Her Story Is Like a Weed: Censoring the Vulnerability in Women’s Writing

The aim of this article is to broaden feminist scholarship on women writers by exploring the relationship between women’s writing, intimacy, vulnerability and censorship, and the rediscovering and canonization of women’s writing in Latvian literary culture. In the early twentieth century, intimacy and motherhood as a source of vulnerability in women’s writing was closely linked to censorship, which revealed enduring patriarchal attitudes. The disclosure of vulnerability associated with a woman’s embodied experience was “a weed” which critics wanted to weed out. Focusing on the example of Anna Rūmane-Ķeniņa (1877–1950), whose literary texts create experimental journeys into intimacy, exploring the inner states of female characters, family relationships and particular situations (death and grief that bring her characters into intimate contact with others and change the shape and experience of intimacies), the article examines the censoring attitude of literary criticism towards the openness with which women’s experiences are discussed.