Un caz de „anxietate auctorială”: Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu
A Case of “Authorial Anxiety”: Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu

Summary/Abstract: The article below links the scriptural practice of Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, the first female writer in the history of Romanian literature to enter the interwar aesthetic canon, and the concept of “anxiety of authorship”, theorized by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their study The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. The concept proves useful in explaining the spectacular transformation of her prose. First of all, the transition from the first stage of creation, called “subjective,” to the second stage of her creation, called “objective”. Second of all, the break from the circle of the journal Viața românească, where she had been encouraged by G. Ibrăileanu to pursue a writing style that seemed to be the “expression of femininity”, and her orientation toward the journal and group Sburătorul, where her new mentor, E. Lovinescu, would allegedly impose on her to adopt a new scriptural practice out of a “need for validation” within his very demanding literary group. In reality, the process indicates rather a motivated reinvention of herself driven by the need to create a name for herself, to be taken seriously in a cultural environment burdened with sexist prejudices, and by the desire to articulate a narrative language that still stands under the auspices of feminine writing, which thus does not deny but subtly emphasizes her gender identity.

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