Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting

exile, and irony exactly by leaving the heterosexist matrix and entering a world where gender is not produced by heterosexuality. Often it will happen that de-heterosexualization occurs at the price of de-gendering; the product here is an androgynous self or several angrodynous selves capable

—as they are in Drozdik's case

—of selfloving. 2. Texts of women modernists: woman as text 2.1. Gertrude Stein: the figure of the woman quester In 1909 Stein privately published Three Lives

, thereby taking, as she herself put it, "the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth in literature" (.Autobiography 66). Indeed, the book precedes by several years such landmark works of modernism as Remembrance of Things Past (1913), Dubliners (1914), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), Jacob's Room (1922), The Waste Land (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). All chapters of Three Lives are unusual in the sense that they do not portray women as participants in institutionalized heterosexuality, in love-and-marriage plots naturalized by romantic and realist fiction. Although the characters have various relationships, the three servant girls

—the German Anna, the black Melanctha, and the German Lena

—are autonomous beings, who do not need men to give meanings to their lives. Their stories are not heterosexual love stories, but are about the women themselves, their thoughts and desires. Especially Melanctha emerges as a quester (the text uses the word "seeker"), a role in literature previously reserved for men only. Melanctha is, then, the heroine of a female Bildung, and has a character as complex and changing as her male predecessors, among them Werther, Julien Sorel, or Raskolnikov. "Melanctha Herbert was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive negress" (82), Stein writes early on, contrasting Melanctha to her more "feminine" friend, Rose, whose laughter "was just ordinary, any sort of woman laughter" (82), and who "had lately married Sam Johnson a decent honest kindly fellow" (82). The life of the autonomous quester is by definition more difficult and complicated than that of a more traditionally "feminine" woman. 112