The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture

1. Maidens, Barbarians, and Vampires: Nationality and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Czech Literature

1 Maidens, Barbarians, and Vampires Nationality and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Czech Literature The Czech writers of the first two phases of the National Revival (1774–1820) tended to look back to the medieval and early-modern periods for their inspiration and appeared to establish a congenial compromise between their personal and political selves. As the nineteenth century proceeded, however, an increasing gulf emerged between the subjective imagination of the male writer and the social role he was expected to perform as the representative of an oppressed nation. Until fairly recently, Czech literary criticism has tended to emphasize this latter role, prescribing as much as describing the social position of the writer in a small-nation culture. In the last few years, however, there have been some attempts to revise this monolithic model by tracing a transition from “nationality” to “personality” in nineteenth-century Czech literature.1 But this process was rarely as clear-cut and as diachronically smooth as it would seem. Throughout the nineteenth century , political and personal constructions of identity continued to be implicated in each other. The cosmopolitan phase of Czech literature, represented primarily by the realist fiction of Jan Neruda, is usually seen 19 as the turning point from nationality to personality. In fact, there is no simple opposition between these categories either before or after Neruda. Mácha’s Romantic poetry precedes Neruda, but it is almost wholly concerned with questions of subjectivity, while the Decadents, usually seen as purely subjective in their interests, did not reject nationality altogether but attempted to define it in new ways. An important area in which these categories intersect is in the representation of gender and sexual relations. An important reason for this intersection in the nineteenth century was that notions of sexuality and nationality shared the same essentialist assumptions: ethnic relationships were deemed as natural a bond as the familial kinship between a mother and a child or a wife and a husband. Such essentialist assumptions have been questioned in recent studies of national identity by Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm that emphasize its status as a historical construct. Benedict Anderson has highlighted the deficiencies of this purely constructionist model of national identity by showing that Gellner’s notion of invention necessarily implies the existence of its immutable and fixed opposite: the true community. The virtue of Anderson’s imagined community is that it collapses the simplistic constructionist-essentialist opposition and, in so doing, implicitly demonstrates the continuity among national, gender, and sexual identity. Thus, for Anderson, nationalism is deeply implicated in the relations between men and women. Just as sexual and gender relations are inherently patriarchal, so is the ethnic bond between compatriots profoundly homosocial: “Regardless of the actual inequality and exploration that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (16). Given the shared essentialist assumptions about sexual and national identity, it is not surprising that these categories became interchangeable . In fact, in the nineteenth century nations were often gendered as “male” or “female” according to their perceived political strength. Thus the weaker and poorer peoples like the Irish and the Slavs were generally personified as female, while the strong and wealthy nations like Britain and Germany were masculinized. The feminization of nationhood , however, did not always connote weakness or vulnerability. The French Republic was personified as “Marianne” and imperial Britain as “Britannia.” Thus “female” was an ambiguous signifier that 20 Maidens, Barbarians, and Vampires • designated weakness and strength, humiliation and pride, virginity and motherhood. In the case of small and politically weak nations, such as nineteenth-century Ireland and Bohemia, these opposite connotations could even coexist. Catholic Ireland was personified by its adherents both as a pure maiden threatened by alien oppressors and as a strong mother who protected the people against the enemy.2 As one might expect from Catholic Bohemia, the same gendered dichotomy was applied to the Czech nation in the nineteenth century. In fact, this virgin-mother split image has its imaginary origins in pre-modern Bohemian legend such as the War of the Maidens, in which the female followers of Vlasta rise up against their fathers and brothers and are ultimately defeated. The earliest complete treatment of this...