Метафоры рукоделия и проблематика субъектности в женской лирике Серебряного века

Abstract

Focusing on the problems of female authorship, this article considers how the “I” of the author is expressed in the works of Z. Gippius, E. Dmitrieva, A. Gertsyk and T. Shchepkina-Kupernik in the context of the gender revolution of the late XIX – early XX centuries. This increased the scope of women’s opportunities but was still a very painful process. Constrained by gender role traditionalism, female writers’ authorial subjectivity was called into question. The article examines these poets’ narrative strategies and the emergence in resistance to dominant androcentric practices of a dual female style or voice, identified in analysis of metalyric texts containing metaphors of women’s needlework: images of spinning, sewing and weaving wreaths that encode the creative process of the female subject. Zinaida Gippius’ lyrics reveal the hidden female subject. Gertsyk (articulating passivity but hinting at a special relationship with the Higher Principle) and Dmitrieva (problematizing female authorship as a threatening act but emphasizing her heroine’s favorites) experiment with an ultra-feminine mode of poetic utterance. Even Shchepkina-Kupernik, whose poems do not stray beyond the traditional “women's circle”, uses gender role stereotypes to mask the true content and the addressee of her lyrics, as her own biography suggests.