Women’s Socio-Communicative Experience in Traditional Culture

as Depicted in Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes by Guzel Yakhina and The New Year Sacrifice by Lu Xun

Abstract

This article studies the sacral communicative practices of women living in traditional culture as they are depicted in the novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes by the contemporary Russian author Guzel Yakhina and the short story The New Year Sacrifice by the 20^th century Chinese writer Lu Xun. We show that these writers use their main female characters to depict the universal problems of the lifeworld of the “little person” in traditional society and examine how religious beliefs, common prejudices and the public opinion they shape control women’s behaviour in traditional society and how sacral notions and images influence the way women perceive their surrounding social and natural worlds. We trace how ethno-cultural values and ethno-psychological attitudes condition sacral communicative practices. A comparative study of the two literary works allows us to identify the main forms of interaction between traditional women and different segments of the sacral space. We examine the types of interaction of traditional women with the world of gods and spirits (religious-spiritual, animist and magical) and the distinctive features of the sacralization of subjects of social communication. The animist beliefs predominating in the worldview of the main female characters Zuleikha and Xiang-Lin are based on ancient mythologies and pagan values that respectively mark traditional Tatar and Chinese ethnic cultures. Sacral and religious beliefs are projections of social relations, while images, myths and symbols of the sacral space are projected onto the sphere of everyday life. The communicative practices of women described by Guzel Yakhina and Lu Xun are studied in their connection with elements of the everyday lifeworld and the sphere of spiritual and religious beliefs.