Образ жінки у циклі новел Листи з Парижа та Отрывки писем из Парижа Марка Вовчка
The image of a woman in the cycle of novels Letters from Paris and Excerpts from Letters from Paris by Marko Vovchok

Summary/Abstract: Marko Vovchok became the founder of Ukrainian feminist literature. On the one hand, this is connected with her biography, and on the other hand, with the ideas of female emancipation that were widely discussed in Western Europe at the time. In this article, we will consider both issues and analyze the characteristic features of typical female characters in Marko Vovchok’s cycle of novels Letters from Paris and Excerpts from Letters from Paris. The aim of the study is to prove the thesis of the presence of the evolution of a woman’s inner world in these images, as seen by the author. The novels were written by Marko Vovchok in an epistolary style. They reflect her thoughts, observations, and impressions of life in Paris. She describes everyday life, morals, problems, and social phenomena characteristic of different groups of society at the time, sometimes drawing parallels between the lives of the French and Ukrainians. Through the prism of everyday life, the writer touches upon such global themes as social inequality and poverty, spiritual values and morality, and the problems of bourgeois society. However, one of the main motifs of the novels, in our opinion, is the fate, role and place of women in society. In order to portray the characters as accurately as possible, the author uses a number of means of psychologizing the characters, such as a detailed description of the circumstances, observations of the characters’ behavior and reactions, realistic reproduction of direct speech, first-person narration by a female narrator, etc. The above techniques are used to precisely reveal both the internal (emotional) and external aspects of the lives of the characters in the series, who are women of different age groups and social status. And this, in turn, allows the author to draw the reader’s attention to the problems of women’s emancipation, a theme that is present in all of Marko Vovchok’s work. There are several typical female images. These are the images of a girl, a young woman, a lady, and an elderly woman. They are generalized, with their own problems, character traits, life circumstances, and a vision of the world. In this article, we will describe these images and analyze the worldview of each of them. The analysis of the characters allows us to conclude that the woman in Marko Vovchok’s novels is independent, intelligent, and responsible, and thanks to her strength of spirit, she is able to overcome any problems in life in order to pass on her experience to others in her later years. The author herself was a strong-willed woman and wanted to draw attention to the problem of the unequal position of women in society with her works and actively promoted the idea of emancipation in her works.

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