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My suffering
is useful to me
It gives me the privilege
to write on the suffering of others
My suffering is a pencil
with which I write
(Swir, Talking to My Body, 1996, 53)1
As a motto to this chapter I have chosen a poem by one of the most stimulating
Polish post-war authors, Anna wirszczy ska, pseud. Anna Swir, from her
collection Talking to My Body, translated by Czes aw Mi osz & Leonard Nathan,
Washington: Copper Canyon Press in 1996. The works of Anna Swir are not
discussed here (see, for example, Ingbrant 2007).
2
As I stated it in my article Feminist Theory in Poland: Between Politics and
Literature (Chowaniec and Phillips 2012), the influence of feminist theories,
mainly from Western Europe and the USA, and their reception in so-called postcommunist countries, has been elaborated in many texts e.g. Peggy Watson, 1993;
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Chapter Two
47
patterns and main roles within the whole literary scene, for example many
of the chapters in the collective volume Nowe dwudziestolecie (1989
2009): rozpoznania, hierarchie, perspektywy (The New Twenty Years:
Recognitions, Hierarchies, Perspectives, Gosk 2010) or Agnieszka
Mroziks Midwives of Transformation (Akuszerki transformacji, 2012).
Examining all the frequently reoccurring topics and tracing the ways in
which womens writing has become melancholic through its fixation on
describing longing, or showing various forms of depression or a sense of
unbearable loss, are not intended however to offer a decadent, pessimistic
view of womens lives and situations, but to actively take part in the
discussion about the contemporary position of women in Poland, on
gender relations, and on the role of the family and the human body in the
new post-communist reality. Melancholy here may take the form of
traditional melancholy, understood as the Saturnine mood, but it is quite
separate from the form of melancholy generally assigned to men, which I
will elaborate further below. Here, suffice it to say that melancholy is more
of a moment than a constant state, and not an individuals state but a social
position, a social melancholy (Oliver 2002), and its main role is to reengage literature within the dialogue about contemporaneity.
Shame, a sense of guilt, of disgust, desolation and physical anguish
these kinds of feelings have featured strongly in womens writing of the
last two decades. Contemporary women writers, concerned with their
femininity and its status in Polish society over the past twenty years, have
exposed Polish patriarchy, taken it apart in order to contest it, ridiculed
and rebelled against it, eventually going on to deconstruct it. In this
fashion, their writing began to approach the political assumptions of
feminism. Studying their output, one may have the impression that their
work represents the melancholy of the conquered, or the clinically
depressed state of those who have lost any hope of a better tomorrow. Yet,
contemporary womens writing can be read as the beginning of a new
programme that is based not only on their own despair. There is a
particular difficulty in reading melancholic writing, since a specific trap
lurks in it: it is traditionally read as an expression of an individualistic
inability to comply with the social order, and as an oppressive in relation
to the individuals freedom. To gain the social dimension of the
melancholy in womens writing one has to see it as a gendered
phenomenon. The female aspect of this womens prose can be identified
through this very melancholy, through its pessimistic mood, since
according, for example, to Julia Kristevaecstasy and melancholy are the
two extreme ways for women to gain access to channels of social order (to
a symbolic form of order, to power and knowledge) within the economy of
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Chapter Two
a monotheistic society, in which the Father, the Law and God is a Man
(Kristeva 1986, 148). From this perspective, women adopt two extreme
means of expression in order to participate in societal life. Yet, writing
about melancholy is also a struggle against it, an attempt to describe it and
expose it. Viewed from such a perspective, the texts themselves are the
ultimate results of the struggle against the melancholy that threatens
women.