Women in Ukrainian literature

The Spirit of the Times / Olena Pchilka & Nataliya Kobrynska; trans. by Roma Franko
Saskatoon, SK : Language Lanterns, c2001.

This is the first book in a series (Women's Voices in Ukrainian Literature) published by the small publisher Language Lanterns, based in my home province. They've done a wonderful job of making some of the historical writing of Ukrainian women available to English readers. Many Canadians are of Ukrainian descent, but sadly, like myself, many don't read or speak Ukrainian. So to have this writing available is really meaningful for me. There are 6 volumes in this series, and still other collections they've put together, not in this specific series. Unfortunately they are only available in these functionally bound academic copies, but don't judge this one by its cover!

This volume presents stories by two writers, Olena Pchilka and Nataliya Kobrynska. Fortunately, they've also included brief biographies of these women, to place them in their historical context. Pchilka was the mother of Ukraine's most famous female poet, Lesia Ukrainka (whose work is collected in a later volume). Both women were writing approximately in the years between 1880-1930, and were well known as activists and feminists.

I enjoyed reading this primarily for its cultural significance to me personally; the writing is of course of a rather dated style, and most of it appeared in magazines and papers of the day. I found I preferred Pchilka, as her style was a bit more concise and more universal. Her longest story, The Girlfriends, was quite illuminating in its exposition of female Ukrainian life in the 1880's. I had no idea that there was a burgeoning feminist movement in Ukraine at the same time as there was nationalist fervor among the intelligensia. In The Girlfriends, a group of friends from rural Ukraine, both women and men, go to Zurich and Vienna to medical school. They meet other Slavs, including a girl from Russia, and all become as close as any group of expats at college tends to. It's very modern in ways - and when the main character returns home to her village and begins working as a doctor and midwife (quite naturally and with no great furor), two of her male friends travel to her for a visit and she ends up marrying one of them, by her own choice and simply for love. One of their coterie is a young man from her village; their mothers are close friends, and thus he is presented as the likely candidate for romance, traditionally speaking. But Pchilka plays with this expectation, and the ending is convincing. I was continually amazed by the thoughts and actions of this group of girlfriends; my preconceptions of Ukrainian life were pretty much tossed in the air and shaken around.

Kobrynska writes shorter pieces, and they are more melodramatic, with more purple prose. Many of the pieces gathered here were based on folklore, so are valuable for that reason alone. The prose was not unpleasant, just quite old fashioned. If the stories are not all perfectly constructed, that is likely because they inspired by political motives and written quickly for that reason. Both authors write about the changing spirit of Ukraine, and the upswell in nationalist feelings; they discuss writing in Ukrainian as opposed to Russian or French, they show interest in peasants and folk customs, they discuss changing social strictures on young people. They are writing about and promoting the "Spirit of the Times", the progressive elements arising in Ukraine at that time. Of course, reading it now, in light of the brutal repression to follow under the Soviet Union, is quite a melancholy experience. I'll finish with a quote by Olena Pchilka, describing the changes in society, which seems quite prescient:

The old foundations of community life, of thinking, of taste, broke up like river ice in the springtime and, crushed to pieces, they swirled away, driven by a warm, free current. Something very fresh and very young was in the air. Old hand and heads -- surprised, dejected, stunned -- were lowered, while young ones rose boldly and confidently, diligently seeking vocations. Young people looked with shining eyes directly into the rising light of justice and freedom, without ever thinking that the light could fade...

Cross-posted at The Indextrious Reader

"I'm getting fond of the room in spite of the yellow wallpaper..."

No matter how dedicated a reader I have been for the greater part of my reading life, I've managed to miss or skip so many classic literary works. Recently Litlove discussed Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, which I had not even realized was a short story rather than a novel. I had never gotten around to reading it, but my curiosity was piqued. She mentioned "The Yellow Wallpaper" along with "The Turn of the Screw" (which I read a couple of years ago) as classic tales of hysteria. I'm not sure which I liked better, but taken on its own, I like "The Yellow Wallpaper" very much. This would be an excellent story to read as part of a larger discussion, as Gilman raises so many issues about women and society and science.

The narrator, a young woman who's recently given birth, has been ordered to take bed rest by her physician husband. They've rented a "queer" mansion (why has it been so long untenanted?) and take an old nursery at the top of the house for their sleeping quarters.

"John is a physician, and PERHAPS--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster."

Her husband doesn't believe she's sick--there is really nothing the matter with her but temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency. She's allowed nothing but rest. No books, nothing. She herself feels a bit of "congenial work" and a little change would actually be beneficial, but she's not permitted. She surreptitiously takes to writing in her journal, and it is there that we come to see her downward spiral into madness. It's the yellow wallpaper, you see--a smouldering unclean yellow, dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

"The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off--the paper--in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life."

"One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin."

As stories go, this one is excellently told. As you read you feel the inner turmoil and torment that the narrator feels. She really does spiral out of control. It's no wonder she lost it having nothing to do all day, day after day, but look at that horrible yellow wallpaper. After a while she perceives a pattern to it of sorts. It's like a trellis, and behind it is a woman trying to get out. No doubt much like how she felt.

"This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then."

"But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so--I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design."

There's so much to think about in this story. I found a critical guide about it in my library filled with essays on everything from motherhood to sickness to sexuality. More than I can possibly try and contemplate here. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is quite an interesting person herself. She underwent "the cure" as well, so she knew what she was writing about. She later committed suicide. In the critical edition I borrowed, the editor writes:

""The Yellow Wallpaper first appeared in the New England Magazine in 1892 and has since become the focus of feminine controversy, as well as celebration, concerning the heroine's confrontation with patriarchy and social duties. Gilman hoped to instruct her audience through her depiction of a woman who wants to write, who wants to do anything to avoid the boredom of isolation and the tedium of mothering."

Gilman had been treated for a breakdown after the birth of her daughter. She wanted so badly to be productive and get well that she underwent treatment that was used for "nervous prostration" invented for shell shock of Civil War victims. Gilman's cure consisted of:

"I was put to bed and kept there. I was fed, bathed, rubbed, and responded with the vigorous body of twenty-six. As far as he (her doctor) could see there was nothing the matter with me, so after a month of this agreeable treatment he sent me home, with this prescription:

'Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time.' (Be it remarked that if I did but dress the baby it left me shaking and crying--certainly far from a healthy companionship for her, to say nothing of the effect on me.) 'Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours' intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live."

It's no wonder her doctor's cure led her to "progressive insanity", according to the text--what is known today as manic-depressive illness. Yet another frightening example of how women were "handled". I know I say this every weekend about every story/author I write about--but I do really want to read more of her work. The critical edition I borrowed included the story, so I will be adding her name to my list and will be looking for her work in the bookstore next time I drop by.

Cross posted at A Work in Progress.

Irish Girls About Town

Irish Girls About Town is an anthology of short stories by Irish women writers like Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly and Catherine Dunne, and by and large it's very good. My favorite story is "Your Place or Mine?", a sort of chilling story about an Irish family who buys a vacation home in France and learns that what's theirs is sort of everyone's.

The other stories vary in quality but are entertaining enough. I loved the first story, Marian Keyes' "Soulmates," about a married couple that gets a long a too well for their friends. There's a lot of chick-lit type stories- breakup fantasies and such- but it's good fun and there are some real gems.

This post is cross-posted to my blog at www.bostonbibliophile.com. Thanks to Kate for hosting this challenge!

The Story's Signature Space of Tethered Ferocity

Clark Blaise on the short story:

By turning away from the need to explain too much, to create, construct and establish, the story opens a space that is not available to the novel. It is the story's signature space of tethered ferocity, the eruption of gesture and repression, the accountant of the unconscious presenting his bill, the Joycean epiphany. It is the reason I call the short story an expansive form, and the novel, contrary to most opinion, contractive. The story says the most that can be said about a restricted moment in time and space. The novel says the least about a great many more.

From Clark Blaise, "The Craft of the Short Story" in Canadian Notes and Queries, issue 72.

The Gipsy's Baby

The Gipsy's Baby / Rosamond Lehmann

London: Hesperus, c2006.

foreword by Niall Griffiths

I searched out this book because it was by Rosamond Lehmann, unaware that it was a collection of short fiction, that it was in fact the only short fiction she ever published. It is made up of five stories which she wrote in the 40's for her brother's journal, New Writing.

I read three of Lehmann's books over the past year or so, and I've really grown fond of her themes and her style. In this book, she approaches once again the lives of young girls and of mature women, all struggling to make sense of a world of disappointment and struggle, both socially and romantically. The first two stories are connected, detailing different moments in the life of a well-off middle class English family and their dealings with, in the first story, a rag-tag poverty stricken family living down the lane, and in the second, a group of four adult sisters and their parents at a seaside resort. This family feels very old fashionedly English; the setting is Edwardian with their children's nursery and governess, and with parents away for extended periods. Still, they are both examinations of the mysteriousness of adult life as perceived by children, and the innocent lack of comprehension of motives or outcomes of various events. In the long lead up to The Red-haired Miss Daintreys, Lehmann discusses what is essentially her theory of writing. I found it particularly fascinating, as we've all been recently discussing in a meme what we do with leisure time. Here is Rosamond Lehmann's take on leisure time, and what a writer's writerly duty is:

Much is said and written nowadays of the proper functions and uses of leisure. Some people, as we know, are all for the organisation of spare time. Some take exercise; some sleep; some wind up the gramophone; some lean against bars or mantelpieces. Others develop the resources of the intellect. I myself have been, all my life, a privileged person with considerable leisure. When asked how I spend it, I feel both dubious and embarrassed: for any answer implying some degree of activity would be misleading. Perhaps an approximation to the truth might be reached by stating that leisure employs me -- weak aimless unsystematic unresisting instrument -- as a kind of screen upon which are projected the images of persons -- known well, a little, not at all, seen once, or long ago, or every day; or as a kind of preserving jar in which float fragments of people and landscapes, snatches of sound... Perhaps this is a wordy, unscientific way of describing the origins and processes of creative writing; yet it seems to me that nowadays this essential storing-house is often discounted... Writers should stay more patiently at the centre and suffer themselves to be worked upon. Later on, when they finally emerge towards the circumference they may have written a good novel about love or war or the class struggle. Or they may not have written a good novel at all.

The next three stories in the collection are shorter, tales of a family made up of a mother (Mrs. Ritchie), one young son (John) and one young daughter (Jane). They live in a small village during the deprivations of WWII, and experience a flood, a removal of a hive of bees from inside a wall of their house, and a village fete in support of the war effort. The first two are brief, sketches really, and I think that the story in the centre of the book, When the waters came, is my favourite piece. It is very short, but carries a sense of menace at odds with the bucolic countryside and the expectations of English village stories. The last line turns the story brilliantly. I found I could really appreciate both this story and the next, A Dream of Winter, because of their succinct form; they were both well constructed impressions of intense moments in this family's life.

The last story, Wonderful Holidays, is once again a lengthy description of the inhabitants of the village (primarily women) as they put together a theatrical with their children during school holidays. It reveals some pretty beastly children; I'm glad I wasn't around when all this was going on! Still, it gives an idea of the rationing and making-do that was expected during the war, and of the effects the war had on varied families and village society in general. It also quite strongly exhibits the class prejudices still prevalent, and is a bit shocking in the callous remarks made by our saintly heroines after going to all the work of providing a theatrical:

"Nerves are getting frayed on the committee," said Mrs. Ritchie... "The village feel we ought to be running it all for them. They're alarmed, I suppose, at the responsibility. If we butt in they think we're patronising and if we retire they think we're snobbish. Both ways they're resentful."

"My dear, I know" said Mrs. Carmichael.

Once again, I found new elements to admire in Lehmann's writing. She adroitly portrays the fearful moments in children's lives, and the necessity in women's lives to carry on despite fear or unhappiness. These stories carry within themselves so many lives, such a variety of existence among the often neglected characters of single women, widows, spinsters, children, or even damaged men. It's well worth the time to read this collection.

I'll be searching out her novel The Echoing Grove next, as it was made into a film (with mixed reviews) which I'd like to see: but I must always read the book first!

crossposted at The Indextrious Reader

Selected Tales by Jacques Ferron

Jacques Ferron writes modern fairy tales. These stories, many of them very short, are set in Quebec and generally follow the conventions of the conte, commenting on society through a combination of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic. Ferron's writing spanned the period before and after the Quiet Revolution, and much of it is concerned with the transition from the rural society of the habitants to the modern world, yet they also offer wry and witty comment on la condition humaine in general. They are often told from the point of view of a village doctor - as Ferron himself was, as a young man in the Gaspésie - with his privileged view of the troubles of both the wealthy and the poor.

Selected Tales is translated by Betty Bednarski, who offers the only route to enjoying the stories for many readers: Ferron's writing is clearly too idiosyncratic for non-francophones, employing such gems as his own transliterations of English with words such as "cuiquelounche" (quick lunch). Happily, Bednarski, who is a wonderfully thoughtful translator, leaves these in the text, supplying the translation in a footnote, so that we can feel we are in on the joke). Even in English, though, the style is quirky and informal: "The Sirens" begins:

And then, one day, the blacksmith cum garage-man, who was beginning to have a bellyful of the Odyssey, said to Ulysses: "You've been back in Ithaca [that's Ithaca Corner, Ontario] all of fifteen years. Why not take a little trip down East? Montreal isn't that far...."

Ulysses is kindly allowed to go by Penelope: "[A]fter all, a weekend was not the Trojan War."

Many of the stories present a vignette of village life, while others, such as "The Bridge" describe the urbanisation of a rural population. This story is typical in its construction, being in the form of a memoir. It begins, with a twist on "once upon a time" - "This was some time ago." and tells how the narrator has been used to seeing an old woman carrying scrap metal across the bridge from Couteau Rouge to Montreal. The woman, her home and her journey are described, as is the birth of her third child. And then, the narrator observes, she simply disappears without explanation.

Not all stories are so brief. My favourite is "The Dead Cow in the Canyon", a rather lugubrious story of a young habitant who moves to the "Farwest" to farm like his father. In Calgary, distracted by meeting a putative cousin, he is persuaded into marrying the daughter of a Chief, before setting off to farm in a canyon with his new wife and a heifer. The heifer is as easily distracted as the young man has been, and pines for a mate, but while her rather feckless owners return to the city to find her one, she dies of thirst. Her subsequent story is poignant and whimsical and, I would say, fairly representative of Ferron in both style and theme. Ferron set up the Rhinoceros Party (so-called because politicans are "thick-skinned, slow-moving, dim-witted" creatures) to promote humour rather than violence as an agent of political change, and this shows in his distinctive and quirky writing. His work as a psychiatrist, too, informs his understanding of human nature, and the "lost" voice of the psychiatric patient can be heard transformed, in stories which are often concerned with the poor, the mad, or the fantastic. With his pleasure in the nuance of language, and his attention to the traditional elements of the conte, Ferron offers us something which seems simple and at times even naive, yet is imbued with rich veins of humour and social comment. Highly recommended.

Cross-posted at Geranium Cat's Bookshelf.

John Mutford's 6th Short Story Pick- Kenneth J. Harvey's "No better a house"

Short Story Monday

Cross posted at The Book Mine Set.

I'm still in Newfoundland visiting family, so this post will once again be short. I picked today's story (Kenneth J. Harvey's No better a house) because it's by a Newfoundlander and certainly captures a lot of how I've felt this trip. It deals with change, resiliency, and the subjectivity of progress all at once. Unlike Leon Rooke's "Yellow House" which I wrote about a couple weeks back, the pacing here is less jarring. Whereas Rooke masterfully kept the intensity high with sudden and unexpected juxtapositions, Harvey employs a different tactic but with no less skill. Somehow this one felt more sneaky. At one point I realized my eyebrows had raised yet I had no idea when it happened.

The Soundtrack
1. Less Cities More Moving People- The Fixx
2. My Old Wooden Shack- Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers
3. Burning Down The House- Talking Heads
4. On The Real- Bottled Beats
5. I Shall Not Be Moved- Johnny Cash