HUNGARIAN STUDIES 11. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar ... - EPA

MARGIT KAFFKA AND DOROTHY RICHARDSON: A COMPARISON 79and justification - and no analysis. Without any doubt, Kaffka's worksdemonstrate that she stepped outside the gentry thematics and when she doesthat, as, for example, in the novel Két nyár (Two Summers) (1916), her writingclearly establishes a feminist position. (Obviously, this position exists in all herwriting.)Dorothy Richardson, as an English-language author and placed within thenow existing significant body of feminist literary criticism, is definitely establishedas a feminist author. As the basis of a comparison between her andKaffka is the proposition by Wittmann, namely the objective of comparatiststudies to research and to establish when, where, and how new woman'simages appear in literature. Gillian E. Hanscombe's "Introduction" 7 presentsa good example of such recognition:Of Ihe early twentieth-century English modernists, there is no one who has beenmore neglected than Dorothy Miller Richardson. There are several reasons for this.First, the style she forged in the writing of Pointed Roofs, the first volume of thePilgrimage sequence, was new and difficult, later earning the nomination "streamof-consciousness."Pointed Roofs was published in 1915 and was, therefore, the firstexample of this technique in English, predating both Joyce and Woolf, its more famousexponents. Secondly, the thoughts and feelings of its protagonist, Miriam Henderson,are explicitly feminist, not in the sense of arguing for equal rights and votes for women,but in the more radical sense of insisting on the authority of a woman's experience andworld view. (1)Hanscombe's third reason for her interest in Richardson's works, theauthor's relationship with German culture, although an important one, is lesssignificant in the comparison with Kaffka's work. The first two, however, fallwithin the argued base, the significance of a specifically woman's and feministposition. These two, an innovative narrative style and the feminist position, Iargue, are elements of Kaffka's writing as well.In this study, I shall focus on the sociological significance of the feministpoint(s) of view apparent in the selected prose of these two authors. FollowingWittmann's postulate, I am aware of the importance of these authors'innovative narrative and I shall briefly discuss this aspect as well. However, inmy view it is the socio-literary significance that should be pronounced in thefirst instance. In the case of Kaffka this is obvious because of her primaryposition in formulating the "facts" of women's position in Hungarian societybefore the First World War. In the case of Richardson, this focus is alsojustified because, in her case, the secondary literature focused on her narrativeinnovation and consequently, the socio-literary significance of her writing hasbeen neglected.