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

MARGIT KAFFKA AND DOROTHY RICHARDSON: A COMPARISON 87Klári is végzett, egyelőre jó zongoraleckékből él, de állás van ígérve neki egy pestiiskolánál. Marcsi azt hiszi, hogy, szerelmes volt egy tanárjába, valami nagy művészbe.Baj is az! ő ráér erre a fényűzésre, nem kell férjhez szaladnia a kenyérért... (321-22)Klári too graduated. At the moment she earns good money as a piano teacher butshe was promised a position at a school in Pest. Marcsi thought she was in love withone of her teachers, some great artist. Who cares! She can afford such luxury, she doesnot need to run to a husband for money... (321-22).Színek és évek is a "multi-dimensional" novel (Fülöp 67). The multidimensionalityof the novel, its thematics, its psychological, sociological,narratological, etc., dimensions invite an analysis from several points of view.The critical body about Kaffka's works focused on the gentry thematics withsporadic mention of the position of women within the Hungarian gentry. Here,the above demonstrates Kaffka's preoccupation with the sociological factorsof patriarchy by describing the sociological with specific attention to theposition of women in Hungarian society of the time.It is an important observation and proposition that Kaffka's novel at handis a "tudatteremtő, lélekteremtő [regény]" ("consciousness and spirit creating[novel]") (Fülöp 68). It is an obvious extension of this proposition to say thatboth aspects, namely the "creation of consciousness" and the "creation ofspirit" is to be understood with reference to the woman/fern ale consciousnessand spirit. This is its most important feature of innovation. Also, the aboveproposition by Fülöp is the more important because it underlines the suggestedintertwining of the author's innovative sociological perception with narrativeinnovation. In other words, the exposition and critique of the patriarchal valuesystem occurs in a specific narrative style. Thus, Kaffka's writing, in Wittmann'ssense, is successful in the presentation of the new woman on twoaccounts: The work is a reflective ("visszaemlékező") novel (Fülöp 68-69) andits narrative innovation rests in the creation and in the study of the Weltanschauungof the remembering individual. The narrative in the novel expressesby the multitude of reflections not only the level of fictionalizing but, at thesame time, it expresses this fictionalization on the level of meditation andintellectual position-taking. This is also important because the Proustianreflective narrative was neither as a primary text nor in the secondary literatureapparent either in Hungarian literature or literary scholarship of the time, orin Kaffka's specific development as an author. In this sense, Kaffka's narrativeinnovation can be positioned in the narration of memory. In this too, her workbroke new ground in Hungarian literature.Richardson's trilogy differs from Kaffka's novel in that it does not havea similar up-front accumulative sociological presentation of the woman's