Utvara kletve. O sublimnom i rodnim ulogama u hrvatskoj povijesnoj tragediji u 19. stoljecu

The fallacy of the curse. Sublimity and gender roles in 19th-century Croatian historical tragedies The book examines gender roles in 19th-century Croatian historical tragedies by drawing on the interpretative apparatus of feminist theory (through the concepts of discourse and gender), literary history, literary anthropology and historiography. The link between all these perspectives is the aesthetic notion of the sublime (in opposition to the beautiful) and its use in three key areas: discussion of the tragic genre (tragedy being the most sublime of all genres), the theory of historiography, which defines a particular attitude towards the past as a sublime attitude (White 1982), and definitions of gender differences (the sublime and the beautiful having been gendered from the very beginning of their presence in aesthetic analysis). The discussion departs from the premise that a sublime attitude towards the past implies a specific division of gender roles: marked patriarchy (Yuval Davis 2004) and the reduction of the woman to natural (as opposed to cultural), private (as opposed to public), and beautiful (as opposed to the sublime sphere of life). The book first addresses the fate of the tragic genre in the 19th century: its “death” (Steiner 2005) or survival in new forms (Williams 1966, Eagleton 2003). The abundant production of historical tragedies in the romantic and post-romantic stages of European literatures is interpreted as an attempt to preserve the sublime pathos of the pre-romantic period in new circumstances characterized by desublimation, positivistic faith in reason and the development of professional historiography. Chapter one overviews aesthetic theories of the sublime, ranging from Longinus, Burke, Kant and Schiller to 20th-century theorists, with particular attention on the use of the notion of the sublime within the theory of tragedy, and on its gendering. In relation to sublime pathos, the author brings under scrutiny the well-known accusation of tragedy as reactionary, and the possible relationship of 19th-century historical tragedies to 20th -century nationalist ideologies, which has been considered by several critics (Vodnik 1906, Krleža 1973c, Banti 2011). In the rest of chapter one, the author elaborates a genre description of the selected corpus by means of formal Aristotelian categories, and gives a working definition of the historical tragedy and a list of those tragedies taken into account. The corpus, selected in accordance with the criteria of the “masculine theatre” (Zeitlin 1993), encompasses tragedies dealing with topics from national history. Most of the tragedies in the corpus are written in verse and are divided into five acts, the characters being great historical figures, rulers and aristocrats. The hero faces an undeserved and inexplicable calamity and perishes tragically, yet with a promise of redemption and reward for the entire nation, consisting in the fulfilment of the dream of the national state. The corpus consists of 34 plays by the following authors: Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, Ljudevit Farkaš Vukotinović, Dimitrija Demeter, Matija Ban, Pijerko Bunić Luković, Mirko Bogović, Dragojla Jarnević, August Abramović Adelburg, Franjo Marković, Franjo Žigrović-Pretočki, Ivan Dežman, Hugo Badalić, Higin Dragošić, Ante Tresić Pavičić, Ida Fürst, Eugen Kumičić, Marija Jurić Zagorka, Nina Vavra and Karlo Lukež. Chapter two is dedicated to the relationship between historical tragedy and national history. The author considers the school of historicism and points out the differences and similarities in the treatments of the collective attitude towards the past in the frameworks of constructivist and essentialist conceptions of the nation (particularly drawing on A. D. Smith). The definition of the ‘sublime attitude towards the past’ is based on Hayden White’s elaboration, and is related to Michel Foucault’s thought on the change of the episteme and the occurrence of ‘war discourse’. Chapter three comprises the analysis and application of the theoretical premises developed in chapters one and two to the narrower topic of this work: the question of gender roles in 19th-century Croatian historical tragedies. After a critical overview of the history of the term gender in feminist theory and criticism, the following 12 sections of chapter three consist of analyses of individual works, topical elements, or writers’ oeuvres. The author analyses the question of the tragic hero and tragic guilt with regard to gender. A description is given of stereotypes concerning active and eloquent male characters and passive and taciturn female characters. This leads the author to analyse the gendering of the nature/culture dichotomy, drawing on structuralist feminist critique (Ortner 1972) and its current revisions (cf. Čale Feldman 2001). Special sections are dedicated to authors such as Dimitrija Demeter, Mirko Bogović, Franjo Marković, Ante Tresić Pavičić, Ida Fürst and Nina Vavra. The popular genre of sentimental historical drama is also taken into account, examining the questions of audience reception and the possibilities of this popular form for conveying ideological content, both in agreement with and in opposition to the prevalent ideology in the canonical tragedies. Croatian opera and libretti of the 19th century are interpreted as part of the canon of historical tragedies (in contrast with the closeness of the Italian opera to the canon of romantic novel, as assumed by Folco Portinari), and are seen as cultural, social and political phenomena of high national culture, without neglecting the wordless domain of music, dominated by the sublimity of the soprano’s voice. Research has shown that gender discrimination is present to the same degree both in tragedies stemming from nation-building ideology and in tragedies written from other ideological points of departure, be they socialist or liberal; hence, this form of discrimination derives from the fundamental structure of sublime “language of ideas without words” (Jesi 2011a) rather than from their secular political characteristic. Nevertheless, the research has identified some interesting deviations from this ideological homogeneity and attempts to create various types of the female sublime. The tragedy Teuta by Dimitrija Demeter (1844) can be read as a melancholic warning about the destructiveness of rigid gender order. A few women writers of historical tragedies, considered by the critics to be intruders in this high literary genre, treated the concept of the tragic sublime in different ways: Dragojla Jarnević domesticated it into female friendship, solidarity and political responsibility; Marija Jurić Zagorka overturned it from the feminist point of view, narrating about a female hero in the 16th-century peasant’s revolt as a metaphor for the socialist revolution; Nina Vavra presented a mobilization of women within the male political sublime, portraying them as fanatical and self-destructive heroines, challenging the time’s norms of ‘respectability’ (Mosse 2005). Ida Fürst, finally, in her tragedy Prince Radovan (1897), rejected the sublime faith in the inevitable catastrophe predetermined by the forefathers’ curse, typical both of the tragedy as a genre and of Croatian national self-perception, presenting it as a mere fallacy, and promoting, on the contrary, a beautiful, pragmatic, reasonable and pacifist political programme. Drawing on Ida Fürst’s naïve but still inspiring idea, the book’s wishful prospect is the turnover of the gendered dichotomy of nature and culture, i.e. an establishing of feminine culture (Katunarić 2009) as a pacifist and constructive basis of collective identity. However, the prospectus of future research outlined in the conclusion refers not to the optimistic developments of the beautiful, but rather to the new forms of the sublime, in the context of a postmodern vision of the tragic, Dionysiac and destructive in theatre and art, forms which are finally freed from their old sublime masculinity, and ready to radically undermine gender boundaries.