page_title: Kir Ianulea
section_title: Kir Ianulea and female empowerment
hierarchical_section_title: Kir Ianulea / Style, themes and symbolism / Kir Ianulea and female empowerment
caption_attribution_description: Română: Mihail Töpler - Maria Dudescu / Logofeteasa Maria Dudescu, ulei pe pânză, Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României, Bucureşti
context_page_description: Kir Ianulea or Kyr Ianulea is a fantasy and historical fiction novella or short story, published by Romanian author Ion Luca Caragiale in 1909. Borrowing the elements of a fairy tale, satire and frame story, it has become recognized as one of Caragiale's leading contributions to short prose, and is often described as one of the seminal works written by him during the last decade of his life. While its narrative structure is largely based on Belfagor arcidiavolo, a story by 16th century writer and political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, Kir Ianulea employs additional elements such as anecdotes to evolve into a social fresco of late 18th-century Wallachia and the Ottoman-ruled Balkans as a whole. Caragiale primarily adapts Machiavelli's theme, which is a fable about the innate unreliability of women, to the realities of the Phanariote epoch, focusing his attention on the interactions between Greeks and Romanians while offering additional insight into the process of acculturation.
  Structured around its protagonist and named after his main alias, Kir Ianulea recounts how one of the lesser devils is assigned the mission of assessing the evil and negativity of women.
context_section_description: Poet and folklorist Ioan Șerb, who included Caragiale's text in his Antologia basmului cult ("The Anthology of Cultured Fairy Tales"), placed it in direct comparison not just to Machiavelli's text, but also to an episode in the One Thousand and One Nights and an anecdote in Romanian folklore (collected by Ovidiu Bârlea in Hunedoara County). In Șerb's assessment, the main difference between such prose and Caragiale's text was the latter's "progressive tendency" and move toward "rehabilitating women". This perspective was received with reserve by Cioculescu: "kir Ianulea's wife, far from suggesting an intent for rehabilitation on Caragiale's part, illustrates the unbearable, exasperating character of a woman who is almost literally infernal. Only the fact that she does not resort to murder imposes the reserve of this 'almost'." In addition to her many psychological defects, Cioculescu argues, Caragiale hinted to Acrivița's innate negativity by mentioning her esotropia, exploiting the Romanian tradition according to which distinct marks on one's face are bad omens. Cioculescu wrote: "Actually, Caragiale builds his theme without misogynistic hatred, with the euphoria of the storyteller and the playwright who knows how to stage a situation for his characters [...]. But the lack of misogyny does not at all imply that the author, who so well depicts the circumstances of kir Ianulea's exasperation, is an advocate of women. [...] That Acrivița is 'fundamentally evil' is instantly apparent to any reader; that she is not a typical representative of all women is also very correctly assessed."
  Mariana Cap-Bun ranks Acrivița's portrayal as "much more evil than the devil" alongside several "strong female characters" in Caragiale's stories and drama, arguing that this motif ultimately owed its inspiration to Shakespeare (and especially to Shakespearean tragedy, which is known to have been treasured by the Romanian author). She also finds that, as Caragiale's career drew to a close, this focus too modified to include the "excessively cruel and weird"—the unassailable meanness characterizing Ianuloaia being complemented by the murderous thoughts of Anca in the play Năpasta (1890) and by the violent bouts of hysteria displayed by Ileana, the incestuous protagonist of Păcat (1892).
caption: Maria, a boyaress of the Dudescu family. Painting by Mihail Töpler (ca. 1800)
exif: {}