Jasmina Ahmetagi?
Transgression of Personal Experience: the Myth about Romantic Love
in Leposava Mijuskovic’s Prose
Abstract:
The myth about romantic love, established with Plato’s story about the androgynous, is resistant and it constantly gains confirmation through temptations in conflicts with reality and in cardinal threatening to the existence. Considering its significance to the structuring of life this myth has become an important part of the psychology, the academic one or the so called popular psychology. The experience of heroes in the prose of Leposava Mijuskovic (1822-1910) is thoroughly marked by the amorous discourse which has an autobiographical background (just to mention her lesbian love choice, early loss of her mother, suicidal tendencies and suicide as the possible outcome in the insufficiently revealed circumstances when her death is concerned). The myth about love is typical for almost all of her protagonists. It is the cause for their suffering much more than the actual life circumstances.
When regarding the writer’s stories as a whole we can notice the transformation of the myth. In the same time her heroes are dealing with projection, transfer, denial and idealization, which are the unavoidable processes for the maintenance of the mythical. Moving between the wish for symbiotic community and self-rejection in the moment when such community is not viable, the heroes of Leposava Mijuskovic rather choose death than being engaged in the questioning of the myth about romantic love, which makes their whole experience so cardinal. In certain stories we can notice the highlighted figures of the basic family, father and mother which are directly related to the mentioned defensive mechanisms.
Writing about the time when the poetic dominance was the analysis of the inner soul processes, Leposava Mijuskovic realizes the prose of recognisable modernistic shapes, whereas nowadays the reader, the one who is capable of interdisciplinary bounding of the literary and psychological experiences, can notice that some of her stories could be interpreted as so called case studies in psychology.
SvD, November 2012
- Conferences and activities > COST meetings > Poznan November 2012 > Ahmetagi?