Numerous literary representations of temptation, seduction and the abduction of women
in world literature from Antiquity to the present are expressed in the form of dialogue
conducted according to the logic of deception and violence. The perpetrators of seduction and
violence are men of various classes and roles. In the Slovene folk tradition we disclose some
literary representations of type of the deceiver and of woman as the victim of an abductor,
which we can also find in the folklore tradition and artistic literature throughout the world.
Since the motif of Fair Vida comes from the common Mediterranean tradition, Slovene and
Mediterranean variants manifest intertextual interactions both in the motifs and symbols of
seduction and violence. The abductor appears both in Slovene and Mediterranean folk
variants also as a symbol of evil and remains unpunished. While in his ballad Fair Vida
(1832), Prešeren focuses predominantly on the eponymous heroine as a victim of the seducer,
Jurčič, in their literary recreations of this theme Vošnjak and Kranjec place greater emphasis
on the figure of the seducer. While in Jurčič’s novel the deceived Vida’s husband avenges
himself on the seducer, in Vošnjak and Kranjec he is punished for his deception by the abused
women.
|
