Characterisation of Women in Maxim Gorky’s Novel “Mother”: A Marxist Feminist Perspective

Abstract

Maxim Gorkyis one of the great portraitists of typification of women in Russian as well as in world literature. He presents a panoramic gallery of female characters such as Nilovna, Sophia, Natasha, Sasha and Ludmilla in his debate-raging novel “Mother”. These female personages belong to the various social classes of the Russian social formation but they possess universality in their personalities whom we have often met every day and everywhere in our daily life. Gorky endows them with class-consciousness, which enables them to involve in the revolutionary proletariat movement, considering Socialism the only way of woman’s emancipation and enfranchisement as well as class-liberation. This paper tends to focus on the re-evaluation and investigation into Maxim Gorky's realistic depiction of these women to delineate their revolutionary roles in the structure of his novel as well as in the Russian Communist politics and social formation form a Marxist Feminist perspective in a new and innovative way. How these female figures are developed from their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois class-milieu to the level of radical Marxist activists and militants. How they liberate themselves from their cowed, wretched and oppressed living conditions into which they have been subjugated, tortured and beaten by men.