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

Summary/Abstract: This article revisits the challenging question of how to situate the Romanian writer Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu in relation to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s concept of the “anxiety of authorship,” here read alongside Laura Mulvey’s notion of the “male gaze.” It identifies and analyzes several recurring specters of this anxiety – those elements of her writing that register the unease of claiming authorship as a woman: the projection of female fulfillment as a purely ideal horizon, women’s inescapable solitude, and a fascination with the pathological, the clinical, and the morbid – that is, with everything that signifies a deviation from the norm. The most salient of these, the fear of the male gaze, is examined through two early texts, Femei, între ele (1919) and Lui Don Juan, în eternitate, îi scrie Bianca Porporata (1920). The article argues that entry into Romania’s mainstream literary scene, for an author belonging to the first generation of women writers admitted to the canon, is accompanied by a set of anxieties that permeate her work and decisively shape her literary style.

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