Tender Narrators. Four Generations of Women and the Female Saga in the Latest Polish Literature

Abstract

 The article concerns the novels by Martyna Bunda Nieczułość, Anna Dziewit-Meller Od jed­nego Lucypera, and Joanna Bator Gorzko, gorzko. The author of the text compares these novels from the perspective of the relationship between mother and daughter, grandmother and granddaughter, as well as the category of daughters and sisters. In the first part of the text, the author focused on the changes in women’s literature after 1989, representations of moth­erhood, demythologising the figure of the Polish mother, and put forward a thesis on the reconstruction of female genealogy and the creation of multi-generational relations between women in recent prose. In the second part, the author analysed novels by Martyna Bunda, Anna Dziewit-Meller and Joanna Bator as realisations of women’s sagas, with particular em­phasis on the poetics of this genre and its polemic against the traditional, patriarchal model of the family story. The author referred to research on the cultural theory of genre and chang­es in the image of the family in recent literature. Analysing selected novels, the author drew attention, among other things, to the absence of men in the family structure, the transgener­ational transmission of trauma and the polemic against the motif of the happy family home. The author concluded that the representatives of the youngest generation are the deposito­ries of family stories, through which they can rethink their identity, and that relationships with grandmothers and sisters replace their flawed and complicated relationship with their mother. In conclusion, the author used the category of the tender narrator from Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s lecture in relation to women’s narratives, including the quadruple perspective of women that occurs in the novels analysed.