Gender relationships in a novel Life is elsewhere by Milan Kundera

This thesis discusses gender relationships in the novel Life is elsewhere by Milan Kundera. The first part of the analysis focuses on construction of motherhood and fatherhood, from which eventually results the positive/negative relationships of the child to the parents and on which we can also see the organization of the parenting practice itself. The second part is devoted to the key issue of the mother - son interactions, and therefore it analyzes the psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipal complex and difficulties associated with it, such as the son's dependence on the dominant mother who in addition fully replaces the absent father. I especially concentrate on the effort of the son to free himself from this dependence and on his consequent search for male identity. Methodologically, my text is designed as a combination of archetypal analysis with an interpretative or conceptual analysis, stemming from the approach of the so called resisting reading. This thesis compares traditional concepts with the feminist ones and applies them on the characters of Kundera's novel. Key words: gender relationships, psychoanalysis, archetypes, dominant mother, male identity