“Within the Borders of a Monastery” by Ekaterine Gabashvili: The Representation of Female Desire and the Feminine

Abstract

Within the Borders of a Monastery is a story by Georgian feminist writer and activist Ekaterine Gabashvili (1851-1938). The goal of the paper is to explore the representation of female desire in the story. As Georgia was the part of the USSR, the humanities in Georgia were ideologized – the scholars would analyze literary texts from strictly Marxist point of view. Therefore, the process of reviewing Georgian literature from feminist perspective has started only recently. The paper contributes to the process and suggests an innovative reading of Gabashvili’s story. As Gabashvili thematizes hysteria and psychosis from feminist-psychoanalytical perspective and challenges gender roles, the paper uses the methodology of the Feminist Literary Criticism with French Feminist and the Gender Performativity Theories. The paper argues that the story depicts female desire as a destructive, incontrollable force which is pre-oedipal, opposes the Symbolic (i.e. the patriarchy) and manifests itself either through hysteria/psychosis or through the semiotic metaphors (e.g. dance). It transcends the female body and is connected to the feminine: the female and male protagonists (Salo and Tevdore, respectively) who love each other, experience and express their desire identically. The feminine is shown as a performative phenomenon through the androgenous male protagonist Tevdore. The opposition between the Semiotic and the Symbolic is reinforced through the semantics of space. The end of the story (the protagonists committing a suicide) reveals the theme of the story: banishing the female desire and the feminine from the symbolic order.