Myths About Woman in the Slovene "Moderna": Mother or Whore?

Abstract

This article is concerned with images of women in the Slovene Moderna, a Slovene literary era that commenced in 1899 with publications by Oton Župančič and Ivan Cankar. The article focuses on two myths of female representation that were formed in Slovene literature and culture at the time: the divine, mystical woman and the evil, bewitching whore. Both archetypes show a crisis of identity during the Moderna as well as a complex relation to eroticism and the problems of depicting the human body in art. They reflect an uneasiness with eroticism in the strict Roman Catholic culture of Slovenia at the time, while the writers of the Moderna might be thought to have reflected the Catholic tradition of the erotic as eternal battle between spirit and the body. The erotic was the most disturbing, frustrating, and confusing topic for Slovene writers at that time.