Prirodno konstituiranje glavnog ženskog lika u pričama Dragojle Jarnevićeve i Vesne Bige
Birthmark: Mythical Construction of the Female Protagonist in Dragojla Jarnević’s and Vesna Biga’s Narratives

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores to which extent the traditional understanding of birthing specificities (for example delivery from a bloody placenta or the first alive child after a series of stillborn children, belief in the motehr’s influence on the child during pregnancy etc.) constitutes female protagonists in the two stories by Croatian authors. Both connect the destiny of their heros with the “birth mark“ which implies the guilt of their mothers. In Dragojla Jarnević’s story “Fairies under Ozalj town“ (Homeland’s histories, 1843) the mother is to blame for her daughter’s misfortune due to a pre-birth alliance with the evil fairy (as she broke the imposed social norms on a pregnant woman), while in Vesna Biga’s story Nightmare (The garden of the soul, 1995) she is guilty of not burning the ominous birth mark – the bloody placenta in which her daugther was born. Studying the relations between the characters, we explore why the authors inrocporate the mythical intertext in the formulation of their protagonists, and how this formulates their own subjectivity as wrtiers. The motif of a woman „guilty“ for ther daughter’s misfortune points toward anthropological research of cultural values which the authors stress employing mythical discourse in the problematisation of gender stereotypes of their respective ages.

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