Female Desire in the Epistolary Novels of South Slavic Women Writers (Hanka by Slovene Croat Writer Zofka Kveder and Jedno dopisivanje by Serbian writer Julka Chlapec-Đorđević)

Abstract

This paper, which deals with Central European literature in the comparative perspective, contains an analysis of the representation of intimacy and love (female desire) in the epistolary novels Hanka (1918) written by the Slovene Croat writer and feminist Zofka Kveder (1878-1926) and Jedno dopisivanje. Fragmenti romana (A Correspondence. Fragments of a Novel, 1932) by the Serbian writer and feminist Julka Chlapec-Đorđević (1882-1969). Both of these South Slavic women writers and feminists were cultural nomads with multiple linguistic identities, part of the Habsburgian myth, and they lived for a time in Prague, then an important city of European modernism and the avant-garde. In the novels, they created a picture of a new woman and her intimate world, focusing on the motifs of love and extramarital affairs. In the novel Hanka, readers follow the thematization of the new independent woman and her intimacy in the chaos of the apocalypse of the First World War, focusing on representations of the idealized love of a woman for a man and a woman’s suppressed desire. Julka Chlapec-Đorđević inherited the legacy of Zofka Kveder in Prague, and her novel Jedno dopisivanje is an homage to Kveder’s artistic achievements. The writer depicts gender intimacy in fictitious letters between Marija Prohasková from Prague and her lover Oton Šrepan, a doctor from Slovenia. In both case studies, the representation of the secret love affair and writer´s understanding of intimacy and romantic love as the key concepts of modernity will be examined.