Abstract
The object of the present study is to explore Zofka Kveder’s journalistic and fictional narratives in terms of the expression of the author’s relation/attraction to the capital as an urban space where important social processes take place. In her writings, Kveder transgresses traditional boundaries between “masculine” and “feminine” space, as well as between urban and rural space. Establishing the capital as the setting of her stories, the author imbues her texts with a modern representation of womanhood. By means of narrative and rhetorical strategies, Kveder locates females in the aforementioned spaces and, in the process, offers new representations of the capital many years before V. Woolf made way for feminine flânerie.
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Notes
Zofka Kveder was born in Ljubljana but spent her difficult childhood—both of her parents often abused her physically—in the countryside. When she was only sixteen years old, she fled to the nearest large town and left for Ljubljana in 1897. In January 1899, she moved to Trieste. Although she had not attended secondary school, she longed to study. Her dream came true in Bern, where female students could study at the university after a successful interview with the rector. After a few months she dropped out of the university because she could not simultaneously study and earn enough money to make it from one day to the next. She spent January and February 1900 in the Bavarian capital of Munich and in March of the same year, she had already made it to Prague, where she published her literary debut Misterij žene (The Mystery of a Woman). This book and the articles published in Slovenian magazines made Zofka Kveder a central figure in the Slovenian women’s rights movement. Moreover, she established many contacts with feminists from various countries of Central and South-East Europe. In Prague, Kveder gave birth to her daughter Vladoša in 1901, and married a Croatian decadent poet Vladimir Jelovšek in 1903. In 1906, the family moved to the capital of Croatia, the city of Zagreb. Her daughters Marija and Mira were born in 1906 and 1911. Kveder died in Zagreb at the age of 48. She committed suicide after her second husband, an important political figure, left her for a young actress (see also Poniž 2003).
I refer here to the image of flâneur as it was introduced in Charles Baudelaire's poetry and theoretically explored by Walter Benjamin in his study Charles Baudelare: A Lyric Poet in the Era of high Capitalism. The Feminist criticism contributed new insights to the debate about flânerie which will be discussed further on.
See the poem Une passante (1861) by C. Baudelaire.
This female figure representing Venice can be identified with Virgin Mary, Justice, Venus and New Rome.
Wolff notes that “the real situation of women in the second half of the nineteenth century was more complex than one of straightforward confinement to the home. It varied from one social class to another, and even from one geographical region to another, depending on the local industry, the degree of industrialization, and numerous other factors” (Wolff 1985, p. 208).
http://www.womenwriters.nl/index.php/Elisa_M%C3%BCller-Adams, 12 November 2011.
See also: Katja Mihurko Poniž (2003): Drzno drugačna. Zofka Kveder in podobe ženskosti. (Daringly Different. Zofka Kveder and the Images of Femininity).
In her first book, Kveder depicts violence against women in the proletarian class and also subtle mechanisms of constraint, such as middle class arranged marriages. She presents the distress of young women and their fear of giving birth to children they cannot support and their suffering in a loveless marriage. Moreover, she also talks of prostitutes and old, worn-out women workers who are in everybody’s way.
See the chapter: Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity in Pollock's work Vision and Difference.
See also the chapter Crowd in Baudelaire's Paris spleen and Benjamin's analysis of this concept.
Zofka Kveder many times choose to sacrifice lunch or dinner for a trip to a cultural event in the cities where she lived. In the letter from Zurich addressed to her friend Ivanka Anžič, she wrote that she went to see Lohengrin and enjoyed it very much but had only one frank left. She concludes: “Ha, ha, so lumpenmässig leichtsinnig.” (Letter to Ivanka Anžič Klemenčič, 25. 9.1899, Manuscript Department of the National and University Library Ljubljana).
For other students in Kveders work, Bern is mainly the city where they can fulfill their intellectual ambitions.
In the year 1906, she wrote a lengthy article on Prague which was published in instalments in the magazine Domači prijatelj (Domestic Friend) that she edited.
“One of the greatest cites in central Europe is known for its beauty and specificities around the globe, but to us, Slavs, the heart of the Czech nation is what makes us so keenly attached to the place” (Kveder 1906a, b, p. 15). “No Slav would skip a visit to the ancient, famous, and always so luscious and wildly blossoming Golden Prague.” (Kveder, Zlata 204)
The story “Slikar Novak” (The Painter Novak, 1906) could be seen as an exception. In it, the tragic life story of the Czech painter Luděk Marold is depicted.
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Mihurko Poniž, K. Gendering the capital: Zofka Kveder’s rhetorical construction of women’s position in the urban topography. Neohelicon 41, 63–76 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0221-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0221-x