Queen-Writer: Construction and Deconstruction of an Image
Queen-Writer: Construction and Deconstruction of an Image

Author(s): DANIELA VARVARA
Subject(s): Cultural history, Political history, Social history, Romanian Literature, 19th Century, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Addleton Academic Publishers
Keywords: Carmen Sylva; Queen Elisabeth of Romania; royal identity; women’s roles; patriarchy; gender identity; literary autobiography; poetry and prose; diaristic writing; nineteenth-century Europe;
Summary/Abstract: Although she approaches literature and writing from her adolescence, the one who will become Romania’s first queen is first and foremost identified with her royal status and then with that of a writer. Not only the above-mentioned verses, reproduced from Queen’s Tales (2012), but also the other poems and stories, as well as some personal statements prove this. Moreover, apart from being a queen, she is a woman and she assumes this role, as we will observe in her attitude and confessions (diaristic or poetic). In a time of deeply patriarchal Romania, or even of a Europe with a mentality still trivial to traditionalism in terms of gender identity, the queen knows that first of all she must be a devoted wife, a woman who has to ensure a successor to the throne. That was in fact the thing that most distressed Elisabeth of Wied, the queen who signed her literary work with the pseudonym Carmen Sylva.

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