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I mana [Mother]

written by Alexandra Papadopoulou, fl. 1902, in Patris Voukourestiou, November 21-December 3, 1899, p. NA (1899, originally published 1899), 3 page(s)

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TITLE: Mother, 1899. DESCRIPTION: Alexandra Papadopoulou (1867-1905) wrote short stories and worked as a teacher. During her residence in Bucharest, Romania, from 1899 to 1900 and 1902, she wrote a series of "patriotic" short stories, aiming to strengthen the national consciousness of the Greeks living in Romania. The stories reflected the intense nationalist conflicts in the Balkans as well as the educational discourse among teachers of this pe... TITLE: Mother, 1899. DESCRIPTION: Alexandra Papadopoulou (1867-1905) wrote short stories and worked as a teacher. During her residence in Bucharest, Romania, from 1899 to 1900 and 1902, she wrote a series of "patriotic" short stories, aiming to strengthen the national consciousness of the Greeks living in Romania. The stories reflected the intense nationalist conflicts in the Balkans as well as the educational discourse among teachers of this period. Both themes were apparent in the work of Papadopoulou, especially after 1896. Several of these short stories were published in the newspaper, Patris Voukourestiou, a Greek-language paper edited in Bucharest. In this story, Papadopoulou portrayed Romanian women with negative characteristics, including questionable ethics and behavior as well as a judgmental attitude toward Greek culture. Her point was to demonstrate the dangers of mixed-nationality marriages, which threatened to overshadow and eliminate "Greekness." Τhe story's main character was a Greek widow from Epirus, a geographical region in Greece with large numbers of men migrating to Central Europe. The widow dedicated herself to raising her son. For his own good, she sent him abroad to be educated and to gain prosperity. He went to Romania, where he became wealthy. Over his mother's objections, he married a woman of Wallachia, Romania. The son, concerned with his mother's age, encouraged his mother to stop living alone in the Greek village and to move to Romania to spend more time with her grandchildren. The mother acquiesced. The son owned a large house, kept servants, and employed both a nanny and a French pedagogue to see to his children. Papadopoulou used the household to exemplify the superiority of Greek culture and the dangers of cross-cultural marriages: The son's wife treated the servants with brutality; the wife demonstrated a lack of respect toward the husband and his mother; the French pedagogue refused to teach the children the Greek language. The wife also "hated the Greek language," and eventually managed to force her mother-in-law to return to Greece. Before leaving, the mother pointed out to her son that his children should not be left ignorant of their father's language and culture, though she knew that his wife limited his options. The mother returned to Epirus, sad that her son "sacrificed, for a foreign woman, everything: language, motherland, mother." This story is one of four included in Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires. KEYWORDS: the Balkans; childrearing; children; cross-culture; family; fiction; Greece; Greek–Romanian rivalry; language; marriage; migration; mother; motherhood; national consciousness; nationalism; Ottoman Empire; patriotism; pedagogy; Alexandra Papadopoulou; Romania; short story; widow; widowhood; wife; wifehood; womanhood Show more Show less

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I mana [Mother]

I mana [Mother]