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Psyche in Eros and Psyche (1904) by Jerzy Żuławski was one of the most important roles of Irena Solska (1875–1958), which she played for twenty years. The playwright confessed that he also had written The Myrtle Wreath (1903) and Ijola (1905) specifically for this actress. In spite of the fact that reviewers often criticized the texts and tried to “protect” Solska from being associated with the author’s intentions, she probably identified herself with them to a great extent. Given the lack of detailed accounts of Solska’s performance in the criticism, these texts become the most important source, although also a controversial one. They reveal some important impulses of Solska’s creativity. Her desire “to restore innocence” in her onstage creation was a way to overcome the repressive reality of her past and the burden accumulated through “the matrilineal heritage.”

This essay investigates how feminine invalidism connects to female creativity in George Fleming's “By Accident" (1898) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)., George Fleming ironically depicts a woman's deathbed confession that is incorrectly interpreted by her husband. His misinterpretation reflects contemporary images of women which were constructed to attain promotion and protection of male authority and emphasize female weakness, innocence, and inadequacy. Furthermore, his misunderstanding underlines falsehood of the image of feminine inferiority that Victorian men needed and developed for an idealization of masculine superiority. However, a consequence is that it ironically yet effectively discloses a concealed female sexual desire in spite of male misinterpretations., In “The Yellow Wallpaper", Gilman relates female insanity to female creativity: the madwoman describes the process by which the “rest cure" drives her mad. Gilman created an innovative style for this representation of insanity, and it is considered to be one of the “missing links" between women writers in the Victorian period and such twentieth-century writers as Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Describing female physical and mental weakness, women writers of fin de siècle fiction invented an original art of narrating that connected feminine invalidism with creativity., 本論文においては、世紀末の女性作家、ジョージ・フレミング (George Fleming) の“By Accident" (1898) とシャーロット・パーキンス・ギルマン (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) の"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) を取り上げ、女性の病弱さや女性の狂気の表象が女性作家の創造性に与えた影響を分析した。男性中心主義的思想が支配的であった19世紀の西欧において、性役割や性別分業を明確にすることは家父長制を維持していく上で重要な要素であり、男性優勢の概念を構築するために、女性の精神的、肉体的、知的な劣勢が文学作品や視覚芸術において頻繁に描かれていた。しかし、既存の性規範が揺らぎだした19世紀末の文学作品には、従来の女性性を覆す無数の女性が女性作家によって創造された。フレミングは女性の死の床における配偶者以外の男性への愛の告白の場面を通し、男性によって捏造された女性性と女性作家が描いた女性性との差異を巧妙に描き出している。一方、ギルマンはモダニズムの作家へとつながる文体によって、女性が狂気へと至る過程を描いている。世紀末における、女性の病弱さ、狂気の表象は女性作家の創造性と密接に関係しているのである。

Eschewing the most wide-spread conventional ways of exploring the subject (feminist criticism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and traditional linear pattern of writing literary biographies), this study undertakes instead to construct a “personal genealogy” of the three French women writers and intellectuals of the past century, using the notions derived to a considerable extent from the thought of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, as well as from the critical approaches elaborated by the new criticism and the reader response literary theory. This manner of reading the 20th century French women’s writers leads the researcher to examine the stereotypes of the “feminine literature” prevailing at that time in order to explain the complex play of different kinds of power involved in the emergence of the interwar women writers generation refusing any collective identity, as well as any filiation with their feminine predecessors (George Sand, Rachilde, Colette, Anna de Noailles, Marcelle Tinayre, etc.). Not surprisingly, the women writers of the “new wave” promote instead the idea of making oneself: the human subject is therefore viewed as a product of social and discursive forces that every single individual’s choice is to confirm or to reject. Thus, the inferiority assigned to the women’s writing is neither called in question nor denounced: it is simply passed over, evaded considering this generic identity irrelevant to the exceptional cases of the striking personalities - the influential (women) intellectuals and the successful (women) authors., Le parti-pris de la présente recherche consiste à récuser l’autonomie de l’œuvre littéraire, afin de tenter une lecture des textes de trois auteurs féminins français du XXe siècle à la lumière des représentations de la femme qui écrit dans l’imaginaire collectif de l’époque. Ce parti-pris définit non seulement l’angle de vision de la chercheuse, mais aussi sa manière de présenter les résultats de ses réflexions, lesquelles ont en effet pris la forme de trois amples allers-retours entre, d’une part, l’analyse des réseaux discursifs (médiatiques, scientifiques, littéraires) contemporains de la période examinée dans chacune de trois parties de la thèse et, d’autre part, les textes des femmes-écrivains qui relèvent de la même période. S’inspirant de l’approche conceptuelle et des méthodes du nouvel historicisme, de la sociologie de l’art et des études de réception, ce travail cherche à saisir ce que le fait de débuter une carrière d’écrivain dans la première moitié du siècle dernier pouvait impliquer pour un auteur féminin. L’examen des opinions accréditées et des idées reçues qui circulaient à l’époque au sujet de la littérature féminine permet ainsi de relever que les divers avis concernant les particularités du style des auteurs-femmes convergeaient tous en un point crucial : l’image de la femme-écrivain est avant toute celle d’une autobiographe contre son gré. En effet, la femme – censée être spontanée, sensuelle, émotive, narcissique et naïve – semblait prédisposée à ne traiter dans ses écrits que les expériences qu’elle avait elle-même vécues. Cette mise en contexte nous permet d’éclairer les conditions de construction de l’identité d’écrivain de ces femmes à qui il est échu par le sort d’écrire – c’est-à-dire de se publier, de se placer sous le regard du public, ou encore de se faire (re)connaître – dans la France du XXe siècle. Il s’avère ainsi que le consensus général sur la nature de la créativité féminine et sur les limites du génie créateur de la femme a beaucoup joué non seulement dans leur refus de toute filiation avec écrivaines des générations précédentes, mais aussi dans l’identification qu’elles font de la littérature avec, d’une part, la conquête et l’affirmation de la singularité, et d’autre part, avec les plus audacieuses transgressions.

U ovom radu nastoji se dokazati neprikosnovenost „ženske kreativnosti” u stvaralaštvu Sylvije Plath kroz simboliku smrti i ponovnog rađanja. „Ženski Lazar” odražava autoričino priznanje da borba između smrti i ponovnog rađanja mora usmjeravati svaki aspekt poetske strukture. Žena u pjesmi istodobno je i žrtva i mučitelj; ona je ženski Lazar koji pogiba od prevelike patnje koju pjesnikinja izjednačava s patnjama Židova koji su mučeni tijekom Drugog svjetskog rata. Ona je žrtva muške okrutnosti, ali je isto tako i nova žena koja se diže iz plamena. Rabeći mit o uskrsnuću feniksa kao osnovu, Sylvia Plath prikazuje ženu koja ustaje protiv svih onih muškaraca koji ju sputavaju, dok aluzije na biblijsko, povijesno, političko i osobno u ovoj pjesmi vode čitatelja u samo središte ličnosti (žene)., The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the inviolability of „female creativity” in the works of Sylvia Plath through the symbolism of death and rebirth. „Lady Lazarus” reflects Plath’s recognition that the struggle between death and rebirth must direct every aspect of poetic structure. The woman in the poem is at the same time a victim and tormentor. She is a female Lazarus who died because of great suffering that the poet equates with the suffering of the Jews who were tortured during World War II. She is a victim of male cruelty, but also a new woman who rises from the flames. Using the myth of the resurrection of the Phoenix, Sylvia Plath shows a woman who stands up against all the men who restrain her. The allusions in the poem to the biblical, historical, political and personal take the reader into the center of a personality (of a woman).