Colours and Years [Színek és évek]
KAFFKA Margit
The novel Colours and Years describes the predicament of the modern woman from a different perspective. While the young women in The Ant Heap were exploring the possibilities and avenues just opening up for developing their social and female identities, this novel concerns a fifty-year-old woman, Magda Porteleky. For Magda, just like for any other woman in Europe in the early 1900s, turning fifty represents closure and solitude, the sense of an endgame, at best only a moment to calculate all her missed opportunities. The following quotation illustrates the views of Magda’s supposedly enlightened stepfather on the role of women, against which Magda and her entire generation had to define themseves: ‘The women of the species will always remain inferior; things can’t be otherwise. After all, two thirds of their life-span are occupied with unconscious animal cares and duties that go with the maintenance of humankind, and insticts guide their intellect. If they liberate themselves from these, they become wayward mongrel figures who cannot find their own place. Woman is a blind tool in the hands of nature. .. All the philosphers, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer agree about that. Only the sick culture of today struggles to play with the idea that women should be taken seriously.’ 212
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