Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet, Dzidzia, Cwaniary: Sylwia Chutnik’s Representations of War and Gender
Katarzyna Nadana-Sokołowska
Instytut Badań Literackich PANAbstract
The article describes the motif of women and war in three novels by Sylwia Chutnik (born 1979): Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet (Pocket Atlas of Women) 2008, Dzidzia (Diddums) 2009 and Cwaniary (The Hustlers) 2012. Drawing from the context of modern Western studies, reflections on these works concern the relationship between gender and war, assuming that it grants an active and heroic role to men while putting women in the role of civilian victims, and in doing so, it consolidates the traditional social hierarchy. Even though the history of war contradicts such stereotypes and abounds in evidence of women’s courage, both as civilians and soldiers, the society – according to scholars – seems to reproduce wartime division of gender roles as justification for the cultural hierarchy of gender. This pushes women’s experience and memory of war to the margins of collective memory. Sylwia Chutnik portraits the women who participated in the Warsaw Uprising and depicts their lives after the war, rediscovering the (in)ability to build a women’s tradition of combat and to pass their wartime stories to daughters and granddaughters. She also shows the forgotten women’s memory of the Uprising: the terrible suffering of civilians, who often rebelled against military decisions. In her understanding, this memory forms an undertone in Polish culture, and has only recently been acknowledged by the so-called oral history.
Keywords:
war, gender, Warsaw Uprising, Polish literature, Sylwia ChutnikReferences
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