engleski

Croatian Tales of Long Ago: Ivana Brlić- Mažuranić’s Covert Autobiography

Abstract Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić is the first women accepted as a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts and one of the finest writers ever to have written in Croatian language. Being born into a politically prominent family" she accepted the ideals of her circle and enthusiastically endeavoured to fulfil her duties determined by the patriarchal values she idealised as inherently ethical. But writing was not among the duties for well bred ladies, so to be able to write and still comply with what she considered to be her role she had to find a form of writing compatible with the role of woman. Since motherhood is the essence of femininity in patriarchy" and since storytelling is what mothers do" writing fairytales could be understood as a compromise between what she should and shouldn't do as a woman" between the essentially masculine act of writing and essentially feminine act of teaching her children language and values through storytelling! Even if in the choice of the genre she was not rebellious and avoided the confrontation with the masculine authority by not interfering with his realm of the public sphere, but conforming to the privacy of family life and literature, the history of her inner struggle to find creative outlet, to emancipate from limitations imposed on her gender is still central to her work. On the manifest level her fairy tales promote the dominant ethical values, but the subtext, the hidden conflicts and their resolutions tell an entirely different story" the story of the emancipation of her Self from the authority of the masculine. Her creative strategy, the interplay of the manifest and the latent, the simultaneous divinization and the rejection of the patriarchal" the subtle subversion of the masculine authority are what this paper intends to discuss" thus discussing the gender issues reflected!

female duties, masculine authority, creative strategy, female authorship, emancipation, patriarchal values

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