Marianna in the House of Bluebeard: Tropes of Female Authorship in Absolute Amnesia.
Absolute Amnesia (1995) is a book that has evoked many discussions in Polish literature after 1989, of both a critical (about menstrual/women’s literature and the processes of canon formation) and a political nature (related to the questioning of the significance of the Romantic heritage of the past). In my presentation, I would like to show these mutual relations between text and its literary context, reading Marianna – the main character of the novel - as a figure of female authorship.
As Izabela Filipiak writes in her well-known essay Literatura monstrualna, the situation of the woman writer within the canon is comparable to that of Bluebeard’s young wife when she enters her husband’s castle. Unlike in the fairy tale however, the woman writer does not allow herself to break the ban and cross the threshold of the Bloody Chamber. Is it because of the ‘anxiety of authorship’ - this female malady of a specific nature well-described in feminist criticism? Can she walk out of Bluebeard’s house?
Absolute amnesia contains tropes of both possible and impossible female authorship and thus displays various strategies of a writing woman’s experiences within the framework of the canonical tradition and outside of it. The language of family metaphors – mother (and grandmother), father, daughter and son figures – used by Filipiak to confront the writer with tradition (and the past), reveals that the matter of sexual difference stands at the very centre of the discourse of canonicity.
