Becoming a (Slovenian) Poet at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: Male Censorship of Vida Jeraj’s Poetry

Abstract

This article analyses the gendered censorship of male writers towards the poetics and writing of Vida Jeraj (1875–1932), the most prominent Slovenian female lyrical poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a member of the new wave of Slovenian women writers associated with the Trieste-based publication Slovenka. This case study demonstrates the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, for a woman from a small, conservative patriarchal society on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to become a poet and introduce new poetics and new imagination. This was due not only to patriarchal society in general, but also to the gendered censorship of Jeraj’s male colleagues and friends. We aim to analyse the gendered discourse with its misogynistic characteristics evident in the correspondence between the poet and male authors during her early period of writing, which had a profound impact on her poetic strategies. Two male critics in particular had a great influence on her style and shaped her poetic career: her friend Josip Murn-Aleksandrov (1879–1901), the impressionist poet of the Slovenian “moderna” literary movement; and Anton Aškerc (1856–1912), the most important and celebrated Slovenian poet of the older generation and the editor of the Slovenian newspaper Ljubljanski zvon. This male censorship also meant that the young poet was forced to self-censor, as her writer’s identity was very fragile. This was one of the reasons why her voice eventually fell silent.