From Objects to Subjects: Body Symbolism in Contemporary Lithuanian Women's Prose.

摘要

In the two decades since the restoration of Lithuanian independence (1990), the number of women writers has increased significantly in Lithuania, as compared to the preceding decades when the country was a part of the Soviet Bloc. With this new generation of writers, the body and its physiology became more visible, and soon took center stage in their literature. Women writers of the previous generation regarded their bodies as an integral part of themselves, but in the latest prose women either behave as if their bodies do not meet society's expectations, or else they experiment with their bodies, paying close and detailed attention to their physical rather than their spiritual existence. Although some scholars are troubled by the frank discussions of female physiology in current Lithuanian women's fiction, considering it a mere reflection of pop culture, in my dissertation I argue that this increased attention to physiological manifestations denotes a new episteme in Lithuanian women's literature, and that this episteme reflects of the specificity of the experience of the repressive Soviet regime.;In this dissertation I focus on the works of three contemporary Lithuanian women writers---Zita Cepaite, Jurga Ivanauskaite, and Ugne Brauskaite---who openly describe the intimate experiences of women in various stages of their life. The protagonists in the works of these writers find themselves at a crossroad of the repressive Soviet past and a pluralist present that determines women's inner conflicts. Narrative elements such as carnival, irony, and laughter, as well as imagery of a grotesque, fragmented body, suggest various forms of trauma. The imagery of the suffering, raped, and abused body in women's literature turns into a literary device that allows a rethinking of the female body at the crossroads of different regimes, ideologies, and social norms, and conveys the state of the postcolonial mind, reiterating various painful experiences of women's neglected agency. At the same time, grotesque bodily imagery and close attention to the material body deconstruct myths in which women are treated as objects, erasing female subjectivity in literature.