Feminism has been deeply concerned with female body either as something to be rejected in the pursuit of intellectual equality or as something to be reclaimed as the very essence of women. Another alternative, associated with feminist postmodernism, seeks to emphasize the importance and inescapability of embodiment rather as a differential and fluid construct than as a fixed given. Different female body representations are inscribed in Latvian women's prose from 1960s to 2010. As it was common for Soviet literature, also in prose of Latvian women writers of the period body and sexuality, especially the female one, was left beyond the discussion, mostly figuring as the unspoken. If woman's body was inscribed in texts by Latvian women writers of the Soviet period, then either as an object of man's desire or in connection with woman's reproductive function as mother's body. However, in the end of 1980s with the disappearance of the censorship and the changes in the general cultural atmosphere, in prose of Latvian women writers previously repressed issues of women's lives started to appear and woman's body was recovered; a different women's history was told through inscriptions on female bodies. In contemporary Latvian women's prose woman's body appears as essential part of female identity, emphasizing inseparability of body and mind and acknowledging that woman experiences the world also with her body.
The aim of this article is to broaden feminist scholarship on women writers by exploring the relationship between women’s writing, intimacy, vulnerability and censorship, and the rediscovering and canonization of women’s writing in Latvian literary culture. In the early twentieth century, intimacy and motherhood as a source of vulnerability in women’s writing was closely linked to censorship, which revealed enduring patriarchal attitudes. The disclosure of vulnerability associated with a woman’s embodied experience was “a weed” which critics wanted to weed out. Focusing on the example of Anna Rūmane-Ķeniņa (1877–1950), whose literary texts create experimental journeys into intimacy, exploring the inner states of female characters, family relationships and particular situations (death and grief that bring her characters into intimate contact with others and change the shape and experience of intimacies), the article examines the censoring attitude of literary criticism towards the openness with which women’s experiences are discussed.
S U M M A RY. The advancement of women as writers in Latvia during the early 20 th century was directly attributed to increased education and freedom. Travelling literary women in the early twentieth century were also part of a larger pattern -the increased ability to travel for pleasure. At the beginning of the 20 th century Latvian upper middle class women went to Western Europe -Italy, France, Switzerland -for enjoyment and educational purposes. Anna Rūmane-Ķeniņa's (1877Rūmane-Ķeniņa's ( -1950 cycle of sketches From the South (Iz Dienvidiem) (1902) and Angelika Gailīte's (1884Gailīte's ( -1975 travel narrative Observations and Dreams (Vērojumi un sapņojumi) (1920) described travel to Italy. Travelogues, positioned between autobiography and fiction, represented subjective experiences and gave women writers an acceptable medium for expressing their thoughts and ideas publicly. As women writers shared their impressions of foreign spaces and peoples with their audience at home, they also articulated themselves. Inscribing their own lives into a text they reinforced their new social position as modern women and writers, thus travel narratives also served as important instances of female agency at the beginning of 20 th century Latvia. K EY WO R D S: women writers, travelogue, autobiographic writing, female agency, Latvian literature.
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