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RESEARCH PRODUCT

O materinstvu na drugi način - prećutane strane materinstva u romanu "Optužena" Slavenke Drakulić

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Slavenka Drakulić is a Croatian journalist and writer, known as a feminist who writes about the problems in women’s lives. In the novel Optužena (2012), she demonstrates in an interesting, artistic way the less known questions of motherhood, often ignored and tabooed in social discourse. It is known that starting from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about maternity, it has been idealized and used in order to constrain women within the patriarchal system, by identifying them primarily as mothers. The concepts of Sigmund Freud, who believed maternity and maternal love to be natural and appropriate for every “standard” woman, contributed to turning into taboos some pathologies connected with maternity. This way of thinking about women and maternity was first questioned by the second wave of feminism. Slavenka Drakulić rejects the myth of maternal love and motherhood and shows how the motherdaughter relationship can be destructive and built on violence, which is the source of pathology. This Croatian author sheds light on the pathological family relationships based on violence and connected with parentification. Potentially, it can be a cause of transgenerational trauma. Hers is not an optimistic image of family, while she also does not provide unequivocal moral judgements; the perpetrator is a victim and the victim is the perpetrator; in fact they are all victims. The problem of the transgenerational transmission of trauma is shown in an interesting literary way and it is really innovative.