How could I be good or on a woman's letter of Jagoda Truhelka

Abstract

The work examines the concept of a woman's letter of Jagoda Tuhelka with special reference to the novels: Plain air and Vojača and the educational epistle U carstvu duše (In the empire of the soul). With respect to the socio-political context of the end of the 19th and 20th centuries, efforts have been made to analyse the idea of the author's female emancipation and how to interpolate it in literary text. Its female poetics is directed to the education of women in traditional society as the basis of female emancipation while the author remains within the framework of the traditional world view supporting the male-female dichotomy and the wife and mother role meant for women. In line with this, the author conceives her female characters as active factors of their own destiny (Plain air), assigning them the function of putting forward their own ideas and developing the polemical discourse with patriarchy, while, on the other hand, her female characters become “innocent” victims of social circumstances and gender stereotypes (Vojača).