Articles & Essays Book Reviews

The emergence of female consciousness in Bildungsromane from contemporary Greece- representative instances

The representation of female voice and consciousness has for long been simply unthinkable until approximately the seventies (Lanser, 1992: 189). Traditionally Bildungsroman excluded women, as it was considered only in malecentered terms (Showalter Elaine,1980: 9-35). Searching for the myth of the Heroine, researchers suggested that recent works by women novelists concerned with women's search for identity related them to the Bildungsroman tradition (Swales, 1978)[1]. In the majority of the literary tradition of the previous century (Showalter, 1977: 180) as well as of the modern fiction of today even when the heroines reach the much desired point of self- discovery, they retreat and withdraw from their ambitions. The many eighteenth and nineteenth century women's novels became a highly popular way of inculcating the norms of womanhood into young readers (Ζervou, 1996: 69), mixing fiction and prescription in a manner that fascinated them while pleasing their parents. The literary genre applied to women had mostly been Entwicklungsroman than Bildungsroman, meaning that it described only the natural development of a girl, without the necessary mental or psychological one (White,1981: 36). So, we deal with a genre that pursues the opposite of its generic intent-it provides models for “growing down” rather than for “growing up” (Pratt, 1981: 16). In the contemporary female Bildungsromane written by women, a most powerful and dymanic femininity is sought, on the contrary to its static and elementary representation in the male Bildungsromane (Morgan, 1972: 184). But is this also our case, or does this tendency in Greek literature consist an exception to the rule?

The novels chosen and used as sources in this study -14 Bildungsromane and a novella with the same structure - cover a quite long period of modern Greek literature, we would dare say almost its major part, in a way that they depict vividly the historical and the literary reality of modern Greece. Although we don’t claim that literature mirrors life, there are certain analogies between the real and the literary universe. Bildungsroman is a genre of threshold literature, that appeals to a dual audience, adolescents and adults as well. Bildungsroman in Greek literary tradition was established in the 30s (Sahinis, 1983: 15-29), when the genre flourished worldwide as well (Karpozilou,1994: 211).

Moreover, though male Bildungsroman describes mainly the period of apprenticeship of the young protagonist till the first years of his adult – mature life, female Bildungsroman comprises a much broader age range (Felski, 1989: 126-127). Initiation into adulthood, entry into marriage or social involvement, quest for sexuality, personal transformation- rebirth (Pratt, 1981: 168) are the archetypal patterns in female Bildungsromane.

Six of the novels (Ninet, (At High school, 114)[2], Margaret, The roaring of the waters, A little time before 18, Could you teach me how to smile, please?) belong to Young adults’ literature, one of them is the only book for adults ever written by a famous children’s literature writer (Achilles’ fiancée), two of them are the most popular adolescent novels ever published in Greece (Contre temps, Straw Hats), the novella (The dying world and the coming world) comes from a collection of short stories addressing young people and four of them (The drifted astray, 20th century, The ancient Scoria, Helen or Nobody) are novels for adults. If we try to discern between literature for adults and that of young adults the criteria would turn out to be relative and vague. If we took the complexity of the plot, the level of the language, the length of the story, the profundity of the meanings or the subjects discussed as the determinant qualities of our study, we would find it almost impossible to classify accurately the texts chosen.

Lymberaki Margarita, 2005, (1946), Straw Hats (Psathina Kapela), Athens, Kastaniotis.

Kazantzaki Galatia, 1963, The dying world and the coming world (O kosmos pu petheni ki o kosmos pu erhete), Politikes ke logotehnikes ekdosis.

Zei Alki, 1997, (1987) Achilles’ fiancée (I aravoniastikja tu Ahilea), Athens, Kedros.

Tinga Tula, 2001(1996), The roaring of the waters (I Voi ton idaton), Athens, Patakis.

Dikeu Eleni, 2005 (1994), Could you teach me how to smile, please? (Mu mathenete na hamojelao sas parakalo?), Athens, Patakis.

Kokkinu Maria, 2005, A little time before 18 (Ligo prin ta 18), Athens, Kedros.

All the novels chosen are written by women writers and aim principally at women’s audience, as they adopt women protagonists. Their discourse is orientated toward women’s response. Female addressivity supports the posture that “language, for the individual consciousness lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. (McCallum, 1999: 293) and this is especially valid for the female language[3]. Female writing is not of course just charming and discreet[4], as it was once thought to be, though it does possess specific features that distinguish it from male writing. Zervou uses the term: “feminization” of the writing, meaning the adoption of a female point of view in narration (Zervou, 2005: 100). In women’s writings indirection, ambiguity, ellipsis, euphemism, reticence and other buffering techniques had been celebrated as aesthetic principles, because women did not dare create authorial narrators in the past (Lanser, 1992: 62-63). Nowadays when we talk about female writing we have many more elaborated techniques in mind, among which the most representative is stream of consciousness. The whole stream of consciousness movement is “a turn from an exaggeratedly masculine literature to a feminine one” (Lanser, 1992:102). The principles that originate from the ethics of interpersonal relations, motherhood, cooperativeness, devotion, understanding, loyalty, communality, solidarity etc. are also the fundamental concepts that qualify and differentiate female writing (Vandergrift, 1996: 17-20).

So an at least minimum corpus of common experiences, feelings, needs and points of view construct a bridge that fills the time gaps and makes the hermeneutic differences converge to the common denominator of female consciousness within the frame of the Greek patriarchal society. The ideological structures of the novels reflect the value system of Greek society, which although subsumed to Western ethics (Sakalaki, 1984: 10), its conservative, petite- bourgeois profile results in several ideological divergences. Of course we notice certain variations deriving from the specific historic context and its role in the formation of an individual's attitude to gender roles.

No matter the time distance between each novel’s publication, or even the historical period of each novel’s reference, recurrent motives and certain narrative techniques allow us to deduce that there are common loci, characteristic and representative of female consciousness that reflect on women’s writings.

According to Psychologists, the pre-oedipal relation with the mother plays a definitive role (Chodorow, 1974). Daughters internalize mother’s model and they merge one into the other. Mothers rarely show willingness to help their daughters become independent in the process of their individualization. Myrsini (Ancient Scoria) never had a close relationship with her mother. On the contrary she used to feel rage, anger and contempt for her. She thought of her as “prismatic and weird” (p.106). Nevertheless she felt remorse and she was inconsolable when she first noticed that her mother was getting older and older every day (p.122) and finally she admitted that she had been treating her mother unfairly (p.223). After her mother dies, she visits her in her dreams, where their lives merge as if they were the same person: “I know that the pages of my mother’s diary interfere with my life- and I find it logical-”, she thinks (p.177). The mother- daughter relation is something like a hereditary feature in Ninet’s family. Ninet, after having passed all her life excruciating her mother with her unheard mischief, the accidental revelation of her mother’s sublime affection and love for her, overheard by Ninet, declaring during a conversation (pp.146-149), transformed her into an angel (Anagnostopoulou, 2004: 160). She tried to regain the time lost by showing extreme tenderness and devotion to her mother. She worshipped her, she behaved in an exemplary way, tried to become as good a student as her mother had been, and looked for her trace everywhere her mother had once been., she chose her mother’s life model.

In few cases there are to be found mothers who break the stereotype and promote positive mother- daughter relation models.

Helen’s mother (Achilles’ fiancée) is the most positive figure among all the literary mothers. Helen admires her, looks up to her, believes in her and feels secure under her protection. Not even a shadow of tension had ever affected their relation. Helen’s sensitive, refined and gentle self had been her mother’s achievement, that showed her the way through her every day practices and choices. On the other hand disharmonious relations with the mother (At the high school, The drifted astray/ Could you teach me how to smile, please? / A little time before 18), or early mother’s loss (Contre temps) cause traumas in young girls’ hearts and become obstacle in the way to their fulfillment.

Women organize their psycho- social identity around the axis of affiliation and not that of achievement (Pollak – Gilligan, 1982). The ethical responsibility towards the others and the priority of their interpersonal relations are the principles upon which the female consciousness is built (Gilligan, 1982: 127). This connectedness is nevertheless a virtue, as well (Baker, 1976), not simply an unconscious urge, but a conscious choice, that comes from emotional redundancy.

Interpersonal relations range from friendships (A little time before 18/ Straw Hats), love affairs (Contre temps, Straw Hats, Achilles’ fiancée, Ancient scoria, Ninet), and familial relationships (Ninet, Could you teach me how to smile please?/ The roaring of the waters/The drifted astray).

Trying to define themselves, girls, they sometimes reject the feminine behavior, showing this way their repugnance to the female destiny and therefore adopting a naughty, turbulent attitude more suitable for boys. This stage is almost predictable and does not predesignate their adulthood. It is mostly an expression of their innate tendency to dispute against parental authority or a way to release their physical spiritfulness. This is the case of Ninet, Katerina (Straw Hats) and of Anna (114).

Some forms of literature prompt our intellectual and emotional insights and stimulate our response more readily than others. The epistolary is such a form. Traditionally associated with women and with the “private” as opposed to the “public” sphere, the letter form engages many feminist issues (Bower, 1997: 3). Epistolarity used to give women a voice that modeled not public proclamation but private confidence. Certain taboos against women’s public writing along with the practice by which novels were presented as the true stories of the narrating protagonists, made epistolarity the only way for women’s writing in the 18^th century (Lanser, 1992: 33).

In modern writings women use other techniques as well, like monologue, that is considered to be the oral equivalent of the letter (Lanser, 1992: 208). Girls’ and women’s need to meditate and communicate with the others is being expressed in their writings. Their inner self comes to being, is formulated, concretized and becomes self-conscious and palpable to us, through the letters and the diaries of the literary protagonists. At times, letters can be so private as to appear almost indistinguishable from diaries.

Moreover, with its emphasis on the act of writing and writing as an action, the letter permits exploration of postmodernist questions. Letters and diaries are embedded texts within the main text, a kind of writing in the square, a mimesis of the real act of novel writing, creating a kind of mise en abyme. Fictitious letter writers attempt to create and revise both self and addressee. In the private space of letters, women, so often silenced[5] in public life, have personal freedom in which to rewrite the self and even, sometimes, to rewrite others. Ninet (Ninet), just like her mother used to think of her own mother very highly and kept corresponding with her when she was away (p.167), so did she (p.25/p.246). Anne (At the high school) keeps a diary, named Harry, and transforms it into a figurative person, sometimes a boy some other times a girl, with whom she shares her secrets, Elpida (The roaring of the waters) writes little notes that report day after day the feelings that led her to commit suicide. Cybele’s (Contre temps) first (pp.167-172) and last letter (pp.223-227) to Aris become the landmarks of their relation and after Helen Bakoura (Helen or Nobody) dies, her brother discovers a whole world of notes and letters she used to write and keep, throughout her life (pp.239-240). Margarita is an altogether epistolary novel, composed of letters written from Margarita to her ideal lover, that never meant to be sent.

Doubles (Mccallum, 1999: 75) are used to explore the idea that personal identity is shaped by a dialogic relation with an Other and that consciousness is a site of multiplicity and fragmentation. It destabilizes notions of consciousness as unified, or coherent, or as existing outside a relation to an Other. It does this by representing an internal fragmentation and alienation of the subject and/or an internalization of the intersubjective relation between the self and the other. To the extent that the concept of the split subject is contingent with the relation between the self and the Other, the distinctions between these two functions blur. The double is frequently both an Other and another aspect of the self, an internalized other.

Achilles’ fiancée is the most characteristic case of a split consciousness, as she even calls herself with two names, Daphne as she had been baptized and Helen the code name given to her by her outlaw comrades. Having renounced her real self and her ideals for the sake of Achilles, she names her daughter Daphne, to remind her of her hidden personality. These two names correspond to two distinct sides of herself, fighting each other (p.230/p.243), until she finds a way to reconcile them, by coming to terms with her long unadmitted and crosscurrent desires. Helen (Helen or Nobody), the painter experiences this double consciousness as well. In order to follow her dream to study painting, she disclaims her femininity, transforms herself into a man and enjoys men’s privileges till the moment she falls in love. This transubstantiation left stamps on her consciousness for the rest of her life, as she never managed to be woman enough to keep her husband by her side.

Antigone (The roaring of the waters) is also a supplementary character to young Elpida. Her life functions as the positive pole of the binary schema composed of these two different women. Elpida is a young quitter, Antigone a grown up fighter. The retrospective oversight of Antigone’s “Bildung” counterbalances Elpida’s example. The motif of the two friends, who supplement one another, is also very common in Bildungsromane (A little time before 18).

Women’s potential sometimes expresses itself through art. Art had always been a field where women were allowed to do so. Their innate charm and elegance is supposed to find an outlet through artistic activities. This fact is usually depicted in a specific branch of Bildungsromane, the Kuenstleroman. The madwoman of Gilbert and Gubar’s thesis (1979: 43) is the creative female artist, who has been numerously represented in myths and fairy tales, as silent or silenced. So, even if they are artistic masters, art for women mostly remains a lonely path to walk, a surreptitious way to self expression and almost never a spurs. Women usually use art as a means to unleash emotional pressure or express themselves (Infanda of Straw hats), or as a means to gain money (The drifted astray) and survive mostly for a transitional period of their lives. In two cases, two literary characters get honors and become distinguished, but this is only an exception (Cybele of Contre temps is an awarded pianist and Helen of Helen or Nobody is a famous painter, who brings up her children and lives by her work ).

The most dominant motif in female Bildungsromane is that of love and marriage, almost inextricably woven. In the woman’s Bildungsroman tension between the heroine’s desires and society's dictates results in archetypal narrative patterns of pursuit of love and submission, accompanied by images of suffocation, dwarfing, and mental illness (Pratt, 1981: 43). Maria of Straw Hats after having experienced sex with a peasant boy as a simply biological matter, she decides all out of the blue to get married, so as to bridle her sexuality. Getting married with Marios, her ever lasting friend, she acquires at once the female role’s prerequisites and finds self-fulfillment in becoming a devoted wife and a mother, though she is losing emotional touch with Marios day after day. Love for the almost always absent Aimilios, who nevertheless haunts her life, is also the motive and the reason why Polixeni (20th century) espoused the revolutionary ideology and dedicated her life at the struggle against fascism.

The case of Myrsini (Ancient Scoria) resembles that of Polixeni. Unfortunate love for handsome Pavlos turns into a coerced, self- imposed devotion to imprisoned George, who incarnated her ideology, but was far from being her ideal half. Daphne (Achilles’ fiancée) erases her conscious self by abandoning her identity to become Helen, Achilles’ fiancé) The early admiration gradually faints away, under the realization of their lack of communication and their differences, deriving partly from their gender consciousness. Helen (Helen or Nobody) sacrifices her career for Saverio’s Altamura sake. After having born three children, her husband abandonded her and even took their younger boy with him. After having stopped painting for years, she ended up her life, living alone and isolated, half insane, mourning her two children who had died earlier,. Having committed the crime of feminine sexuality and personal power she ended up a cultural deviant, a kind of outcast.

Cybele (Contre temps) also has a tragic love story. She does not recognize real love in the face of gentle Spyros and follows her childish dream, called Aris, to whom she even gets married. Unfortunately, she comes to consciousness after the wedding and she exhausts herself trying to abide by her husband. When she leaves him, it is too late. Spyros has already passed away. Of course there are love affairs that are not so fatal as well. There are also festive denouements. Young girls look for love, flirt and try new roles all the time (Katherine of Straw hats, Anna of 114, Daphne of A Little time before 18, Anna of At High school). Sometimes heroines find their way out, choosing solitude or alternative, free from bonds love affairs, like Helen (Achilles’’ fiancée), Alexandra (The drifted astray), Clio (The dying world). They provide a bright spot in an otherwise bleak landscape of marital politics. A quality of consciousness that is essentially antisocial characterizes the most admirable heroines.

Dreaming, day dreaming and illusions are also a recurrent element, that marks a temporary disorientation of the heroine, the vacillation taking place in her value system as well as her changing perception of reality and functions as a transitional stage in the shaping of her consciousness (Felski, 1989: 144). The distinguishing characteristics of dreaming- fluidity and mobility- a locus in the unconscious indifferent to the symbolic laws of logic, have much in common with the characteristics of the feminine imaginary as described by Irigaray. Irigaray challenges the singularity and universality of language and knowledge (Luce Irigaray,1977: 67), she attempts to leave behind the conceptual universe of the Logos and she creates a new ideological place, pre- oedipal or post- patriarchal female imaginary, a place of desire, the repressed unconscious of culture (Luce Irigaray,1985: 55). Women indulge themselves in mental wanderings, in a romantic and idealistic way.

Myrsini (Ancient Scoria) dreams constantly. She explores her restless and troublous consciousness weaving the weird patchwork of her life from fragments and reminiscences. In her dreams she even manages to get rid of her decorous self and she finally becomes a horn running away with a truckman (pp.245-248). Helen Boukoura (Helen or Nobody) having rescinded time, lives in a temporal space between reality and madness, consciousness and delirium. She talks to her beloved children while being on her own and she has visions, a special kind of insight, combined with imagination (the ship named Seahorse taking her son away when he died- p.182). Katerina’s (Straw Hats) last dream is a strange amalgam of awareness, consciousness and wishful thinking. Having tried to reciprocate to David’s love and female destiny, as experienced through her mother’s and sister’s Mary model, she finally turns it down and feels attracted to the perspective of an adventurous life. Andreas imaginary personality, is the key component of her dream. He takes her away, around the world.

An undeclared war usually takes place in women’s consciousness, a war between their nature and the way they experience or perceive female identity. As femininity is identified with debility, subjugation and sexuality, it repulses them and they sometimes deny their own self. Anna (At high school) feels dirty and would like to get rid of her female nature (p. 97), every time a boy or a man shows his interest in vulgar way. She feels safe only in her father’s arms. Alexandra (The drifted astray) releases herself of her virginity through an operation, thinking that the responsibility of being her first lover, made her boyfriend reserved and unresponsive. She thought of her virginity as the problem that undermined their relationship. Helen knows better than anyone else that the male disguise offered her the opportunity to follow her dreams. Womanhood made her vulnerable and led her to an unfortunate passionate love that destroyed her life.

The equation, not to say identification of writing with living relates to the fact that women in patriarchal societies are deprived of their right to speak and articulate their own voice. Young protagonists write in order to exist, to communicate with the readers, to transform the act of writing into a less autistic and narcissistic one. In 20th century, Polyxeni narrates her life retrospectively as if she is reading a book without binding (p.22) and she is a cohort of her father’s belief that our lives should be readable, so as no one could distort our deeds (p.56). In Ancient Scoria, Myrsini writes down the story of her life, trying to include it concisely in a questionnaire and in Helen or Nobody, Helen keeps notes for everything that she thinks worth mentioning or impresses her in her everyday life). This repeated motif becomes a surplus (Suleiman Susan Rubin, 1983: 54-56)[6] which underlines a basic component of the texts’ ideology According to Kristeva the uniquely female language, the Semiotic, derives from the pre-Oedipal stage of development before the child enters the patriarchal symbolic order and functions as the 'Other' of real language, monopolized by men (Kristeva, 1984). So writing seems the only semi- public rostrum, from where they can utter their voice and take a glance at their lives. Writing and living interlock and cooperate. Female “escape through imagination” (Meyer Spacks,1975) is not escapist but strategic, a withdrawal into the unconscious for the purpose of personal transformation. In other words, as Héléne Cixous puts it, women's writing constitutes “the possibility of change itself... the movement which precedes the transformation of social and cultural structures.” (Cixous H., 1976).

Politicization as a novelistic motif first appeared after the 60ies (Sakalaki, 1984: 244) and it concerned mainly men (Sakalaki, 1984: 229). In texts with ideological thesis, where the heroines serve a social goal and strive against social inequalities or other kinds of oppression, we meet empowered heroines (Suleiman, 1983: 56). Their political consciousness mostly maturates after their initiation in love and their interference with the political sphere takes place mostly through men (three out of four). Consequently, they manage to go beyond their gender and class boundary and adopt a powerful and active role. It seems like a mediated experience.They become agents mainly under the orders or the instructions of a man that inspires them.

On the other hand, they are more reflexive and open minded and they dare question authority. So, in two cases (Ancient scoria, Achilles’ fiancée) women embrace socialism, and communism as alternate systems, only to find that these systems, too, are undermined by the sexual politics of patriarchy (Pratt, 1981: 49). However, they finally come to a deeper understanding of themselves and opt themselves out of politics, turning down the doctrinal norms of action for a more personalized way of reacting and interacting with the social sphere. In other words, they politicize their personal experiences (Tziovas, 2005: 445). This feature combines the two main tendencies of feminist thought, the one that supports the need of women’s participation in the public sphere and the other that yearns for the awakening of the real, primordial – edemic and suppressed female self (Tziovas, 2005: 451). In the other three cases (20th century, The drifted astray, The dying world and the coming world) women support communism and choose the vigorous involvement in social – political struggles than the secure and settled life, promised by societal norms. Polyxeni (20th century) sacrifices herself for her beliefs and dies in prison. Clio (The dying world and the coming world) divorces her fiancé, who forced her to conform with his standards and to abandon her social activities and dedicates herself to her principles. Alexandra (The drifted astray), after an arduous effort to stand on her feet and support the frail and mentally unstable members of her family, encounters socialism and finds consolation and inspiration in the perspective of the social change at the end of the novel (p.346).

Reading literature, poetry or philosophy is a leit motif in women’s and children’s literature. The references to other books create an intertextual net, where heroes discuss with each other, ideas intersect and get cross-fertilized (Zervou, 1996: 142) [7]. Moreover, the allusive presence of cultural data becomes a weapon in the hands of women writers who make the best possible use of the given western cultural inheritance and deconsecrate it from within. The protagonists’ literary preferences also reveal their personality, they imply their sensibility and they even more indicate at least to some extent the way their consciousness has been shaped and developed.

Cybele (Contre temps) compares her life with the heroes’ life from the books she reads, she talks to these heroes, as if they were real and she even identifies herself with them (62/80). So Captain Nemo, Pierre Rionsai, Eva Saint Claire or Remi become her playfellows and the conflict between her reality and her readings marks her gradual maturation (Zervou, 1996: 143). Myrsini (The ancient Scoria), being more sophisticated, reads Elytis’ poetry (p.12),one of the top poets of contemporary Greece, a choice that indicates her fancy for surrealistic lyricism and revery, which is natural for her age. After her involvement with the liberation movement and her embracing of socialism, she reads Tolstoi and Dostojevski (p.107). Julia’s choices- a secondary heroine of the same novel- who indulged herself in Bildungsromane, like Eroica of Politis, Argo of Theotokas and The teacher with the golden eyes of Mirivilis, reveal her attitude towards life, as their elegance of speech and style correspond to her temperament. The contraposition of the literary preferences represents the antithesis the characters and their different literary interests bring forth and their factual and intrinsic incompetence to communicate.

Gender played and still plays, a complicated role in the construction of the text. In women's fiction that deals with society, incapable of either fully rejecting it or fully accommodating to it, the outcome has to do with the disjunctions of the narrative structure, tone ambivalences, and inconclusive characterizations. There is a constant slippage, a blurring of the logic and boundaries between fantasy and reality, past and present, a continuous interplay between psychic and everyday life (Wilkie – Stibbs, 2002: xiv). These protagonists are encoded in the narrative as the fragmented subject of Postmodernism in Jameson’s definition of it (1981)[8]. This fragmentation reflects on the disintegration of language and narration and the emergence of the psychic landscape in which the characters operate.

In Achilles’ fiancé, two parallel stories starting from two opposite ends and attributed in the first and third person singular respectively, compose a multistranded narration. These stories develop, intersect and meet in the middle, having been in the meanwhile inextricably interwoven, provoking an atmosphere of uncertainty, swiftness and fluidity. In Ancient Scoria, narration resembles and has much in common with the stream of consciousness. It stubbles, stops abruptly, swerves and doesn’t guide the reader safely through the story (Van Dyck, 1998: 397-398). In third person narratives, the focalising female character, though central to the narrative, is usually positioned at the margins of the particular social milieu. Although events are narrated from the perceptual point of view of the female character, as if seen through her eyes (Stephens, 1992: 27) and the internal focalisation[9] technique is important for the construction of characters as “ideologues” and for the representation of their subjectivity and intersubjectivity, women rarely become ideologues[10], articulating their own words. “Culture” agrees Firestone “is so saturated with the male bias that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes”. Even when they fight against the normative values, they get defeated, because these values derive from their subconscious realm. (Could you teach me how to smile please?/At high School/ 114/ Ninet/ Maria in Straw hats/ Contre temps). Nevertheless, there are certain moments, when psycho- analysis (Cohn, 2001: 54-88) allows us to see through their minds and have a glimpse at and a better understanding of their inner self. This feature gives women the possibility to come to terms with their subjectivity, through a harmonious amalgamation of the narrating and the narrated I (Katerina in Straw hats/Clio in The dying world and the coming world/ Polixeni in 20^th century).

Another recurring technique in third person narration is free indirect speech. It is a “literary device” (Fludernik, 1993: 73), whose purposes prominently include automatic gear shifting between narration and characters' minds, usually in the interests of empathy and narrative inconspicuousness Its structural indeterminacy accentuates forms of gender indeterminacy. Its indeterminacy of voice undoes the categorical polarization of authors, narrators and characters; as a rhetorical figure it mediates between, through, and across voices seeking to be heard (Mezei, 1996: 67). Texts typically move in and out of characters' consciousness from psycho-narration to free indirect speech and back.

Some female characters (Achilles’ Fiancé, Ancient scoria, The drifted astray, Helen or Nobody) postulate their right to exist consciously, they trace their memories, explore their feelings and dare present themselves in the first person. Women become conscious subjects by the very act of speaking and therefore writing. For when one becomes a locutor, when one says I and, in so doing, reappropriates language as a whole….it is then and there, according to linguists and philosophers, that occurs the supreme act of subjectivity, the advent of subjectivity into consciousness. It is when starting to speak that one becomes I. It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of “ego” in reality (Wittig, 1985: 6). Female ego conquests more and more the narratological territory of the Bildungsroman and first person narrators risk their reliability in the name of immediacy and intimacy. Unreliability can occur along three axes: the axis of facts/events, the axis of knowledge/perception, and the axis of values (Martin & Phelan,1999). Here the unreliability originates from the fact that conscious and unconscious events cooperate and collide at the same time.

Daphne, the suppressed self of Achilles’ fiancée, talks in “I”, though her other half, Helen, from whom she becomes more and more alienated, is presented in the third person. Myrsini (Ancient Scoria) is also a daring first person narrator, self- analyst and director of her life. Antigone (The roaring of the waters) undertakes the narration of the last two thirds of the novel (pp.139-250) and summarizes her life in the first person, addressing to her imaginary audience, Elpida and her implied audience, the readers. All the first person narrators are middle- aged retrospective narrators, mature and wise, that intervene in their past, comment and judge it, in a distancing way[11], while the narrating I criticizes the narrated one. The narrating I, is qualified not only to narrate, but also to recreate and recast the past into a new mold. The horizon of the narrated I’s experiences is not committing (Stanzel, 1999: 142). Self-consciousness anyway is a “rather nasty trick and the search for meaning in our lives, which occurs at the behest of the interpreter, nothing more than a game, fun to play but bearing no relationship to reality whatsoever”. Kotre distinguishes two opposing elements in “the interpreter's” remembering: archival storage and self-mythmaking— “The remembering self, both as keeper of archives and as a myhtmaker,” he concludes, “fashions a remembered self. I establishes me” (Kotre,1996: 118).

Usually the external descriptions of the protagonists’ appearance are absent and their image is being shaped mostly through the emersions of their inner life and consciousness, that is substantiated into seemingly unimportant details and impressions (20^th century, Achilles’ fiancée) (Mike Mary, 1995: 228). Time becomes the pure essence of reality, which may be described as “a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outline” (Kumar, 1963: 9-10). Moreover we can notice an inclination of Greek women writers to give their protagonists names symbolically charged, from Greek mythology or History (Antigone, Helen, Daphne, Alexandra, Polixeni, Clio). This endows the heroines with a special splendor, while they remind allusively their predecessors.

What is evidently missing from the novels we discussed, is the most characteristic feature of women’s writing, the stream of consciousness, with the exception of Ancient Scoria. This can be explained through the particular intellectual conditions in contemporary Greece. Here, the long clinging of the literary tradition to the epistemologic field of Romantic Humanism and the sovereignty of the generation the thirties, led to the imposition of a unified literary writing, a counterpoise to the prevailing polyphony. Thus, while the most polyphonic literary genre, the novel, was coming to age in Europe, the Greek intellectual leadership undertook a systematic expedition for the achievement of linguistic conformity, aiming at the promotion of the concept of Greek cultural continuity and homogeneity (Tziovas, 2002: 172-191).

Girls grow up under the primordial impulse of their gender destination, which is nothing but a social construction. The traditional values about femininity and maternity are the constructive elements of their socialization. Family, love and beauty are almost always ranked at the highest positions of their value scale (Sakalaki, 1984: 232/239). The relation with a strong and at the same time socially subordinated mother is of outmost importance. Prohibitions, deprivations and limitations shape female social behavior, though the privileges offered to them through education rarely have a social effect. Professionalism for women seems to be the very opposite of marriage and motherhood. These two goals shape almost always the substratum of their ambitions and dreams. The family strategy focuses mainly on the control of their sexuality, which fills them with guilt and restrains their creative potentialities. When they excel in a traditionally male field, subconscious guilt makes them retreat in other fields, so as to counterbalance their success with self sacrifices. They consider power incompatible to their nature, something that repulses men away. So, they disclaim their right to subjectivity and consent to their living a pretentious life (Beauvoir De, 1949, I: 23), under the dominance of the phallic look (L. Irigaray, 1974). They cannot surmount the psychological barrier called “motivation to avoid success” (Horner, 1970: 46), as success is supposed to be interwoven with aggressiveness and antagonism. Female consciousness is shaped according to the malecentred standards and oscillates between the desire of self determination and the guilt and fears deriving from it. Female Ego and needs are not set as default and normal, but as the Other of the man’s, always incomplete according to the scale set by men (Gilligan, 1982: 18).The mechanisms of social control reinforce the long established immanency and internalized self control, imposed from the early years on female consciousness.

To avoid aphorisms, we must admit that there are a few literary examples where female consciousness breaks the chains of the patriarchal society, adopts a critical stance and redefines itself, turning down the ready-made schemata offered by the male dominated world. Girls’ reactions can scarcely be characterized as revolutionary – except a few cases that under specific historical circumstances and their involvement with politics radicalized their behavior-. This revolution though almost never comes to the substantiation of their inmost desires. Women writers try to reject the 19^th century tradition of possible endings, marriage and death and suggest alternative possibilities for women (DuPlessis, 1985) not always showing clearly the way through which the emerging modern female consciousness could be transformed into a new effective social identity (Achilles’ fiancée, The ancient Scoria).

Female consciousness appears to be intersubjective and fluid rather than isolated, crystallized and self-dependent, standing in the middle of the postmodern centrifugality of the personality and the liberal-humanistic regard of the self as an integrated and autonomous entity. Female consciousness is not set as an unchangeable unhistorical essence, nor as a lonely Ego trying to define itself as something extra ordinary or unique[12]. Transcending this dichotomy, women discover themselves through their relations, their gradual development, the role playing and the heterogeneity of their inner selves (Docherty, 1991: 187), a process that keeps the narration open.

After having read thoroughly the texts we can locate a remarkable difference between the four most recently published Y.A. novels and the rest of them. These are not exactly Bildungs but Entwicklungsromans, that follow the heroine through the period of adolescence. Dealing with contemporary girls, they display a significant change in female consciousness. Girls reject parental standards, they are more cynical and down to earth. They worry about their professional future and still look for love. Politics is only a peripheral interest of theirs and they plan their future in a self-centered way. What is left untouched from the past is the suppression of their sexuality. Female sexuality understandably seems to mean danger to many female authors rather than power; male sexuality is power. Female aspiration is a joke. Female rebellion may be perfectly justified, but there's no good universe next door, no way out. Young potential revolutionaries can't find their revolution (Meyer Spacks, 1975: 200). Prejudices and conservative ideas still haunt the process of their consciousness formation and undermine their possibility to achieve self confidence and feel equal to men. In these cases the heroine has so thoroughly internalized societal norms that she is fighting against behavior patterns encoded in her own consciousness (Anna of 114).

From time to time we notice a remarkably affirmative change in women’s consciousness, that mostly concerns individual cases rather than being a norm. These cases reflect female writers’ wish to transform their protagonists into agents and protagonists of their own lives, in order to, starting from the literary universe, influence the existing ones. There is also a certain distinction between the young heroine's quest for social integration and the older woman's quest for selfhood, a quest for spiritual rebirth (C. G. Jung, 1969: 114)[13], so as to become master of her self. The dynamic protagonists of the 30ies and 40ies can be interpreted and attributed to the writers’ personalities. Lilika Nakou always created positive standards for women (Anagnostopoulou[14]) and Melpo Axioti’s and Galateia Kazantzaki’s communist ideology led them to a similar choice. The other positive protagonists, that try to redefine themselves actively, come from the eighties and nineties and are created by politicized writers as well (Alki Zei, Maro Duka).

To conclude, literature sets an analogy to life. So, exactly as in life, women sometimes conform to the given standards and they idealise marriage and motherhood, some other times they demand equal access to the symbolic order, according to the claims of liberal feminism, and a few women reject the male symbolic order in the name of their right to be different, following the principles of contemporary radical feminism (Moi, 1985: 12).

[1]The quest motif is central in Bildungsromane. This describes events in terms of the desire of one subject: at its most abstract meaning, the desire of a single subject to successfully transgress an obstacle or boundary

[2]We examine these two novels as if they were one, because the latter is the continuation of the former.

[3]“Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates” (Bakhtin, 1981: 280) . This concept is used to discuss the role of language in relationships between the self and others, and the construction of implied readers in narrative within active subject positions.

[4]Emmanuel Roidis, Αcropolis, 28 April 1896. According to the famous scholar, women were authorized to write only about familial or maternal subjects and their main goal should be to support and inspire their men. See: Rizaki Irini, 2007.

[5] Women are forced to silence because the factors that determine them and they are identified with, childbearing and the body functions in general are thought to be dirty and obscene, they consist a taboo and lie on a private - personal field, which is the very opposite of the public political discourse. (Elshtain Jean Bethke, 1981).

[6]About novels with ideological thesis see: Suleiman Susan Rubin, 1983: 54 -56.

[7]Zervou describes the relation between the intertextual references and the narration in a scale as follows: mere interpolation, comparison, incorporation in action, contradistinction (Zervou Alexandra, 2005: 142)

[8]Jameson (Political Unconscious, 1981, Cornell University Press) describes the breakdown of the relationship between signifiers

[9]The term is meant to distinguish between the witness of fabula events and their narrator, the linguistic subject. In addition to seeing, the focalizer may also hear, taste and feel the events of the narrative.

[10]ideologue: the speaking person in the novel who in speaking his/her “own unique ideological discourse” represents a specific ideological position or “language world view”: Bakhtin, M. M. , 1981: 332 -333.

[11]The terms “engaging” and “distancing’ narration have been first introduced by Warhol R. R.: 11 -18.

[12]Humanist ideologies appeal to notions of a common core of humanity, or essential humanness (Soper, 1986: 12) and insist on the inherent value of individual human beings. Thus, poststructuralist theorists such as Althusser, Derrida and Foucault have dismantled humanist ideologies on the basis that they are logocentric. As Giddens has argued, the first “takes consciousness for granted, as an inherent characteristic of human beings ” and hence assumes “that the subjective is not open to any kind of social analysis” and the second “reduces consciousness to the determined outcome of social forces” (Giddens, 1979 :120).

[13]Jung defines Wiedergeburt as involving either renovation or transformation of an individual so that all of his or her faculties are brought into conscious play. This may involve a renewal without any change of being, inasmuch as the personality which is renewed is not changed in its essential nature, but only its functions, or parts of the personality, are subjected to healing, strengthening, or improvement.

[13]Anagnostopoulou Diamanti, The emergence of gender identity in narrative works of women writers from the literary generation of the thirties, (I anadisi tis emfylis gynekias taftotitas se afigimatika erga gynekon sygrafeon tis logotechnikis jenias tu trianda), Presentation in the Third Congress of the European Association of Neo - Hellenic Studies) http: //www. eens congress.eu/?main__page=1&main__lang=de&eensCongress_cmd=showPaper&eensCongress_id=279

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