IVO ANDRIĆ’S THE MISS: THE PROBLEM OF FOCALIZATION AND OF HAVING ACCESS TO THE “SUBJECT-POSITION

Abstract

The main female character in Ivo Andric’s novel The Miss is one of the very rare female figures in predominantly patriariariarchal history of Serbian literature which has got the access to the subject position as the position of acactive and responsible agency in а wider historical process. This paper examines the nararrative strategy of representation, in Andric’s novel, of this exceptional culultural and historical situation. The third-person-singular, male narator suggests that the exceptional access of the only offspring of Radakovic family, i.e. the daughter, Rajka Radakovic, to the subject position, is the case in which both the common law of patriarchal community (according to which all property, including the symbolic functions as well, should be inherited along the male line, “from father to son”, never “from father to daughter”) and also the security of existing patriarchal order, are threatened. This results in a public resistanance to her; a view that The Miss is not eligible for the subject position because she is irresponsible and unaware of her real duties in the wider social and historical context. Therefore the access to the subject position turns out to be fatal for the main female character of Ivo Andric’s novel The Miss, since she either didn’t ununderstand her role properly or she found herself in the place which – according to the distribution of gender and symbolic roles in patriarchal community – was not hers and was even forbidden for her as a female. In this way, the paradigmatic situation of the patriarchal symbolic order is confirmed once again: the female figure has been always excluded from official patriarchal history, being either sentenced to anonymity or to monstrouous metamorphoses throuough which this figure is tranansformed into a hybridized gender-mutant with horrifying ethics. Or, as it is successfully demonstrated/narrated in Andric’s novel The Miss, the female figure is usually excluded from official historical narratives of patriaiarchal community by being sentenced to both the anonymity and the cruel public denouncement.