Masquerade and Femininity

Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers

Edited by

Urszula Chowaniec, Ursula Phillips and Marja Rytknen

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers, Edited by Urszula Chowaniec, Ursula Phillips and Marja Rytknen This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2008 by Urszula Chowaniec, Ursula Phillips and Marja Rytknen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-468-5, ISBN (13): 9781847184689

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Introduction Urszula Chowaniec, Ursula Phillips and Marja Rytknen Masquerade and Femininity.................................................................... 1 Russian Women Writers: a Brief Overview of Research and Publications to Date ......................................................................... 8 Polish Women Writers: Research and Publications.............................. 16 The Search for Femininity Within and Beyond the Masquerade in Russian and Polish Womens Writing .............................................. 27 Part I: Women Writers and the Trouble with Authorship Chapter One............................................................................................... 42 A Masquerade of Masquerades: Blizhnevs The Snezhin Family Evgeniia Stroganova Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 55 Writing as a Space of Pain and Refuge: Vera by Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia Arja Rosenholm Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 72 Authorship and Masquerade in Narcyza michowskas White Rose Texts Ursula Phillips Chapter Four ................................................................................................... 93 Femininity, Masquerade and Performance in Poliksena Solovevas The Woman Who Never Was Kirsti Ekonen

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Table of Contents

Part II: Masquerade and the Search for Creative Identity Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 114 Creativity and Masquerade in the Early Works of Maria Komornicka and Zofia Nakowska Lidia Winiewska Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 126 Undoing Gender Masquerade: Maria Komornickas Oscar Wilde: An Ideal Apocryphon Karolina Krasuska Part III: The Anatomy of Masquerade in Modernist Writing of the 1930s Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 144 Venus Mirror: Exile and Masquerade in Irina Odoevtsevas The Mirror Xenia Srebrianski Harwell Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 157 Against Masquerade: Irena Krzywicka in Search of Woman Urszula Chowaniec Part IV: Femininity and the Experience of Horror Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 172 Gendered War: Mothers and Widows in Irina Grekovas Novel The Ship of Widows Kirsi Risl Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 185 Death as the Mask of Life in Womens Reflections: Olga Tokarczuks Final Stories and Anna In in the Tombs of the World Irina Adelgeym

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vii

Part V: The Masquerade of Woman in Contemporary Literature Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 200 Naturalness as the Mask of Genuine Femininity in the Reading Materials of Post-Soviet Girls and Teenagers Mariia Litovskaia Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 215 Candidates for Female Candides: The Diary of a Simple Soul and the Masquerade of Femininity Irina Savkina Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 234 Vera Pavlovas The Intimate Diary of an Excellent Student and the Masquerade of Femininity Marja Rytknen Contributors............................................................................................. 247 Index........................................................................................................ 253

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present volume has its origins in the Conference on Masquerade and Femininity held in May 2006 at the Department of Russian Language and Culture, School of Modern Languages and Translation, University of Tampere, Finland. We are very grateful to all our colleagues at the Department for contributing their ideas and suggestions and for their invaluable assistance in successfully organizing the conference. The conference revealed that the notion of masquerade can be multifaceted and attractive, and also controversial. It contains simultaneously elements of hushed up secrecy and boisterous performance, the suggestion of superficiality and the longing for truth, as well as many other promises and contradictions which this book will try to map out and explore. The participants of the conference were both attracted and puzzled by the idea of masquerade in womens writing. Why masquerade? This book is the result of their further reflections inspired by the conference; we would therefore like to express our gratitude to all those who took part in the conference discussions, including those who are not represented in the book. Special thanks are due to Kirsi Risl, whose enthusiasm, energy, and commitment were invaluable in promoting the conference, and by extension the book itself. We are also indebted to the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, Finland, and the Embassy of the Polish Republic in Helsinki, who have generously financed the translation into English of those articles originally written in Russian or Polish. The articles by Evgeniia Stroganova, Irina Adelgeym, Mariia Litovskaia, Irina Savkina and Lidia Winiewska were translated by Ursula Phillips. We would also like to thank Professor Carol Adlam of the University of Exeter and Professor Grayna Borkowska of the Polish Academy of Sciences for agreeing to review our book. Urszula Chowaniec Ursula Phillips Marja Rytknen

INTRODUCTION URSZULA CHOWANIEC, URSULA PHILLIPS AND MARJA RYTKNEN

Masquerade and Femininity
What do women do in order to be feminine? They put on their make-up and their beautiful clothes, they flirt, they act gracefully, they play. They perform their little trickery just as men do, in order to be liked, be successful, achieve their goals. Why, then, should this masqueradeif we are to refer to such trickery or mimicry, all the paraphernalia of beauty (Irigaray 1991, 78) in this waybe associated only with women? Following Irigaray, the notions of masquerade and femininity are understood here as a functional metaphor for being socially successful, and are explored from various angles: as motifs, strategies, forms, parodies, and rituals in womens lives. But why is a womans position in this collective social performance different from that of a man, worth special attention? Are all women the same? Do women from different cultures have different experiences? Or perhaps cultural differences capture different instances of this broadly understood masquerade, variations which are nevertheless underpinned by the same structures of patriarchal domination and displacement? These are the questions at the heart of this book. They are not new, of course, but here they bring together a number of female scholars from different countries in order to focus on two national literatures of two centuries, and to analyse them in depth. This has been a very specific project, trying to match the predominately western theories of such scholars as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, Judith Butler and others with so-called East European culture, exemplified here by Russian and Polish literary texts and thought. This juxtaposition of two domains is intended to shed light on the question of how women are seen in Russian and Polish literature and how femininity has been inscribed in those literatures, while also taking into consideration the perspective of masquerade theory. Finally, the aim of the project is to show whether we can find, within the discourses of masquerade and femininityand despite local idiosyncrasiessome sign of a universal gender trouble? Thus, the

Introduction

project is designed as a comparative case study, undertaken against the background of larger problems in the humanities. The notion of masquerade and femininity has been present in the humanities for a long time, beginning seriously with the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality as the realm of masquerade, meticulously developed by Jacques Lacan (Lacan 1982; Rose 2005).1 The very term masquerade, used in relation to a womans gender identity was coined by the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere in her famous essay Womanliness as a Masquerade published in 1929. This seminal essay argued that femininity is a mask that women wear in order to be better accepted in a social world codified by men. From this moment on, the theory of masquerade was to appear in various studies related not only to literature, but also to film, psychoanalysis and gender, trying to answer the still present question of whether is it really true that femininity is just a mask or a masquerade (Tselon 2001; Woodward 1988-89; Horrell 2004; Doane 1988-1989; Craft Fairchild 1993). The background to every deliberation on gender identity in relation to masquerade is underpinned by the vast tradition of literary texts in which the notions of masquerade, masking, concealing, and pretending have been taken up, as well as by our fascination with masks throughout history: from the Ancient classical theatre to the Venetian masquerade balls (Tooker 1983). The connection between the idea of masquerade and theories of femininity, along with a long literary tradition devoted to the leitmotifs of mask and masquerade, has brought us to the idea of elaborating it in relation to womens writing. Therefore one of the main aims of this volume is to examine womens writings within the framework of the problems surrounding the concept of masquerade: such a take on literary theory, as we try to show, opens up new readings and further possibilities for research. The masquerade as an interpretative perspective allows us to explore narratives from the point of view of conventional rules, but refracted through the camera obscura of the mask, inverted, or upside down. This, in turn, provides the opportunity to examine the rules themselves. How many mens features does a woman have to have in order to represent true femininity!Irena Krzywicka, the modernist Polish writer, exclaimed in one of her essays (1933, 131). A woman, in this instance, needs enormous strength in order to conceal her painful monthly periods and deal with the everyday life situation of masquerading her body and pretending that these shameful secrets, as Krzywicka calls
1

Sexuality belongs for Lacan in the realm of masquerade []. For Lacan, masquerade is the very definition of femininity precisely because it is constructed with reference to a male sign. (Rose 2005, 67)

Masquerade and Femininity

them, do not exist. But what does she mean when she says that femininity requires plenty of male features? Does she imply that in order to be feminine, women should play the game of a fragile, flirtatious girl (as in Rivieres case), but that there is no actual femininity behind this game? Perhaps Krzywicka uses the words feminine and male ironically, aware of the discursive character of the terms, of their connotations and actual disconnection from material bodies as Butler would argue (Butler 1990; 1993). Or perhaps Krzywicka believes that gender is outside language, and that there is a true femininity (as well as a masculinity) which can be found beyond the gender masquerade? Connecting the theme of masquerade, which brings us close to poststructuralist and postmodernist discourse, with the theme of femininity, which generally conveys the notion of essentialism, has made possible the investigation of all possible answers to the question of how many male features one may find in the female gesture! This connection contradicts the essentialist belief in authenticity, opposes the idea of a real or true gender (where the notion of masquerade plays the role of the anti-essentialist gatekeeper), yet the essentialist element can nevertheless be shown to be present in all the female bodies that have been masqueraded, dislocated, and controlled by patriarchal practice and its traditions of social order, family, aesthetics, sexuality and so on. This volume then is intended to show various strategies of masquerading in the Polish and Russian comparative literary context. Judith Butler, drawing on Lacanian theory, investigates the strategies of masquerade in the masculine order:
Women are said to be the Phallus in the sense that they maintain the power to reflect or represent the reality of the self-grounding posture of the masculine subject, a power which, if withdrawn, would break up the foundational illusions of the masculine position []. Hence, being the Phallus is always a being for a masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment his identity through the recognition of that being for. (Butler 2006, 61)

Thus relations can be seen as a game or heterosexual comedy (63). In this comedy what women are inevitably compelled to do is to masquerade, since masquerade, as Butler sees it, is the ontological specification of the Phallus (63), therefore all gender ontology is reducible to the play of appearance (63). Masquerade then can be read as a denial of feminine desire (64). As Irigaray points out

Introduction masquerade has to be understood as what women do in order to recuperate some element of desire, to participate in mans desire, but at the price of renouncing their own. In masquerade they submit to the dominant economy of desire in an attempt to remain on the market in spite of everything. But they are there as objects for sexual enjoyment, not as those who enjoy. What do I mean by masquerade? In particular, [] femininity. The belief that it is necessary to become a woman, a normal one at that, whereas a man is a man from the outset. [] a woman has to become a normal woman, that is, has to enter the masquerade of femininity [], [has to enter] into a system of values that is not hers, and in which she can appear and circulate only when enveloped in the needs/desires/fantasies of others, namely men. (Irigaray 1985, 133134)

Irigaray does not deny that women may find their own desire, their own femininity, but woman is not to be reduced to mere femininity. Or to falsehood, or appearance, or beauty (1991, 77); she suggests that there is a way of finding a female subjectivity. Butler, as well as Riviere, advocates the opposite. Even though masquerade suggests that there is femininity prior to the mask, some sort of feminine desire or demand that is masked and capable of disclosure (2006, 64), Butler shows that masquerade can be understood differently as being in itself, as being the performative production. The latter interpretation of masquerade eliminates the necessity of distinguishing between what appears to be a sexual ontology (what is beneath the appearance), and what Butler calls the comedic dimension of gender. Nevertheless, in both of these general understandings of masquerade we can see the possibility of using masking in two ways. As Kathleen Woodward concludes, the controversial aspect of Rivieres pioneering study has spawned at least two currently circulating notions of masqueradeone that views the inevitable female disguise as submission to the dominant social code, and another that sees masquerade as disruptive and as resistance to patriarchal norms (Woodward 19881989, 125). However, the notion of masquerade constantly raises new questions. As Butler eloquently puts it:
Does masquerade, as Riviere suggests, transform aggression and the fear of reprisal into seduction and flirtation? Does it serve primarily to conceal or repress a pregiven femininity, a feminine desire which would establish an insubordinate alterity to the masculine subject and expose the necessary failure of masculinity? Or is masquerade the means by which femininity itself is first established, the exclusionary practice of identity formation in which the masculine is effectively excluded and instated as outside the boundaries of a feminine gender position? (Butler 2006, 65)

Masquerade and Femininity

Butler in her interpretation of masquerade sees it not only in the feminine; she draws the analogy between the homosexual man and the masked (masqueraded) woman who wishes for masculinity, but fears the retributive consequences of taking on the public appearance of masculinity. Masculinity is taken on by the male homosexual who, presumably, seeks to hidenot from others, but from himselfan ostensible femininity (70). This analogy brings Butler to the conclusion that we have to rethink the very notion of masculinity as well as femininity rooted in fact in unsolved homosexual cathexes. The melancholy refusal/domination of homosexuality culminates in the incorporation of the same-sexed object of desire and reemerges in the construction of discrete sexual natures that require and institute their opposites through exclusion (73). This Butler-Riviere dialogue with its references to Irigarays notion of masquerade showsas do the chapters of this volumethat the notion of masquerade is complex and multidimensional. It leads us, on the one hand, to the problematic matter of human subjectivity and, connected with it, sexuality, and, on the other, to the term itself as it relates to ideas of mask, theatre, play, spectacle and spectatorship, performance and Others. The Oxford English Dictionary connects the word masquerade with deception, disguise or masking which refer to protecting or hiding from view, or to deceiving for a purpose. Masquerade is to assume false appearance (see the chapters by Irina Savkina and Ursula Phillips in this volume, and Tselon 2001). This is why the notion of masquerade is so strongly connected with the notion of identity. Masquerade [] is a statement about the wearer. It is pleasurable, excessive, sometimes subversive [] The mask hints, disguise erases from view, masquerade overstates. The mask is an accessory, disguise is a portrait, masquerade is a caricature (Tselon 2001, 2). And this caricature appears, as we see in the theories of Riviere, Irigaray and Butler, in a variety of meanings, which only become visible in the attempt to reveal or unmask the concealment. Only in this attempt does the masquerade serve its critical function:
Masquerade unsettles and disrupts the fantasy of coherent, unitary, stable, mutually exclusive divisions. Masquerade replaces clarity with ambiguity, certainty with reflexivity, and phantasmic construction of containment and closure with constructions that in reality are more messy, diverse, impure, and imperfect. The masquerade, in short, provides a paradigmatic challenge not only to dualistic differences between essence and appearance. It also challenges the whole discourse of difference that emerges with modernity. (Tselon 2001, 3)

Introduction

Our volume is likewise intended to challenge stable divisions, binaries, boundaries and categories, such as the categories of the West and the East by confronting so-called East European literatures with western literary theories. This volume is not intended, however, to provide a comprehensive or exhaustive account of masquerade or femininity, or of the exploration of these issues or theories in Russian and Polish literary studies. It is intended to engage in these important issues in the texts that are often situated on the boundaries between eastern and western experiences. It will soon be twenty years since the division between the socialist East and democratic West collapsed. Literature is still a great vehicle for preserving the traces (the wounds, breaks, gaps) left by such transitions, while it remains important to examine the huge historical upheavals that Eastern Europe has had to face in the past two hundred years. This volume is partly intended to examine the stigmas left by historical tumults from the perspective of womens writings, as well as to examine the strategies of masquerade as ways of both adapting to and fighting against the difficulty of life. It is a collection of idiosyncratic voices from Russian and Polish culture of the nineteenth century to the present which may contribute to illuminating present-day Europe. We also wish to contribute to the more general debate on womens and gender studies, bringing together voices from two countries, not too distant, but often still treated as oppositional, not only in relation to the West but to each other. Often the voices refer to historically difficult times (political partitions, war, emigration, revolution or transition), which evoke the idea of a world upside-down, a sometimes cruel and chaotic carnival, where the idea of masquerade and the role of women in it is especially significant. As Terry Castle suggests: The world upside-down is a feminocracy (Castle 1986, 254). Just as the masquerade ball was an ephemeral suspension of the archaic pattern of Western gender relations (255), so too transitional times always bring to the surface the question of womens freedom and their roles, opening up possibilities for them that often turn out to be ephemeral. In this volume the notion of masquerade and femininity is explored in various ways. The interpretation of feminine representation as a masquerade in literature and/or publishing practices, especially in relation to the discourse on naturalness (Mariia Litovskaia discusses real femininity in the post-Soviet reading of girls and teenagers), together with the notion of the authenticity of feminine roles (Irina Savkina), plays a crucial role in this debate. The volume contributes also to the discussion on femininity in difficult transitional times when women suffer, and where the lack of men (war, emigration, death) requires an

Masquerade and Femininity

adjustment in the behaviour of women (such as adaptation to new circumstances through masquerading). A vital element in this voice is the suffering that often cannot be separated from the practices of masquerading. Here we have the portraits of women mourning after the Second World War in the chapter by Kirsi Risl; the disguises of a young Russian migr in that of Xenia Srebrianski Harwell; or the masks of death in Irina Adelgeyms. The notion of womanhood as a void deprived of subjectivity, or of a woman being nothing but a mans inspiration, subordinated to and adapting to a mans power is vividly described in Kirsti Ekonens discussion of a Russian Symbolist novella, as well as in the texts by Evgeniia Stroganova and Xenia Srebrianski Harwell, where the theme of the mirror as an important part of female experience interestingly appears, as it also does in that by Arja Rosenholm. Womens struggle against their subordination by parents, lovers, men and the power of gender roles can be see also in the chapters by Urszula Chowaniec and Marja Rytknen. Similar motifs of woman as the other, including analyses of her displacement, of the (un)comfortableness of living, of forms of mimicry, and of the ways in which women are suppressed, unite in dialogue with the above topics in the theme of the migrs loneliness in Srebrianski Harwells text, as well as in the discussion about female authorship in the chapter by Ursula Phillips on the Polish writer Narcyza michowska (Gabryella); in those by Lidia Winiewska and Karolina Krasuska on the early modernist Polish writers Maria Komornicka and Zofia Nakowska; in Kirsti Ekonens text on the Russian modernist writer Poliksena Soloveva; in Arja Rosenholms on Khvoshchinskaia; and in Evgeniia Stroganovas on the nineteenth-century writer Blizhnev and his/her novel The Snezhin Family. The theme of masquerade in all these chapters appears both as a result of patriarchal indoctrination and as a way of fighting against it. The same themeswhen seen concurrently across all the chapters of the book often appear to be discussed from both these perspectives at the same time, debating ways of masquerading both as a force of subordination and as an emancipating strategy. The theme of motherhood, for example, can be found both as a way of institutionalizing a womans body (Kirsi Risl) as well as a source of strength in the liberation from patriarchal structures (Urszula Chowaniec). Similarly, the themes of authenticity, nature and culture are discussed from the perspective of different aspects of masquerade: from standpoints which are aware of the constructed character of femininity as a mask and which resist dreams of a natural essence, to attempts to review modern

Introduction

essentialism, where the need to find the real meaning of who one is as a human being is ever present. We do not have a definite, single agenda according to which we are suggesting that the notion of the self is constructed entirely by culture or that it is natural (essential) and is hidden by masquerade, or thatthrough deconstructing the masqueradeit can necessarily be disclosed. With this volume we wish to add our voices to the discussion on what femininity is from the perspective of masquerade understood as an interpretative functional tool. The book has also grown out of the more general background of earlier publications on Russian and Polish womens writing which we now briefly survey below.

Russian Women Writers: A Brief Overview of Research and Publications to Date

Feminist and gender studies on Russian literature and womens writing began seriously in the late 1980s with the publication of the pioneering works by Barbara Heldt and Joe Andrew.2 Heldts Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (1987) was one of the very first to challenge dominant views on the history and tradition of Russian literature and to put forward the radical idea that the Russian literary tradition had been dominated by male writers and male fictions whereas women writers contribution to Russian literature had been largely neglected, and that women in literature were constrained by the symbolic model of terrible perfection. Heldts as well as Andrews early works have had a major impact on the study of Russian womens writing both in the West and in Russia. Since Heldts and Andrews classics, a plethora of substantial works on Russian womens writing have been published, which have continued to change and correct some of the views on Russian womens literary
2

Andrews Women in Russian Literature: 1780-1863 (1988) and Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature, 1822-49: The Feminine and the Masculine (1993) present readings of well-known works of Russian literature from a feminist or gender perspective. Narrative and Desire also presents critical readings of lesser known works by Russian women writers. Andrews recent publication Narrative, Space and Gender in Russian Fiction 1846-1903 (2007) continues and develops the ideas of his earlier works, focusing in particular on the interconnections between the three keywords of his title and the ways in which they jointly contribute to establishing gendered identity in a number of literary texts by both male and female nineteenth-century authors (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov as well as Sokhanskaia and Khvoshchinskaia).

Masquerade and Femininity

history. Catriona Kellys A History of Russian Womens Writing, 18201992, accompanied by An Anthology of Russian Womens Writing, 17771992 is still the most comprehensive general introduction to Russian womens writing, scrutinizing both the historical, social and political as well as literary contexts of womens writing over a long period of time and providing close readings of selected individual authors texts. Many other comprehensive and outstanding works have since been published on Russian womens writing, as well as on the significance of gender in Russian literature. Edited volumes by Rosalind Marsh (1996a, 1998), Helena Goscilo (1996), Toby Clyman and Diane Greene (1994), and Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal and Mary Zirin (1994) are among the best known. In German scholarship we should mention the multivolume series FrauenLiteraturGeschichte initiated and published since 1994 by Frank Gpfert, and now numbering nearly twenty volumes on the history of Russian womens writing, as well as Christina Parnells (1996; 1997) and Elisabeth Cheaurs work. The list of significant works, monographs as well as multi-authored anthologies on Russian womens history and writing and on gender in Russian literature is now enormous, suffice it to refer here to the bibliographical publications on the field.3 Irina Savkina (1997) has aptly noted that Russian womens studies in history and literature did not begin in the West in the 1970s, but almost a hundred years beforehand in Russia when, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the studies on the history of women in Russia by E. Likhacheva and Elena Shchepkina appeared. In 1889 a comprehensive bibliographical dictionary of Russian women writers compiled by Nikolai Golitsyn was published. At the end of the nineteenth century E.S.Nekrasova wrote several essays on women writers: Elena Gan, Anastasiia Marchenko and Nadezhda Durova.4 These studies brought to
A comprehensive bibliography of general studies and reference books on Russian womens writing as well as of studies on specific periods can be found in Barker and Gheith (2002, Guide to further reading, 365-379) listing over 400 titles on the field of Russian womens history and writing. See also the already mentioned Ledkovsky, Rosenthal and Zirin (1994); Tomei (1999); Parnell and Heyder (1997); as well as Stroganova (2004, 151-161); Iukina (2003, 63-232); and Pushkareva (2002). 4 Likhacheva, E. Materials for the History of Womens Education in Russia (10861856) ( (1086-1856), St Petersburg 1890); Likhacheva, E. Materials for the History of Womens Education in Russia (1856-1880) ( (1856-1880), St Petersburg 1901); Shchepkina, E. From the History of the Female Personality in Russia ( , St Petersburg 1914); Golitsyn, N.N. Bibliographical Dictionary of
3

10

Introduction

the fore the rich literary material and information about women writers who were found again in the 1980s-1990s. Likhachevas and Shchepkinas works already formulated key ideas about the difficulty of legitimating women writers position in the literary world and about patriarchal stereotypes of femininity and their influence on women writers self-perception. This tradition of research into womens literature and history seems also to have been lost, perhaps because it did not continue during the Soviet period (Savkina 1997, 370). The tradition is now being revived by contemporary Russian feminists.5 Since the 1980s, scholarship on Russian womens writing has focused on feminist revision, on reinterpreting and reconstructing the literary tradition. This has not meant simply adding women into the literary canon or establishing an alternative canon, but rather a critical reconsideration of the cultural and social values that have produced the gender bias in Russian literary history as well as a consideration of literary texts by women writers. Two recent examples are the multi-authored, edited volumes on the history of Russian womens writing published in English and German/Russian respectively in 2002: Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheiths A History of Russian Women Writers, and Arja Rosenholm and Frank Gpferts Das Vieldeutige Nicht-zu-Ende-Sprechen: Thesen und Momentaufnahmen aus der Geschichte russischer Dichterinnen. The anthology compiled by Barker and Gheith is an impressive presentation of the history of womens writing in Russia from its beginnings to the present day (Barker and Gheith 2002, 1) by prominent scholars in the field. Despite its impressive analyses of Russian womens writing in different periods, it also shows that there is a growing need for more specific/specified studies on the field of Russian womens writing and that much of the research [...] is still in its incipient stages (Barker and Gheith 2002, 13). The latter publication is the result of a research project at the Departments of Russian at the Universities of
Russian Women Writers ( ), St Petersburg, 1889; Nekrasova E.S. Elena Andreevna Gan (Zeneida R-va) 18141842: Biographical schetch ([...] ). , 1886, 8: 335-354; 9: 553-574; Anastasiia Iakovlevna Marchenko (T.Ch. ili A. Termizov). , 1889, 11: 392-422; Nadezhda Andreevna Durova (Devitsa-kavalerist Aleksandrov) 1783-1866. , 1890, 9: 585-612. 5 Valentina Uspenskaia, director of the Tver Centre for Womens History and Gender Studies has published reprints of these works and other feminist literature in recent years. See the reprint of Shchepkinas work available on the Centres website: http://tvergenderstudies.ru

Masquerade and Femininity

11

Potsdam and Tampere. The editors, Rosenholm and Gpfert, have both long been engaged in their own research on the history of Russian womens writing. The starting point of the anthology is the view that the literary tradition of Russian women is not a question of facts, that is of whether or not this tradition exists, but that a tradition has to be created (Rosenholm 2002, 9). What these two anthologies have in common is that they do not promote a progressive view of the development of womens writing in Russia. Instead, what remains certain in this writing of history is its discontinuity and fragmentariness: Eine Brchigkeit oder gar der Eindruck des Zuflligen, was fr die russische Kritikerin E. epkina die Geschichtsschreibung der Frauenliteratur characterisiert, scheint auch in diesem Band die Tradition zu markieren (Rosenholm 2002, 15), or as Barker and Gheith state:
[any] history, after all, is by definition arbitrary, providing closure and periodization, defining schools and movements in ways that, while often useful, also seem artificial. How [...] could we at once construct a history and yet remain true to [...] its livingness? (2002, 3)

In addition to this revision and questioning of literary canons and traditions made possible by the application of feminist theories, a further methodological innovation in research on Russian womens writing is the application of interdisciplinarity. Literature is not understood only as part of elitist high culture and artistic refinement, but as part of popular culture, affected by social and literary institutions, politics, the market and so on.6 During the 1980s and 1990s, that is the time of perestroika and glasnost and of major transformations in Soviet and post-Soviet society, women writers in Russia began to search for the lost tradition of womens writing and for new forms of femininity and womanhood. These were
6 Landmark works in this respect have been the collection of articles Gender Restructuring in Russian Studies (1993) edited by Marianne Liljestrm, Eila Mntysaari and Arja Rosenholm; Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture edited by Jane Costlow, Stephanie Sandler and Judith Vowles (1993); RussiaWomen Culture edited by Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (1996), the edited volumes by Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd entitled Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution (1998a) and Russian Cultural Studies (1998b); and Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society Since Gorbachev (1999) edited by Adele Marie Barker. See also the three volumes edited by Elisabeth Cheaur and Carolin Heyder in Russian (1999; 2000; 2003) and one in German (2002); Frauen in der Kultur edited by Christine Engel and Renate Reck (2000), and Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation, edited by Peter Barta (2001).

12

Introduction

being radically transformed in literary texts by female authors, as shown by Helena Goscilo in her Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost (1996). Several anthologies of contemporary women writers were published in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s while numerous anthologies of translations of Russian womens writing also appeared in western Europe and North America. According to the writer Svetlana Vasilenko, editor and compiler of one of the Russian anthologies The New Amazons ( , 1991), the situation of women prose writers has improved since the late 1980s, when she and many of her female colleagues found it difficult to have their texts published because of the stigmas associated with woman writer and womens literature which were still considered by publishers to be second-rate. In a later anthology of womens prose texts published in 2002 Vasilenko writes:
[W]e have achieved what we wanted to achieve. That is, our prose, prose by women writers, has been recognized. [...] Today, when a woman writer comes to a publishing house with a manuscript, she doesnt have to be afraid that she will be mocked for writing womens prose ( ). What is more, almost every publishing house has its own series of womens literature. And it is prestigious to publish in them. (Vasilenko 2002, 5)

When we consider research conducted in Russia and in other countries of the former Soviet Union, we can see that there are also many publications and a good deal of research undertaken in the field of womens, gender and feminist studies.7 Feminist and gender studies in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union experienced a boom in the 1990s: numerous books introducing major works of feminist theory through translations into the Russian language were published, centres and institutions of gender studies were founded at universities, and two peerreviewed academic journals began to be published: Gender Studies ( , based at the Kharkiv Centre for Gender Studies) and Gender Notebooks ( , based in St Petersburg). It is noteworthy that gender and womens studies have developed in both cultural and educational capitals, Moscow and St Petersburg, and perhaps even more so in the provincial centres, significantly also outside Russia: Ivanovo and Kharkiv are, according to
Tatiana Dashkova (2003) and Irina Savkina (2007) in their review articles provide an evaluation of the state of the field within the humanities, focusing on historical and philological studies, respectively, and distinguishing different tendencies and problem areas.
7

Masquerade and Femininity

13

Dashkova (2003), the leading centres in gender studies in the former Soviet states. Active centres in Russia are located, for example, in Tver, Ekaterinburg, Perm, and Vladivostok. Perhaps the most challenging and important contribution to the field of feminist and gender studies on the Soviet and post-Soviet periods is the book The Gendered 90s, or the Phallus Does Not Exist ( 90-e, , 2003), by Irina Zherebkina, Director of the Kharkiv Centre for Gender Studies and editor-in-chief of the journal Gender Studies, where she discusses Soviet and post-Soviet representations of sexual difference and womens experience with the help ofbut with a critical approach towestern post-structuralist feminist thought. She puts forward the idea that there are similarities but also quite significant differences in gender discourses in the West and in post-Soviet Russia, caused by the different historical circumstances in which feminism and gender studies are applied and develop in Russia (Zherebkina 2003, 249-251; see also Adlam 2007). One of the important notions put forward by Zherebkina and discussed by others, is that the official Soviet ideology of equality repressed the question of sexual difference, and did not address the question of womens individual experiences (in contrast to feminist movements in the West). After the fall of the USSR the asexuality of public discourse turns into an overemphasis of sexual difference and into what Zherebkina calls the naturalization of sex (Zherebkina 2003, 19-22; Savkina 2007, 227-228). In recent years the use of the term gender in Russianand of gender studies ( ) in Russia has provoked some highly critical responses and debates, suffice it to refer here to some of these discussions.8 The editors of a recent sbornik, or collection of articles, Womens Challenge ( , 2006), Evgeniia Stroganova and Elisabeth Cheaur, state that womens literature of the nineteenth century is still inadequately known and studied, especially in Russia (2006, 5). In another collection edited by herself, Evgeniia Stroganova (2004, 4) notes that gender studies in the discipline of philology were first introduced in Russia into linguistic scholarship and only later in literary scholarship. Gender studies in literature are still the concern of a relatively small group of scholars, but, as Stroganova states, there is a growing interest in them.

Serguei Oushakine points out that the term gender is a Western import that has no historical past in Russian society, and its popularity among Russian scholars exemplifies their lack of independence and depth of thought (Ushakin 2002, 1617).

14

Introduction

For Stroganova, gender studies in literature are first and foremost concerned with the writing of literary history:
A gender approach to the history of Russian literature of the nineteenth century fulfils a corrective function and reveals the inadequacy of traditional approaches and methods. With its help it is possible to solve such important tasks as deconstructing established stereotypes of interpretation and undertaking new readings of fictional texts, including well-known ones; the problematization of the concept of feminine aesthetics, which prompts research into specific features of womens writing; and the recognition and making known of works by women writers of the nineteenth century. (Stroganova 2004, 5)

Such work on Russian womens literary history is currently being undertaken by Stroganova and her colleagues at Tver State University in the form of international seminars, collections of essays and dissertations (Lebedeva 2006; Olekhova 2005; Pavlova 2006; Smirnova 2005; Stroganova 2004; Stroganova and Cheaur 2006; Vorobeva 2006)9, as well as at other centres of gender studies: Perm (Abasheva and Vorobeva 2007; Danilenko 2006), Saratov and Ekaterinburg.10 It must be noted, however, that some of the studies conducted in Russia in the field of philology rely on traditional methods for the close reading of motifs, plots, characters etc. This differs little from the analysis of more familiar, canonical works of Russian literature. Russian gender studies in the field of literature are still less developed, perhaps, than gender studies in sociology or history, and dependent upon a few enthusiasts in departments of Russian philology.

See also the textbook Russian Women Writers from the Nineteenth to the Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries: Texts and Lives ( XIX- XX : . ). Tver: Izdatelstvo M.Iu. Batasovoi, 2006. 10 One could also mention here important sources where much of the published research undertaken in Russia and CIS are available. Two CD-collections of publications: Female Discourse in the Literary Process in Russia at the End of the Twentieth Century ( XX ), Zhenskaia informatsionnaia set, compiled by T.A. Klimenkova, E.I. Trofimova and T.G. Troinova, n.p.; Women in Russia in the Twentieth Century: Experience of an Era ( XX . ), Zhenskaia informatsionnaia set, compiled by S.G. Aivazova, T.A. Klimenkova, N.N. Kozlova, and T.G. Troinova, Moskva: Pasomar, n.p. An Internet based Gender library is supported by the European Humanities University: http://library.gender-ehu.org

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Despite the overwhelming body of research already done on Russian womens writing by western and Russian researchers and the apparent change in publishers attitudes towards womens literature, the secondclass status of the term womens literature seems to remain deeply ingrained in Russian culture. In her article Gender with a Russian accent ( ) Irina Savkina (2005) assesses the critical reception of womens literature in contemporary Russia and comes to the conclusion that although the term womens literature might no longer be such a highly derogatory term as before, and although it might nowadays have gained a more general resonance, the expansion of womens writing in Russia since the 1990s is considered by literary critics to be a sign of decline, of a crisis in (high) Russian culture. The use of the term as neutral is a sign rather of political correctness than of a genuine change in views and values in relation to womens writing. In yet another article Savkina (2006) reveals the grim reality of present-day perceptions of Russian literary history and the formation of the literary canon in textbooks for schools and universities: there is no consideration whatsoever of gender aspects in literature, and women writers are as good as absent in recent histories and textbooks on Russian literature published by prominent publishing houses and scholars. In conclusion Savkina states that there are many problems connected with the writing of womens literary history while the search for ways and directions for research into the history of Russian womens literature has only just begun (Savkina 2006, 27). Thus, despite the abundance of published works on Russian womens writing of various historical periods, both western and Russian, we agree with Savkina that not all has been done in the field by any means, and that much of the research is still in its beginning stages. The theme of masquerade has not been studied in its own right in scholarship of Russian womens writing. However, it can be seen to be connected to the idea of dvoistvennost (), the doubleness or duality of the situation of women writers, located at the margins of Russian culture both as writers, where writing is considered to be a masculine occupation, and as women, for whom the masculine role of writer is not easily accessible: women writers are both inside and outside the dominant culture. This dvoistvennost is characteristic of the situation of Russian women writers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it arises in various forms in contemporary writers as well. Closely connected to dvoistvennost are the cultural constructions of women and femininity associated with womens lack of creativity and imagination (Rosenholm 2002; Kelly 1994a). Metaphors and other terminology used in feminist theory on womens language in

16

Introduction

literature such as mimicry, travesty or play, all of which are related to the notion of masquerade, have been applied in the interpretation of Russian womens writing. Christa Binswanger (2002) directly uses the concept of masquerade in her book on Poliksena Soloveva and her strategy for overcoming the dilemma of the woman writer: Soloveva achieved this by masquerading as a male writing subject. Stephanie Sandlers (1996) article on Mariia Petrovykhs and Inna Lisnianskaias poems is another individual example of how the theory of gender masquerade might be applied to Russian womens literature. However, to our knowledge, there has been no systematic presentation of this theme in relation to Russian womens writing. Most of the publications mentioned here are written on Russian and/or Soviet womens writing. There are very few publications conducting comparisons between womens writing in other Slavic or post-Soviet cultures, or between western European and Russian womens writing. This is understandable in the sense that researchers of Russian culture are concerned with the specific historical and cultural context of Russia. There are some exceptions. Women in Russia and Ukraine (1996) edited by Rosalind Marsh represents a collection of articles on various historical, social and cultural aspects in Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet womens lives, not only or even primarily in literary texts. Engendering Slavic Literatures (1996), edited by Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester represents one of the rare exceptions of works investigating gender and feminist issues not only in Russian but also in Croatian, Polish, Serbian and Ukrainian literary texts. One of the goals of the volume was to make writers representing other Slavic cultures familiar to western scholars of Russian literature (Chester and Forrester 1996, ix). The editors point out that Russia and Russian language and literature tended to dominate Soviet culture and that other Slavic literatures were marginalized, which means that women writers in Slavic, ex-Soviet countries have been doubly marginalized. We hope that this volume, despite the predominance of Russian writers, will also encourage others to engage in dialogic approaches between Slavic literatures.

Polish Women Writers: Research and Publications

In considering the critical work produced so far on Polish women writers and feminist approaches, the fact has to be acknowledged that with a few major exceptions, this field is still relatively undevelopedin both Polish (home-grown) and in foreign studies (by which we mean English-

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language or European, including Russian)when compared with the relatively sophisticated, theoretically underpinned studies devoted to Russian female writers mentioned above. As with the Russian women writers attempts were made in the nineteenth century (Sowiski 1821; Chmielowski 1885) to identify and reinstate women writers, but this was nothing like as systematic or as feminist as the works by Likhacheva or Shchepkina. One of the aims of the current volume is to bring studies of Polish women writers into the comparative context (here alongside texts by Russian women) in an attempt to introduce more Polish women writers to a wider non-Polish literary-critical public (though the lack of translations of the original texts, especially of nineteenth-century works, remains a problem) and to subject them to the same in-depth level of treatment as the Russian works. Hence the slightly greater space devoted here in this Introduction to the Polish over the Russian publications, as this scholarship is not so widely known, tending to be confined to the relatively small circle of Polonists and not generally known to scholars of Russian literature. We seek to demonstrate that texts written in Polish can stand up to the same level of critique, using the same analytical and theoretical tools, as those written in other European languages. Our only regret is that only five of the thirteen chapters in the current volume are devoted to Polish rather than Russian literature. In our aims we follow on from an earlier volume on gender consciousness that brings together Polish and Russian modernist texts: The New Consciousness of Sex in Modernism: Studies on Gender in Fin-de-Sicle Polish and Russian Culture (Nowa wiadomo pci w modernizmie. Studia spod znaku gender w kulturze polskiej i rosyjskiej u schyku stulecia), edited by German Ritz, Christa Binswanger and Carmen Scheide (2000). What remains to be done, as a task that we shall seek to address in future projects, is an actual comparison between Polish and Russian texts by women, for example between their thematic and ideological approaches, historically and in the contemporary context. This is not to suggest that the number of works published on Polish women writers has been small. But a distinction perhaps needs to be made between approaches that are predominantly archaeological or descriptive, i.e. they seek to reinstate women writers who have been forgotten or by-passed by the canon and by mainstream criticism, or they describe female figures encountered in literary texts without submitting the attitudes and purposes of the writing subject itself to serious critique, and those studies that write from a declared feminist, or at least gender-sensitive, standpoint and seek to identify how the authorial and/or narrative standpoint functions in the text. Some works on texts by women,

18

Introduction

of course, are written without any gender agenda, and yet may be useful contributions to literary studies from other perspectives, such as SzaryMatywiecka (1994), Bobrowska (1997) and Aleksandrowicz (1998) or the numerous articles devoted to the Nobel laureate Wisawa Szymborska. Meanwhile a large proportion of the works having a more or less strongly declared feminist programme are multi-authored volumes, sometimes the result of conferences, which (perhaps inevitably) turn out to be mixed bags: they tend to include some articles clearly drawing on and sympathetic to feminist notions and theory, and some that focus more on images of women in literary texts, by men as well as women, where a vast range of literary periods, genres and individual writers is encompassed (scattered across other literatures as well as Polish) without any obvious coordinating theme other than the term womansuch volumes as Women in Literature (Kobiety w literaturze), edited by Lidia Winiewska (1999) or A Century of Women in Literature (Wiek kobiet w literaturze), edited by Jadwiga Zacharska and Marek Kochanowski (2002). This is not to deny the value and contribution of these volumes, on the contrary: the sum of their individual parts is substantial and they include articles by some of the main contemporary critics representing womens or gender studies in the Polish literary field: Grayna Borkowska, Jadwiga Zacharska, Lidia Winiewska, Ewa Kraskowska, Inga Iwasiw, Piotr Urbaski, Kamila Budrowska, Robert Cielak, German Ritz, Kazimiera Szczuka, Liliana Sikorska, Agata Araszkiewicz, Elbieta Pakszys, Ewa Paczoska, Krystyna Kosiska, Agnieszka Graff, Kinga Dunin and others, but to indicate that the feminist approach is not one that is uniform, nor one we should necessarily expect to find in works devoted to Polish women writers. The dispersal of feminist analyses in multi-authored, edited volumes with very general titles together with the lack of a large number of substantial monographs, has perhaps had the effect of watering down their impact. The confusion or shyness in being perceived as too ideological is perhaps a factor contributing to this lack of clarity (though the avoidance of feminism can hardly be described as non-ideological)and may be itself an indication of the enormous struggle faced by feminism at all in the Polish political, religious and cultural context, where idealized images and prescribed models of correct womanhood remain very strong (Walczewska 1999; Graff 2001). In her introduction to one of the better focused multi-authored volumes Feminist Criticism: Sisters in Literary History and Theory (Krytyka feministyczna. Siostry teorii i historii literatury, 2000), edited by herself and Liliana Sikorska, Grayna

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Borkowska points to these issues surrounding the reception on Polish soil of feminist literary criticism and its consequent marginalization, including the oft quoted thesis that feminist research tools are not compatible with Polish culture [sic!]. However, we have to agree with her that despite these opinions, feminist criticism has been developing on our native soil for ten [now seventeenEds] years (Borkowska and Sikorska 2000, 7) and that it continues to do so, whether or not attempts are made to marginalize it. The relatively late arrival of feminism on the Polish literary critical scene has not been without its positive aspects, however. Polish literary studies began to examine writing by women as a serious and valid concern during the early to mid-1990s and drew on both Anglo-American and French feminist thinking, without accepting anything wholesale and with a certain evident desire to identify something distinct in the Polish experience, and hence in the writing of Polish women. One might suggest that the late arrival of Polish literary studies on this arena enabled Polish literary critics sympathetic to the inclusion of more women within in the bounds of literary studies, to view their Anglo-American and French predecessors with a healthy detachment (authors have tended to adopt a pick and choose approach rather than emulate any one theorist). And one could also argue that the introduction of feminism by certain key critics (Maria Janion, Grayna Borkowska, Krystyna Kosiska) has also contributed to a liberalization in Polish literary studies more generally, challenging not only conventional assumptions about what makes up Polish culture per se but also traditional methodologies, and opening up to other new theoretical approaches, such as the wider gender studies and postcolonialism (Iwasiw 1994 and 2004; Bakua 2006). An important landmark was Volume 4-6 (1993) of the literary critical journal Teksty drugie, which included translations of key texts of western feminist criticism (Showalters Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness; Cixous The Laugh of the Medusa); contributions from or interviews with established Polish and American criticsmale as well as female; polemics, such as Halina Filipowiczs article Against Womens Literature (Przeciw literaturze kobiecej); and voices who have subsequently become important contributors to the field of feminist and later gender studies: Toril Moi, Beth Holmgren, Grayna Borkowska, Ewa Kraskowska, Inga Iwasiw and Kinga Dunin. Whilst the volume has been superseded by subsequent publications, it remains a useful reference to key texts and debates in the early 1990s. Several of the essays were republished with additional new chapters as Body and Text: Feminism in Literary Studies: An Anthology of Essays (Ciao i tekst. Feminizm w

20

Introduction

literaturoznawstwieantologia szkicw), edited by Anna Nasiowska (2001). Perhaps the key year was 1996, which saw the publication of Maria Janions Woman and the Spirit of Otherness (Kobieta i duch innoci), which contains the two articles on Maria Komornicka mentioned in our current volume by Karolina Krasuska, and Grayna Borkowskas Alienated Women: A Study on Polish Womens Fiction 1845-1918 (Cudzoziemki. Studia o polskiej prozie kobiecej). While Janions work does not address only literature, Borkowskas study falls exclusively within the discipline and is the first major study from a feminist perspective of Polands chief women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is so far the only Polish work of its kind to be translated into English (Borkowska 2001): Klementyna TaskaHoffmanowa (1798-1845), Narcyza michowska (1819-1876), Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841-1910), Maria Konopnicka (1842-1910) and Zofia Nakowska (1884-1954). In addition, the work discusses lesser known Polish women writers from the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Jzefa Sawicka (pseud. Ostoja), Jzefa Kisielnicka (pseud. Esteja), Cecylia Walewska, Eugenia mijewska, Waleria Marren-Morzkowska and Maria Jehanne Wielopolska, and concludes with a comparison between the approaches to femininity in the diaries of Nakowska and her contemporary Maria Dbrowska (1889-1965). Although made available to English-speaking audiences in 2001, reaching beyond the limited sphere of Polish speakers remains a problem due to the lack of availability of translations of the original works; with the exception of a few scattered in collections (Goscilo 1985; Bassnett and Kuhiwczak 1988) and random individual works (see the list in Hawkesworth 2001, 314-316) there is no substantial body of texts translated from Polish into English that might be compared, for example, to Kellys Anthology of Russian Womens Writing 1777-1992 (1994b) which accompanies her History. This problem also limits the usefulness to literary studies of Celia Hawkesworths edited book A History of Central European Womens Writing (2001), for which the chapters on Polish womens writing, covering from the middle ages to the present day, were written by Borkowska, Ursula Phillips and Magorzata Czermiska. An expanded version of the Polish chapters was published by the three authors more or less simultaneously in Polish as Polish Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present Day: A Guide (Pisarki polskie od redniowiecza do wspczesnoci. Przewodnik, 2000). The latter two works are what we might call archaeologythe attempt to identify or rediscover as many women writers as possible, defined here as producers of literary texts, not

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so much to reintegrate them into any specific tradition but rather to reinstate them as integral (not marginal) contributors to the reserve of texts written in Polish. They contain no sustained interpretative material and do not attempt to place the writers within a specifically feminist framework or tradition; both remain useful, however, as initial listings of names and brief information on their works presented for the first time in one place within their historical, sociocultural and intellectual contexts, though subsequent researchas well as a much broader interpretation of what is understood by the term woman writer (not just a writer of poetry, drama and/or fiction but of letters, travel diaries, home manuals, conduct guides, hymns and prayers, and other genres)will lead to the discovery of many more women writers than are listed in these (Partyka 2004, 114). Under the general heading archaeological-descriptive, we would also include the several works that have appeared sporadically since the early 1990s on Polish women writers of the pre-partition period (before 1795) up to and including the early nineteenth century, some having a more feminist slant than others, but all of which have done much to restore this neglected area of Polish literary studies: Polish Women Writers of Earlier Times (Pisarki polskie epok dawnych), edited by Krystyna Stasiewicz (1998); Stasiewiczs book on the eighteenth-century poetess Elbieta Drubacka (2001); Joanna Partykas Well-Trained Wife: The Writing Woman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Culture (ona wywiczona. Kobieta piszca w kulturze XVI i XVII wieku, 2004); Alina Aleksandrowiczs Izabela Czartoryska: Polishness and Europeaness (Izabela Czartoryska. Polsko i europejsko, 1998). In addition we would mention the major studies by Karolina Targosz which, although not strictly literary studies, have added considerably to our knowledge of early women: Polish Savantes of the Seventeenth Century: The Intellectual Aspirations of Noble Women (Sawantki polskie XVII wieku. Aspiracje intelektualne kobiet ze rodowisk dworskich, 1997) and With a Nuns Pen: Seventeenth-Century Polish Chroniclers of Their Orders and Times (Pirem zakonnicy. Kronikarki w Polsce XVII w. o swoich zakonach i swoich czasach, 2002); and also the series of historical-sociological studies Women (Kobiety), edited by Anna arnowska and Andrzej Szwarc and published since 1993 by the Institute of History of Warsaw University, which have provided invaluable context and background to our considerations about Polish literary women. Borkowskas Alienated Women, however, was the first full-length study to fully take on board the reservoir of French and Anglo-American feminist approaches to literature, inspired by such established names as Irigaray, Shoshana Felman, Toril Moi, Elaine Showalter and Nancy K.

22

Introduction

Miller; this is not to say that she writes without critical distance from these critics. Nancy K. Miller, whose own approach draws more on the French than the American tradition, is likewise one of the inspirations for Krystyna Kosiskas book on Gabriela Zapolska (1857-1921) Body, Desire, Clothing: On the Early Novels of Gabriela Zapolska (Ciao, podanie, ubranie. O wczesnych powieciach Gabrieli Zapolskiej, 1999), as are Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva. This book is one of the few attempts made by any Polish critic not only to identify but to exploit an criture fminine. This kind of in-depth monograph (whether written like Kosiska from a committed feminist perspective, or from one that polemicizes with it, yet still takes it seriously), focused on a specific author or problem, is very rare in Polish literary studies, written in Poland or abroad; though we should also include here Borkowskas study of the interwar poet Halina Powiatowska Unthinking and Unromantic (Nierozwana i nieromantyczna, 2001) and Agata Araszkiewiczs of another woman poet Zuzanna Ginczanka I am Expressing to You my Life: The Melancholy of Zuzanna Ginczanka (Wypowiadam wam moje ycie. Melancholia Zuzanny Ginczanki, 2001). Kosiskas work in a sense leads into uncharted territory, after which the entire territory of Polish literary studies looks very different having been seen through these eyes. According to Inga Iwasiw, Kosiska, in reading though the body, i.e. as a woman, realizes the feminist postulate of interpretation that preserves the perspective of the (female) interpreter (2005, 36); though one could take issue with the assumption that all women necessarily read through the body. In the same year and from the same publisher there appeared another feminist work that has been influential in the field: Sawomira Walczewskas Ladies, Knights and Feminists: Womens Discourse of Emancipation in Poland (Damy, rycerze i feministki. Kobiecy dyskurs emancypacyjny w Polsce). This is not limited to literature, but literary women feature significantly in it since literature was one of the few areas of public life where women in the past could exercise some, albeit limited freedom. Walczewska explodes the myth of the greater public roles enjoyed by Polish women in the nineteenth century (associated with patriotic self-sacrifice, conspiracy and other national activities) showing how such roles were very clearly defined and confined along strict gender lines. In this work Walczewska challenges the stereotypical but persistent Polish model of male-female relations as one where noble chivalrous men protect infantile women, and seeks to redefine relations on the basis of equal value and partnership, something she demonstrates some Polish