On the other hand, regardless of the (already dubious) quality of such intellectual or artistic work, leaving the family circle and entering the public eye entails both objectification and exposure: the woman's actions, effect, and judgment are beyond her control, and she may receive a kind of attention and gaze that can have devastating existential and moral consequences – at least that is what the word danger that keeps popping up in Gyulai's review suggests. 3 To Gyulai, women were by nature incapable of deep thinking and sustained intellectual work, thus it was unnecessary for them to enter these fields. 2 According to the premise of Gyulai's review, although the intellectual abilities of women are equal to those of men, they are of a different nature, therefore “no matter how great a talent a woman may have, neither in affairs of the state, nor in literature, nor in science can she rise to the same rank as a man of similar talent” ( Gyulai 1908:274). Pál Gyulai, the most influential Hungarian literary critic of the second half of the 19th century published in 1858 a highly polemical paper on women writers in response to Flóra Majthényi's book of poems 1 and Júlia Szendrey's translations of Andersen's tales. Women and tales: a literary proposal from 1858 Conversely, I look at how the notion of the tale being a gendered genre, a form of expression particularly suitable for women developed in 19th-century Hungarian culture, and why it was the tale that became one of the suggested/authorized literary genres for (middle-class) women who aspired to be literary authors. The gendered aspects of the genre of tale can be examined through the possible actors, that is, along the lines of characters, storytellers, collectors, editors, writers, illustrators, researchers, or audiences here, I focus on the tellers, collectors, and writers of tales. In this paper, I try to explore whether, in light of folklore studies, the tale was a women's genre in 19th-century Hungarian society. The article investigates how the tale became a gendered genre, and presents women tellers, collectors and writers of tales as well as the diverse ways they were represented in Hungarian culture in the 19th century. Yet, he noted that in case women still insist on becoming literary authors, they should turn only to certain genres, such as tales. In 1858 a leading Hungarian literary critic as well as collector and editor of folk poetry started a debate about the possible literary career of women, arguing that literature and other forms of public artistic activity are fields that should not be open to women as it may cause serious moral and social problems.
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