Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, the Night House)

Abstract

In her paper Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom (The Day House, the Night House) Justyna Sempruch analyzes Tokarczuk's 1998 narrative in the context of the post-communist revival of patriarchy in Poland as well as the parallel Western impact on women's writing in Poland. These two distinct socio-cultural developments, as reflected in Tokarczuk's novel, expand the concept of a subversive household a transnational dis/order that abolishes borders between domestic (national) and foreign structures: an increasing masculinization of the power structures (political arena and scientific practices) impacts the management of the social and the most private aspects of women's lives in post-1989 Poland while the growing popularity of intellectual feminism, borrowed from U.S. and French second-wave positions, encourages a local digging into a collective feminist past. Tokarczuk's narrative belongs to a category which draws on Irigaray's theories and displays preoccupations with the failure of the sexual revolution. Sempruch argues that Tokarczuk's narrative reflects on the Western formulations of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as a discourse normalising patriarchy, as well as on re-evaluations of hysteria as the unheard voice of the woman whose language is reduced to psychosomatic symptoms. Justyna Sempruch, Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.3 (2008):