The Inter-Imperial Dowry Plot: Modernist Naturalism in the Periphery of European Empires

Taking Liviu Rebreanu's novel Ion (1920) as an example of a modernist text produced in the periphery of European empires, the essay proposes a typology of inter-imperial modes of gendered silence. Set in a small village in Transylvania, on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian empire, itself on the semi-periphery of the modern world-system, the novel dramatizes Transylvanian Romanians' claim to a modernity understood as a struggle for land redistribution and language rights. The essay traces a series of inter-related forms of modernist silence as they pertain to the portrait of an ostensibly “traditional” female character. We argue that this portrait is a symptom of an inter-imperial predicament that sidelines projects of gender emancipation in the service of prioritizing anti-imperial struggles. Women's complaints against this predicament register as whims.