Stereotypes in female images of the Siberian epos

In the heroic legends of the peoples of Siberia, a special role is played by typical descriptions (stereotypes) that carry plot-forming and compositional functions. They reflect the syncretism of aesthetic and moral popular views in their content and the semantic guidelines that epic heroes are endowed with. As ethno-poetic constants, these stereotypes embodied the people’s value attitude to the world around them and, being transmitted for a long time, became ethnically differentiated cultural universals acquiring a normative status over time. In this study, an axiological approach has been applied to consider traditional portrait descriptions of warlike heroes and virgins, based on the comparative material from the epic of Buryats, Khakasses, and Shors. This approach allowed us to conclude that the similarity in imaging the characters of these peoples’ epic has a natural and genetic origin and that the descriptions show the syncretism of aesthetic and moral assessments. The descriptions used in the depiction of female characters are intertextual stereotypes taken from the general epic fund. The structure of these stereotypes comprises supporting phrases that tend to become epic formulas and function independently in the epic. Of the poetic and visual means, stereotypes steadily involve the comparisons and epithets easily correlated with the phenomena and objects of Nature and Space. The generally accepted statement that hyperbole is the main imaging device in the heroic epos is also confirmed in the female character description stereotypes.

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