Articoli di riviste sul tema "Man-woman relationships – Novela"

A partir do diálogo entre história e literatura debatemos sobre relações amorosas inter-raciais, racismo e a discriminação em Luanda, capital de Angola, através da análise do relato sobre o ”casamento” do homem ”preto” e do ”mato” angolano, Marajá, e da mulher portuguesa e branca, Arlete, presente no romance ”Os discursos do mestre Tamoda” do escritor angolano Uanhenga Xitu.Palavras-chave: Luanda. Casamentos inter-raciais.Uanhenga Xitu.THE MARRIAGE BETWEEN BLACK MAN MARAJá AND WHITE WOMAN ARLETE: relationships and racism in "The Speeches of Master Tamoda" by Uanhenga XituAbstract: From the dialogue between history and literature, we discussed interracial love relationships, racism and discrimination in Luanda, the capital of Angola, through the analysis of the report on the "marriage" of the black man and from the Angolan "jungle", Marajá, and the Portuguese and white woman Arlete, present in the novel "The speeches of master Tamoda", written by Angolan writer Uanhenga Xitu.Keywords: Luanda. Interracial marriages. Uanhenga Xitu. LA BODA DEL NEGRO MARAJá CON LA BLANCA ARLETE: relaciones amorosas y racismo en "Los discursos del Maestro Tamoda" de Uanhenga XituResumen: A partir del diálogo entre historia y literatura discutimos sobre relaciones amorosas interraciales, racismo y discriminación en Luanda, capital de Angola, a través del análisis del relato sobre la "boda" del hombre "negro" y del "mato" angoleño, Marajá, y de la mujer portuguesa y blanca, Arlete, presente en la novela "Los discursos del maestro Tamoda" del escritor angoleño Uanhenga Xitu.Palabras clave: Luanda. Boda inter-racial. Uanhenga Xitu.

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Laureate (1919-2007), a British novelist, poet, a writer of epic scope, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. She was the “most fearless woman novelist in the world, unabashed ex-communist and uncompromising feminist”. Doris has earned the great reputation as a distinguished and outstanding writer. She raised local and private problems of England in post-war period with emphasis on man-woman relationship, feminist movement, welfare state, socio-economic and political ethos, population explosion, terrorism and social conflicts in her novels.

The portrayal of women in Indian English novels is a complicated and changing component of literature that has changed with time. It is critical to remember that Indian English literature is immensely diverse and that women are not portrayed uniformly throughout. The portrayal of women in Indian English literature does share certain common themes. The portrayal of women frequently reflects India’s immense cultural diversity. The depiction of female characters varies depending on the cultures, groups and customs present. Traditional roles for women in the novels of Manohar Malgonkar include wives; mothers and daughters frequently take on the role of carers and are required to respect traditional family and social norms. Women characters were neglected and men played an important role in his novels. The present study will concentrate on comprehensive portrayal of man-woman relationship in his selected novels. It also depicts the characterization of women in his selected novels.

Two Hungarian authors, Sándor Márai and Péter Nádas, seem to have one thing in common: their attraction to triangular relationships. Written between 1935 and 1942 and portraying human relations in pre-World War II Hungary, Márai’s two novels and one drama all turn on a very specific triangular structure between two close friends and the woman whom they both love(d). Now they conduct a painful tête-à-tête to decide on the final ownership (or simply fate) of the woman. Written in 1979 and portraying human relations in communist Hungary, Nádas’s play has only two actors on stage, a woman of aristocratic descent and a young man, the son of a high-ranking communist official, the woman’s long dead lover. This exchange between the two characters opens into an encounter of three, where the woman and the young man each use the other as a mediator to reach the third, the lover/father. Bollobás argues that the triangles displayed by the two authors represent two distinct types: the former is informed by fixed, hierarchical, subject-object power relations, while the latter by fluid, non-hierarchical, subject-subject relations.

The notion of the “new woman”, which emerged as a feminist ideal in Western consciousness during the late 19th century, resonates throughout both European and US-American literature. The main character in Olga Kobylanska’s novella “Eine Unzivilisierte” (1898) embodies the theme of female liberation in Ukrainian literature of the era. Similarly, the central female figures in Edith Wharton’s short stories, “The Other Two” (1902) and “The Mission of Jane” (1904), highlight the heightened role of women within the patriarchal society of the United States during that period. Applying close reading, block method and typological approach for the study of diachronic aspects of literary relationships the article analyzes the literary embodiment of the concept of “new woman” in short prose of Ukrainian and US-American women authors. In “Eine Unzivilisierte”, the protagonist Paraska actively opposes marrying a man chosen by others and is decisive in her own choice of partners; she does not feel any obligation to be a typical “housewife”, or to correspond to the typical picture of a woman, with all the activity connoted as typically “feminine”. Independent of her husband, the “new woman” at the turn of the centuries, Paraska proudly appeals to her right and ability to find another partner at any given moment. In contrast to Kobylanska’s novella Wharton’s short stories demonstrate rather submissive behavior of their central female characters, both named Alice. Maternity enables both Alices to subvert the established hierarchy achieving some freedom of “new woman”. In Kobylanska’s novella, the rural setting contrasts with the urban backdrop of Edith Wharton’s short stories, symbolizing the societal constraints faced by the “new woman”.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Chokher Bali and D.H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers are two famous novels in the early 20th century from two different social culture. Both these novels have particular important issues in them to be discussed. As in Chokher Bali we find Tagore has presented his idea in feminism, man-woman relationship, woeful condition of widow in his contemporary society etc. In the same way in Sons and Lovers Lawrence has talked about critical mother-son relationship, social bondage among the characters, description of nature, problems in the lives of working class etc. Though Chokher Bali and Sons and Lovers are from different social context but they can be compared through the commonly discussed issue in them that is complex mother-son relationship and the impact of motherhood to the sons. This paper is going to discuss the impact of excessive motherly affection to the life of son, similarities and dissimilarities in mother-son relationship in Chokher Bali and Sons and Lovers. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3381310

The article seeks to explore the concepts of masculinity and androgyny in the works of the American writer Frank Norris (1870- 1902). Based on two novels, “Moran of the Lady Letty” and “A Man’s Woman”, the study examines the peculiarity of male and female images. The interaction of the sexes often grows irreconcilable, and the theme of emancipation becomes one of the key ones in the writer’s work. Norris creates a new model of female behavior, unusual for the literary tradition of the past: women in his works demonstrate great fortitude and are able to play unexpected roles. In the novel “Moran of the Lady Litty”, Moran Sternersen who has been sailing the seas since childhood, is able to take control of the ship’s crew, consisting entirely of men. At the same time, she sets an example for her lover, Ross Wilbur, who at the beginning of the novel is presented as a pampered young man. Raised in an aristocratic environment, Ross feels a lack of masculine qualities and unexpectedly discovers them in Moran. In his relationship with the girl the man seeks to adopt definite traits and skills from her, such as firmness in interpersonal relationships, the ability to fight, to take quick decisions, etc. Lloyd Searight from the novel “A Man’s Woman” revives the waning will of her husband, Ward Bennett, a polar explorer, demoralized by the failure of his last expedition to the North Pole. Lloyd, who works in the hospital as a nurse, quits her profession in order to help her husband to recover. Having been healed, Bennett realizes that his wife has suffered just as much, and decides to make a new attempt to conquer the Arctic. Thus, Norris demonstrates the obsolescence of sexual prejudice in a rapidly changing America of 1890–1900s and offers an original interpretation of the ideas of masculinity and androgyny.

The novel responds to the female presence more than other literary genres, as its narrative elements contribute to receiving the female discourse and supplying it by expressing their thoughts, emotions, and gentle voices, and exploring their subconscious spaces by expressing their value. Women’s issues, and for this reason feminist writings rose to establish glory for women in parallel with what the man wrote, in addition to the importance of the central female presence in building the narrative space and her presence on the narration scene because the female narrator differs from the male narrator who dominated the scene by presenting the relationships of women through masks, and here this cry achieves a revolution Against the adoption of masculinity all the joints of life. The appearance of a woman and her call to live her world and express herself without feeling the dominance of the family (father/brother) was shaped when she observed perspectives that feed into her literary production through her relationship with her body or with the man, because writing about herself makes her more honest than the man, as this appeared through Feminist creativity in literary practice, so it seemed active and productive, and had a speciality with its awareness, language, independence of speech and thinking. The spontaneous dreaming child with a scene conveying the development of the life stages of women and the places mentioned in them and the relationships with family and friends, passing through the primary school stage and then university, which witnessed the great shift in her life, her ideas and her relations with others, as well as the transformation of the narrative language from its spontaneity to its maturity in proportion to age, and the novel showed Techniques in presentation and qualitative transitions transcended the linear narration in classic novels, mixing with imagination and activating the senses effectively and in a language that sought to sharpen The feminine atmosphere by conducting the tale obtained on the current real woman issue, because Shahd Al-Rawi is the character of the novel.

The article explores the motif of love in a totalitarian society in Anchee Min’s novel “Wild Ginger”. Though an American citizen, Anchee Min belongs to a group of modern Chinese-American writers whose interests focus around the past of her home country China. Childhood and teenage years which Min spent in Communist China provided her with a lot of material for her later novels. In Wild Ginger through a classic plot of love triangle the writer approaches the motif of love in the times of Cultural Revolution. The author examines love as a relationship between a man and a woman, and as a religious feeling and communist ideology. Grotesque becomes the main literary device. Over-exaggeration bordering on incredibility expresses the author’s rejection of the surrounding reality. Intertwining comical and tragical situations, the novels brings the reader to a conclusion that love is the only means of attainting personal freedom and maturity in a totalitarian society.

The paper examines a collection of short stories by the Russian writer Nikolai Alexandrovich Krasheninnikov (1878–1941) Shadows of Love, which was published in 1915. According to critics, in his stories Krasheninnikov draws the “dreary path” of heroes who come to life at the moment of meeting with deceptive illusions. The collection’s author builds a whole system of male and female perception of relationships, using a fairly simple formula, characteristic of modernist works in which the hero or heroine is tested by betrayal or jealousy. According to Krasheninnikov, both a woman and a man who find themselves in a situation of adultery exist in an active-passive Vestnik slavianskikh kul’tur. 2024. Vol. 71 Philological sciences 167 paradigm of dependence on invented relationships (both the traitor and the one who is being cheated, and active principle can awaken in a woman, and passive becomes a companion of a man, depending on the chosen role. It is noteworthy that for a woman in Krasheninnikov’s stories, adultery is seen, first of all, as one of the manifestations of female rebellion in a patriarchal society, even if marital relations are not abusive for a woman. Opened betrayal or suspicion of it destroys masculine perception of the world, no matter how it was created, through a priori unequal marriage or loving relationships. The motif of adultery yields to the theme of a man’s search for illusory love, both in the opening and closing story of the cycle, which indicates the desire of author to both find one’s way to the essence of intersexual relations and catch the elusive “mood of love” with one stroke, which is typical for a short story genre (collection dedicated to A.P. Chekhov). The Poetics of the stories is built not so much on the antithesis of the manifestation of feminine and masculine principles, but on a preliminary attempt to reveal the psychology of sex, continued by the author in the novels of the 1910–1920s.

There has been a whole range of both male and female writers who have advocated the cause of women and portrayed the diverse shades of their personality in inventive works. Rabindranath Tagore has been the most countless-minded personality of modern India. He was the first writer to give equal or perhaps more place to women in his writings. The wave of new woman ideology was not only limited to the Western world. It affected women around the world and even men who were sensitive to women’s issues. Rabindranath Tagore was a personality who clearly dealt with issues like women’s will, their rights and freedoms in his novels. The approach adopted in the present study is not a follow-up to Western feminist ideas, but a synthesis of the concepts available within the Indian sociological system. In India, feminism is a debatable concept. Indian feminist researchers or women studies researchers have not been able to define what Indian feminism exactly is? Indian feminists are not very comfortable in creating a strict definition of theories such as writing and Western feminism. He was a personality who dealt with issues such as women’s will, their rights and freedoms clearly in his novels. In Tagore’s narrative, there is a reflection of courageous women in women. One can call them the ‘New Women’. Keywords: New Woman, Feminine, Indian Society, Marriage and Family, Man-Woman Relationship, Sexuality

The Norwegian author Jonas Lie is best known as a writer of domestic fiction depicting the Norwegian society through the perspective of marriage and the family. Through readings of Lodsen og hans hustru, Rutland and Gaa Paa!, this article challenges this view by emphasizing the maritime dimension of Lie’s work. A place-phenomenological method based on the writings of Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger and Robert Pogue Harrison allows for a focus on specific place relations in the novels such as the shore, the house, and the ship. Consequently, Lie’s novels establish a convergence between two opposite, yet mutually dependent movements – an “oceanization of the domestic” and a “domestication of the maritime” – as they portray compromises between ocean and land, man and woman. As a result, Lie is not only revealed to be a modern writer, more so in some ways than Ibsen, but also a writer who takes more radical (perhaps even specific Nordic) steps in the relationship between land, ocean, and the sexes than more internationally renowned authors of the sea such as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad.

Emma Jeleńska-Dmochowska’s novels: Young Lady (1899), The Ring (1907), Woman, Miserable Fluff... (1909) seem to be an insightful, though probably unintentional, study of female self-destruction. At the root of this self-destruction is always the male element – the character of a father or brother, cousin, husband. A man who – through a relationship of kinship or affinity – gives the female heroin her status and defines her identity, and who is (or was) the owner or co-owner of the landed property located in the Polesian borderlands. <br>Such story patterns and creations of the heroines are already implemented by the works of Eliza Orzeszkowa (e.g. Two Poles, 1893) and Maria Rodziewiczówna (e.g. Dewajtis, 1889). In my article, I want to trace the similarities (and differences) between the narratives of Jeleńska-Dmochowska and Orzeszkowa. I am also interested in reflecting on whether the analyzed novels of the Rose and Fly author really have such a pessimistic tone. It seems that in these stories of self-destruction one can find their reverses – stories of self-salvation. Finally – I would like to think about the consequences of this double interpretation for the reception of Jeleńska-Dmochowska’s work.

Literature is one of the most prevailing and ancient ways of understanding life as well as the world. Especially women and literature are clearly related to each other because women writings revealed the true state of society and its treatment of women. Unlike other writers Anita Desai didn't use conventional and not influenced by folk tales, myths and epics but presented her novels in realistic manner by adapting current problems related to woman-man relationship, cultural conflicts, disposition, mangled psyche and marital maladjustment. Bye- Bye Black bird is such a novel. The story deals with two main characters Dev and Adit in London. Adit an Anglophile turns into a hopeless nostalgic returnee and Dev an Anglophobe turns into a hopeful Anglicized inhabitant of London. Sarah, an English woman, moves away from her parents and marries Adit. The Conflict idea between the Indianess of Adit and Sarah’s own Western self runs in her mind throughout the novel. This paper mainly aims to analyze marital maladjustment in Anita Desai’s Bye- Bye Black Bird."

Sexual encouragement is a natural gift brought by humans from birth and becomes universal in its expression. Cultural and psychological backgrounds that can make manifestations of encouragement are different. Sex and one's self-perception determine a person's status as female-female. This article is about to reveal differently: Javanese and Arabic in two novels of Pariyem Recognition and Sacred Night through a comparative literary approach. Pariyem, the main character in Pengakuan Pariyem, was originally born as a woman. However, his bitter and sweet experience with Kliwon caused him to be trapped in female status. New womanhood reappeared when she was feeling happy to conceive a baby from her relationship with Den Bagus Ario Atmojo. His dream of becoming a woman is felt to be realized through his son who carries the blood of priyayi descendants. In Zahra, the main character in Malam yang Keramat, the lie of being a man whose father forced him for twenty years, caused psychological imbalance. Therefore, he volunteered to be present as a female who always obeyed sexual satisfaction. Precisely with that pleasure, he found his true sex.

Abstract: Zainichi Korean literature, which addresses questions concerning the Zainichi Korean minority, can be considered as one among many postcolonial literatures. By examining works of Sagisawa Megumu, Kaneshiro Kazuki, and Kim Masumi as case studies, I position contemporary Zainichi Korean literature within the broader context of postcolonial global history. Sagisawa's novel Saihate no futari (Two persons at the margins, 1999) narrates the relationship between a Japanese woman, whose father is an American GI, and a Zainichi Korean man. After the man succumbs to leukemia, the woman discovers that his mother was a survivor of the atomic bomb. The silencing of his mother's voice can be analyzed using Spivak's concept of the subaltern. Kaneshiro's novel GO (2000) addresses Korea's division as a consequence of imperialism and the Cold War. Furthermore, it draws connections between African Americans in the United States and the Zainichi Korean minority, which can be interpreted as an allusion to Bhabha's concept of mimicry. In Kim Masumi's novel Nason no sora (The sky of Nason, 2001), a Zainichi Korean woman residing in the United States engages with both the Japanese expatriate community and Asian Americans, contending with essentialist concepts of ethnicity. I argue that in the selected novels both the literary negotiations of Zainichi Korean postcoloniality and its entanglement with global history as well as the references to other diasporas, namely, the Asian and African diasporas in the United States, contribute to a subversive reframing of some prevailing narratives concerning the Zainichi Korean minority in Japan.

Marriage is an important thing in the life of a woman. The importance that our society attaches to marriage is reflected in our literature and it is the central concern of Shashi Deshpade’s novels. In our society where girl learns early that she is ‘Paraya Dhan’, and she is her parents’ responsibility till the day she is handed over to her rightful owners. What a girl makes of her life, how she shapes herself as an individual, what profession she takes up is not as important as whom she marries. Marriage is the ultimate goal of a woman’s life. This paper attempts to probe into the problems of marriage through the protagonists of her novels where one enjoys the freedom of marriage and the other accepts the traditional marriage. Shashi Deshpade highlights the problems of marriage faced by middle-class people in finding suitable grooms for their daughters. This problem is well-illustrated through the characters of her novels. Since the girl’s mind over her childhood is tuned that she is another’s property, she tries to attach a lot of importance to it. it is indeed a tragedy that even in the modern age, Indian females echo the same sentiment where it was marriage which mattered most of them but not to the men. It is a beginning of females sacrifices in life that marriage brings to her. Shashi Deshpande encourages her female protagonists to rise in rebellion against the males in the family matters, instead she wants to build a harmonious relationship between man and woman in a mood of compromise and reconciliation.

Goddess’s or Satan’s Intervention? A Palimpsest Reading of Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur (2013) The text concerns Roman Polanski’s film Venus in Fur (2013), a multi-layer psychodrama written for two characters, taking place on several levels of human relations: actress vs. director, literary character vs. performing artist, man vs. woman. Venus in Fur has been defined as a kind of palimpsest, i.e. a film story based on the fictional skeleton of other works. Referring to the concept developed by Gérard Genette, who categorized the ways in which different texts interact with each other, the article investigates the film’s hypertextuality, i.e. the “grafting” of Venus in Fur (as a hypertext) upon earlier works (hypotexts). When discussing Venus in Fur as a text of culture constituting a hypertext superimposed on other literary pieces, such as David Ives’ dramas, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novels, mythological and biblical stories, it was necessary to identify their mutual relations by deciphering all the interconnections, reworkings, reinterpretations, and revisions. Due to the relationships existing between the various cultural texts in the film, the analysis was treated as a palimpsest reading. Attention was also paid to the director-actress relationship and the role of the female character in connection with the reinterpretation of the myth of the goddess Venus.

The terms metaphor and metonymy, as defined by Roman Jakobson, produce important insights when applied to the novels of Fedor Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi. The oeuvre of each novelist constitutes a remarkably consistent whole because it emanates from the creative unconscious, rather than from conscious thought processes. In Jakobson’s view, metaphor involves the “combination of heterogeneous elements”; such elements in Dostoevskii include contrasting styles, genres, and references to other art forms such as painting. Windows juxtapose interior and exterior space, as the reading of letters juxtaposes private to public communication. By contrast, metonymy involves the linking of similar elements. As a metonymical writer, Tolstoi tended to take the opposition between self and other that he inherited from the romantic tradition and transform it into a relationship between self and self. The purpose of his well-known device of estrangement is to create just such transformations. In courtship, the self-other relationship is that of man to woman; Tolstoi minimizes this relationship by avoiding all sincere expressions of desire that lead to marriage.

Abstract: Many environmental ills derive from humanity’s unsustainable fondness for meat, a fondness that often pushes (and sometimes breaks) environmental limits and reveals unsustainable patriarchal ideologies. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Ang Li’s The Butcher’s Wife each, in very different ways, expose the strands of “meat and gender“ enmeshments in Korea and Taiwan respectively, showing the mutual interdependence of carnivorism and patriarchal power. So deeply rooted are the entangled strands of carnivorism and sexism that contesting them (either together or apart) means dismantling the very definition of human corporeality: in The Vegetarian, this means that a woman becomes a plant; in The Butcher’s Wife, it means that a man becomes the very cattle he has spent his life slaughtering; in both, questioning meat is a very dangerous challenge that comes from a woman through a narrative perspective that is clearly feminist. Both novels plainly show deep analogies and correspondences between domestic violence and violence against animals, and yet, in both, there is a taut relationship between vegetable-based histories and a more meat-based modernity. This article argues firstly that the violence of meat-eating in The Vegetarian and The Butcher’s Wife is both physical and psychological. Dreams and madness are involved. Normalcy is male, deviance female. Order is meat, chaos vegetal. And the threat of death will either be fully realized or will hang menacingly in the air. Secondly, this article argues that the novels importantly show that breaking points (psychological and environmental) are often utterly unpredictable and that once breached, the results can also be devastatingly unpredictable.

The Polish Pocahontas Story: The Life of „the First Pole among the American Indians” According to Bolesław Zieliński In the inter-war years, so-called „Indian novels” enjoyed immense popularity with the younger Polish reading audience. The article analyzes a representative novel in this genre, Orli Szpon (Eagle Talon) by Bolesław Zieliński, as an example of a literary construction of Polishness based on a specifi c idea of racial difference. Its plot revolves around a love relationship between a Polish man and an Indian woman, therefore it brings to mind the story of Pocahontas as an important analogue. Reading Orli Szpon in the light of the colonialist implications of the story of Pocahontas shows the extent to which Zieliński’s novel relies on the schematic and biased imaginings about American Indians that dated back the colonial era and dominated American depictions of the Natives in the course of the nineteenth century.

The plot of Turgenev’s novellas and novels typically explore complex situations related to the relationship between a man and a woman. However, the theme of child/parent relations occupies an equally significant place in the writer’s work. In early works, he often solves it at the household level, in the form of parental concern for the socialization of their child, and sometimes it is also associated with the motive of parental authority. However, since the late 1850s, Turgenev’s portrayal of parental love takes on spiritual dimensions. Christian motifs, such as parental blessings and prayers for children, are becoming increasingly important. The intensification of such intonations also occurs in later years, when Turgenev is involved in the polemics relevant for that time about the relationship between the instinctive and the moral, including in child-parent relations, which captures even the animal world from him. In some of his later works, inspired by observations of birds, the writer depicts parental care for their offspring and translates these behaviors to a human context, underscoring the supernatural significance of parental love.

Thomas Hardy is distinguished by his contemporaries for the fact that the subjects of his novels are taken from the rural environment in the agricultural region south of England. He calls his homeland Dorset, Wessex, in memory of former King Alfred the Great. Themes and subjects of his novels are attractive and dominant. In all of his most popular novels, Hardy describes, outlines, and portrays human beings who are faced with powerful attacks of devastating and mysterious forces. He was a serious novelist who sought to present the view of life throughout a novel. Frequently, his themes and subjects mix with the sequence of events that have extreme and fatal consequences, while he rarely fails to inspire the reader with his deep mercy to the characters who suffer in their live; he often cannot afford to reach the highest degree of tragic element. The author sends an indictment to his time: he firmly rejects the duality of morality according to which the behavior of a man and the behavior of a woman is differently estimated. Thomas Hardy’s world as a writer is completely realistic, even transparent because he is a rare master of description of the environment. His characters are creatures of their environment, presented in their mutual relationships, often with sharp psychological observations. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” is based on a familiar motif, that of a fallen woman, where Tess represents the prejudices of the Victorian society. In the novel, Hardy portrays an innocent poor girl of a country, a victim of the combined forces of Victorian patriarchal society, of the hypocrisy of social prejudice and gender inequality, which shows his deep sympathy for Tessa, the protagonist of the novel, a symbol of women devastated without mercy in a world dominated by males. He shows that Tess is an example of the devastating effect of society's pressures on a pure girl, and that Angel and Alec are personifications of destructive attitudes towards women.

Thomas Hardy is distinguished by his contemporaries for the fact that the subjects of his novels are taken from the rural environment in the agricultural region south of England. He calls his homeland Dorset, Wessex, in memory of former King Alfred the Great. Themes and subjects of his novels are attractive and dominant. In all of his most popular novels, Hardy describes, outlines, and portrays human beings who are faced with powerful attacks of devastating and mysterious forces. He was a serious novelist who sought to present the view of life throughout a novel. Frequently, his themes and subjects mix with the sequence of events that have extreme and fatal consequences, while he rarely fails to inspire the reader with his deep mercy to the characters who suffer in their live; he often cannot afford to reach the highest degree of tragic element. The author sends an indictment to his time: he firmly rejects the duality of morality according to which the behavior of a man and the behavior of a woman is differently estimated. Thomas Hardy’s world as a writer is completely realistic, even transparent because he is a rare master of description of the environment. His characters are creatures of their environment, presented in their mutual relationships, often with sharp psychological observations. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” is based on a familiar motif, that of a fallen woman, where Tess represents the prejudices of the Victorian society. In the novel, Hardy portrays an innocent poor girl of a country, a victim of the combined forces of Victorian patriarchal society, of the hypocrisy of social prejudice and gender inequality, which shows his deep sympathy for Tessa, the protagonist of the novel, a symbol of women devastated without mercy in a world dominated by males. He shows that Tess is an example of the devastating effect of society's pressures on a pure girl, and that Angel and Alec are personifications of destructive attitudes towards women.

Ivan Turgenev’s novella “First Love” in the light of the Oedipus conflict is studied. But it’s done not according to S. Freud’s conception, in which erotic desire is the starting point and crucial aspect of the conflict between father and son. Rather, it interprets the way it is understood by Freud’s heirs S. Ferenczi and J.M. Masson, and even more in the light of R. Girard’s culturology. Thus, what is crucial for the author is the competitive conflict in itself, which only in a second step leads to father and son desiring the same woman. Nevertheless, some symbols that might play a role in Freud’s psychoanalytic observations are impor- tant for as well. Among these symbols are the jacket fit for children which his mother forces Vladimir to wear in Zinaida’s presence, Vladimir’s hair torn out by Zinaida, the knife with which Vladimir wanted to kill his rival but which he drops, the fact that Vladimir’s father rides on horseback better than Vladimir, and the whip with which the father beats Zinaida. To our point of view, the starting point of the plot is that Vladimir’s parents do not care for him. This is a trauma for the young man and the origin of an erotic rivalry for his father. When Vladimir discovers that Zinaida is his father’s lover and, even more, that they are unhappy in their relationship, this becomes a profound trauma for the young man, one could even say, it symbolically castrates him. Later on, he is not able to love or to overcome circumstances in order to reach his aims. He rather somehow goes on instead of living. For example, he does not marry.

Cultural d iscussions of D.H. Lawrence's creative legacy never cease, but his novelistic work remains the least considered in literary scholarship. A direct reading of D.H. Lawrence's works gives us every reason to note that a woman very often becomes the subject of his prose. The discourse on women in his texts is presented in the context of socio-cultural and family stereotypes of the female role. Analysis of recent research and articles on the works of D.H. Lawrence over the past three years has shown that his novels continue to be the main subject of scholarly consideration. Only a few literary critics have dealt with D.H. Lawrence's novels, completely ignoring the image of women in short prose. Hence the obvious relevance of our research. The aim of the article is to analyze the features of the image of the mother in Lawrence's novel ‘Mother and Daughter’. The task of the research is to establish the foundation of the plot of the novel and the artistic components of female images in it. It has been established that the novel’s core plot is the latent conflict between Virginia Bodoin and her mother, whose dominant feature is overprotection. The text consistently demonstrates the personal and emotional subordination of an adult daughter to her mother. In his works, Laurence often artistically depicts the fate of his characters as a direct result of maternal psychological violence. In the short story "Mother and Daughter", similar to many other short stories and novels of Lawrence, the artistic image of the family features a psychologically dominant, educated, and strong-willed woman, who, through overprotection, deprives the opportunity for the rest of the family to live their own life. The figure of the father in Lawrence's works is often absent: he is either deceased or reduced to the image of a spineless alcoholic or a passive romantic. As the author gets into the routines of the Bodoin women's lives, they implicitly lead us to an understanding of the relationship between the two of them as that of a married couple, where the mother "plays" the male role. Rachel's separation from men appears to be caused rather by the psycho type of the heroine than the modern way of living. Guided by the classification of the most common types of human behavior developed by Jean Shinoda Bolen, a follower of the Jungian school, we consider the depiction of relationships in the Bodoin family as the author's version of the Greek myth about Demeter and Persephone. The text contains details that attest to the financial prosperity of the heroines and emphasize their beauty and intelligence, but according to Lawrence's artistic version, all this did not make the women's lives fulfilling. Mother and daughter feel unhappy for different reasons. If Rachel, due to her asexuality and hypertrophied maternal instinct, seeks to dominate her daughter's life and takes any man as a competitor, Virginia, on the other hand, lacks male attention and even paternal care. The conclusions state that the short story "Mother and Daughter" by D.H. Lawrence is a kind of interpretation of the Greek myth about the abduction of a girl as a way to get her out of her mother's care. The fact that the words denoting blood relationships are used in the title of a short story leads us to the following interpretation: the lives of Bodoin women artistically represent a very common in society of that time model of relationship, and so, we would consider Virginia's life not as a special case, but as a norm. Keywords: Lawrence, the image of a woman, the myth of Demeter and Persephone, novel

The article aims to study the poetic means of reproducing models of intergenerational dialogue in the parameters of “conflict/solidarity”. The material of the study is the novel “Bonjour tristesse” (“Hello Sadness”) by Françoise Sagan, which demonstrates models of intergenerational relations within and around one family. The objective of the research is to study the existential model of “friend or foe” in intergenerational relations, the peculiarities of generational identification and self-identification, to clarify the mythopoetic interpretation of the archetype of Mother, Eros and Thanatos, and the gender focus of intergenerational relations. The study uses the methodology of literary gerontology, existential interpretation of a literary text, mythocriticism, psychoanalysis, sociological and psychoanalytic works related to age anthropology. Historical, cultural, comparative historical and typological methods are used to study the embodiment of age-related aspects, as well as to establish thematic, figurative, and compositional features of the functioning of intergenerational dialogue in a literary text. The result of the study shows that the intergenerational dialogue in the novel takes place within the framework of the models of “solidarity” and “conflict”. The figurative and motivational complex “solidarity” is characteristic of Cécile and Raymond’s relationship with elements of the idealisation of the father. The model of “solidarity” with elements of manipulation prevails in the relationships of Cécile-Elsa and Cécile-Cyril. During the story, these relationships do not have a deep emotional connection. The “conflict” model is expressed in the Cécile-Anne interaction. Anne makes the mistake of taking her role as a mother to Cécile to heart. Thus, she breaks the established ties in the family, trying to impose “foe” roles on the father and daughter, and on the other hand, she attempts to try on the sacred image of a mother, which leads to Anne’s death. The novel presents an artistic interpretation of the Mother archetype in several projections. First of all, in the variation “patronage as a maternal function”, the Mother archetype is characteristic of Anne. However, if Anne’s patronage as a “foe” is acceptable to Cécile, she does not plan to see her as her father’s wife, or her mother (stepmother). The Cécile-Anne conflict can also be seen in the mythological tradition of the stepmother-stepdaughter. Another variation of the Mother archetype, the “sacrificing mother”, is characteristic of Cyril’s mother, but Cécile negatively perceives the type of “woman in the family kinkeeper role”. The mythopoetics of the conflictual parallel of Eros and Thanatos in the novel is closely related to the motif of the intergenerational relationship between Raymond and Elsa. Here, the connection between an older man and a young lover is a necessary confirmation of a man’s physical and emotional state. The line of mutual love between 40-year-old Anne and Raymond provides an example of harmonious ageing. However, the destructive conflict between Cécile and Anne becomes a modulated energy aimed at eliminating the threat (Anne). In this way, the author’s intention reveals the ontological problem of playing with death, the unconscious realisation of the primordial instinct of destructiveness. The motif of Thanatos is immanently present in the novel because of the death of Cécile’s mother. The relationship between Raymond and Anne causes Cécile’s rejection and ends in Anne’s suicide. Anne’s attempt to take her mother’s sacred place ends in death.

The article examines the creative biography of the translator and librarian of the Public Library, a student of M.L. Lozinsky, Maria Nikitichna Ryzhkina (married Petersen; 1998–1984), the first translator of M. Proust’s novel Towards Swann. Special attention is paid to her activities in the publishing house “World Literature” (“Vsemirnaya Literatura”), where she is under her own name and under the pseudonym “M. Elagina” published, in addition to excerpts from M. Proust’s novel Towards Swann, the novels of R. Rolland Cola Brunion, The Enchanted Soul, A. Bero The Sufferings of a Fat Man and M. Marx The Woman, collections of short stories The Man is Kind by L. Frank and Timur by K. Edschmid, plays by G. Buchner The Death of Danton and Woyzeck. The authors of the article examine archival documents from the collections of the Russian National Library: the personal file of M.N. Ryzhkina (Petersen) and her diary (1920–1921); as well as her memoirs written in the 1980s and covering almost the entire life path, from the Archival Collection of the House of the Russian Abroad. The article gives numerous fragments from these sources. The information significantly complements the already known facts (according to other sources) about the work of M.L. Lozinsky’s Translation Studio, about his method of “collective translation,” about the relationship of students. The appendix contains archival documents from the personal file of M.N. Ryzhkina (Petersen) about her life in the period from 1919 to 1941.

Purpose/Objective of the Study: Sudha Murthy through her novels empowers women and motivates them to be courageous in adverse situations. The main purpose of this piece of research is to study the struggle faced by the women protagonists in the Select novels of Sudha Murthy titled ‘Gently Falls the Bakula’ ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Mahaswetha’ and how they rise above their mundane existence in search of a meaningful life and start a new life to fulfill their aspirations. Methodology: To achieve the purpose of the study, a systematic review of research literature was undertaken. Three novels namely ‘Gently Falls the Bakula’ ‘House Of Cards and ‘Mahaswetha’ have been critically analyzed. In addition to this, the research articles published in the Peer-Reviewed Journals were also examined. With the help of the literature, we were able to study the struggle of women and how they overcome the barriers by finding a solution to lead a meaningful life. Main Findings: The findings that emerged from the Study reveal the violence, denigration, and exploitation faced by the female characters of the novels such as Anupama, Mridula and Shrimati. It is also found that Man-Woman relationship, social acceptance, and estrangement in modern life, forms the core in all the novels namely ‘Gently Falls the Bakula’ ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Mahaswetha’. It is inferred that the women in the novels such as Mridula, Srimati and Anupama are simple, hardworking and innocent throughout, whereas the males - Sanjay, Srikant, and Anand are strongly influenced by the power of luxury, comfort, and materialism, steadily climbing up the corporate ladder without realizing the value of family life. The man’s greed for power, luxury, and social status has proved to be very expensive to the female characters. The female protagonists realize the fact that artificial values and material success cannot make a person successful. They also work tirelessly to overcome the barriers drawn by male-dominated society to lead a purposeful life. Implications: Social and Ethical values are delineated in the novels taken for study. Life is depicted as a journey with learning and unlearning experiences meeting with innumerable obstacles and barriers to testing the grit and willpower. These obstacles help us to make a decision as seen in the protagonists depicted by Sudha Murthy. Their choices were hard yet, they gathered courage, purpose, and meaning to create a new horizon. Getting to know our real worth is a relentless task, it helps us to toughen our values and passion. Self-discovery is not an easy ride and it requires pain and understanding. The characters here gather courage and face a new dawn.

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough (1937-2015) is one of the most popular Australian novels in Vietnam, which is mentioned in the curriculum of Australian Studies – a major of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City). In general, the themes which mainly attract readers’ attention are the great love story between Meggie Cleary – a beautiful, tough woman and Ralph de Bricassart – an ambitious Catholic priest, and (or) an inevitable tragedy resulted from the conflict between the love for God and that for man. However, exerting much focus on human relationships in The Thorn Birds makes it hard to see another important “figure” – nature – as well as the relationship between human and nature in the West of Australia, the main setting of the novel where the climate is harsh, unique and sometimes unpredictable. Since the theme of nature accounts for a large content of the novel, The Thorn Birds is likely to be an interesting subject to eco-critical studies. In this paper, from the perspective of ecocriticism, we try to point out how the theme of nature is treated in this novel, including how the figure of nature being depicted, how the human-nature relationship being dealt with and how nature is embracing human life and “telling” human stories. We also indicate the possible connection between literature and daily human life, and between a 1977 Australian novel which tells us the stories of the natural cycle, the bushfires, the imported animals, etc. and the unusual wildfires which occurred in this country at the beginning of the year 2020. In addition, by evaluating as a typical Australian novel from eco-critical perspectives, we hope to introduce a new approach to conduct research on Australian literature at the Department of Australian Studies and for other researches of literature major in the University.

This paper clearly focuses on The Representation of Unattainable love in T.S Pillai’s Chemmeen. Chemmeen is one of the celebrated works in Indian Literature. He is known as Malayalam novelist and Short story writer. His novels and short stories mostly focused on oppressed classes of Kerala in the mid twentieth century. Chemmeen is translated by Anita Nair from Malayalam into English in 2011. The author portrays Karuthamma and Pareekutty as lovers in the novel. The pitiable lovers of the novel are playing a vital role in the novel. They struggle a lot to express their love each other. They don’t even express their love through words but through eyes, they speak a lot. The lovers love to speak and spend time with one another. Both of them are unable to reach the destination of marriage. The tradition, customs and society are the major reasons of the unattainable love of Karuthamma and Pareekutty. They are unable to hide their love from one another when problem occurs. The author clearly presents happiness and pain of the lovers. Further, the writer describes their suffering in life without their loved one. The protagonist belongs to the fisher community. Her lover is known as Muslim trader. As per the customs of fisher community, a fisher woman should not maintain a relationship with a man belonging to another community.

Background: Novels are book-length fictional prose narratives, usually representing characters and actions with some degree of realism. Because of the main character in Linda Howard’s Novel Cover Night, it is important to study Purpose: to find out and describe the psychology of the main character in the novel Cover of Night by Linda Howard so that it helps obtain information and knowledge about the linguistic psychology of the main character, as well as developing literature. Studies related to character building. Method: This study uses the library method. The researcher will describe the main character of the novel. Namely Linda Howard’s novel “Cover of Night” as the primary data source. The other is about the characters in the novel. Researchers use a psychological approach to analyze the novel. Results and Discussion: The results of this study are that the main characters, Cate Nightingale and Calvin Harris, in this novel are portrayed positively as good characters, while Cate Nightingale is a loyal woman. She had no relationship with other men after her husband’s death. Her love for her husband made her blind and never attracted to other men. Cate is also a hardworking woman. He has to work hard to earn money to raise his children, so Calvin falls in love with Cate. Calvin Harris is a strong and mighty man with such a significant character that he makes an impression on one’s life. Implication: This research provides positive inspiration about Calvin’s personality as a character who has a heroic nature. This novel helps obtain information about the linguistic psychology of the main character, who is always brave in protecting someone he loves, even though he has to risk his life.

After the finishing of the research, we found the following results: The writer has sought to search for what they were through the heroines were often open text voice of equality, and take the heroines of women's rejecting voices the marginalization and persecution and to advocate openness to the world, it owes a world governed by traditions and superstitions. Touched on topics of interest to women crossing of the suffering of Arab women that hurt of sexual oppression, spinsterhood, and the violence of the man, her novel represent a cry against feminist ideas of traditional and stereotypical suffered by mothers in the stillness and silence. Taken from the body axis of subjects and penetrated the depth of the social relations and psychological generated through it, but most of her novels are breaking taboos has boldly as high in the description of intimate relations. - The masculine power is considered as the strategic entrance to the persecution of feminist is the central authority and control over the oppressed in society and especially the Algerian society, especially as this was the authority is the authority of the Father. Did not denounce the authority of the Father, but long-pen authority of the husband and brother. Masculine authority is in the eyes of the writer is the authority racist dictatorship, they are calling for the lost harmony between the female and masculine power, they are rejecting the personality of the woman in Haramlik or Psychological tension which is necessary characters and suffering from spiritual unity in spite of the presence of the man, the husband. Then enter into a world of utopia to achieve what cannot be achieved on the ground. At the level of the language we note that it choose the language appropriate to the contents of that address Sometimes it tends to discipline and sometimes tend to slang, but it did not disturb the nerve, especially with male photographed moments of intimate relationships.

This article takes as its subject of study the Yadamgye(野談系) short novel Chaesaenggiwoo(蔡生奇遇). The purpose is to examine Old man Chae(蔡)’s Satirical character, his son’s psychological phase of fantasy, and traces of women’s desires.Through this, I would like to reveal that the way of depicting characters and desires contributes to effectively taking on satire. Previous studies have tended to look at the work mainly based on the confrontation between Old man Chae(蔡) and interpreter Kim Ryeong(金令). It seems that there was a strong intention to place the work in the coordinates toward modern realism novels by highlighting aspects that dynamically show social status trends during the modern transition period. However, as that view has solidified to this day, it is thought that areas excluded from the work also clearly existed. This paper focused on three aspects of the excluded areas. First, contrary to the existing view that defined Old manChae’s character as ‘serious’ and ‘stern’, it focuses on the fact that the fallen noble class is effectively being satirized by acquiring a comical typicality that goes back and forth between desire and respect (ideology) around ‘whims’ and ‘memory loss’. Next, the description of the fantastic desire detected in the son Chae-saeng(蔡生)’s gaze, attitude, and emotions shows that this text is not only composed of the axis of the confrontation between old man Chae and interpreter Kim Ryeong, but also that there is another axis of generational conflict between father and son. This tells us that the text contains a fantastic narrative of the son’s dual desire to fulfill his desire that goes against his father’s teachings without seriously violating his father’s world. Next, we examine how the fantastic desire detected in the son Chae-saeng’s gaze, attitude, and emotions reveals the duality of hesitation between his father’s teachings (ideology) and his desire. In addition, it is revealed that the son’s narrative is being satirized by depicting the narrative of a foolish person’s megalomaniac desire and windfall as the miraculous fulfillment of the desire is achieved solely by the interpreter. Lastly, by analyzing the desires of old man Chah’s wife, Chae-saeng’s wife, and Kim Ryeong’s daughter, we examine how each woman escapes from traditional hierarchical relationships and society’s expected gaze. In doing so, this article aims to reveal that the text satirizes the downtrodden yangban class in the late Joseon Dynasty while unleashing the various desires of the members of the Fallen Yangban family.

This research article dwells upon the exploration of the various colours of humanism as reflected most impressively in Doris Lessing’s most famous novel, The Golden Notebook. During her long-spanning literary career, she did receive a very deep impression and motivation from her contemporary female-writers such as Mary Wollstone Craft, Kate Millet, Elain Showalter, Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and some others. Like all these feminist-writers, she too was very deeply concerned with the mental harassment, rape-violence and the sexual exploitation of the females in the existing phallocentric society. She too accelerated the movement of feminism even in the contemporary period. Being a woman, she could understand much better the issues and the problems of the females. Thus, through her novels, she has very strongly advocated for the equality, liberty and fraternity to the females without any kind of gender-discrimination. She is not an object of sexual gratification, confined to the domestic activities, but rather she has her oven self-esteem, love and honour. She cannot lose her self-esteem at any cost. By dint of her novels, she very strongly raised her voices against gender-discrimination, social injustice, sexual exploitation, mental torture and misconduct being committed to the females. In her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, she happens to introduce the two lady characters– Anna and Molly, living together in a London flat in 1957 in their free and independent life-style. These intermittent narrative frames four huge sections dedicated to Anna’s notebooks of the 1950’s,’ a black notebook dealing with the African experience, out of which, she has written her only novel; the red for politics – the decline and fall of the communist myth; blue a record of free relations with men, and of rosy dreams and sessions with her analyst; yellow in which she takes up stories; mostly drafts of a novel in which ‘Ella’ re-enacts a large part of Anna’s experience. In all this, what it means to be ‘free women’ is very thoroughly articulated and worked out. The question of living “lives like men” poses an illusion within the narrative. Despite Anna’s engagement in a sexual relationship with the same liberty as a man, it inevitably culminates in an undesirable dependency. This aspect alongside the overwhelming freedom of choice that stifles her literary endeavors, the unchecked freedom permitted by the world’s irresponsible state, and the paradoxical liberty of a woman obsessed with the notion of integrity, who is fatefully bound to navigate randomly to discern the significance of her actions, collectively construct the novel’s intricate framework. Despite the evident complexity, the novel’s most remarkable attribute does not lie in its profound or original difficulty. Contrarily, it resonates a compelling conviction of closely mirroring actual experiences. Within this realistic depiction, the anticipated concerns of a mid-twentieth-century writer organically find their respective positions, enhancing the authenticity and relatability of the narrative. It is simply an exceptional documentation of the experience of female autonomy and responsibility in connection to men and other women. It illustrates the endeavor to achieve self-reconciliation regarding these relationships, as well as issues of writing and politics. The document’s distinctiveness is highlighted by its unwavering honesty and extensive scope, providing a unique exploration of these multifaceted dimensions. It has got a very wide range of interest among the readers. Thus, it remains as a sort of the book that determines the way people think about themselves.

Penelitian berjudul Penyejajaran Diri Tokoh Perempuan Novel Cintaku di Kampus Biru Karya Ashadi Siregar ini membahas feminisme dengan menguraikan kesejajaran gender dalam novel Cintaku di Kampus Biru. Penelitian ini dilakukan karena adanya pandangan kesejajaran gender tokoh perempuan sebagai bagian dari budaya populer yang menarik untuk dikaji. Selain itu, problematika asmara mahasiswa tingkat akhir sebagai ciri sastra populer memiliki keunikan yang tidak terdapat pada novel lain yaitu hubungan asmara mahasiswa dengan mahasiswa dan mahasiswa dengan dosen. Adapun teori yang digunakan untuk yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah feminisme dan kesejajaran gender. Hasil penelitian ini berupa paparan mengenai: 1) penggambaran tokoh perempuan dalam novel Cintaku di Kampus Biru karya Ashadi Siregar sebagai upaya menyejajarkan diri dengan laki-laki, 2) reaksi tokoh laki-laki dalam novel Cintaku di Kampus Biru karya Ashadi Siregar melihat usaha penyejajaran diri yang dilakukan tokoh perempuan, dan 3) sikap pengarang terhadap feminisme berdasarkan penyajian cerita di dalam Novel Cintaku Di Kampus Biru. A study entitled “Penyejajaran Diri Tokoh Perempuan Novel Cintaku di Kampus Biru Karya Ashadi Siregar” discussed the feminism by describing gender aligment in the novel entitled Cintaku di Kampus Biru. The study was aimed at showing the female gender alignment was a part of a popular culture that was interesting to explore. Moreover, the problematic of the final degree college student as the character in the popular literature which has uniqueness that wasn’t in other novel novels was the love relationship between college students and college student or college student and their lecturer. So the purpose of this study is to analyze feminism in the novel Cintaku on Kampus Biru by Ashadi Siregar, written in 1972. The theories used in this study were feminism and gender alignment. This study resulted in several findings which exposed about: 1) The description of the woman character in the novel entitled Cintaku di Kampus Biru karya Ashadi Siregar as an effort to align herself with men, 2) The reaction of the man character in novel entitled Cintaku di Kampus Biru karya Ashadi Siregar when he noticed the effort of gender alignment that the woman did, and 3) The author’s attitude with feminism based on the presentation of the story in the novel entitled Cintaku di Kampus Biru. The benefits of this research are revealing feminism in Ashadi Siregar's novel Cintaku on Kampus Biru as well as being a reference for other researchers in studying feminism.

The problem of the identity of the woman hiding her gender under a male pseudonym makes us recollect U. Eco’s arguments about the truth and the purpose of literature as well as A. F. Losev’s ideas about the name and the meaning, the theories of the feminist literary critics K. Millett, M. Ellman, T. Moi, E. Showalter, etc. who have presented "women`s writing" and "writing about women" in the feminist field. As one of the central principles of feminist criticism is that no scientific view can ever be neutral, the problem of pseudonyms occupies an important place in the contemporary gender studies, explicitly or implicitly highlighting the artificially constructed debate, which divides "serious male literature" and "superficial and secondary female writing". On the one hand, this is the problem of feminism itself, on the other, it is a question of the role and place of the woman in the world` culture and history. In this kind of the analysis we cannot ignore such an epiphenomenon of postmodernism as "label change" with the postmodern emphasis on the sociocultural role of the context, which is especially relevant in aspects of the gender "name problem". The last one, undoubtedly, is included in the problematization of postmodern culture on the whole, since all cultural narratives have always been gender "stories". Today an individual construct his or her gender-reflecting reality, still the modelling of the new gender system is far from being complete. The created sign systems are ambivalent, the meanings are very unstable and can easily be hermeneutically interpreted. However, the role of hermeneutics in analyzing the relationship between the author and the sociocultural context is in the core of the gender aspects of literature, in general, and in the problems of the pseudonym as a change of "name", in particular. The latter is by all means relevant and important. Undoubtedly, one of the main incentives for feminist scholars in their turn to women's literature is connected with the patriarchal demand for women's "silence", their "dumbness" in culture and, accordingly, in literature. Obviously, there are two main interpretations of the concept of "female literature" in feminist criticism. The first one is the representation of female subjectivity in its difference from the male one. The second approach is the representation of "non-essentialist" female subjectivity, which is understood as the logical structure of the difference. In general, in the patriarchal dichotomy of the femininity and masculinity "women who write" are always dangerous. "Three strange sisters" – Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte wrote their novels under disguise of male pen names, exactly specifying two conceptual motives: the "Other" concept and the image of "Veil". In this context the motive of androgyny is also important from the point of view of both analysis and literary criticism. In ХIXth century George Sand (Aurora Dupin), having most vividly represented this concept, became an example for many subsequent generations of feminists – writers, actresses and media representatives. However, in our era of gender plurality, the question of the pseudonym as a problem of "genders" is not so relevant; more likely it is still a question of the priorities in the feminist theory. In the contemporary discourse of literary criticism many of the author’s socially significant features are perceived as gender neutral. In the postmodern paradigm the question of the androgynous identity of the man/woman writer requires its further actualization as the androgynous is often replaced by the bisexuality (J. Irving` "In One Person"). In general, it should be recognized that postmodern approaches to gender identity, which paint a "picture of the world" today, transform the female experience of being as the "Other", secondary and insignificant with a conceptual orientation to a fundamental variety of postmodern cognitive perspectives.

This paper explores the links between sexuality and subjectivity in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Paradise. The theories of Jacques Lacan and Nancy Chodorow are employed to examine the anatomical and social / symbolic factors that lead Morrison's subjects to adopt a gendered self. Chodorow's argument that the mother's gender and preoedipal relationship with her child have a profound bearing on the child's gender identity and subsequent sense of self is cited in addressing gender formation and male-female relationships in Morrison's novels. Lacan's view of gender formation as positioning the gendered subject in a particular position in relation to language / the Symbolic system is also considered. Lacan's and Chodorow's concepts are applied in a study of a number of issues pertaining to sexuality and identity, including: homosexuality and 'deviant' sexuality as perceived threats to normative patriarchal gender systems in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; the discord apparent in male-female relationships in Morrison's novels; and the marginalisation of mothers and women as 'other.'

Anita Desai is one of the most prominent Indian novelists of India. Her writing is different from other novelists as she deals with psychological problems in her novels. She is very much interested in the interior landscapes of the mind of her characters. Most of her novels have the theme of alienation, isolation, loneliness, loss of identity and importance of communication in married life. Anita Desai beautifully picturizes the complexities of man-woman relationships in her novels. The objective of this study is to show the feministic perspective of Anita Desai’s women characters in her novels.

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay (b. 1974), a modern feminist writer, promotes and celebrates women’s freedom that the women seek to enjoy both physically and psychologically. Bold and candid, Bandyopadhyay exposes “hardcore sexuality” into her work, going against the flow in society. Panty, one of her best-known works, is a novella about a nameless woman who goes through surreal experiences. The novella is set in contemporary Kolkata, a boisterous metropolis, where women work at part with men, but still the women feel a sense of inferiority. The woman in the novella enters a dark apartment, owned by a mysterious man with whom she has a complicated relationship, at night and finds a soft and silky panty in leopard-skin print. Circumstances force her to wear the panty, and just then she begins to imagine its original owner along with her wild sexual life. The rest of the story evolves around the woman’s imagination, her love, sex, loneliness, uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and so forth. This article analyzes how a woman struggles to achieve a secure space in society as well as an established identity. The article also explores how a woman navigates between love and sex, freedom and dependence, and continues to search for a life that she has not yet lived.

Vijay Tendulkar (1928-2008) is India’s most famous Marathi play writer. Through his writing he focuses on the contemporary issues of society. The Vultures, Sakharam Binder and Ghashiram Kotwalin these plays he focuses on the male dominance, women Discrimination, Gender Inequality, Violence, man woman relationships. The Vultures which were published in 1961 and Sakharam Binder in 1972 Ghashiram Kotwal in 1972 shows the male dominance in the society and how men overpower woman as well as conflict between human relationship and the actual picture of the patriarchal society. His prolific writing over a period of five decades includes thirty full-length plays, twenty-three one-act plays, eleven children’s dramas, four collections of short stories, two novels and five volumes of literary essays and social criticism. His female characters are mainly from the lower- and middle-class families such as housewives, teachers, mistresses, daughters, slaves and servants. The issues of male dominance, gender discrimination, greed for money, sexual norms, violence, manwoman relationship, social issues, power and morality have been featured prominently in his plays. He deals with all the problems and conspiracies, of the contemporary society. The conspiracies are discussed in this paper under the heading – Male Dominance.

Sunetra Gupta who is an Indian immigrant living in England and working in Oxford University as a Professor of Zoology has written five novels. Her fifth novel, So Good in Black published in 2011 celebrates globalization and the free passage to western countries for Indians and for the westerners to India. Human relationship is the main crux of postmodern writings and Gupta also brings out the cross-cultural human relationship in So Good in Black with much details. At the backdrop of Kolkata, India, Gupta colourfully draws the human relationship especially man-woman relationship in this novel. As the values of life are at stake due to the materialistic advancement in the modern world, Gupta highlights the fact that human relationship always lies in dark and it is good to keep it in black. The characters namely Byron Mallick, Max Gate, Damini and Ela suffer as they from relationship with themselves and with others who are their kith and kin. The women characters namely, Damini, Ela and Barbara become victims in the hands of Byron and Max, as they try to form relationship among them. The cultural values of India and the West is comparatively discussed by the author in this novel to bring out the very nature of Indian woman like Ela who gives importance to Indian culture and prefers it though she experiences cross-cultural human relationship.

This paper deals with the Eco-feministic views of Kamala Markandaya that she has expressed in her novels, which make her in the real sense a true Eco-feminist. The novel entitled The Coffer Dams (1969) is studied in this paper to find out her eco-feministic outlook. The focus is on comparing the qualities of the nature with the qualities of the women, the characters of Kamala Markandaya as true lovers and protectors of nature. It has been found that the chief character of this novel named Helen loves, respects, protects the nature and tries to consolidate her relationship with the animals, birds, flora and fauna and even she toils for making the people aware particularly her husband named Clinton the indispensability of the affectionate relationship of the man with nature. The novel unveils the men’s outlook towards the woman and the nature, their tendency of showing dominance over woman and the nature and how the woman is exploited at their hands and the nature is getting destructed by them. An analytical method is used to study the eco-feministic perspective of Kamala Markandaya in this novel.

Women writers gave new dimension to Indian Literature. It took several years and numerous notable individuals to elevate Indian English writing to its current stature and reputation. Many women authors created songs, short tales, and plays long before novels became popular. They are regarded as stewards of India's rich fable and story-telling legacy. In their writings, they incorporate the recurring female experiences, which soon affected the Cultural and Language patterns of Indian Literature. Shashi Despande is among the sensitive thinkers who perceive the numerous elements of human experiences in order to draw serious conclusions about the individual's predicament in the face of society's insurmountable norms. She conceives the plots of her novel speculating the position of woman in relation to social paradigms and established religious practices. Shashi Despande, encourages the cult of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘complain’ but develops the aesthetics of self assertiveness for self preservation. The Binding Vine is a novel with a complicated structure and several levels of recommendations, concentrating on the illusions of man-woman relationships, the horror of rape, society's indifference, and the emptiness of marriage as an institution.

Since the Tanzimat Period, it is possible to come across characters in the position of primary or secondary persons in Turkish novels, who want malignancy, pursue malignancy, harm their surroundings, and are called ‘malevolent’ for this reason. Among these characters, women have a special place and importance in terms of the way they are reflected in the work. The female character, whose name is not mentioned in the novel Siyah Gözler, published in 1911 by Cemil Süleyman Alyanakoğlu (1886-1940), one of the leading novelists and storytellers of the Fecr-i Âtî literary community founded in 1909, composes an example that draws attention to this. In the work, the woman, who is over thirty years old, is infatuated with a handsome twenty-two-year-old young man. But she turns their relationship into a nightmare with the fear that she will let him go away one day. A malignancy nurtured/revealed by jealousy soon upsets the woman's mental balance and leads her into complete paranoia. As a result of this jealousy, the woman becomes insane and kills the young man by strangling him. In this examination, the novel Siyah Gözler was tried to be considered within the framework of the malevolent female type and therefore it was aimed to evaluate and interpret the female character mentioned in the work from a different perspective. In the “Introduction” part of the examination, brief information was given about malignancy and the malevolent female type, the storytelling, noveldom, and Black Eyes of Cemil Süleyman Alyanakoğlu, afterward, with a thematic perspective and sometimes by making use of psychoanalytic interpretations, the malevolent female type in the novel has been revealed. In the “Conclusion” part, some judgments were made based on the material determined regarding the malevolent female type.

Artiklis vaatlen olmekirjanduse nimelist nähtust – 1970. ja 1980. aastate vahetusel Nõukogude Eestis ilmunud romaane, mille keskseks teemaks olid kaasaegsed sugudevahelised suhted. Asetan olmekirjanduse kitsalt eesti kirjanduspildist laiemale, üleliidulisele taustale, mida kujundavad paljuski sotsioloogia areng ning selle keskajakirjanduslik kajastus. Muuhulgas sõna emantsipatsioon kasutuse kaudu teostes näitan romaanide käsitluslaadi vastavust kaasaegsele ajakirjanduslikule käsitluslaadile. Seeläbi paigutan romaanid ajakirjandusega ühte, „hilisnõukogude liberaalsesse kriitilisse diskursusse“, kus võim ja vastupanu, nõukogulikkus ja ebanõukogulikkus on tihedasti läbi põimunud. In this article, I examine a phenomenon known as 'everyday literature' (olmekirjandus)—novels published in Soviet Estonia at the turn of the 1970s—1980s. By name, these novels could be expected to depict contemporary everyday life, whereas they really focus on gender relations, marital and especially extramarital relationships. Contemporary criticism did not value such books highly; nevertheless, they stood out as a corpus and succeeded in evoking a discussion. In retrospect, everyday novels have been interpreted as a particular incarnation of light/lowbrow literature, as timid harbingers of postmodernism, and as proto-feminist works. While these interpretations all have their grounds, they operate in a narrower context of Estonian (national) literature. In this article, I set everyday novels on a wider background of the cultural situation in the contemporary Soviet Union.This situation was heavily influenced by the rebirth of sociology and its reflections in print media. Having been banned meanwhile since the middle of the 1950s, sociology again became a permitted discipline in the Soviet Union. Among prominent areas of study were matters concerning the private sphere: family life and gender dynamics. That in turn gave rise to an extensive discussion of gender relations and “the woman question” in contemporary print media—in newspapers, culture magazines and popular science magazines. The discourse was one of sharp antagonism, tending to ridicule the state-endorsed slogan of women’s emancipation and gender equality, and to pit men and women against one another.I argue that the vocabulary and the general approach of everyday novels closely corresponds to that of the print media, and acknowledging this allows for the most fruitful interpretation of these works. I demonstrate the close proximity of the novels to media accounts, describing the general problem settings of the novels and, more closely, the use of the very word 'emancipation' itself. Both novels and media texts feature the so-called emancipated woman and her (lacking) counterpart – either an irresponsible womanizer or a weak drunkard of a man. Neither male or female characters are content with the situation and while the blame may shift from one party to another, in novels as well as in media accounts, the phenomenon of emancipation itself is considered a negative, but most importantly, a ridiculous thing.The corpus seems to have awoken opposite intuitions already in its contemporary audience. As most often the case with the literature of the Soviet era, a question of conformism and resistance, of Sovietness and anti-Sovietness has implicitly coloured the discussions of everyday literature. On the one hand, the novels were considered petty, taking on subjects familiar from print media and offering no new depths in their approach. The latter was perhaps most clearly expressed in a 1980 piece by Rein Veidemann that gives its name to the current article, “On the nature, meaning, and function of everyday literature”; according to an exile Estonian reviewer’s ironic comment, everyday novels exemplified the truest socialist realism. On the other hand, they were read very widely and succeeded in stirring up a controversy, thus proving to be at least somewhat unconventional in the time and place of their publication. An evident reason are open references to sexual matters; however, it is not irrelevant that they touched upon the problems of changing gender relations, even if the analysis they offered did not satisfy the audience.In addition to sketching out the general power relations of Soviet Russia and Soviet Estonia, and pointing out the influence of the central Soviet print media on Estonian culture, the framework of postcolonial studies emphasizes that Sovietness and anti-Sovietness does not have to be an either/or question—those seemingly opposite intuitions may well thrive side by side. Drawing a parallel between the novels and media texts among other things allows them to be placed within the 'late Soviet liberal critical discourse', a term used to describe the metaphor-laden media discourse of the 1970s—1980s Soviet Union. This discourse is simultaneously a locus of conformism and resistance, avoiding certain taboo subjects and displaying fiercely critical attitudes toward other, more “harmless” subjects as a manner of managing the dissatisfaction of the Soviet citizen; whereas “the woman question” has been argued to be namely one of such token subjects. Positioning the novels within the late Soviet liberal critical discourse similarly on the one hand blocks the interpretation of the novels as something unprecedented and, no less, subversive and dissident or even implicitly nationalist; on the other hand, it does not completely cut off their critical potential.

From the sensuous scenes of culinary delectation and preparatory foreplay in Eat Drink Man Woman to the current crop of texts infused with metaphors of consumption as assimilation, writers and filmmakers have signified diasporic Asian bodies by merging cultural and racial markers. This is an introduction to the issues involved in representing the Asian body in diaspora and the politically fraught issues for racial minority populations in majority 'white' nations. Examples in this piece skim from Japanese-Canadian literature and metaphors of ingestion to racial minority identity politics in the United States. In Chorus of Mushrooms, a novel by Japanese-Canadian Hiromi Goto, one of the foci for the Tonkatsus' cultural change-over from the Japanese to the Canadian side of the hyphen is a determined alteration in eating habits. 'Western' food is the only type provided and the grandmother, Naoe, comments that her daughter has "converted from rice and daikon to weiners and beans" (13). In many ways, Keiko tries to force her family to eat their way into a new Canadian skin. Ostensibly, through the absorption of Western-style Canadian food, the Tonkatsus would achieve the goal of becoming one of 'them'. Using metaphors of cultural miscegenation, Keiko's daughter Muriel, as well as Obasan's Naomi and Stephen Nakane, could be described as 'banana'-yellow on the outside, white on the inside (Brydon 104). In the Asian-Australian literature and politics Webpages, The Banana Schtick, this term is reclaimed deliberately and defines specific issues for Asian-Australian writers and academic work which bypass the usual 'area studies' presumptions. This customarily derogatory metaphor is used by those within and without racial minority communities, across most class groups, barring the embedded invisibility of whiteness. Similar metaphors which denote the clashing (or possible melding) of races or cultures include the use of the term 'oreos' for African-Americans who take on what are deemed white, middle-class characteristics, or who do not act 'like a negro should' (Dyson 222). The term 'apples' has referred to Native Americans and 'coconuts' to individuals of South-East Asian or West Indian origin. The plethora of food metaphors link these models of hybrid identities with notions of cultural consumption and ingestion. Yau Ching, while examining Ang Lee's film Eat Drink Man Woman, observes: "those close-ups of the kungfu of chopping and stir-frying constitute a postmodern version of the West's Chinoiserie. I felt like I was stripteasing, selling something that I didn't have" (31). Yau's positioning as a part of the 'striptease' offered by the highly detailed shots of food preparation evokes discomfort. The scenes are meant to be evocatively 'Chinese' and operated as cultural shorthand: "food thus serves as an index of the imaginary 'heritage' passed on, the racial symbolism, the alimentary sign of Chineseness" (31). This obsession with the minutiae of process and material becomes a part of what Shu-Mei Shih calls a "porno-culinary genre" (1), another way for 'chinese-ness' to be observed, assessed, and ultimately consumed. A site that reacts explicitly to this commodification of Asian-ness, and particularly Asian women, is Mimi Nguyen's Exoticise This! It provides an excellent listing of Asian feminist and Third World women's resources, zines, and creative work. Notably, it is one of the few critically engaged, non-pornographic sites that will appear during a search for "Asian women" using Web search engines or directories. As pointers of racial/cultural doubling, the food markers mentioned above assume a constant social or mental bearing as 'towards white': white as the centre, as the most desired once again. The community or familial censure that this 'doubling' encounters could be read as a start in eroding the assumed attractive power of being 'white,' except that the judgments are based on essentialist ideas of what white/non-white means (in behaviour, talk, etc.) and their incompatability. This mode of reasoning maintains that a subject must be one side of the hyphenated identity or the other. For the most part, the terms used to describe the 'whitened' Others are analogous with various versions of raw produce and organic perishables. Conversely, "whiteness [is] often signified ... by commodities and brands: Wonder Bread, Kleenex, Heinz 57. In this identification, whiteness [comes] to be seen as spoiled by capitalism, and as being linked with capitalism in a way other cultures are not" (Frankenberg 199). The condition of whiteness as embodying capitalism inflect various constructions of western 'modernity', as well as the assumption that this kind of modernity is the logical state to which all nations and communities aspire. The growing area of 'whiteness' studies, and publications like Race Traitor, challenge this notion of a neutral flesh colour. The tokenistic acceptance of racial minority communities promotes divisiveness by allowing only a narrow range of representation for 'coloured' peoples. This perpetuates the masking of white privilege in that it remains the always-present and never-questioned. David Palumbo-Liu, an Asian-American race theorist, presents the symbiotic relationship between Korean-Americans and Anglo-Americans in the 1990s as an example of this creation of self-destructive alienation. He uses the incidents surrounding the 1992 Los Angeles riots, post-Rodney King trial, to emphasise how "Korean-Americans were represented as the frontline forces of the white bourgeoisie" (371), protecting their goods and property, being part of the capitalist programme which enabled them to become asset-rich 'Americans'. In most images and reports, the presence of white Americans (in downtown south-central Los Angeles) was elided while that of black Americans was amplified. Ruth Frankenberg suggests that "racist discourse ... frequently accords hypervisibility to African Americans and a relative invisibility to Asian Americans and Native Americans" (12). Palumbo-Liu states more specifically: the locating, real and figurative, of Asians in between the dominant and minor is made less tenuous and even rationalized by a particular element which situates Asians within the dominant ideology, and frees them of the burden of their ethnicity and race while retaining (for obvious ideological purposes) the signifier of racial difference: the notion of self-affirmative action. (371) The basic desire to be accepted/assimilated into majority white societies has meant that, in some instances, Asian citizens are complicit with the promulgation of certain stereotypes of themselves. Bypassing the expectations and approvals of white society altogether are increasing numbers of Asian-Canadian and Asian-American texts, whether in the form of novels, magazines (such as Giant Robot), or films, which do not assume a white audience but, instead, one that recognises the stereotypes and amalgamations of being part of diasporic Asian communities in North America and elsewhere. References Brydon, Diana. "Discovering 'Ethnicity': Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Mena Abdullah's Time of the Peacock." Australian/Canadian Literatures in English: Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Russell McDougall and Gillian Whitlock. Melbourne: Methuen, 1987. 94-110. Ching, Yau. "Can I Have MSG, an Egg Roll To Suck on and Asian American Media on the Side?" Fuse 20.1 (1997): 27-34. Dyson, Michael Eric. "Essentialism and the Complexities of Racial Identity." Multiculturalism: A Reader. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1994. 218-29. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. London: Routledge, 1993. Goto, Hiromi. Chorus of Mushrooms. Edmonton: NeWest P, 1994. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Markham: Penguin, 1981. Lee, Ang, dir. Eat Drink Man Woman. Samuel Goldwyn, 1994. Palumbo-Liu, David. "Los Angeles, Asians, and Perverse Ventriloquisms: On the Function of Asian America in the Recent American Imaginary." Public Culture 6 (1994): 365-81. Shih, Shu-mei. "Globalization, Minoritization, and Ang Lee's Films." Paper given at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies, 23-28 June 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tseen Khoo. "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, Porno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php>. Chicago style: Tseen Khoo, "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, Porno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tseen Khoo. (1999) Fetishising flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian representation, porno-culinary genres, and the racially marked body. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php> ([your date of access]).

The western world has an enthusiasm for blondes that amounts to a cultural fetish. As a signifier the blonde is loaded: blondes have more fun, blondes are dumb, blondes are more sexually available, blondes are less capable, less serious, less complicated. The blonde is, in modern day patriarchy, often portrayed as the ideal woman. The Oxford Dictionary defines a Goddess as a female deity or a woman who is adored for her beauty. The Blonde Goddess then is the ultimate contemporary female, worshipped for her appearance, erotically idolised. She may be a Playboy bunny, the hot girl on the beach or the larger than life billboard, but everywhere her image haunts mere mortals: the men who can’t have her and the women who can’t be her. During the second wave of feminism the Blonde Goddess was vilified as an unrealistic illusion and exploitive fantasy and our enthusiasm for her was roundly challenged. She was a stereotype, feminists cried, a site of oppression, a phoney construct. Men were judged harshly for desiring her and women were discouraged from being her. Well beyond hair colour and its power as signifier the very notion of Goddessness, of being adored for one’s beauty, was considered repressive. Women were called upon to refuse participation in blondeness (in its signifying sense) and Goddessness (in the sense of being revered for attractiveness) and men were chastised for being superficial and chauvinistic.Nevertheless, decades later, many men continue to lust after her, women (and increasingly younger girls) work ever harder at being her — bleaching, shaving, breast augmenting and botoxing — and the media promotes endless representations of her. If the second wave thought the Blonde Goddess would give up the ghost easily it was mistaken but what their enthusiastic critique did enable is the birth of a new type of Blonde Goddess, one generally considered to be stronger, more empowered and a better role model for the 21st century Miss. Though the likes of Mae West hinted at this type of Blonde Goddess well before Madonna it was not until Madonna’s generation that she went mainstream. There have been many Blonde Goddess “It girls” — Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield and Debbie Harry (singer of the band Blondie) to name a few, but two in particular stand out as the embodiment of these types; their bodies and identities going beyond the image-making machinery to become a kind of Blonde Goddess performance art. They are Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. The enthusiasm for blondeness and Goddessness routinely gives rise to faddish cultural enthusasisms. In Monroe’s day her curvaceous figure was upheld as the model female form. After Madonna appeared with her bangles and layered tops girls all across America and around the world dressed like her. Drawing on Angela Carter’s feminist readings of De Sade in The Sadeian Woman and envisioning Monroe and Madonna, two of the most fêted examples of Blonde Goddessness in history, as De Sade’s Justine and Juliette reveals their erotic currency as both couched in patriarchal gender relations and binding us to it. Considering Monroe and Madonna with the Marquis De Sade characters Justine and Juliette in mind illustrates that Goddessness as I’m defining it here — the enthusiasm which with women rely on beauty for affirmation and men’s enthusiastic feeding of that dependence — amounts to a feminine masquerade that disempowers women from a real experience of femaleness, emancipation and eroticism. When feminists in the 60s and 70s critiqued the Blonde Goddess as the poster-child for good old-fashioned sexism it was women like Monroe they had in mind. What feminists argued for they largely got — access to life beyond the domestic domain, financial autonomy, self-determination — but, as a De Sadian viewing of Madonna will show, we’re still compromised. While many feminists, most notably Andrea Dworkin, rejected the Marquis De Sade, notorious libertine and writer, as a dishonourable pornographer, others, such as Luce Irigaray and Angela Carter, felt he accurately reflected the social structures and relations of western civilisation and was therefore fertile ground for the exploration of what it is to be a woman in our culture. Justine and Juliette are erotic novels that recount the very different fortunes of two dissimilar sisters. They are beautiful (of course) and as such they are Goddesses, even while being defiled and defiling. Monroe and Madonna are metaphorical sisters in a man's world (and it was an infamous touch of video genius when Madonna acknowledged as much by doing Monroe in the video for “Material Girl” early on in her career). Yet one is a survivor and one isn't. One is living and one is long dead. Monroe is the Blonde Goddess as victim; Madonna is the Blonde Goddess as Villain. Monroe cast a shadow; Madonna has danced with the shadow. Both Marilyn and Madonna assumed a feminine masquerade so successful, so omnipotent, that they became not just Goddesses, desired by men, admired by women, and emulated by girls, but the most iconic and celebrated Blonde Goddesses of their age. It was, and in Madonna’s case still is, a highly sexualised masquerade that utilises and promotes itself as a commodity. Both women milked this masquerade to achieve notoriety and wealth in a world where women are disadvantaged in the public sphere. Some read this kind of exploitation of erotic desire as a mark of subjugation while others see it as a feminist act: a knowing usage of means toward a self-possessed end, but as Carter will help demonstrate, masquerade is, either way, an artificial construct and our enthusiasm for trading in it comes at a high price. Monroe, the sexy, fragile child-woman, was the firstborn of the sisters. Her star rose in the moralistic fifties, and by all accounts she spent most of her time in the limelight frustrated by her career and by the studio’s control of it. She was “owned”, and she rebelled against it, fleeing to New York City to study acting at the renowned Actors Studio. She became a devoted student of method acting, a technique that encourages actors to plumb their emotional depths and experiences, though her own psychological instability threatened her career. She was scandalously difficult to work with: chronically late, forgetful, and self-indulgent; and she died alone, intoxicated and naked. Conspiracy theories aside, it seems likely that a cocktail of mental disturbance, man trouble, and substance addiction led to her premature death by overdose in 1962. Monroe’s traditional take on blondeness and Goddessness embodied the purely feminine masquerade and translated to the classic Justine trajectory.Madonna can be thought of as Monroe’s post-modern younger sister, the next generation of Blonde Goddessness. Known for her self-determination, business savvy and self-control Madonna’s self-parody and decades long survival and triumph in a male dominated industry is remarkable. Perhaps this is where the sisters differ most: Madonna challenges the dominant semiotic code of traditional gender roles in that she combines her feminine masquerade with masculinity, witness the pointy cone bra worn with pinstripe trousers and monocle on the “Blonde Ambition” tour. Madonna is the new blonde — shrewder, more forceful, more man-like. She plays girly in her feminine masquerade, but she does so self-consciously, with a wink, as the second sister who has observed and learned the lesson of the first. In Carter’s exploration of the characters of Justine and Juliette she notes that when the orphaned girls are turned out of the convent to fend for themselves, Justine, the sister whose goodness and innocence is constantly met with the brutality and betrayal of men, "embarks on a dolorous pilgrimage in which each preferred sanctuary turns out to be a new prison and all the human relations offered her are a form of servitude" (39). During Monroe’s pilgrimage from foster care, to young wife, to teen model, to star she found herself trapped in an abusive studio system that could not nurture her and instead raped her over and over again in the sense that it thwarted her personal aspirations as an actor and her desire for creative autonomy by overpowering her with its demands. Monroe did not own her own life and sexuality so much as function as a site of objectification, a possession of the Tinsel Town suits. In her personal life she was endowed with the “feminine” trait of feeling; she was, like Justine, "the broken heart, the stabbed dove, the violated sepulcher, the persecuted maiden whose virginity is perpetually refreshed by rape” (Carter 49).In real life and in most of her characters Monroe was kind hearted, generous, caring and compassionate. It is this heart that Justine values most; whatever happens to the body, no matter how impure it becomes, the heart remains sacred. The victim with heart is morally superior to her masters. In a suffering that becomes second nature, "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity” (57).Conspiracy theories and rumors of Monroe's suffering and possible murder at the hands of the Kennedys (cast as evil Sadian masters) abound. Suicide attempts, drug dependency, and nervous breakdowns were the order of the day in her final years. The continuing fascination with Monroe lies in the fact that she was the archetypal sullied virgin. Feminine virtue and goodness require sexual innocence and purity. If Monroe’s innocence (a feature of films like Some Like it Hot) was too often confused with stupidity she made the most of it by cornering the market on bimbo roles (Gentleman Prefer Blondes is her ultimate dumb blonde performance). But even those who thought she couldn’t act realised that her appeal was potent because her innocence was infused with the potentiality of an uncontainable libidinous energy. Like Justine, Juliette was a woman born into a man's world, but in her corruption Juliette decided beat men at their own game, to transcend her destiny as woman at any cost. Carter says of Juliette: She is rationality personified and leaves no single cell of her brain unused. She will never obey the fallacious promptings of her heart. Her mind functions like a computer programmed to produce two results for herself — financial profit and libidinal gratification. (79)Indeed, it could be said that it is financial profit and libidinal gratification that most defines Madonna in the public’s eye. She is obscenely rich and often cited for her calculated re-inventions and assertive sexuality (which peaked in the early nineties with the album Erotica and the graphic Sex book). Madonna, like Juliette, is a story-teller. Even if she isn’t always the author of her songs she creates narrative interplay using song, fashion, and video. Like Juliette Madonna takes control of her destiny. She heads her own production company and is intimately involved with the details of her multi-faceted career. Like Monroe Madonna is said to have slept around strategically in her pre-stardom years, but unlike Monroe she was not passed around. The men in Madonna’s life early in her career were critical to advancing it. From Dan Gilroy, who helped form her first rock band, the Breakfast Club to DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez, who remixed tracks on her debut album Madonna took every step up the ladder of success guided by a precision instinct for self-preservation and promotion. She was not used up as she used others. Her trail leaves no sign of weakness, just one envelope-pushing accomplishment after another, with a few failures along the way, most notably in film. Though very different central to both Monroe and Madonna’s lives and careers is a mega-watt erotic appeal, an appeal that has everything to do with their respective differential repetitions of being blonde.In Eroticism Georges Bataille defines eroticism as the fusion of separate objects involving the play of discontinuity and continuity. In Bataille’s work these words have a specific and unconventional meaning. Discontinuity describes our individuality, our separateness from each other, a separateness that reigns in our social and work-a-day lives. Continuity refers to dissolution of separateness that is most associated with death but which is also experienced by way of exalted living through a taste of transcendence. Bataille posits three types of eroticism: physical, emotional and religious and he claims that they all “substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity” (15).Here Bataille meets De Sade. In the Introduction to Eroticism Bataille speaks of De Sade’s assertion that we come closest to death (continuity) through the “licentious image.” Further, Bataille declares that eroticism is not just an enthusiasm; it is the enthusiasm of humankind. “It seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions,” he says. “I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions” (12). He goes on to state that our enthusiasm/eroticism is not just an aspect of our being, but its driving force: “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear.” (15).Human beauty is, Bataille suggests, measured by its distance from the animal — the more ethereal (light and unearthly) the female shape and texture, and the less clear its relation to animal reality, the more beautiful — the erotic moment lies in profaning that beauty, reducing it to its animal essence. Perhaps this is another reason why blondeness matters and signifies sex, conferring as it does a halo, an ethereal “light” which evokes the sacredness of continuity while denying the animal (the hairy and base reality of the body). This is the invitation The Blonde Goddess makes to defilement, her begging to be reduced to her private parts. Juliette/Madonna subverts her blonde invitation to be profaned by actively taking part in the profanation. Madonna has openly embraced gay culture, S & M, exhibitionism, fetishism, role-play and religious symbolism placing herself centre stage at all times. Justine/Monroe attracted erotic victimisation while Juliette/Madonna refused it by sleight of hand, and here again De Sade can help make sense of this. The works that illustrate this difference between Justine/Monroe and Juliette/Madonna most clearly are The Misfits and Truth or Dare. The Misfits is a beautiful and delicate film, written by Monroe’s then husband, Arthur Miller. The role of Roslyn is rumored to be based on Monroe's own character and her relationship with its three metaphorically dying cowboys reveals an enchanting and pale Justine broken by the dysfunctional and dominating masculinity around her. In contrast, Truth or Dare is a self styled documentary of Madonna’s “Blonde Ambition” tour. It portrays Madonna striking a pose as the tough-talking Queen of the castle, calling the shots, with a bevy of play-thing pawns scuttling beneath her. But, opposite as these characterisations are, some sameness emanates from the two women in these works. Something haunts the screen and it is this: the sisters’ unavoidable cultural roots as women. Even as Madonna sucks on a bottle in faux fellatio, even as she simulates masturbation on stage or scolds her messy young dancers there is something melancholic about her, a vague relationship to Monroe. And here Carter helps solve the mystery: "She [Juliette] is just as her sister is, a description of a type of female behavior rather than a model of female behavior and her triumph is just as ambivalent as is Justine's disaster. Justine is the thesis, Juliette the antithesis” (79).In other words, in Carters’ view Justine/Monroe as heart personified maintains the traditional role of woman as body, as one belonging to the private sphere who pays dearly for entering public life, while Juliette/Madonna as reason personified infiltrates the male dominated territory of culture. Unlike Monroe, Madonna gets away with being a public figure, flourishes even, but as Carter’s Juliette, this victory has required her to betray herself in some way. It is “ambivalent” and Madonna doesn’t quite get off scot free. Madonna has been progressive in that she moved away from the traditional feminine role of body in a forbidding industry, but even though her lucrative maneuvering is more sophisticated than Monroe’s careening, she walks a fine line. In De Sade the sexuality of a libertine is a male identified desire in which women are objectified and exploited. Madonna’s trick is to manifest in feminine masquerade then take an ironic turn in objectifying and exploiting herself in what amounts to a split persona, half woman, half man. In other words she seduces herself under our gaze, and she dares to enjoy it. Ultimately, neither sister can escape the social structure into which she was born. Monroe, who was unable to live as a real woman, lives on as a legend, a Blonde Goddess in the eternal feminine masquerade. Madonna is reborn every time she re-invents herself but it’s hard to tell, with all the costume changing, who the real Madonna is. It was the unactualised real woman that the second wave tried to free by daring to suggest that she existed and was valuable beyond signification and Goddessness and that she had a right to her own experience of enthusiasm/eroticism rather than being relegated to the role of being the “licentious image” for the male gaze. The attack on the Blonde Goddess underestimated the deeply rooted psychic/emotional conditioning at play on both sides of the Blonde Goddess game. Here we are in a new millennium in which the ‘pornified’ Blonde Goddess is everywhere but even if she’s more unfettered and sexually active that deeply rooted conditioning remains. For Carter neither Justine nor Juliette is a worthy role model for the women of today and it would seem to follow that neither are Monroe nor Madonna. However, Carter does speak of “a future in which might lie the possibility of a synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling” (79). Blondeness as a signifier and Goddessness as a function inhibit an experience of shared enthusiasm and eroticism between men and women. When Bataille speaks of nakedness he means eroticism as the destruction of the self-contained character that gives rise to an experience of continuity. This kind of absolute nakedness is impossible for those trapped in the cycle of signification and functional relations. I suggest that the liberation project of the second wave of feminism stalled when in our desire to not be Justines we simply became more akin to Juliette. Blondeness as a signifier is still problematic, and Goddessness of the kind I have spoken of here — women’s attachment to using beauty to garner adoration in place of an innate sense of self and worth and men’s willingness to patronise it — is still rampant and both the Justine and Juliette feminine masquerades produce a false economy of enthusiasm and eroticism that denies the experience of authenticity and the true potential of relationship. The challenge now is one that most needs to be met not in the spotlight but in the privacy of our own beings and the forum of our lives as the struggle for synthesis continues in those of us, female and male, blonde, brunette, redhead, black or grey-haired, who long for an experience of ourselves and each other that transcends masquerade. ReferencesCarter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago Press, 1979.Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1987.Madonna. Erotica. Warner Bros, 1992.———. “Material Girl.” Like a Virgin. WEA/Warner Bros, 1984.——— and Steven Meisel. Sex. Warner Bros, 1992. The Misfits. Dir. John Huston.. MGM, 1961. Some Like It Hot. Dir. Billy Wilder, Billy. MGM, 1959. Truth or Dare. Dir. Alek Keshishian. Live/Artisan, 1991.

It is widely acknowledged among film scholars that Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir Mulholland Drive is richly infused with intertextual references and homages — most notably to Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). What is less recognised is the extent to which J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella Carmilla has also influenced Mulholland Drive. This article focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive, particularly the formation of femme fatale Camilla Rhodes (played by Laura Elena Harring), with the aim of establishing how the Gothic shapes the viewing experience of the film. I argue that not only are there striking narrative similarities between the texts, but lying at the heart of both Carmilla and Mulholland Drive is the uncanny. By drawing on this elusive and eerie feeling, Lynch successfully introduces an archetypal quality both to Camilla and Mulholland Drive as a whole, which in turn contributes to powerful sensations of desire, dread, nostalgia, and “noirness” that are aroused by the film. As such Mulholland Drive emerges not only as a compelling work of art, but also a deeply evocative cinematic experience. I begin by providing a brief overview of Le Fanu’s Gothic tale and establish its formative influence on later cinematic texts. I then present a synopsis of Mulholland Drive before exploring the rich interrelationship the film has with Carmilla. Carmilla and the Lesbian Vampire Carmilla is narrated from the perspective of a sheltered nineteen-year-old girl called Laura, who lives in an isolated Styrian castle with her father. After a bizarre event involving a carriage accident, a young woman named Carmilla is left in the care of Laura’s father. Carmilla is beautiful and charming, but she is an enigma; her origins and even her surname remain a mystery. Though Laura identifies a number of peculiarities about her new friend’s behaviour (such as her strange, intense moods, languid body movements, and other irregular habits), the two women are captivated with each other, quickly falling in love. However, despite Carmilla’s harmless and fragile appearance, she is not what she seems. She is a one hundred and fifty year old vampire called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (also known as Millarca — both anagrams of Carmilla), who preys on adolescent women, seducing them while feeding off their blood as they sleep. In spite of the deep affection she claims to have for Laura, Carmilla is compelled to slowly bleed her dry. This takes its physical toll on Laura who becomes progressively pallid and lethargic, before Carmilla’s true identity is revealed and she is slain. Le Fanu’s Carmilla is monumental, not only for popularising the female vampire, but for producing a sexually alluring creature that actively seeks out and seduces other women. Cinematically, the myth of the lesbian vampire has been drawn on extensively by film makers. One of the earliest female centred vampire movies to contain connotations of same-sex desire is Lambert Hilyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936). However, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the spectre of the lesbian vampire exploded on screen. In part a response to the abolishment of Motion Picture Code strictures (Baker 554) and fuelled by latent anxieties about second wave feminist activism (Zimmerman 23–4), films of this cycle blended horror with erotica, reworking the lesbian vampire as a “male pornographic fantasy” (Weiss 87). These productions draw on Carmilla in varying degrees. In most, the resemblance is purely thematic; others draw on Le Fanu’s novella slightly more directly. In Roger Vadim’s Et Mourir de Plaisir (1960) an aristocratic woman called Carmilla becomes possessed by her vampire ancestor Millarca von Karnstein. In Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) Carmilla kills Laura before seducing a girl named Emma whom she encounters after a mysterious carriage breakdown. However, the undead Gothic lady has not only made a transition from literature to screen. The figure also transcends the realm of horror, venturing into other cinematic styles and genres as a mortal vampire whose sexuality is a source of malevolence (Weiss 96–7). A well-known early example is Frank Powell’s A Fool There Was (1915), starring Theda Barra as “The Vampire,” an alluring seductress who targets wealthy men, draining them of both their money and dignity (as opposed to their blood), reducing them to madness, alcoholism, and suicide. Other famous “vamps,” as these deadly women came to be known, include the characters played by Marlene Dietrich such as Concha Pérez in Joseph von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935). With the emergence of film noir in the early 1940s, the vamp metamorphosed into the femme fatale, who like her predecessors, takes the form of a human vampire who uses her sexuality to seduce her unwitting victims before destroying them. The deadly woman of this era functions as a prototype for neo-noir incarnations of the sexually alluring fatale figure, whose popularity resurged in the early 1980s with productions such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a film commonly regarded as a remake of Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic noir Double Indemnity (Bould et al. 4; Tasker 118). Like the lesbian vampires of 1960s–1970s horror, the neo-noir femme fatale is commonly aligned with themes of same-sex desire, as she is in Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive Like Sunset Boulevard before it, Mulholland Drive tells the tragic tale of Hollywood dreams turned to dust, jealousy, madness, escapist fantasy, and murder (Andrews 26). The narrative is played out from the perspective of failed aspiring actress Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) and centres on her bitter sexual obsession with former lover Camilla. The film is divided into three sections, described by Lynch as: “Part one: She found herself inside a perfect mystery. Part two: A sad illusion. Part three: Love” (Rodley 54). The first and second segments of the movie are Diane’s wishful dream, which functions as an escape from the unbearable reality that, after being humiliated and spurned by Camilla, Diane hires a hit man to have her murdered. Part three reveals the events that have led up to Diane’s fateful action. In Diane’s dream she is sweet, naïve, Betty who arrives at her wealthy aunt’s Hollywood home to find a beautiful woman in the bathroom. Earlier we witness a scene where the woman survives a violent car crash and, suffering a head injury, stumbles unnoticed into the apartment. Initially the woman introduces herself as Rita (after seeing a Gilda poster on the wall), but later confesses that she doesn’t know who she is. Undeterred by the strange circumstances surrounding Rita’s presence, Betty takes the frightened, vulnerable woman (actually Camilla) under her wing, enthusiastically assuming the role of detective in trying to discover her real identity. As Rita, Camilla is passive, dependent, and grateful. Importantly, she also fondly reciprocates the love Betty feels for her. But in reality, from Diane’s perspective at least, Camilla is a narcissistic, manipulative femme fatale (like the character portrayed by the famous star whose name she adopts in Diane’s dream) who takes sadistic delight in toying with the emotions of others. Just as Rita is Diane’s ideal lover in her fantasy, pretty Betty is Diane’s ego ideal. She is vibrant, wholesome, and has a glowing future ahead of her. This is a far cry from reality where Diane is sullen, pathetic, and haggard with no prospects. Bitterly, she blames Camilla for her failings as an actress (Camilla wins a lead role that Diane badly wanted by sleeping with the director). Ultimately, Diane also blames Camilla for her own suicide. This is implied in the dream sequence when the two women disguise Rita’s appearance after the discovery of a bloated corpse in Diane Selwyn’s apartment. The parallels between Mulholland Drive and Carmilla are numerous to the extent that it could be argued that Lynch’s film is a contemporary noir infused re-telling of Le Fanu’s novella. Both stories take the point-of-view of the blonde haired, blue eyed “victim.” Both include a vehicle accident followed by the mysterious arrival of an elusive dark haired stranger, who appears vulnerable and helpless, but whose beauty masks the fact that she is really a monster. Both narratives hinge on same-sex desire and involve the gradual emotional and physical destruction of the quarry, as she suffers at the hands of her newly found love interest. Whereas Carmilla literally sucks her victims dry before moving on to another target, Camilla metaphorically drains the life out of Diane, callously taunting her with her other lovers before dumping her. While Camilla is not a vampire per se, she is framed in a distinctly vampirish manner, her pale skin contrasted by lavish red lipstick and fingernails, and though she is not literally the living dead, the latter part of the film indicates that the only place Camilla remains alive is in Diane’s fantasy. But in the Lynchian universe, where conventional forms of narrative coherence, with their demand for logic and legibility are of little interest (Rodley ix), intertextual alignment with Carmilla extends beyond plot structure to capture the “mood,” or “feel” of the novella that is best described in terms of the uncanny — something that also lies at the very core of Lynch’s work (Rodley xi). The Gothic and the Uncanny Though Gothic literature is grounded in horror, the type of fear elicited in the works of writers that form part of this movement, such as Le Fanu (along with Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelly, and Bram Stoker to name a few), aligns more with the uncanny than with outright terror. The uncanny is an elusive quality that is difficult to pinpoint yet distinct. First and foremost it is a sense, or emotion that is related to dread and horror, but it is more complex than simply a reaction to fear. Rather, feelings of trepidation are accompanied by a peculiar, dream-like quality of something fleetingly recognisable in what is evidently unknown, conjuring up a mysterious impression of déjà vu. The uncanny has to do with uncertainty, particularly in relation to names (including one’s own name), places and what is being experienced; that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity. Though it can be frightening, at the same time it can involve a sensation that is compelling and beautiful (Royle 1–2; Punter 131). The inventory of motifs, fantasies, and phenomena that have been attributed to the uncanny are extensive. These can extend from the sight of dead bodies, skeletons, severed heads, dismembered limbs, and female sex organs, to the thought of being buried alive; from conditions such as epilepsy and madness, to haunted houses/castles and ghostly apparitions. Themes of doubling, anthropomorphism, doubt over whether an apparently living object is really animate and conversely if a lifeless object, such as a doll or machinery, is in fact alive also fall under the broad range of what constitutes the uncanny (see Jentsch 221–7; Freud 232–45; Royle 1–2). Socio-culturally, the uncanny can be traced back to the historical epoch of Enlightenment. It is the transformations of this eighteenth century “age of reason,” with its rejection of transcendental explanations, valorisation of reason over superstition, aggressively rationalist imperatives, and compulsive quests for knowledge that are argued to have first caused human experiences associated with the uncanny (Castle 8–10). In this sense, as literary scholar Terry Castle argues, the eighteenth century “invented the uncanny” (8). In relation to the psychological underpinnings of this disquieting emotion, psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch was the first to explore the subject in his 1906 document “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” though Sigmund Freud and his 1919 paper “The Uncanny” is most popularly associated with the term. According to Jentsch, the uncanny, or the unheimlich in German (meaning “unhomely”), emerges when the “new/foreign/hostile” corresponds to the psychical association of “old/known/familiar.” The unheimlich, which sits in direct opposition to the heimlich (homely) equates to a situation where someone feels not quite “at home” or “at ease” (217–9). Jentsch attributes sensations of the unheimlich to psychical resistances that emerge in relation to the mistrust of the innovative and unusual — “to the intellectual mystery of a new thing” (218) — such as technological revolution for example. Freud builds on the concept of the unheimlich by focusing on the heimlich, arguing that the term incorporates two sets of ideas. It can refer to what is familiar and agreeable, or it can mean “what is concealed and kept out of sight” (234–5). In the context of the latter notion, the unheimlich connotes “that which ought to have remained secret or hidden but has come to light” (Freud 225). Hence for Freud, who was primarily concerned with the latent content of the psyche, feelings of uncanniness emerge when dark, disturbing truths that have been repressed and relegated to the realm of the unconscious resurface, making their way abstractly into the consciousness, creating an odd impression of the known in the unknown. Though it is the works of E.T.A. Hoffman that are most commonly associated with the unheimlich, Freud describing the author as the “unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (233), Carmilla is equally bound up in dialectics between the known and the unknown; the homely and the unhomely. Themes centring on doubles, the undead, haunted gardens, conflicting emotions fuelled by desire and disgust — of “adoration and also of abhorrence” (Le Fanu 264), and dream-like nocturnal encounters with sinister, shape-shifting creatures predominate. With Carmilla’s arrival the boundaries between the heimlich and the unheimlich become blurred. Though Carmilla is a stranger, her presence triggers buried childhood memories for Laura of a frightening and surreal experience where Carmilla appears in Laura’s nursery during the night, climbing into bed with her before seemingly vanishing into thin air. In this sense, Laura’s remote castle home has never been homely. Disturbing truths have always lurked in its dark recesses, the return of the dead bringing them to light. The Uncanny in Mulholland Drive The elusive qualities of the uncanny also weave their way extensively through Mulholland Drive, permeating all facets of the cinematic experience — cinematography, sound score, mise en scène, and narrative structure. As film maker and writer Chris Rodley argues, Lynch mobilises every aspect of the motion picture making process in seeking to express a sense of uncanniness in his productions: “His sensitivity to textures of sound and image, to the rhythms of speech and movement, to space, colour, and the intrinsic power of music mark him as unique in this respect.” (Rodley ix–xi). From the opening scenes of Mulholland Drive, the audience is plunged into the surreal, unheimlich realm of Diane’s dream world. The use of rich saturated colours, soft focus lenses, unconventional camera movements, stilted dialogue, and a hauntingly beautiful sound score composed by Angelo Badalamenti, generates a cumulative effect of heightened artifice. This in turn produces an impression of hyper-realism — a Baudrillardean simulacrum where the real is beyond real, taking on a form of its own that has an artificial relation to actuality (Baudrillard 6–7). Distorting the “real” in this manner produces an effect of defamiliarisation — a term first employed by critic Viktor Shklovsky (2–3) to describe the artistic process involved in making familiar objects seem strange and unfamiliar (or unheimlich). These techniques are something Lynch employs in other works. Film and literary scholar Greg Hainge (137) discusses the way colour intensification and slow motion camera tracking are used in the opening scene of Blue Velvet (1984) to destabilise the aesthetic realm of the homely, revealing it to be artifice concealing sinister truths that have so far been hidden, but that are about to come to light. Similar themes are central to Mulholland Drive; the simulacra of Diane’s fantasy creating a synthetic form of real that conceals the dark and terrible veracities of her waking life. However, the artificial dream place of Diane’s disturbed mind is disjointed and fractured, therefore, just as the uncanny gives rise to an elusive sense of mystery and uncertainty, offering a fleeting glimpse of the tangible in something otherwise inexplicable, so too is the full intelligibility of Mulholland Drive kept at an obscure distance. Though the film offers a succession of clues to meaning, the key to any form of complete understanding lingers just beyond the grasp of certainty. Names, places, and identities are infused with doubt. Not only in relation to Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla, but regarding a succession of other strange, inexplicable characters and events, one example being the recurrent presence of a terrifying looking vagrant (Bonnie Aarons). Figures such as this are clearly poignant to the narrative, but they are also impossibly enigmatic, inviting the audience to play detective in deciphering what they signify. Themes of doubling and mirroring are also used extensively. While these motifs serve to denote the split between waking and dream states, they also destabilise the narrative in relation to what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, further grounding Mulholland Drive in the uncanny. Since its publication in 1872, Carmilla has had a significant formative influence on the construct of the seductive yet deadly woman in her various manifestations. However, rarely has the novella been paid homage to as intricately as it is in Mulholland Drive. Lynch draws on Le Fanu’s archetypal Gothic horror story, combining it with the aesthetic conventions of film noir, in order to create what is ostensibly a contemporary, poststructuralist critique of the Hollywood dream-factory. Narratively and thematically, the similarities between the two texts are numerous. However, intertextual configuration is considerably more complex, extending beyond the plot and character structure to capture the essence of the Gothic, which is grounded in the uncanny — an evocative emotion involving feelings of dread, accompanied by a dream-like impression of familiar and unfamiliar commingling. Carmilla and Mulholland Drive bypass the heimlich, delving directly into the unheimlich, where boundaries between waking and dream states are destabilised, any sense of certainty about what is real is undermined, and feelings of desire are paradoxically conjoined with loathing. Moreover, Lynch mobilises all fundamental elements of cinema in order to capture and express the elusive qualities of the Unheimlich. In this sense, the uncanny lies at the very heart of the film. What emerges as a result is an enigmatic work of art that is as profoundly alluring as it is disconcerting. References Andrews, David. “An Oneiric Fugue: The Various Logics of Mulholland Drive.” Journal of Film and Video 56 (2004): 25–40. Baker, David. “Seduced and Abandoned: Lesbian Vampires on Screen 1968–74.” Continuum 26 (2012): 553–63. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: U Michigan P, 1994. Bould, Mark, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck. Neo-Noir. New York: Wallflower, 2009. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth, 2001. 217–256. Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. Carmilla. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 243–319. Hainge, Greg. “Weird or Loopy? Spectacular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation.” The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. Ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davidson. London: Wallflower, 2004. 136–50. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. 216–28. Punter, David. “The Uncanny.” The Routledge Companion to the Gothic. Ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2007. 129–36. Rodley, Chris. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber, 2005. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Theory of Prose. Illinois: Dalkey, 1991. Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998. Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Cinema. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness Lesbian Vampires.” Jump Cut 24.5 (2005): 23–4.