THE REAL OF AGING AND THE “NOT-ALL” OF WOMAN: A LACANIAN READING OF BABA YAGA LAID AN EGG
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35120/sciencej0501147dKeywords:
Lacan, aging, jouissance, post-socialist literature, feminine subjectivity, Baba YagaAbstract
This article offers a sustained Lacanian reading of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009; Eng. trans. 2010) by Dubravka Ugrešić, arguing that the novel stages aging femininity as an encounter with the Real and reconfigures the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga as a figure of feminine jouissance beyond phallic signification. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan - particularly the mirror stage, the tripartite registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real), sexual difference, the “not-all” (pas-toute), and jouissance - this study demonstrates how Ugrešić’s tripartite narrative structure formally enacts the split subject. The novel’s representation of the aging female body, grotesque corporeality, and maternal ambivalence reveals the instability of identity and the failure of the Symbolic order to provide signifiers for elderly womanhood outside ridicule or invisibility. Engaging recent scholarship (2021–2026) on aging, gender, and Lacanian theory, this article situates Ugrešić within post-socialist literary discourse and contemporary feminist psychoanalysis. Ultimately, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg reclaims the monstrous feminine as a site of excess rather than lack, exposing the Real of female jouissance as that which resists symbolic domestication.
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