Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32 (2014) 81–110 © 2014 by he Johns Hopkins University Press 81 Writing the Cretan Woman: Gender and Society in Two Ethographies of Fin-de-Siècle Crete Aris Anagnostopoulos Abstract he realist induction to document the life of Greek villages associated with ethographia relected the construction of the category of “woman” in late-nineteenth century public discourses as crucial for the continuity of the nation and simultaneously excluded from its political community. An analysis of two ethographies reveals social perceptions of gender roles in the context of the inal stages of the “Cretan Question.” Ioannis Damvergis’s “he Martyr” rehearses a nationalist conception of precarious womanhood, which afected a symbolic inversion of female reproductive capacities. Ioannis Kondylakis’s Patouchas ofers a more varied account of the social change that accompanied the rise of urban professional classes to power and the close interconnection of gender, kinship, and politics by introducing the igure of the dangerous “new” woman. Both stories were in fact deeply gendered ren- ditions of the antagonism in an all-male political community, in view of the profound social and cultural changes associated with modernity. From text to context: historicizing Ethographia Accepted genealogies of Greek iction in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century propose a developmental trajectory from the historical novels of mid-nineteenth century to the etho- graphic tendency to record the village life at the turn of the century, which gradually turned its focus to the urban environment and became the cosmo- politan, urbane novel of the 1930s (e.g., Sachinis 1997:283; Tziovas 2003:32–33; Voutouris 1995:252–253; see Beaton 1999 for a discussion). he genre of ηθο- γραφία ( ethographia) in this genealogy dominates the ity years between two literary generations, that of the 1880s and that of the 1930s. Broadly deined, it is understood as a realist or naturalist turn in the prose production of the era, focusing on the mores and customs of smaller societies and social groups,