Female Images in European Baroque Poetry (Based on the Verses of Ivan Velychkovsky, Danylo Bratkovsky, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell)

Abstract

The following paper explores the specificity of female images with regard to the peculiarities of their formation in European poetry of the Baroque period on the examples of Ivan Velychkovsky’s works. The oeuvre of this striking representative of seventeenth-century Ukrainian literature is compared with the verses of the Polish-language author Danylo Bratkovsky as well as English Baroque epigrams by Robert Herrick and verses by Andrew Marvell. Comparison of poetic specimens belonging to different linguistic and cultural spaces is possible because, in spite of the different local mentality, all the above-mentioned poets are carriers of the common Baroque worldview formed on the basis of the Holy Scripture, Christian theology, and the heritage of Greek and Roman antiquity. In the course of our research, we observed the existence of common Baroque poetry traits (regardless of the place of genesis and confessional affiliation) in the perception of women and the formation of female images. All of the mentioned poets followed the bipolarity and Baroque antithesis of women’ imagery. All of them, in one way or another, derive their judgments from the reception of the established biblical stereotypes. In view of the insufficient reflection on this issue in contemporary Ukrainian literary criticism and in order to arrive at a more comprehensive outline of female images in the seventeenth-century poetry, we use a method of comparing Ukrainian, Polish, and English samples of Baroque verses in terms of their features and traits, characteristic for the works of this period. This article proposes to create a generalised Baroque image of the woman, outlining her place in the society at that time, by comparing the works of the representatives of different local mentalities.