The Impossible Woman in Nineteenth Century Russian Literature

• In Event: 19th-Century Women Writers in Context I: Gan, Pavlova, Zhukova, and Tur in European, Theoretical, and Romantic Contexts

Abstract

This project presents the category of the impossible woman, a heroine found in works by nineteenth century Russian women writers including Karolina Pavlova, Elena Gan and Marya Zhukova, among others. The impossible woman, so named because of the impossibility of her achieving complete subjectivity a la Helene Cixous’s “impossible subject”, is a category contingent on not only her spacio-temporal and gendered liminality but on her ability to access a unique aesthetic experience that is engendered by her social and political isolation in conjunction with her education, imagination and her indefatigable drive for recognition and desire for subjectivity. The impossible woman not only provides an opportunity to understand the social, political and philosophical import of the heroine as written by women writers, anticipating ample opportunity for inclusion of women writers in existing scholarly discourse of, and pedagogical approaches to, the long nineteenth century, but this understanding of the heroine also encourages a re-evaluation of existing analyses and understanding of the heroine as written by canonical male writers of the same period.

Author

• Mary Elisabeth Elliott, UC Davis