Masquerade and Femininity
Masquerade and Femininity:
Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers
Edited by
Urszula Chowaniec, Ursula Phillips
and Marja Rytkönen
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers,
Edited by Urszula Chowaniec, Ursula Phillips and Marja Rytkönen
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 Rytkönen 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 Rytkönen
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 Women’s Writing .............................................. 27
Part I: Women Writers and the Trouble with Authorship
Chapter One............................................................................................... 42
A Masquerade of Masquerades: Blizhnev’s 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 Żmichowska’s
White Rose Texts
Ursula Phillips
Chapter Four ................................................................................................... 93
Femininity, Masquerade and Performance in Poliksena Solov’eva’s
The Woman Who Never Was
Kirsti Ekonen
vi
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 Nałkowska
Lidia Wiśniewska
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 126
Undoing Gender Masquerade: Maria Komornicka’s 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 Odoevtseva’s
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 Grekova’s Novel
The Ship of Widows
Kirsi Räisälä
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 185
Death as the Mask of Life in Women’s Reflections: Olga
Tokarczuk’s Final Stories and Anna In in the Tombs of the World
Irina Adelgeym
Masquerade and Femininity
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 Pavlova’s The Intimate Diary of an Excellent Student
and the Masquerade of Femininity
Marja Rytkönen
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 women’s 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 Räisälä, 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 Wiśniewska were translated by
Ursula Phillips.
We would also like to thank Professor Carol Adlam of the University
of Exeter and Professor Grażyna Borkowska of the Polish Academy of
Sciences for agreeing to review our book.
Urszula Chowaniec
Ursula Phillips
Marja Rytkönen
INTRODUCTION
URSZULA CHOWANIEC, URSULA PHILLIPS
AND MARJA RYTKÖNEN
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 “masquerade”—if
we are to refer to such trickery or mimicry, all the “paraphernalia of
beauty” (Irigaray 1991, 78) in this way—be 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 women’s lives. But why is a woman’s 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 femininity—and despite
local idiosyncrasies—some sign of a universal “gender trouble”? Thus, the
2
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 woman’s 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
(Tseëlon 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 women’s writing. Therefore one of the main aims of this
volume is to examine women’s 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 men’s 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
3
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
Riviere’s 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
4
Introduction
masquerade has to be understood as what women do in order to recuperate
some element of desire, to participate in man’s 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 Riviere’s
pioneering study has spawned at least ‘two currently circulating notions of
masquerade’—one 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
5
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 hide—not from others, but from himself—an
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 Irigaray’s notion of
masquerade shows—as do the chapters of this volume—that 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 Tseëlon 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” (Tseëlon 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. (Tseëlon 2001, 3)
6
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 women’s 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 women’s 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
women’s 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
7
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 Räisälä; the disguises of a
young Russian émigré in that of Xenia Srebrianski Harwell; or the masks
of death in Irina Adelgeym’s. The notion of womanhood as a void
deprived of subjectivity, or of a woman being nothing but a man’s
inspiration, subordinated to and adapting to a man’s power is vividly
described in Kirsti Ekonen’s 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. Women’s 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 Rytkönen.
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 émigré’s loneliness in Srebrianski
Harwell’s text, as well as in the discussion about female authorship in the
chapter by Ursula Phillips on the Polish writer Narcyza Żmichowska
(Gabryella); in those by Lidia Wiśniewska and Karolina Krasuska on the
early modernist Polish writers Maria Komornicka and Zofia Nałkowska;
in Kirsti Ekonen’s text on the Russian modernist writer Poliksena
Solov’eva; in Arja Rosenholm’s on Khvoshchinskaia; and in Evgeniia
Stroganova’s 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
themes—when 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 woman’s body (Kirsi Räisälä)
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
8
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 that—through deconstructing the masquerade—it 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 women’s 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 women’s writing
began seriously in the late 1980s with the publication of the pioneering
works by Barbara Heldt and Joe Andrew.2 Heldt’s 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.” Heldt’s as well as Andrew’s early works have had a
major impact on the study of Russian women’s writing both in the West
and in Russia.
Since Heldt’s and Andrew’s classics, a plethora of substantial works
on Russian women’s writing have been published, which have continued
to change and correct some of the views on Russian women’s literary
2
Andrew’s 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. Andrew’s 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
9
history. Catriona Kelly’s A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 18201992, accompanied by An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 17771992 is still the most comprehensive general introduction to Russian
women’s writing, scrutinizing both the historical, social and political as
well as literary contexts of women’s 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 women’s 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 Göpfert, and now numbering nearly twenty volumes on the
history of Russian women’s writing, as well as Christina Parnell’s (1996;
1997) and Elisabeth Cheauré’s work. The list of significant works,
monographs as well as multi-authored anthologies on Russian women’s
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 women’s 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
3
A comprehensive bibliography of general studies and reference books on Russian
women’s 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 women’s 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 Women’s Education in Russia (10861856) (Материалы для истории женскаго образования в России (1086-1856),
St Petersburg 1890); Likhacheva, E. Materials for the History of Women’s
Education in Russia (1856-1880) (Материалы для истории женскаго
образования в России (1856-1880), St Petersburg 1901); Shchepkina, E. From
the History of the Female Personality in Russia (Из истории женской личности в
России, St Petersburg 1914); Golitsyn, N.N. Bibliographical Dictionary of
10
Introduction
the fore the rich literary material and information about women writers
who were “found” again in the 1980s-1990s. Likhacheva’s and
Shchepkina’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s writing published in
English and German/Russian respectively in 2002: Adele Marie Barker
and Jehanne M. Gheith’s A History of Russian Women Writers, and Arja
Rosenholm and Frank Göpfert’s 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 women’s 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
women’s writing in different periods, it also shows that there is a growing
need for more specific/specified studies on the field of Russian women’s
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 (Библиографический словарь русских писательниц),
St Petersburg, 1889; Nekrasova E.S. ”Elena Andreevna Gan (Zeneida R-va) 18141842: Biographical schetch” ([...] Биографический очерк). Русская старина,
1886, 8: 335-354; 9: 553-574; Anastasiia Iakovlevna Marchenko (T.Ch. ili A.
Termizov). Киевская старина, 1889, 11: 392-422; Nadezhda Andreevna Durova
(Devitsa-kavalerist Aleksandrov) 1783-1866. Исторический вестник, 1890, 9:
585-612.
5
Valentina Uspenskaia, director of the Tver Centre for Women’s History and
Gender Studies has published reprints of these works and other feminist literature
in recent years. See the reprint of Shchepkina’s work available on the Centre’s
website: http://tvergenderstudies.ru
Masquerade and Femininity
11
Potsdam and Tampere. The editors, Rosenholm and Göpfert, have both
long been engaged in their own research on the history of Russian
women’s 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 women’s
writing in Russia. Instead, what remains “certain” in this writing of history
is its discontinuity and fragmentariness: “Eine Brüchigkeit oder gar der
Eindruck des ‘Zufälligen,’ was für die russische Kritikerin E. Ščepkina 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 women’s 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 women’s
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 Liljeström, Eila
Mäntysaari and Arja Rosenholm; Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture edited
by Jane Costlow, Stephanie Sandler and Judith Vowles (1993); Russia—Women—
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
Cheauré 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 women’s 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 (Новые амазонки, 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 “women’s literature” which
were still considered by publishers to be “second-rate.” In a later
anthology of women’s 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 doesn’t have to be
afraid that she will be mocked for writing ‘women’s prose’ (бабья проза).
What is more, almost every publishing house has its own series of
women’s 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
women’s, 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
(Гендерные исследования, based at the Kharkiv Centre for Gender
Studies) and Gender Notebooks (Гендерные тетради, based in St
Petersburg). It is noteworthy that gender and women’s 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
7
Tat’iana 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.
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 (Гендерные 90-e,
или фаллоса не существует, 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 women’s experience with the help
of—but with a critical approach to—western 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 women’s 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”—гендер in Russian—and of gender studies
(гендерные исследования) 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, Women’s
Challenge (Женский вызов, 2006), Evgeniia Stroganova and Elisabeth
Cheauré, state that women’s 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.
8
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 women’s
writing; and the recognition and making known of works by women
writers of the nineteenth century. (Stroganova 2004, 5)
Such work on Russian women’s 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 Cheauré 2006; Vorob’eva 2006)9, as
well as at other centres of gender studies: Perm’ (Abasheva and Vorob’eva
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.
9
See also the textbook Russian Women Writers from the Nineteenth to the
Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries: Texts and Lives (Русские писательницы
XIX-начала XX века: Тексты и судьбы. Учебное пособие по спецкурсу).
Tver’: Izdatel’stvo 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 (Женский дискурс в литературном процессе России конца
XX века), 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 (Российские женшины в XX веке. Опыт эпохи),
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
Masquerade and Femininity
15
Despite the overwhelming body of research already done on Russian
women’s writing by western and Russian researchers and the apparent
change in publishers’ attitudes towards women’s literature, the secondclass status of the term “women’s literature” seems to remain deeply
ingrained in Russian culture. In her article “Gender with a Russian accent”
(Гендер с русским акцентом) Irina Savkina (2005) assesses the critical
reception of women’s literature in contemporary Russia and comes to the
conclusion that although the term “women’s 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 women’s
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 women’s 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 women’s
literary history while the search for ways and directions for research into
the history of Russian women’s literature has only just begun (Savkina
2006, 27). Thus, despite the abundance of published works on Russian
women’s 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 women’s writing. However, it can be seen to be
connected to the idea of “dvoistvennost’ (двойственность),” 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 women’s lack of
creativity and imagination (Rosenholm 2002; Kelly 1994a). Metaphors
and other terminology used in feminist theory on women’s 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
women’s writing. Christa Binswanger (2002) directly uses the concept of
masquerade in her book on Poliksena Solov’eva and her strategy for
overcoming the dilemma of the woman writer: Solov’eva achieved this by
masquerading as a male writing subject. Stephanie Sandler’s (1996) article
on Mariia Petrovykh’s and Inna Lisnianskaia’s poems is another
individual example of how the theory of gender masquerade might be
applied to Russian women’s literature. However, to our knowledge, there
has been no systematic presentation of this theme in relation to Russian
women’s writing.
Most of the publications mentioned here are written on Russian and/or
Soviet women’s writing. There are very few publications conducting
comparisons between women’s writing in other Slavic or post-Soviet
cultures, or between western European and Russian women’s 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 women’s
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 undeveloped—in both Polish
(“home-grown”) and in “foreign” studies (by which we mean English-
Masquerade and Femininity
17
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 (Sowiński 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-Siècle Polish and Russian Culture (Nowa świadomość płci w
modernizmie. Studia spod znaku gender w kulturze polskiej i rosyjskiej u
schyłku 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 Wisława 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 “woman”—such
volumes as Women in Literature (Kobiety w literaturze), edited by Lidia
Wiśniewska (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 women’s or
gender studies in the Polish literary field: Grażyna Borkowska, Jadwiga
Zacharska, Lidia Wiśniewska, Ewa Kraskowska, Inga Iwasiów, Piotr
Urbański, Kamila Budrowska, Robert Cieślak, German Ritz, Kazimiera
Szczuka, Liliana Sikorska, Agata Araszkiewicz, Elżbieta Pakszys, Ewa
Paczoska, Krystyna Kłosińska, 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, Grażyna
Masquerade and Femininity
19
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 seventeen—Eds] 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, Grażyna Borkowska, Krystyna Kłosińska) 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 (Iwasiów 1994 and 2004; Bakuła 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 (Showalter’s “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”;
Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa”); contributions from or interviews
with established Polish and American critics—male as well as female;
polemics, such as Halina Filipowicz’s article “Against ‘Women’s
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, Grażyna Borkowska, Ewa
Kraskowska, Inga Iwasiów 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 (Ciało i tekst. Feminizm w
20
Introduction
literaturoznawstwie—antologia szkiców), edited by Anna Nasiłowska
(2001).
Perhaps the key year was 1996, which saw the publication of Maria
Janion’s Woman and the Spirit of Otherness (Kobieta i duch inności),
which contains the two articles on Maria Komornicka mentioned in our
current volume by Karolina Krasuska, and Grażyna Borkowska’s
Alienated Women: A Study on Polish Women’s Fiction 1845-1918
(Cudzoziemki. Studia o polskiej prozie kobiecej). While Janion’s work
does not address only literature, Borkowska’s study falls exclusively
within the discipline and is the first major study from a feminist
perspective of Poland’s 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 TańskaHoffmanowa (1798-1845), Narcyza Żmichowska (1819-1876), Eliza
Orzeszkowa (1841-1910), Maria Konopnicka (1842-1910) and Zofia
Nałkowska (1884-1954). In addition, the work discusses lesser known
Polish women writers from the second half of the nineteenth century, such
as Józefa Sawicka (pseud. Ostoja), Józefa Kisielnicka (pseud. Esteja),
Cecylia Walewska, Eugenia Żmijewska, Waleria Marrené-Morzkowska
and Maria Jehanne Wielopolska, and concludes with a comparison
between the approaches to femininity in the diaries of Nałkowska and her
contemporary Maria Dąbrowska (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 Kelly’s Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing
1777-1992 (1994b) which accompanies her History.
This problem also limits the usefulness to literary studies of Celia
Hawkesworth’s edited book A History of Central European Women’s
Writing (2001), for which the chapters on Polish women’s writing,
covering from the middle ages to the present day, were written by
Borkowska, Ursula Phillips and Małgorzata Czermińska. 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 średniowiecza do
współczesności. Przewodnik, 2000). The latter two works are what we
might call “archaeology”—the attempt to identify or rediscover as many
women writers as possible, defined here as producers of literary texts, not
Masquerade and Femininity
21
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 research—as 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); Stasiewicz’s book on the eighteenth-century poetess Elżbieta
Drużbacka (2001); Joanna Partyka’s “Well-Trained Wife”: The Writing
Woman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Culture (“Żona
wyćwiczona.” Kobieta pisząca w kulturze XVI i XVII wieku, 2004); Alina
Aleksandrowicz’s Izabela Czartoryska: Polishness and Europeaness
(Izabela Czartoryska. Polskość i europejskość, 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 środowisk dworskich, 1997) and With a Nun’s Pen:
Seventeenth-Century Polish Chroniclers of Their Orders and Times
(Piórem 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 Żarnowska 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.
Borkowska’s 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 Kłosińska’s book on Gabriela Zapolska (1857-1921) Body,
Desire, Clothing: On the Early Novels of Gabriela Zapolska (Ciało,
pożądanie, ubranie. O wczesnych powieściach 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 “écriture
féminine.” This kind of in-depth monograph (whether written like
Kłosińska 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 Borkowska’s study of the
interwar poet Halina Poświatowska Unthinking and Unromantic
(Nierozważna i nieromantyczna, 2001) and Agata Araszkiewicz’s of
another woman poet Zuzanna Ginczanka I am Expressing to You my Life:
The Melancholy of Zuzanna Ginczanka (Wypowiadam wam moje życie.
Melancholia Zuzanny Ginczanki, 2001). Kłosińska’s 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 Iwasiów, Kłosińska, 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: Sławomira
Walczewska’s Ladies, Knights and Feminists: Women’s 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