Modernismul queer în circulație: omologii și divergențe între Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu și Virginia Woolf

If the relationship between Romanian and world literature is becoming an increasingly present topic in current research, due to materialist-based theoretical tools of Immanuel Wallerstein and further the WReC research, the role played by queer studies in understanding networks of cultural circulation often remains neglected. An example of this is the notion of queer modernism, which could prove to be an indispensable tool in mapping the cultural relations of exchange between Romanian literature and that of Western centers in the first half of the 20th century. Feminist and queer modernist studies show that the subject of queerness, centered especially around the crisis of gender definition, constitutes one of the major forces in the development and circulation of literary modernism, where the expansion language’s limits in prose is underpinned, in subtext, by the attempt to transgress the cisheteronormativity of the era. Starting from Eugen Lovinescu’s attempt to establish a structural homology between Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu and Marcel Proust, I use the concept of queer modernism to propose, rather, an ideological homology between the Romanian writer and Virginia Woolf. Confronting two contexts marked, on the one hand, by similar patriarchal conditions and, on the other hand, by important local specificities, I aim to trace what kind of response to these conditions each author’s prose embodies, directing my attention to strategies of encoding queerness in their novels. I will observe the main point of divergence in the two authors’ representations of queerness: where Virginia Woolf conceives of a character who openly disrupts the stability of the dichotomous sex-gender system in Orlando, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu almost opaquely encodes the lesbian relationship between two female characters in Drumul ascuns [The Hidden Road]. I will argue that one of the impediments to the wider circulation of queer modernism in Romanian literature is the imperative to construct a legitimate national culture, incompatible with elements that question traditional values, especially in the post-1918 political context. The comparison with Virginia Woolf will function as a means to delineate the diverse manifestations of queerness within various contexts related to modernity, conceived as a global phenomenon.