Experience of the war : (re)presentations of femininity in the novels by Agatė Nesaulė, Birutė Pūkelevičiūtė, and Nelė Mazalaitė

Based on the concrete examples of Lithuanian and Latvian exile novels (Agate Nesaule‘s, Birutė Pūkelevičiūtė‘s, and Nelė Mazalaitė‘s), the article analyzes how the war influenced a woman‘s place and the (re)presentations of femininity in the social and symbolic space. The labyrinth of meanings of femininity, the clash of male and female experiences and identification forms are analyzed with the help of the activeness/passiveness, man/woman, and mother/daughter relationship models. The conditions of war facilitated the intensive development of the formula of masculinity, which Friedrich Nietzsche defined as work, war, and sex. In the environment of value disbalance, these masculinity- oriented concepts ruled and dictated women‘s social roles. In the situation of war the woman‘s body became a "public space”. The image of a man-warrior had a negative connotation in the eyes of a woman: it was a man-conqueror, who dictated conditions and reduced a woman‘s function to solely sexual. The author concludes that the war provoked new meanings of the sexual aspect. It strengthened the traditional canon of masculinity, legitimized the aggressive masculinity, and meaningfully transformed and even deformed the usual representations of woman's self-worth and motherhood. The analysis of novels provokes the unexpected insight that in these exceptional conditions differences of male and female paradigms are more highlighted than the ones of Baltic and other nations