‘A PRETTY ROSE AND SHE ARE THE SAME, BOTH BEAUTIFUL’: FEMALE CORPORAL CODE IN NATALIA KOBRYNSKA’S LIFE AND WORKS

Abstract

The article analyzes various forms of women’s corporal representation in Natalia Kobrynska’s fiction. Through modes of physicality the writer considers the important existentials of female world – love, beauty, happiness, motherhood, and age. In the writer’s texts, the body becomes a psychosomatic code of female identity self-expression, a marker of spiritual axiology, a way of transforming bodily experience into a subjective picture of a woman’s life path. What does a woman’s beauty mean for her: is it a gift, charisma or fate? How does a woman use her visual attraction in marriage strategies, in communications with men? How does she perceive her beauty loss, her physiological aging, her time passing? These questions determine the principles of female education in Nataliya Kobrynska’s fiction as they also become important concepts in her philosophical understanding of woman’s ontogenesis. The article explores how individual corporal experience of the writer herself is exteriorized through the artistic creativity and self-narrative. N. Kobrynska often expresses personal physicality in the context of her own life dramas – early widowhood, parents’ loss, refusal from motherhood in favor of public self-dedication, and lonely old age. Based on the memoirs of contemporaries, the visual perception of N. Kobrynska is conveyed as an attractive, charismatic, elegant woman.