CONCLUSIONS

Womens writing or writing by women gives rise as a category to many

controversies and problems: on the one hand, the very category is rightly
questioned by feminist theory because of its essentialist connotations and
the many stereotypes that have surrounded it for centuries. There are,
however, as I showed in Chapter One, possibilities to avoid these
accusations and still sustain the validity of the terms, thanks to the
sociological and existential argument claiming that the position of a
woman in society has always been different from that of a man. This is
also connected to the position of the writer, the argument begun by
Virginia Woolf in A Room of Ones Own and then developed by Simone
de Beauvoir in her analyses of discourses and philosophical foundations in
culture in relation to gender divisions in The Second Sex.
Strangely enough, the essentialist argument is used against the category
of womens writing also by the opponents of feminism, by those who,
despite the decades of deconstruction of so-called unbiased or neutral
categories such as human being, still claim that literature should be read
beyond gender, simply as a record of the universal experience of human
beings. The focus on womens writing does not deny that there is a
spectrum of human existence where the universality of experience is
present, though it should always been treated with extreme suspicion and
caution towards the rhetoric through which such experiences are
conveyed. Pain may be just such an experience, because the rhetoric of
bodily suffering (Chapters Six and Seven) is vague, and at the same time
standardized and highly metaphorical (the rhetoric of war, fighting,
dealing with an enemy, etc.). We all are used to treating our body as an
external entity, thus we are all alone with our pain. Yet the reasons why
we write about our pain are gendered, and so the reading of pain and the
dislocations and alienations associated with it should always been
sensitive towards the bodily, gender and socio-political contexts in which
a text about pain is created. As such, womens writing has always been
and should continue to be considered as a crucial literary category; a
category that possesses deconstructive potential in relation to all allembracing, and thus always colonizing and oppressive, discourses.
Since the time of Virginia Woolf and then Simone de Beauvoir,
numerous works have been devoted to womens writing and its specificity.

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Conclusions

This book did not aspire to enumerate them, although some of their
theories and opinions have been shared and employed in its
interpretations. The most important postulate of my analyses is the
rejection of the traditional connection between melancholy and bodily
decay. As I show in Chapter Two, the melancholic themes in womens
writing do not represent the same value as in male authors, in terms of the
aesthetic expression of an individual position in the symbolic world:
usually appropriated by men (as literary protagonists as well as in
psychological theory), melancholy represents the highly individualistic
attitude of a subject towards the outside. Meanwhile, the melancholic
themes in womens writing, using melancholic narratives (such as bodily
pains, failed and impossible friendships, the disappearance of travellers or
the figures of abjection), I read rather as representative critical positions
toward society, culture or political issues.
Polish contemporary womens writing is an intriguing record of the
desperate need for a better world: a cry for cultural change to liberate
woman from the thousands of stereotypes and formulae dictating her
behaviour. It is a cry against the culture of the offended, as Izabela
Filipiak called Polish culture in one of her magazine columns. She
complained about the conservatism of Polish culture and the fact that
Poland had missed the chance to change offered by the 1989
transformation. Since 1989, we could have changed ourselves into
civilized and tolerant, brave, wise and effective people. It could have been
a beautiful country, she wrote in a collection of essays (Filipiak 2003,
202). Filipiak also complains in the eponymous essay, The Culture of the
Offended, as in her whole book named after this essay, about many unjust
Polish events of the past two decades: for example, the arrest and
punishment of Dorota Nieznalska, an artist from Gda sk, for offending
religious feeling by presenting masculine genitalia on the cross, in an
exhibition about discourses on masculinity. Other issues such as
homophobia and the anti-abortion law are also part of the culture of the
offended, which Filipiak sarcastically defines as a culture where some
murders are believed to be reprehensible, while others are glorious. We are
pro-life, so we defend the life of the unborn, and at the same time we are
pleased that thanks to NATO projects, our soldiers are leaving for different
parts of the world to kill other people, those who have already been born
and raised (Filipiak 2003, 204).
In recent years a few publications have appeared in English by women
on Polish culture, among which Joanna Rajkowskas ekphrastic
description of her various artistic projects is especially interesting.
Rajkowskas Where the Beast is Buried (2013) does not directly consist of

Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Polish Womens Writing

197

literary short stories; the sections oscillate between autobiographical

accounts, literary expression and documentary records of artistic
endeavours. Yet, they are very important as womens writing and critiques
of the contemporary notions of freedom of expression, tolerance, and
openness towards the re-evaluation of the past. Joanna Rajkowska, as the
author of numerous installations, artistic actions and artistic interventions,
confronts in many of her productions the paradox between the cultural
critical approach and the societal need for security, control and
conservatism. Among the many impulses that lie behind Rajkowskas
initiatives, I see two as being particularly important: the observation of
societal lack of trust, according to which there is an omnipresent notion of
potential danger emanating from the other, and hatred of the unpredictable,
where everything needs to be announced, regulated andagain
controlled. For Rajkowska, security, understood as a way of regulating
public space, becomes a vehicle of control, which in fact leads to the
deprivation of the possibility of artistic experience, and can thus be seen
as a means of regulating freedom.
Another recent work, Agata Pyziks Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in
Europe East and West (2014), is a critique of the development of
aggressive capitalism and an analysis of unjust social and cultural
phenomena in Eastern Europe, with a special focus on Poland. The book
starts with a bitter tone: So yes, the East is still more beastly than the
West, but perhaps it has become more so during the transition, finally
fulfilling all the negative stereotypes the West had about it while it was
riled by its decaying communist parties (Pyzik 2014, 34).
The same pessimistic tone of Izabela Filipiak, Rajkowska and Pyzik
was also heard in Maria Janions bitter speech to the First Womens
Congress (held in Warsaw, 2021 June 2009), when she concluded that
the years 19892009 had shown that Democracy in Poland had a
masculine gender.1 A similarly disillusioned account of the
transformation may be found in the already classic How We Survived

For years I was well aware of the clear division between serious and non-serious
matters: in times of oppression the struggle for independence is considered a
serious matter, and the fight for womens rights is not. [] I believed that freedom
for the whole society should be achieved first, and then, together and peacefully,
we would improve womens conditions. To my surprise, it transpired that a woman
was to be a family creature in liberated Poland, a creature whoinstead of
engaging in politicsshould take care of the home. It took some time before I
realized that democracy in Poland has a masculine gender (quoted in Chowaniec
2012, 5).

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Conclusions

Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakuli (1992, 1993) and in

the very recent Europe in Sepia by Dubravka Ugresi (2014).
Joanna Rajkowska, Agata Pyzik, Inga Iwasiw, Anna Nasi owska,
Patrycja Pustkowiak, Marta Dzido, Sylwia Chutnik, Dorota Mas owska,
Justyna Bargielska, women of various ages, discussed here and not,
women of the contemporary Polish literary scene, are linked by these
literary accounts of a culture that did not satisfy the expectation that it
would grow into an open, tolerant and fully democratic one (in all areas of
life, not just in relation to the abortion law).
Yet, the project of creating the figure of a traveller or a nomad to fight
against melancholy is also an ethical and moral project: the disclosure of
melancholy as a feminine revolt against patriarchal culture may appear
almost like a modernist attempt to build bridges between an unequal
world, or like the humanist dream of satisfying the needs of all human
beings. This humanist project is of course not devoid of ironical selfawareness of the utopian value of all-embracing justice. In a time of
deconstructing subjectivity rather then restoring it, and of searching for the
aporias in a theory rather than constructing one, the project of
melancholic migrating bodies, which constructs the travelling subject in
its struggle against melancholy, may seems risky as a political gesture.
Still, as a feminist reader, I have found it crucial to read Polish womens
writing as an important message about Polish culture, as part of the active
voice within cultural communication. A feminist reader is committed to
breaking the pattern of oppression by calling attention to the way some
texts can perpetuate it, we read in Gendering the Reader (Mills 1994, 15).
This project has attempted to uncover the position of the female subject
within the themes of melancholy and migration.
An enormous amount of scholarly research has been undertaken on
migration during the past ten years or so. Such scholarship is usually
conducted according to the interdisciplinary method, where connections
are made between the fields of social studies, politics, statistics,
economics, cultural studies and also, although somewhat marginally,
literary research. Research on migration has been made possible thanks to
the numerous academic centres focusing on migration studies, some of
them very new.2 Without doubt, migration and emigration are currently
2

Such as University College Londons Migration Research Unit (Department of

Geography) and Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM,
Department of Economics), the Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary
College, the Sussex Centre for Migration Research at Sussex University, the
Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and the International
Migration Institute (IMI) at the University of Oxford.