The Female Gothic in Rokhl Brokhes’ “Unter-Barg” (“Underhill,” 1906)

• In Event: Women on the Edge: Women’s Rage and Revolution in Russian and Yiddish Literature

Abstract

Women writers have often been neglected in Yiddish literary criticism. Recently, there has been a significant scholarly turn to studying women’s creative voices. This paper sheds light on the understudied woman prose writer Rokhl Brokhes. At the turn of the twentieth century, Brokhes published her stories in leading Eastern European Yiddish periodicals. She continued writing into the Soviet period, with her stories appearing in both Soviet and American publications. The State Publishing House of Belarus planned to publish an eight-volume set of her collected works before the Nazi invasion halted that project. Brokhes died in the Minsk ghetto in 1943. Her works have received little critical attention, despite their masterful and nuanced depiction of marginalized women during the early twentieth century.
This paper analyzes Brokhes’ story “Underhill” (“Unter barg,” 1906). The first-person narrator, a pregnant housewife named Hana, describes her descent into madness and eventual murder at the hands of her husband’s revolutionary circle. The story takes place against the backdrop of growing revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire, but it focuses instead on the unhappy domestic life of a sickly woman. I argue that Brokhes uses the Gothic motifs of madness, female imprisonment, and transgression to offer a scathing critique of women’s victimization during early twentieth-century modernization processes. Significantly, it is a woman who narrates her own life and death. I frame my analysis of “Underhill” with a discussion of the “female Gothic,” a trend in feminist scholarship that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. This scholarship, largely based in the study of nineteenth-century English literature, examines how women writers employed the Gothic mode to articulate anxieties about women’s oppression in patriarchal societies. I argue that Brokhes’ “Underhill” represents a modified form of the female Gothic in Yiddish literature. In so doing, this paper contributes a gendered lens to the growing body of scholarship that examines the Gothic in Jewish literatures (Grumberg 2019; Masel 2020).

Author

• LeiAnna Hamel, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign