Violence, Faith, and Women in Romanian Literature

This essay offers a gendered reading of the confluence of violence and faith in Romanian literature, through a reading of two texts: Tatiana Bran’s “Deadly Confession”, and Elie Wiesel’s “Night”. While the former looks at the violence visited upon women in the context of religion and faith, the latter seeks to locate the place of women in the course of the loss of faith in a male context. The essay embeds these readings within the larger context of women and violence in Romanian literature from the 19th century to the present. While the instance of Bran’s novel serves as representative of much of this literature, the example of Wiesel’s autobiographical narrative is uniquely contextualized by the field of Holocaust literature. Nevertheless, it is possible to see these two readings – one, a woman authored text of violence against women, the other, a male authored text of women as a refuge from violence – as complementing each other in the ways in which women respond to faith and the loss of faith.