10.2478/ewcp-2020-0016

Mihaela Ursa (coordinator). Zoe, fii bărbată! Coduri de gen în cultura României contemporane. Ed. Adrian Tătăran and Alexandra Turcu. Piteşti: Paralela 45, 2019.

Zoe, Be a Man! Gendered Codes in Contemporary Romania’s Culture,1 the collection coordinated by Mihaela Ursa, is the result of a team’s work, a scholarly enterprise that clearly shows how a Ph.D. advisor can stimulate and encourage his/her disciples on new tracks of scholarship without, however, stifling their originality and independence of thought. Although the collection is cautiously entitled “gendered codes,”2 this book is a Romanian approach to feminist literary criticism (as defined by Maggie Humm in her renowned reference book dedicated to this topic). The coordinator explains her intentions in the “Introduction.” It is very common among Romanian cultural elites to consider feminism as “a monolithic ideology” (7) or the remnant of “the most rudimentary and harmful and collectivist propaganda” (7). Political correctness is also often sampled in the discourse of the same elites only by “the extremism of some form both regrettable and peripheral” (7). The result is the very widespread protective attitude of many Romanian female artists and writers: “I am not a feminist, but…”. The studies in the collection under perusal are authored by the coordinator and by young emerging scholars knowledgeable in various gender studies theories. All the essays rely on serious bibliographies that offer a convincing national and international scholarly background to the problem under discussion. The essays tackle gender issues in literature, cinema, music, political science, or history. I review them in the order of their appearance in the collection. Alexandra Turcu deals with the female gaze in Romanian contemporary visual arts and offers the reader a very enticing Mihaela Mudure 147 analysis of the exhibition Woman, All too Woman, organized by the Art Museum of Timişoara in August 2018. Mihaela Ursa makes a thorough analysis of gender in Romanian literary studies. One of the strong points of her essay is the gendered analysis of Camil Petrescu’s work and of Vitoria Lipan, the main character from Mihail Sadoveanu’s novel The Hatchet. Ursa’s observation that the writerly misogynistic attitudes are not, necessarily, intentional, but they come “from the epistemic subsoil, from the vulgate of an entire age” (48), partly excuses these attitudes and neglects the fact that these patriarchal attitudes must be assessed against the gendered background of power relations extant in the Romanian society. Ursa’s essay includes some very valuable ideas which should be taken into account by the decision makers of Romania’s education policies. In Romania, literature is taught “almost exclusively from the national point of view” (51), which means that gender representation is not a concern and that ethnic minority writers who live in Romania and write about Romania are omitted.3 Another problem tackled by Ursa is canonization. According to her, canonization should be a continuous conversation about what is valuable in literature. This means that the canon is changeable, but this does not diminish its value and impact. Undoubtedly, Ursa’s essay is one of the most important contributions to feminist Romanian literary criticism.4 Ovio Olaru’s essay on gender in Romanian poetry in the 2000s impresses with documentation and the careful reading of his corpus of texts. Olaru raises a very interesting question: is post- communist sexism the result of totalitarianism or does it come from a set of patriarchal values which precede communism? I think that the answer is easy to give if one remembers Titu Maiorescu’s polemic with Sofia Nădejde.5 Maiorescu believed that women are inferior to men because their brain is smaller, and, consequently they should be satisfied with their minor(ized) place in society. Olaru’s essay is certainly a very interesting reading but the young scholar makes two statements which need, in my opinion, further comment. Olaru considers that during the transition period “Romanian culture was not mature enough to include a discussion 148 East-West Cultural Passage about gender” (74). It seems to me that with Olaru gender is synonymous with “feminism.” Misogyny, however, is also based on a certain construction of gender. The feminist discourse appeared in Romanian culture and literature abruptly, during the nineteenth century, but it was quite powerful and very much in tune with what was going on in Europe and the United States at the time. It is true that after the sequence of dictatorships that began in 1939 and ended in 1989, Romanian feminist discourse had to adapt to the oppressive political circumstances, but it did not disappear. Olaru concludes his article mentioning that “it is very clear that Romanian literature slowly discovers that it has another cultural handicap it was not aware of” (95). Adela Xenopol had already pointed to this handicap in “To Equal Merit, Equal Right,” her programmatic 1926 article in The Female Writer’s Journal published under the auspices of The Female Writers’ Society. The short existence of this society shows very well that the Romanian literary establishment was well aware of this handicap but did not want to do anything about this and, consequently, stifled Xenopol’s initiative. A very competent analysis of the Romanian novel authored by women is offered by Daiana Gârdan who efficiently uses the Morettian model in order to construct a very coherent argument. Some minor observations must be made, however, precisely because Gârdan wrote a very good piece. Firstly, the 1935 anthology of women’s writing was compiled not only by Margarita Miller-Verghy (102) but by Miller-Verghy and Ecaterina Săndulescu. Secondly, Gârdan talks about the first Romanian female writers and characterizes them as leading “inertial lives in the shadow of great men” (102).6 This is a very unfair characterization of the pioneers of female writing in Romania. I shall give just one example: Emilia Humpel-Maiorescu, Titu Maiorescu’s sister, certainly did not lead an inertial life in the shadow of her husband and/or brother. A feminist and a champion of female education, Humpel-Maiorescu wrote numerous articles on women’s role in society, feminism, pedagogy. She translated from Friedrich Schiller and founded educational institutions for girls. Her work, published in numerous journals, deserves to be Mihaela Mudure 149 collected in a volume. No more inertial was A. Xenopol or Maria Rosetti, and I stop my enumeration here. Adrian Tătăran’s analysis of anarchical literature and women’s contribution to it is certainly one of the best documented and challenging articles in the collection. Not only is this topic rarely approached by Romanian scholars but Tătăran offers a nuanced and very knowledgeable reading of anarchism and feminism, radical projects that aim at fundamentally changing society. Many anarchists have a problem including patriarchal domination in their anti-authoritarian critique. Tătăran’s analysis of Panait Muşoiu’s approach to the feminist discourse brings a Romanian touch to this discussion. The article is also a very good introduction to such provocative personalities as Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Louise Michel, and Lucy Parsons. Romanian children’s literature is analyzed through the gendered lens by Eva Sărăşan. The young researcher relies on the Morettian distant reading in order to establish the proliferation of this genre in Romanian literature and its institutions between 2000 and 2018. In Romania, children’s literature is still regarded as a more permissive, more accessible niche, a minor(ized) and easy- going genre. Quantitatively, it is obvious that children’s literature is a genre preferred by women writers who knowingly or unknowingly, have internalized the above-mentioned biased perspective. Similarly, motherhood, much less than fatherly love, is the inspirational engine for this kind of literature. Sărăşan detects an interesting gendered tendency: significant numbers of women writers make their debut in children’s literature and stay in this niche for much longer than their male counterparts. On the contrary, male writers make their debut writing literature for adults and later they may move towards children’s literature. There are also authors who prefer to write only children’s literature. Florin Bican and Victoria Pătraşcu are very good examples in this respect. Emanuel Modoc’s article analyzes ideology and gender in The Girls’ Book. The first part of the article is an overview of women’s and girlhood’s issues in Romania before 1989. Modoc considers that one of the purposes of the (Romanian) state 150 East-West Cultural Passage socialism was the “a-genderification” of society (cf. 184) and backs his evaluation on Katherine Verdery who actually talks about a reconfiguration of gender roles. Modoc mentions the existence of the two editions of The Girls’ Book: one in 1974 and one in 1977, but he fails to analyze the differences between them. These differences are not irrelevant. The 1974 edition includes an article by Gabriela Melinescu which disappears in the 1977 edition, whereas the very conventional Sofia Scorţaru Păun, who authored one article in the 1974 edition, appears as the author of two articles in the 1977 edition. No mention is made of the female personalities who contributed to this book: Eugen Florescu interviews the famous ballerina Magdalena Popa, Zoe Dumitrescu-Buşulenga authored one essay, and the brilliant journalist and polemist Ecaterina Oproiu contributed 21 pieces. This makes The Girls’ Book very much an Ecaterina Oproiu book. A more careful reading of The Girls’ Book would certainly have made Modoc’s article much more convincing. The collection ends with two very well documented articles belonging to Maria Fărâmă and Andrei-Călin Zamfirescu. The former compares Ada Milea with DakhaBrakha, a Ukrainian folk group, pointing to the identity and gender strategies from Eastern European contemporary music. Well written and very nuanced in its appreciations, Fărâmă’s essay is certainly one of the best texts in this collection. Zamfirescu offers an interesting reading of the European Middle Ages focusing on the idealistic and demonic representations of femininity. Still, one observation has to be made. Zamfirescu talks about the Cathars and considers them “a branch of the Bogumilic sect from Eastern Europe” (223). Whereas the Cathars and the Bogumils were simultaneous religious phenomena, there is no clear indication of any direct relation between them. Would it not have been more convincing to look at the similarities between these heretical movements as the result of a common European forma mentis that haunted the continent at approximately the same time? Mihaela Mudure 151

In conclusion, the collection coordinated by Ursa is an interesting reading and a remarkable book from several points of view. Firstly, it is an excellent example of the scholarly cooperation that must exist between students and their professor. The appearance of more such books would be beneficial for the development of a healthy climate in Romanian higher education. Secondly, but not less important, this book shows that in Romania there is a young generation of scholars who are interested in developing gender studies and bringing a new perspective to Romanian humanities. The observations included in this review have been made in the spirit of collegial respect and solidarity and they are meant to be an invitation to read this valuable collective scholarly enterprise. Ursa has coordinated an important collection that is worth reading carefully.

MIHAELA MUDURE Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Notes:

1 Zoe, fii bărbată! Coduri de gen în cultura României contemporane 2 My translation throughout. 3 I am wondering who should be of more interest in the textbooks of Romanian literature: someone like Anne de Noailles who did not write in Romanian, nor was she very keen on acknowledging her Romanian roots or writers such as Miklos Banffy, Emese Egyed or Joachim Wittstock, who lived or live in Transylvania and who wrote/write about Transylvania. Of course, the core issue here is the definition of Romanian literature. Is Romanian literature to be defined primarily by the writer’s language (although Anne de Noailles is a “happy” exception in this respect)? Or is Romanian literature to be defined by the territory where the Romanians live together with other ethnic groups? 4 I disagree with one of Ursa’s statements about the literary curriculum in the Romanian school, but this does not diminish the value of this article. Ursa considers that the literary curriculum during the last years of communism contained a large “enough” number of female writers thanks to the egalitarian ideology officially supported by the Communist Party (cf. 42). Or at the beginning of the 1970’s the only female writers present 152 East-West Cultural Passage

in the textbooks for the high schools were Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Ana Blandiana, Maria Banuş, and Magda Isanos. In the 1977 Romanian literature textbook, authored by Florian Creţeanu, Dumitru Andronache, and Nicolae I. Nicolae, even Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu disappeared and the only female writer was Ana Blandiana, briefly mentioned among the Romanian poets translated abroad (291). Misogyny is an old disease with Romanian textbook authors. 5 See Ştefania Mihăilescu’s anthology Din istoria feminismului românesc. Antologie de texte (1838-1929). 6 Quotation from Dora Pavel’s article “Care e prima doamnă din literatura română” [“Who is the first lady of Romanian literature?’], Apostrof 6.37 (1993): 3.

Works Cited

Humm, Maggie. The Dictionary of Feminist Theory. Cleveland: Ohio State UP, 1995. Print. Mihăilescu, Ştefania. Din istoria feminismului românesc. Antologie de texte (1838-1928). Iaşi: Polirom, 2000. Print. Pavel, Dora. “Care e prima doamnă din literatura română.” Apostrof 6.37 (1993): 3. Print. Xenopol, Adela. “La merit egal, drept egal.” Revista Scriitoarei 1 (1926): 3. Print.