Interpretation of the motif of female puppetry: From myth to postmodernism
Authors:   Aktobe Regional University, Spivak-Lavrov Irina 
Published: December 2024

The article deals with the interpretation of female puppetry in the context of various historical periods from mythology to postmodernism. Ritual and archetypal origins of the culturological phenomenon of the puppet are determined. The image of a woman-puppet and a puppet-woman correlates with many related motifs: a revived statue, duality, transformation, inner emptiness, and static characters. Various interpretations of the motif of puppetry in the aspect of romantic, expressionistic, postmodern aesthetics in Russian and European literature are explored. In romantic literature (“The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann), the mechanical puppet Olympia is associated and subordinated to the odious figures of its creators and puppeteers: Professor Spalanzani and lawyer Coppelius. The images of scientists, inventors in the context of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are associated with infernal dark forces, this theme also dominates in Goethe’s poem Faust, Dr. Faust is practically inseparable from Mephistopheles and forms a single whole with him. Thus, the idea of pure reason, devoid of faith, ascending not to divine truth, but to the opposite demonic principle, is accumulated. One of the interpretations of the motif of a woman-puppet in the literature of romanticism is the humanization, anthropomorphism of puppet characters, when they are endowed with a soul and high human qualities (H.C. Andersen’s “The Tin Soldier”). In the twentieth century, in the literature of modernism and postmodernism, this interpretation of the motif of puppetry is inverted. Now a person is likened to a puppet, transforming into a mannequin and a robot. In the modernist literature of the first third of the 20th century, the motif of female puppetry was extremely popular, the article considers the heroines of V. Wolf’s short stories, female images in K. Vaginov’s novel Bambochada, Valya (the novel Envy) and Natasha
(“The Cherry Pit”) from the works of Yu. Olesha, as well as the female characters of V. Nabokov’s novels King, Queen, Jack and Invitation to a Beheading. In Invitation to a Beheading, the world of vulgarity turns into a totalitarian apparatus, in which any manifestation of “otherness” is not possible. Cincinnatus should be executed only because he does not fit the molds and patterns of the puppet world. The images of puppets, marionettes, and puppeteers become markers of the dehumanization of the art of the 20th century. A puppet is always perceived as a fake person, a copy, a simulacrum, so one of the main related motifs of puppetry is the motif of duality. The image of a person possessed by a “double” is transformed into an “automatic machine”, into a living dead person. In the context of modernism, more precisely expressionism, in the texts of V. Wolf, Yu. Olesha and K. Vaginov, female images are likened to puppets or things, they are “puppet-like”, but the human component is still present. In the process of creating images, comparisons and various types of tropes play an important role. In the postmodern novels of V. Nabokov, the characters completely transform into puppets, the ambiguity disappears, but the absurdity of the images appears.