ORIENTALIZING FEMININITY: NOTIONS OF IMPURITY IN UKRAINIAN MODERNIST LITERATURE

Abstract

The paper examines the interconnectedness of feminity with ethnonational otherness in Ukrainian modernist literature in the context of European misogyny and ethnophobia. It demonstrates how the representation of female sinful otherness, impurity, and disloyalty was cemented in misogynistic imagery, in which women appeared as witches and heterodox temptresses through sexual and cultural differentiation. The otherizing of Orientalized ethnic groups in Eastern Europe — typically Jews, Roma, and Tatars — involved their conceptual feminization as well. Specifically, the paper analyzes the topic of the decay of the Slavic/Orthodox/masculine ‘race’ and the range of concomitant tropes and ideas found in Ukrainian modernist literature, such as castration, celibacy, and obsession with ‘tainted’ blood, which reflected ‘racial’ anxieties that went hand in hand with misogynistic ideas of the feminine role in spiritual and physical decline. The study performs close readings of works by Olha Kobylianska, Mykhailo Yatskiv, and Natalia Livytska-Kholodna, in which women appear as demonic-vampiric, heterodox seductresses and heresiarchesses, who threaten to ruin the ethno-androcentric culture of the modernist epoch. Orientalized femininity and the ambivalence it brought to Ukrainian modernism harbored the ethnoreligious fears and inherent sinfulness that encompassed traditional descriptions of the femme fatale, as well as such associated figures as the fallen angel and seductive adulteress – the initiatrix of moral, sexual, national, and religious transgression, which invariably alluded to a perceived crisis in patriarchy and reproductivity. The analysis focuses on the three thematic aspects of sin and sinfulness: temptation, heterodoxy, and betrayal.