Ucieczka z zamkowej wieży, czyli o feministycznym przepisywaniu baśni w prozie polskiej po 1989 roku

Abstract

Re−writing is, as outlined by A. Rich, a way of both criticising the old and building a new order. As a literary technique it is one of the most significant and distinguishable elements of the feminist poetics. Famous plots, motives and traditional genres in works of such writers as A. Carter, J. Winterson, M. Atwood show their limitations. Fairy tales and myths of any culture consist believes essential to the people inhabiting it and this is the reason their new versions have an outstanding position among the other re−written stories. 1989 was a turning point for the presence of this technique in Polish prose. Polish writers, (S. Chutnik, K. Dunin, I. Filipiak, Matka Bolka, A. Nasiłowska) in their re−written fairy−tales present a diverse attitude to the well−known stories (as well to a plot as to the genre itself). The writers show different kinds of opression embodied and caused by the old tales. They also transform the tarditional stories in many various ways − from stylistic to narrative alteration, from changes in the assessment of characters to acts of modification and contamination of whole plots. All this make re−written fairy tales (despite the limited number of them) a significant series of important statements about western culture and have inspired a discussion on the topic among Polish feminists.