Women from a woman's perspective

This paper deals with an attempt to look at P. Orintaitė's interwar prose written in Lithuania in a new aspect. The prose under analysis consists of two novels "Paslėpta žaizda" ("1 Iidden Wound") and "Daubiškės inteligentai" ("Intellectual People of Daubiske") and novellas "Iš sostinės" ("From The Capital") and "Jurgučio pieva" ("Jurgutis' Meadow"). In these works the woman's situation is presented in several ways: we see characters of women and variants of femininity, the variety of forms of woman's life, new things which expand the conception of womanhood, the growth of woman's role in society. All these themes are introduced by P. Orintaitė. P. Orintaitė is the first conscious Lithuanian feminist who made her debut with the publicistic writing "Wheat and Rauges" based on the issues of women culture. In her theoretical considerations and fiction the author contemplates the woman's existential problems and discloses her inner struggles, doubts and attempts to stay a woman and an individual. P. Orintaitė emphasizes both modern and conventional femininity. The woman's emotional world becomes equally important as the social one. In the analysed works the stages, forms and types of woman's life are introduced. There are four different types of women in the authors' works: romanticists - idealists, rationalists, materialists and pious ones. All the above-mentioned themes were new at the time and their birth is related with interwar literature and P. Orintaitė's works where a new attitude towards women is introduced