Helena Goscilo

Myth, according to Roland Barthes, constitutes a social stereotype passed off as something natural, whereby ideological imposition appears as “what goes without saying.” Since cultures generate myths to present their norms as facts of nature, myth is a form of communication creating a system of second-order meaning. For centuries Polish culture aligned with Europe’s myth of womanhood, institutionalized in the imbalanced misogynistic binary that predicated womanhood as the secondary category defined as the polar opposite of the purported primacy category—manhood. Accordingly, the quintessence of womanhood was established as passivity, subservience, nurture, emotionality, irrationality, intuition, body, and so forth. Born to support men (the Adam’s rib scenario), women as the weaker sex were the pale moon (menses, after all), drawing light from the sun equated with the male. Moreover, owing to the centrality of the Catholic Church in Poland, the Polish woman became conflated with the Virgin Mary and abstracted into an allegory of the long-suffering nation (Matka Polka/Boska). With the dissolution of the Eastern bloc and Poland’s recovered independence, an extraordinary revolution in Polish women’s cultural production has overturned this hardy but improbable icon of femininity, to reclaim a different womanhood. While the postmodern art of Ewa Juszkiewicz exposes the erasure of women as individuals in male art of previous eras, the prose of Manuela Gretkowska and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as the films of Agnieszka Smoczyńska, Małgorzata Szumowka, and Olga Chajdas, reconceives women as individuated, active, creative, sexual, independent, strong beings, ultimately more than a match for their fabled male counterparts. My presentation engages the Marxist John Berger and French feminism—Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous—as well as scholars specializing in postmodernism, notably Linda Hutcheon. Time permitting, it also parenthetically references Russian parallels and contrasts (Tania Antoshina, Viktoriia Lamashko, and Liudmila Ulitskaia).