THE STAND IN THE IDEAL
In order to elude something from exposure to critical attacks it is enough to put it in the myth, in the ideal. Ideals cannot be contradicted, corrected, completed or reproached. Ideals are beyond good and evil. However, it is too easily forgotten that they are also beyond reality (it comes to my mind something like "The Eternal Romania" or "The Perfect Romania"). The two main topics of Alexandrine Cantacuzino's discourses, the woman and the nation, which make together an associative notch often met with inter-war feminist discourse, are contextualised in a world of essences, they are regarding absolute, metaphysical values. For this feminist, as for her other contemporaries, the war was the fundamental experience of life, the chronological landmark, imposing, capable to set up in the discontinuity a "before" and an "after", because it concentrated the power of a deep and irreversible transformation and it was on the point of becoming the origin of a new historical development. "A new world raises from the bleeding mankind" was convinced Alexandrine even since 1917(Cantacuzino, 1928:7).
In what follows, we will refer to this work only by pointing the page. The war takes the aspect of a huge collective refunding sacrifice. The new world that Alexandrine speaks about is not a revolution of the old world, not even a modernization of it. She never uses the term "modernization" or "revolution". But no, we are wrong about this, she speaks about a "moral revolution", but in this context the term has a conservative meaning: in her way of thinking, as we understand it, the new world is a reprogrammation of the same symbolical frame of the world, in the conditions of the perfection of a new beginning. The war interrupted the history all of the sudden, providing the opportunity of a new genesis of the same character. After the war it is not the society that transforms itself, but the nation that regenerates returning to its ordinary virtues, fulfilling in this way its ideal identity; and this is because perfection is at its origin, but the only one that keeps its characteristics is the soul. "His kind soul and his delicate Latin nature"(Cantacuzino, 1928:4), says the author in 1923 referring to the Romanian. "I saw- amazingly confesses Alexandrine Cantacuzino- the soul of the nation always faithful to its past, in the middle of difficulties, of temptations and of plots (37). "Nowhere else but here, a nation has been kept alive only by its faith"(28), the only thing left to be done being a "moral and religious waking up" (our underline)(loc. cit.), a fight for "moral, social and familial rebirth (our underline)" (73). Uncheckable, but precious soul qualities and fairy-tale characteristics are also attributed to the nation: "our kind and forgiving nation, but healthy and invincible in fights", "a country of Prince Charming and Princesses"(19) etc. This nation, which is a "big Romanian family"(ibidem, 80), fulfilling the condition of homogeneity and of organic unity, is projected by a very susceptible and excessively passionate patriotism on the huge screen of eternity in a symbolic and immortal country. The word country inspires her for the following exhortation: " let the word Country warm our hearts, light our minds in a blessing prayer (...); the symbolic word Country which links up the generations, unites the ancestors with their grandsons and creates eternity on Earth" (ibidem, 31).
"In brief, the purpose of nationalism is just this- the construction of increated goods. This is what nationalism does: it builds eternity" said Mr. Sorin Antohi in a conference. We confirm him in this case, too. It is a serious matter and requires an exclusivist and intangible system, having the sensibility of a religious ceremonial: "We strongly affirm, that the wide world hear us: nobody dares to touch the sacred patriotism of this nation" (ibidem, 65). The woman as a theme of her discourse is discussed in the same way the nation is. The Romanian Mother is kind, devout, honest, hardworking, humble. It means she is just like the nation which she "builds with her own blood, with her heart, with her tears, with her wishes and her hopes" (121). She is strongly taking part to its perpetuation, assuring with her own body its biological and cultural community. In addition, that is because she is not only everyone's mother, but she also keeps the tradition. The nation finds its origin in the woman; the mother is fulfilled through the nation. Here is a simple, obvious fact, that being once proved, increases incomparably the importance of woman.
This being settled, there is enough justification and lack of humor to say that "the Romanian woman has to give a new directive to the Romanian society. She, who doesn't have any political rights, not recognizing either of this kind of passion, can easier accumulate knowledge and make a restoration of the public life"(262) or "the woman was, still is and will be the greatest social element which raises or sinks the nation (16). And that is not all. If today the woman is a minority, the Romanian nation was also a minority of history. So there are similarities between them, there are coincidences that spontaneously offer them for comparison. In the same way, if the nation "is born to be an enlightened apostle of justice, love and fraternization" (138), the Romanian woman has, in turn, the duty to give a new "ethical directive" to the Romanian society.
Finally, in the same way that patriotism seemed to be more like a religious feeling and induced a mystic of the nation, feminism turns the woman into the subject of a suis generis soteriology. The woman has to be the savior of the nation, each woman being a hero who ignores herself and waits only for an impulse in order to begin her actions. In addition, there it is: "Women of my country, get up and get yourselves firmly in the holly fight for the defense of the Romanian life, for the protection of our children, for the development of the Romanian Country" (118). Because the woman is an endless moral source, she has at her disposal an unused vitality, an uncorrupted soul. She brings from the depths of the society and of history a contagious health, an irresistible purity, and an incorruptible morality. "Morality in the public life, this is the gospel that the woman must bring as an welcome gift" (Cantacuzino, 1929:4). Feminism would be a sort of religion that equals the women with the priests. She even writes: "The priest, with the cross in his hand, is the apostle of faith, the one wonder-maker and the woman is the apostle of love, the creator of the human soul" (145).
The praise of the woman and the praise of the nation are counterpointly developing. Such a brave and special nation, "a young, strong and healthy people, who's life bursts out at every step in the idealism's rhythms" (28) can have only an adequate mother, who's soul latently contains "treasures of heroism" (84) and who is "a queen among women" (144).
EVIL'S IDENTIFICATION
It has been unnecessarily proved that the nationalism is xenophobic. Xenophobia is, we could say, a logic result of nationalism. If we are the best, it is obvious that everybody else can be only worse, if not worst. Nationalists cannot go on with their lives because of their ancestors. Strangers and what comes from them are the evil insinuated into the narcissistic perfection, meaning us, they strongly affirm. Often, the "danger of strangers must be written as "fast modernization" and the nationalistic lamentation must be understood as a conservative reaction. It is known that in the nationalistic discourse the stranger is used as a metonymy of modernization.
Here is Alexandrine Cantacuzino's point of view in a paragraph that could be a part of no matter how selective anthology of nationalistic literature: "Wide materialism is spreading and the people of great ideals, which kept so many centuries, under so many foreign masteries, under so many invaders, its whole soul, the 1000 years old nation which fought and suffered everything, but didn't give up its faith, its holly law, nor its tender language, this nation which avoided any interference with strangers, even when living together in the same places with other peoples, watching round the consciousness, in such a way that not even love was possible between teenagers, this nation [who] preserved for us so many centuries all of our ethnic character, this idealist to the back-bone nation, a nation of idealistic shepherds and of brave ploughmen, suddenly changes, after proving to the world its braveness and its wisdom. From poor, but honest, it becomes lucre lover, giddy by the power of money, tempted by everything"(20).
Even under Alexandrine's carefully watching the "most intuitive nation of all the nations" is invaded by a "cannibalistic mentality, which destroys everything round it, which doesn't respect anything and which manages to turn our country into a great fair, where even the conscience could be sold at auction" (24).
The woman herself, like the nation, is confronted with her own reality which, of course, is auctioned and refused: "Not with the doll-woman, or with the object-of-pleasure-woman, or with the object of luxury-woman will we step forward in the new world that rises, where everybody must earn by work one's right to life" (86). Cantacuzino has no mercy for fancy, parasitical, infantile woman: "(...) it is our duty to strengthen this family life, to give higher preoccupations to the woman, to call her to share all the responsibilities, to give up the doll-woman, the luxury-object- woman, the eternal child- woman who thinks she can live only from the man's work, the insignificant woman who can not figure out what are the real needs of life" (Cantacuzino, 1924, p. 5). Not only that the woman and the nation, they are both liable to the same vices, but they also have a common enemy. It is "the strangerism" that came in surreptitiously and touched the gentle soul of the woman, getting her out of her home for useless parties."
We must understand very clearly. Strangers are all those who do not belong to the same nation as we do, those who are out of "the family". Nationalism impossibly enlarges our family and teaches us towards this worship of a monstrous Mother Country - a Mother- Country to whom the ethnic minorities are as stepchildren: always suspected and always denied. Anyway, Alexandrine Cantacuzino has a constant guilty presumption regarding them. The ethnic minorities "organize themselves surreptitiously" settle in the Romanian country, "the whole mankind", defame the Romanians presenting them as some kind of savages, "as some evildoers, who commit injustice on purpose". These minorities have "souls to make war against us and to deeply offend our national dignity, they tread on "wrong paths" and they "fight hiddenly" (279).
THE WAYS OF SALVATION
However, how did the nation and its quintessence, the mother weman, protect themselves from these dangers, how can they save themselves from becoming estranged and from degradation, what should they become? In order to paraphrase a welknown beautiful saying, they must become what they already are. This is exactly what the nationalist project propose to itself, when there is not a political strategy and seldom there is not: to make the nation emphasize its own identity, the way this one results from a mythologisant reading of tradition. The solution is metaphysical and Utopian, if not deeply ideological. But that is why it was so easily requested and embraced. It does not ask us to do anything else but to take us in an imaginary world, in which we are the best because we are the first, we are the eldest, the most distinguished, the bravest, etc. And in which we get ahead of any competition as in a publicity. The feminism in its cantacuzin version has this prototype. Alexandrine Cantacuzino oscillates according to the needs of the argument, between the ever woman, the mother, the woman whose progress moves inevitably towards the firm woman, refusing the compromises of consciousness, the moral vector, the authentic Romanian woman, the woman in the man's half-light got accustomed to frivolity, who hesitates to assume her major role to which her mythical qualities predestinate her. This feminism tries to make no difference between the everyday-woman and the mythical woman. It stimulates the annulment of the artificial difference, between the ideal and the real, setting free the essence inside her.
We saw before that the temptation of the easy living and of money, the passion, the hate, the wickedness, and the lie are the weaknesses both for the woman and for the nation.
Under these circumstances, the procedures of decontamination are the same: work, faith, education, morality. The agencies especially involved in this activity concerning the woman's and the nation's resurrection can only be the Church, the School and the Family, "the three major factors of the social life" (60).
"The Family, the Church and the School- in the author's point of view- are to wake up and to give advice together to the lost consciences by rolling the ideas and by imposing the principles" (15).
Exceptionally, the woman is responsible for the present and for the future of the nation: "The woman, the wife, the mother are to closely watch over this huge social process, in order that it develop in the silence of the mature nations and in the wisdom that we all owe to those who sacrificed themselves in order to give us the chance to live in the times of the unification of the Romanian soul"(262).
Alexandrine Cantacuzino overestimates herself and counts on the ability of the traditional agencies to administrate the new social realities after 1918. To her, for example, The Orthodox Church "was, is and will still be the Mother Church who wants to protect her children" (72), while the ancient orthodox law should remain " the prevailing law of the Romanian Unitary State" (65). The salvation was collective. There were not the individuals who where redeemed by orthodoxy, but the whole nation. In its turn, feminism had the same role as orthodoxism. The cultural conditions and Alexandrine Cantacuzino's training were in such a way structured that one couldn't have found a better role for the woman but to take care of the public soul, the Romanian soul.
Paradoxically, but naturally for a nationalistic way of thinking, the individual is sacrificed for the good of the community. Where the salvation is collective, the individual does not matter anymore. <<"Everything for the country, nothing for us", this should be the slogan of our life>> (10) the students from The Literature University were advised in 1919, on the occasion of the opening of the first student's hostel.
Nationalism has a great advantage. It always finds a scapegoat outside the community.
MP
english translation by Florentina Pruteanu