other function than being an object of admiration in the eyes of her husband and his friends with the insect which pleases the senses of the fin-de-siècle aesthete. After Viviane has left her husband and met her lover, Dr Merluzzi, in Basel, they stop at a bridge over the Rhine river and a dragonfly lands on her bosom. Dr Merluzzi covers it with his hand, as if trying to strangle it. When he withdraws his hand, the dragonfly appears to be dead. He pierces it with a needle from Vivian’s hat and attaches it to her hat. Spending the night together, Viviane wakes up screaming because she has the feeling that the dragonfly’s wings are fluttering. Merluzzi removes the dragonfly needle from her hat, but the animal is still trembling, so he wants to get rid
But from time to time there come days when the memory of some horrible experience seems to seize her; no one can explain the madness which possesses her. With flight-like movements begins her crisis. When she flies through the garden like that, flapping her arms – swaying and floating – then you know it has begun. Suddenly she collapses rigidly, stretches her limbs as if her poor body was being pierced. In such a mood, she stays dead for a day and two nights … then she wakes up. She seems to be tortured with incomprehensible torments. She writhes along in nameless misery, crawling on the floor – until a new sleeping pill, which is forcibly given to her, sinks her into unconsciousness again. Then Viviane wakes up the next day – and she has forgotten everything.7
meisel-hess 13
In Meisel-Hess’s, Kveder’s, and Svobodová’s texts, the traditional structure of the story of adultery is subverted with an emphasis on the protagonist’s inner life, on her perceptions of the world, and on the mental processes that take place within her. This can be seen as the effect of how the authors use the typical devices of the modernist fin-de-siècle short story. Another feature of the modernist short story can be seen in critical, realistic descriptions of the middle-class marriage. As D’hoker and Eggermont argue, at the turn of the twentieth
Realistic descriptions of Vera’s dead, drowned body, Viviane’s madness, Nedda’s disgust towards her body, and the reproduction of empty chatter in Viktoria’s dining room testify that all four authors were deeply concerned with the social role of the middle-class women and combined fin-de-siècle aesthetic with social criticism.
3 Intimacy between the Realm of Domesticity and City Topographies
In her seminal study about women of modernity in the urban topography, Janet Wolff argues that “the real situation of women in the second half of the nineteenth century was more complex than one of straightforward confinement to the home. It varied from one social class to another, and even from one geographical region to another, depending on the local industry, the degree of industrialization, and numerous other factors” (Wolff 45). Indeed, in the cities, especially capitals, “women were promenading, driving in the park, going to the theatre or boating,” they were present in the spaces of “bourgeois recreation, display and those social rituals which constituted polite society, Society, Le Monde” (Pollock 78).
As a metaphorical map in ideology, it structured the very meaning of the terms masculine and feminine within its mythic boundaries. In practice, the ideology of domesticity became hegemonic, it regulated women’s and men’s behaviour in the respective public and private spaces. Presence in either of the domains determined one’s social identity and therefore, in objective terms, the separation of the spheres problematized women’s relation to the very activities we typically accept as defining modernity.
pollock 98
In all four stories the intimacy of domestic spaces is confronted with the alienation of the city as a place where a woman loses her identity: Vera plans to leave for Vienna, where she hopes to be an anonymous person, Viviane goes insane in Basel and Viktoria leaves her home village and heads to Prague, where she takes on a new identity as a banker’s wife. At the end of her narrative, Nedda goes to an unnamed city which seems to her like “that great river of life, which without asking gathers everything that comes close to it and drags, drags without rest, without will” (Milčinović 185).8 Presumably, Nedda will gradually turn into an unhappy middle-class wife. The metaphor of a river as a dangerous place occurs in Neddina povijest also in the beginning and is connected with a forbidden and unpleasant realm/topos. In Libelle the insect lands on Viviane’s bosom when she and her lover cross the bridge over the river and Vera commits suicide by crossing the border between water and land, by drowning. In all the stories, the act of crossing the borders functions as a spatial metaphor. Svobodová’s story in its entirety takes place indoors, there are just two exteriors: the imaginative winter landscape in Viktoria’s home village and places she envisions when talking about the future car ride with her soon-to-be lover, after she has abandoned her romantic illusions.
With the exception of Nedda’s home in the countryside, in the other three stories we are looking in vain for a space where protagonists would feel safe and happy. Home is a place where they experience boredom and even sexual abuse, yet the spaces outside are not perceived as spaces of freedom or serenity either. Vera, Viviane, and Viktoria want to abandon traditionally feminine spaces, transgress boundaries, but they fail since they remain dependent on the man.
4 Central European Women Writers Struggling with the Dominant Catholic Female Ideal
The women writers whose works have been discussed in this chapter belong to different nationalities; however, they all lived in an area where moral standards were rooted in the Christian religion and where the strongest figure of identification was the Holy Mother. In the selected stories the topic of motherhood is embedded in the narrative in a discrete way. Overtly, it is only touched upon in Neddina povijest, where the protagonist rejects motherhood and longs for a relationship free from the pressure of reproductive sexuality. As Milčinović shows, in accordance with psychoanalytic studies of the period, Nedda’s attitude towards motherhood is connected with the absent mother figure in her childhood. In the marital relationship, Nedda overcomes the disgust towards her body that she had developed through her aunt’s and grandmother’s constant reminders that any contact with boys is sinful. But after the birth of a dead child, she comes to learn that her husband’s view of sexual relationship overlaps with those she was confronted with throughout her childhood and adolescence, fostered by her being an illegitimate child: a woman has to silence her desire if it is not in the reproductive function within an institution of a marriage.
Childless Viktoria, Vera, and Viviane act in the same way. Viktoria’s husband has a son from his first marriage, and as the reader can assume, they do not consummate love. Nevertheless, the narrator reports that Viktoria’s husband finds his sexual pleasure outside marriage bonds. She, on the other hand, seems to replace marital sexual life with platonic romantic love, and the only way she can overcome this illusion is by having an affair with a handsome man for whom she does not have any affection. Although she knows that she had not committed any sin, Kveder’s Vera temporarily finds happiness in an extramarital relationship, but is aware that the society would label her as a sinner. In the moment of epiphany, she realizes that sexual relationship alone cannot heal all the wounds she incurred during her marriage: “I am so mentally devastated, everything is so torn and crushed within me that I need enormous strength to heal. And Hanuš can’t give me that much! … Oh, I need happiness,
Similarly, Viviane cannot find peace in the arms of her lover: “In dull anguish of the heart, a woman huddled in the arms of a strange man,” writes Meisel-Hess (7) about the first night Viviane spends with Dr Merluzzi.10 Viviane recognizes that by leaving her husband she is exposed to another man who is actually a stranger, as she has learned from the episode with the dragonfly on the bridge. Furthermore, by leaving the environment where her role was founded on the premises of the Catholic feminine role ideology (and therefore appreciated), she slipped into the role of a woman who follows her desire and is therefore a sinner in the eyes of her (Catholic) community.
Central European women writers shared common moral (Catholic) values, as Michela De Giorgio explains, “[W]omen’s desire for the marital state, during the whole of the nineteenth century and until the First World War, derived from the world’s equating the dignity of female social existence with matrimony” (De Giorgio 173). The consequences of this ideological basis of female self-perception had, as the selected texts witness, immense influence on their lives.
5 Conclusions
The selected writers explored the possibilities of breaking out of the domesticity and intimacy that they did not perceive as rewarding; furthermore, for them, conjugal intimacy is something abhorrent, due to their not feeling any love and passion. Women writers discussed the crisis of the female self in search of a new identity. In short, their stories mediate a message that the development of women’s identity as a free human being can only happen when women step into the world on their own and are able to survive without male’s support. Although my research is limited to only four authors, it indicates that the topic of middle-class marriage constraints was an important issue for women writers at the turn of the twentieth century.
The selected Central European writers combined stylistic experiment with a social and moral concern by focusing on the relationship between intimacy
Placing literary modernism in a transcultural and transregional context within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy through this interplay of locational positionalities and intersectionality helps us understand not only the aesthetics of change at the fin de siècle but also our own way of theorizing it today. We can thus establish a more differentiated literary and cultural history of this vast geographical area, one that takes into account the marginalized voices of women in addition to and next to the established canonical writers and that discovers common modernist threads in their works across existing political, linguistic, and intellectual boundaries beyond the dominant narratives of national imagined communities.
schwartz 44
The author acknowledges financial support by the Slovenian Research Agency for the research project Transformations of Intimacy in the Literary Discourse of Slovene “Moderna” (J6-3134).
Kveder in the letter to Martha Tausk, National and University Library in Ljubljana, Ms 1113, 31 March 1907.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. “Und Frau Viviane füllte die Gläser, unermüdlich flatterte sie um die Tafel herum, und von da in ihren warmen, schönen Salon hinüber, wo sie am Flügel phantasierte, daß allen Gästen den Atem stockte, so schauerlich spielte Viviane, die Künstlerin, die der gute, kluge Arzt sich errungen hatte und die sein Glück war, das ihm von der Stirn strahlte.“
“Celý její pustý, bezúčelný nový život změnil se v jedinou zlatavou míhající se krůpěj, hořkou jako všechna budoucí, mstivá políbení …”
“Paní Viktorie nemyslila na to, co povídal ve Vídni zkažený muž. Její vzpomínky bloudily nyní daleko, venku po sněhových pláních, po lesích, lámajících se bělostnou tíží, po parku domovském, který obléhali hladovějící zajíci, kolem starého neopravovaného zámečku, ploužily se po hustě zavátých cestách podle rybníku, podle cihelny, po neprojeté silnici, pod okny sousedního panského domu, po jeho sněhem znetvořené zahradě, pod zachumlané akáty a černé bezy, pod osvětlená renesanční okna se zapadlými stříškami, podobajícími se bílým obočím, ke dveřím chladného kamenného zámku, jehož mohla býti paní. „Ach,“ přerušila si tuto vzpomínku a pomyslila, „jaké tam musí být v těch pláních nekonečné ticho a jaká strašná siroba!“ A slyšela v duši neznatelnou, ale stále víc a více se rozechvívající hudbu, unylé, jednozvuké, únavné rolničky, blížící a ztrácející se na nekonečných cestách pod vysokými nedružnými hvězdami, pod závratnými ohromnými nebesy.”
“Nedelja v oktobru. Orumenelo listje, sivo podnebje, vlažno vzdušje … Megle se vlačijo po hribih in se cunjasto razpredajo v dolino. Dež lije izpod neba in monotono šumi po strehah. Jesen polni vzduh, se ziblje v medlem rumenkastem, negotovem svitu popoldanskem in napolnjuje dušo z vso ono praznoto in zapuščenostjo, s katero je zastrla naravo. Neizrekljiva puščoba mi lega na dušo. Videla sem nekoč sliko »Sivo na sivem«: Velika plan se je širila, posuta s pečevjem in kamenjem, a nad njo so visele v fantastičnih kopah megle, neka rumenkasta svetloba je prihajala od nekod in objemala stvari s svojim medlim mrtvaškim svitom. Vsa slika je dihala grozno otožnost in zapuščenost, bilo mi je, kakor da bi vame strmela skozi megle upadla lica bolnikov, kakor da bi bile mrtvaške kosti raztresene po planjavi ….”
”V jídelně sluha podával ovoce, uložené na delfských majolikách a proložené větvičkami cesmínovými. Bílé šeříky, od němého ctitele uměle vypěstované pro tento den, rychle vadly a umíraly.“
”Aber von Zeit zu Zeit kommen Tage, wo die Erinnerung an irgendein gräßliches Erlebnis sie zu packen scheint; niemand vermag zu erklären, unter welchem Wahne sie steht, mit flugartigen Bewegungen, beginnt ihre Krise. Wenn sie so durch den Garten fliegt, mit den Armen flatternd, – sich wiegend und schwebend, – dann weiß man, es beginnt. Plötzlich fällt sie starr zusammen, dehnt und streckt die Glieder, als würde ihr armer Leib durchbohrt. So bleibt sie wie tot einen Tag und zwei Nächte … dann erwacht sie. Unbegreifliche Qualen scheinen sie zu durchwühlen. Sie windet sich in namenlosem Jammer, am Boden kriechend, dahin – bis ein neues Schlafmittel, das man ihr gewaltsam einflößt, sie wieder in Bewußtlosigkeit versenkt … Dann erwacht Viviane am nächsten Tag – und hat alles vergessen.”
“U onu veliku rijeku života, što ne pitajuči kupi sve, što joj dodje u blizinu i vuče, vuče bez odmora, bez volje – .”
“O, jaz sem duševno tako razdejana, vse je tako raztrgano in strto v meni, da potrebujem neizrečeno veliko, da bi ozdravela. In Hanuš mi ne more dati toliko! … O, jaz potrebujem sreče velike, divje sreče, ki bi mi pretresla vsak moj živec ter mi napolnila vso mojo dušo, ki bi bila velika kot vesolje in močna kakor smrt!”
“In dumpfer Herzensangst schmiegte sich ein Weib in die Arme eines fremden Mannes.”
Works Cited
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Bernik, France. “The Introduction of Symbolism into Slovene Literature.” Slovene Studies 10, 2 (1988), 161–169.
D’hoker, Elke, and Stephanie Eggermont: “Fin-de-Siècle Women Writers and the Modern Short Story.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 58, 3 (2015), 291–312.
Dorfer, Brigitte. Die Lebensreise der Martha Tausk [Martha Tausk’s life journey]. Studienverlag, 2008.
Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel (eds). Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity .Indiana University Press, 2005.
Forsås-Scott, Helena. “Introduction.” Textual Liberation: European Feminist Writing in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Helena Forsås-Scott, Routledge, 1991, 1–12.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/Modernity, 13, 3 (2006), 425–43.
Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Polity Press, 1992.
Hawkesworth, Celia (ed.). A History of Central European Women’s Writing. Palgrave, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, 2011.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 .Vintage Books, 1989.
Jensterle Doležal, Alenka. “The Influence of Czech Women Writers on the First Literary Work of Slovene Zofka Kveder.” “Wir wollen der Gerechtigkeit und Menschenliebe dienen” :Frauenbildung und Frauenemanzipation in der Habsburgmonarchie – der südslawische Raum und seine Wechselwirkung mit Wien, Prag und Budapest [“We want to serve justice and human love”: women’s education and emancipation in the Habsburg monarchy – the South Slav region and its interaction with Vienna, Prague and Budapest]. Ed. Vesela Tutovac et al. Praesens Verlag, 2016, 268–283.
Kos, Janko. “Srednja Evropa kot literarnozgodovinski problem.” [Central Europe as a Literary-Historical problem]. Srednja Evropa [Central Europe]. Ed. Peter Vodopivec. Mladinska knjiga, 1991.
Kveder, Zofka. Zbrano delo I [Collected works]. Litera, 2005.
Meisel-Hess, Grete. Eine sonderbare Hochzeitsreise [A strange honeymoon]. Spelinski, 1905.
Mihurko Poniž, Katja. “Kveder, Zofka.” A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries. Ed. Francisca de Haan, Krasimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi. Central European University Press, 2006, 282–285.
Mihurko Poniž, Katja. “Stičišča v literarnih opusih Zofke Kveder in Adele Milčinović.”[Junctions in the literary works of Zofka Kveder and Adela Milčinović]. Zofka Kvedrová, (1878–1926): Recepce její tvorby ve 21. Století [Zofka Kvedrová, (1878–1926): Reception of her work in the 21st Century]. Ed. Jasna Honzak Jahič and Alenka Jensterle-Doležalová. Národní knihovna ČR, Slovanská knihovna, 2008, 71–78.
Milčinović, Adela, Ivka, 1905.
Mourková, Jarmila. Růžena Svobodová. Melantrich, 1975.
Overton, Bill. The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830–1900 .Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Perrot, Michelle. “Stepping Out.” A History of Women in the West. 4, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War. Ed. Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot. Harvard University Press, The Belknap Press, 1993, 449–481.
Pollock, Griselda: Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art. Routledge, 2003.
Schwartz, Agatha, and Helga Thorson. “The Aesthetics of Change: Women Writers of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.” Crossing Central Europe: Continuities and Transformations, 1900 and 2000. Ed. Helga Mitterbauer and Carrie Smith-Prei. University of Toronto Press, 2005, 27–46.
Sieder, Reinhard. Sozialgeschichte der Familie [Family social history]. Suhrkamp, 1987.
Svobodová, Růžena. Pěšinkami srdce [Heart path]. Česka graficka unie a. s., 1922.
Thorson, Helga. “Regarding the Voices of Viennese Literary Modernism: Grete Meisel-Hess’s ‘Die Stimme: Roman in Blättern.’” Modern Austrian Literature 44, 3/4 (2011), 11–18. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/24649856. Accessed 14 September 2020.
Walkowitz, Judith R. “Dangerous Sexualities.” A History of Women in the West, vol. 4. Ed. Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot. Harvard University Press, 1993, 369–398.
Wolff, Janet. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Polity Press, 1990.
Zimmermann, Susanne. “Frauenarbeit, soziale Politiken und die Umgestaltung von Geschlechterverhältnissen.” [Women’s work, social politics and the transformation of gender relations.] Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne [The women of Viennese modernism.] Ed. Lisa Fischer and Emil Brix. Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, R. Oldenburg Verlag, 1997, 34–52.