“The Blue Rose” by Lesia Ukrainka as the ‘rite de passage’: biography, psychiatry and writing

The paper explores “The Blue Rose” (1896) by Lesia Ukrainka in terms of the ‘rite de passage’ as the text with a ritual function that reflects the cultural, gender, and author status transformations within the field of literature. In the most general sense, the first drama by Lesia Ukrainka is analyzed as an act of initiation into the fin de siècle culture. Peculiar features of this ritual are the critical comments of the modern culture, transformation of the autobiographical facts into aesthetic phenomena, and interiorization of the motif of death. “The Blue Rose” discusses a female genetic illness — a popular topic of the late 19th century — and depicts an attempt of escaping into the illusionary world of platonic love. Representation of the female insanity and ‘unconventional love’, as well as the critique of a bourgeois view of happiness and the patriarchal world, is also an important aspect of the drama. References to the unpublished materials of Lesia Ukrainka’s archive — her excerpts from the “Psychiatry” by Krafft-Ebing — allow concluding that “The Blue Rose” treats insanity as a psychiatric and not a psychological phenomenon. The mother-daughter relations as well as the tension of the mother-son relations in the family of Kosaches are also an important element in Lesia Ukrainka’s work. “The Blue Rose” (1896) is a multidimensional and experimental drama. Its author transforms numerous autobiographical facts into cultural situations and engages in a discussion on the topical themes and motifs of the fin de siècle, in particular female insanity, hysteria, and maternity. The writer employs naturalistic methods of analysis and reinforces descriptions of female insanity with the facts from psychiatric practice. “The Blue Rose” displays an interest of Lesia Ukrainka in Neoplatonism, which she would later associate with a Neo-romantic impulse ‘ins Blaue’. In general, the author did not follow the foreign patterns, as the critiques noted, but explored the Zeitgeist of the new era. She involved authentic practical experience of her own life and the lives of her relatives and friends, analyzed moral norms and psychological states referring to the cultural codes that ranged from “The Romance of the Rose”, Dante, Shakespeare, and Heine to Zola, Ibsen, and Nadson. This practice ensured Lesia Ukrainka’s initiation into the fin de siècle culture and paved her way to the modernist drama.

Romancing the Dance

This chapter addresses the relationship between religion and dance in popular, vernacular literature. While some scholars view secular and religious works as separate, unrelated phenomena, I demonstrate how medieval romances co-opted sacred dance motifs. In these texts, dance functioned as a ritual, deifying courtly love (including troubadour lyric) and conferring a sacred aura onto courtliness. The first section uses Guillaume de Lorris’s section of Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) to show how dance in romance championed aristocratic values (including the chivalry of medieval knights), the gift economy, and enchantment. The second section focuses on Jean de Meun’s section of Le Roman de la Rose. It shows how Jean co-opted the Rose’s dance content to critique the project of courtly love. The third section analyzes Dante’s poetry from the Paradiso (Paradise), in which the poeticization of dance enabled Dante to best express divine love.

The Romance of the Rose

The Romance of the Rose occupies a unique position in the medieval French literary tradition, widely recognized as the most circulated and well-known French narrative poem across Europe, from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century. This chapter attempts to situate the two parts of the romance, attributed to two authors, within the production of verse narrative in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By evoking the transition from orally-produced epic poetry to learned adaptations of Latin and Celtic narratives in the French vernacular, it attempts to articulate the profound impact of the Rose upon the establishment of the figure widely known as the clerkly narrator. The first author, Guillaume de Lorris, definitively developed the figure of the first-person narrator/lover figure, while the second, Jean de Meun, used the fictional ambiguity of dual authorship to create a paradigm of the deceptive narrator that will have a rich afterlife in late medieval literature.

Troubadours, Romancing the Rose, and the Rebirth of Naturalism

As Chapter Eleven explains, sex in plants couldn’t be considered until the anathematization of sex in scholarly discourse ended and naturalism in illustrated herbals revived, and these changes occurred following the influx of Greek learning during the “Twelfth Century Awakening.” The poetry of the troubadours and the natural theology of St. Francis laid the foundation for the revival of naturalism. Scholars like Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus reintroduced naturalism in herbals, and artists like Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Weiditz pioneered realistic plant portraits. In the first general treatise on botany since Theophratus (De Natura Stirpium [1536]), Jean Ruel adopted such terms as “conception” “parturition” “gestation” and “fetus.” To account for conception, he explained that the wind acts as husband to the plant: “after the wind Flavonius begins to blow … all vegetal things are married to it.” This “plants-as-female” paradigm was poeticized in “The Romance of the Rose.”