SOPHIA ANDRUKHVOVYCH’S “KATANANKHE”: DECONSTRUCTION AND RECONFIGURATION OF THE MYTH OF FEMALE AGING

The paper explores the theme of female aging in Sofia Andrukhovych’s novel “Katananhe,” drawing on the psychoanalytic concept of the mirror stage and the triadic construction of the old female character in culture. It explores two female characters: Lesia, who strives to resist aging, focusing on external rejuvenation while remaining internally preoccupied with her age, and Zhanna, who is stuck in her old age, unable to change it. The analysis of the gaze highlights postwar social norms that shape women’s perceptions of aging. The paper also addresses aging as a traumatic process. Lesia’s experience of war becomes a turning point: she communicates with an elderly neighbor and feels how the scent of old age infects her. Her attempt to suppress the traumatic memory of war manifests physiologically, affecting her body’s responses and reinforcing her fears of aging. The emphasis on the gaze deepens the exploration of female corporeality: though the gaze at the elderly female character is unsympathetic, the woman herself does not gain a full voice but occupies an atypical space of sexuality, where desire and repulsion intertwine. At the same time, the novel underscores the tension between visibility and erasure, as aging women’s bodies exist in a paradoxical state—observed yet silenced, present yet denied agency. The motif of voyeurism reveals recurring acts of covert looking in the novel, which expose social expressions of emotion and the affectivity of vengeance. These acts of looking form a complex network of power dynamics, where the observer and the observed are locked in a continuous interplay. One of the novel’s key engagements with antiquity is the ironic inversion, wherein punishment takes the form of what a person fears the most. In this framework, old age becomes an inescapable reality for Lesia, reinforcing the inevitability of aging as a central theme. However, ‘Katananhe’ transgresses normative constraints, propelling female aging beyond conventions, disrupting the body’s imposed silence, and asserting it through rage and vengeance.