In Search of Matriarchal Utopia in Contemporary Serbian Writing

Abstract

In The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987), Eisler asserts that the Neolithic societies used to follow a “partnership model” of civilization that rested on egalitarian and matrifocal values. However, over time, it gave way to the current “dominator model” that focuses on masculine ideals of superiority and dominance. It is her genuine belief that a historical transition from earlier idyllic to more aggressive cultures can be reversed in order for the matriarchal society to be constructed again in the future. This theoretical framework will be employed in the comparative analysis of two modern Serbian books of prose that seek a vision of feminist utopia at the end of the 20th century: Novaković’s The Danube’s Apocrypha (1996) and Šalgo’s The Road to Birobidzhan (1997). Novaković‘s two novellas joined in one book describe an uprising threatening to overturn the social order in near future and has a female narrator who shares with the reader the testimony concerning a secret community of women, which is “silently awaiting” its Goddess to appear. Šalgo’s posthumous, unfinished novel partly reads as a proclamation of a new religious doctrine about the female Christ figure named Messiana and her ardent acolytes who spread the word about a hideaway which would serve to rescue the vulnerable and the endangered. Though the original intention of both Šalgo and Novaković was to support the destitute and unprotected women of the Balkans by building the characters and the plots reminiscent of their plight, their writing turned into an unparalleled quest for the continent of the female, a very particular Utopia. The following analysis will also be based on the analytical approaches of Freud, Jung, Frye, Fromm and Hutcheon.