Abstract
During the fin-de-siècle in Croatia, when the professionalization of women’s writing was still in its infancy, Adela Milčinović1 published her first articles, literary reviews, and vignettes. This paper is dedicated to an analysis of the author’s literary texts (the novellas “Nedina ljubav” [Neda’s Love] and “Sjena” [Shadow], the play Bez sreće [Without Fortune], and Autobiografija [Autobiography]), which we read as representations of the social status of women in that era. We assert that these representations are characterized by a series of ambivalences, which may ultimately signal the instability of gender boundaries. The texts are predominantly about female characters who forge their own gender identity by transgressing the common social functions of femininity. Although it could be assumed that these are proto-feminist efforts, the paper examines the effects of female emancipation and the subversion of patriarchy.
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