Download Stoica Briena – Do not Kill the Women!

Do not kill the women! A feminist
cry from stifled Romania
Autor: Briena Stoica
Univ. Lucian Blaga, Sibiu
Doctorand an II, bursier POSDRU
Prof. coord. – Prof. Univ. Dr. Ghe. Manolache
Contact: [email protected]

Under the influence of feminist literary
theories, literature written by women
can be treated as a separate category if
we are to take into account the various
motifs, themes, narrative strategies
and perspectives which bear a feminine
print. Despite the diversity of the
literary genres or their realist or
modernist mode of narration, typical
tendencies of feminist literature have
been identified.

The research I am currently conducting concerns six
women authors that were active in the literary field
during communism. A special consideration deserves
Maria Luiza Cristescu, a well-known literary critic but
whose prolific literary production has been overlooked
in recent years. The major focus of her novels is
mapping the power structures present not only at the
political level but in the individual interactions as well.
The feminist slogan of the 70s the personal is the
political informs her novels, preeminently the one that
appeared in 1970- Do not kill the women! Its rather
pathetic tone is set on the background of the so-called
socialist emancipation of women. Although the
communist vision of the new role of women transpires
from her novel, it is certainly in a parodic way.

With Do not kill the women!, Maria Luiza
Cristescu proves that feminine literature is
not merely an artificial construct, the writer
herself proving to be an example of this type
of literature. Instinct, candor,
sentimentalism, subjectivity, femininity, all
these traits, considered by the critic Eugen
Lovinescu as specific to feminine literature
can be detected in this novel. Nevertheless,
the lucid perspective of Raluca on her own
femininity, reminds of Freud and his
malicious commentary that being a woman
implies a guilt that has to be atoned for.

The novel is a feminist manifesto which
deconstructs prejudice, illuminates new
angles of femininity, as well as conveying
a revised identity of women. The gallery
of women portraits who orbit around
Raluca, includes women who follow the
prescriptions of the society in which they
live, conforming to their roles in such
degree that they become caricatures.

The grand narrative of the time, in Lyotard’s words,
describes women as forever liberated and the feminist
claims of freedom and equality with men seem to have
found their ultimate response in the socialist vision of the
role and status of women. Although Marx does not bring
forward a clear theory deliniating the new woman, Engels
follows his line and claims that the emancipation of
women is possible only when class struggle is surpassed.
Thus, in the socialist vision, once the woman is given the
possiblity to earn her living, the barriers that kept her in a
position of inferiority to men is finally removed. The
communist reality was nevertheless very different. Women
were now burdened with new social roles, without a
meaningful transformation of the patriarchal roles assigned
to them previously. The woman worker and truck driver,
the communist illegalist, the active political women were
emasculated images that did not reflect the change in the
society’s perception of roles but they merely juxtaposed
forecefully new social attributes.

The novel of Maria Luiza Cristescu does not reflect
the communist image of the woman liberated by
her social role. On the contrary it subverts this
very ideological construct rendering it as fallacious.
The main character, Raluca, destabilizes
conventions by assuming voluntarily the role of a
non-conformist in the way she chases happiness.
Raluca is a free woman, a new liberated,
independent woman. She earns her own living,
she lives by herself in an apartment, there are no
tangles with family life, presenting herself, albeit at
a superficial level, as the perfect model of socialist
emancipation. This paradigme is demistified by her
relation with her lovers, which holds the key of the
whole novel.

Raluca is not married and her pursuit of happiness in
fulfilling relationships with men, proves to be illusory.
She has a one night adventure with a man but not
because she is carried away by feelings, on the
contrary she is extremely lucid and plays a role to
verify if such an experience can indeed be liberating.
She finds that reason interposes between her and the
experience she is living, ruining the phantasma that
momentary relations can lead to happiness. In the
meantime she is involved in what seems a perfect
relation with Radu. His image of what a woman should
be is well defined and the whole set of patriarchal
values and prejudices are meant to entangle and
suffocate her. Thus, after considering the fake role of
the submissive, beautiful, silent puppet, who only
serves to boost the man’s ego, attributed to her, she
decides to break free from Radu. She does so but not
before she shreds to pieces his prefabricated, artificial
representation of what she is supposed to be.

Raluca chooses now another relation whose sinous
development constitutes the subject of the novel. It is
in this relationship with Marcel that she finds true
freedom, as roles are reversed and she can now play
the part of the rational, lucid, powerful, domineering
figure. Marcel assumes the mask of a poetic, instable,
irrational man, professing such sensitivity that he
verges on collapse were Raluca to abandon him. He
clings to her as a way of escaping from himself and
his domineering mother. If Raluca seems entitled to
dictate the rules of the game because of her
aforementioned rationality, in the end of the novel the
masks fall and we find that she has been the
vulnerable one all along and that Marcel was the one
in power the whole time. Raluca is abandoned by him
in favor of a frivolish, spiritless girl who nurtures his
paternal instincts. In the end Raluca’s pretension of
detaining control is demistified and her presumptious
assumptions make her the victim figure in the end.


Maria Luiza Cristescu’s play with her characters
aims at deconstructing the representantion of a
liberated woman due to her financial
independence. The tangles of a patriarchal,
obsolete mentality strangle her illusions of
freedom and free will and defeat her.
Considering the fact that in the communist
period, feminism as a movement was
completed annihilated, and the impact of the
second wave of feminism was hindered, we
appreciate the novel of Maria-Luiza Cristescu as
being revolutionary in its fresh, non-cliched
perspective as it questions radically the
condition of women.