writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

In the first part, Parren speaks more of her visit in Spetses, the atmosphere and the history of the
island and its inhabitants. The actual information on Altamura is limited and obscure. The picture,
however, Parren already draws is quite telling. From the very start, Eleni is placed next to Laskarina
Bouboulina, the heroine of the Greek War of Independence and naval commander who lived in
Spetses at the beginning of the 19 th century. The two women are described as an extraordinary pair
of courage, determination and sacrifice. Both women in Parren’s narration, in their own way, rebel
against oppression. Therefore, they are supreme examples of female bravery even though at the
end, their hopes and aspirations are brutally defeated.
In the second article, Parren states that her intention, when she visited Eleni, was to pull her out
of the seclusion of the family home, where she had, more or less, imprisoned herself. For Parren, the
feminist journalist, Eleni could have been a rare but significant model for young women. She was
educated, she pursued her dream at all costs, she practiced painting and she gained considerable
respect for her work. But the woman she met, was, in Parren’s own words, “an enigma”. 4 In her
portrayal, Parren briefly reports important episodes of Boukouri’s life. She insists on her father’s role
during the war, on her drive to become an artist, which forced her to dress as a man, on her
employment when she returned in Greece. But she also speaks of how the unbearable pain and
distress turned her to this weird old woman who performs night rituals to mourn her dead children
and makes everyone on her island wonder and gossip about her interest in witchcraft.
Parren counts Eleni amongst “the martyrs of art”, for her extraordinary abilities, thorny life, and
hard destiny and stirs up, for her readers, sentiments of compassion and sympathy. 5 Even from her
early years in school, according to her account, Eleni was punished by her teacher for sketching all
night; she had to struggle hard to get her education in a foreign land, she experienced rejection and
misery as a wife and mother. Parren thus sanctifies the daughter, wife and mother by stressing her
family roles as inscribed in gender stereotypes of a patriarchal society. But she also appears to insist
on Eleni’s commitment to art and work, elements ascribed to her own feminist agenda. Kallirhoi
Parren, as the leading female intellectual in the women’s emancipation movement in Greece,
strongly supported in her writings and newspaper the rights of women to education and paid
employment. 6 Eleni’s early achievements were clearly attuned to Parren’s objectives and feminist
discourse but the allusions on Altamura’s distraught behavior in Spetses enfeebled the icon of the
uncompromising and mighty artist Parren was looking for.
At the very beginning of the 20 th century, Kallirhoi Parren published a trilogy of novels called The
Books of Dawn (Ta vivlia tis avgis). The titles of the three parts are noteworthy: The Emancipated (I
cheirafetimeni, 1900), The Witch (I magissa, 1901) and The New Contract (To neon symvolaion, 1901‐
3). 7 In 1907 the novel was turned into a play called The New Woman (I nea gynaika). The main
character in The Emancipated, as well as in the play, is Maria Myrtou, a woman who left Athens,
moved to Italy to study art and then traveled to Istanbul where she earned her living out of her
paintings. Although Maria Myrtou is not Eleni Boukoura, she shares key elements with her: the
determination to study, the dedication to art, the courage to transgress the boundaries of female
space. There are also some minor references in the novel which can also be read in relation to
certain emblematic details of Eleni’s life: the comment, for instance, that Maria never cut her hair (in
contrast to what Eleni did in Italy) or when Maria, in the first part, prepares a portrait of her
husband’s grandmother — the description and sentiments Parren accredited to the event brings to
mind Eleni’s illustrious painting of her mother. 8 Maria, moreover, falls in love and marries a young
man who will soon betray her. But Maria, unlike Eleni, represents the future not the past and
exemplifies the New Woman of the 20 th century. From this point onwards, Parren’s iconic figure of
female emancipation will follow a completely different path and she will totally break with Eleni’s
real life. Loyal to her principles of truth and justice and showing a great deal of feminist awareness,
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