Papadiamantis’ “E Fonissa” as an Allegory of Epistemological Treachery

by REBECCA SALTNDERS, REBECCA SAUNDERS, Instructor in the English Department at Loyola  University (New Orleans), and a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA

Alexandros Papadiamantis’ novel, E Fonissa {The Murderess), is most often read as an indictment of the position of women in Greek society and particularly of the dowry system, as Frankojannou, the “murderess” of the title, is inclined to murder young girls to spare them from the trials of womanhood. It also seems to me, however, that the novel sets up a striking association between filling up containers—what I am tendentiously calling creating contents”—and treachery. For example, Frankojannou commits her first three murders by way of filling up some kind of container or cavity: in the first instance she forces her fingers into her granddaughter’s mouth, and in the second instance she pushes two girls into a cistern. And of course these murders are conditioned by what Frankojannou deems the most treacherous of all “fillings up”—filling up the womb with a female child.
Further, the novel is replete with scenes of characters concealing themselves within some kind of container—usually to escape the law. Frankojannou’s mother, Delcharo, for example, escaping from the gendarmes who allege that she has used magic
to sabotage their business affairs, conceals herself in a hollowedout tree. Frankojannou’s polymorphously perverse son, 0 Mouros (as he’s called), conceals himself first in the covered yard of a boatbuilder, then in the basement. And of course Frankojannou…

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