Ciało, szaleństwo i chaos : o wybranych międzywojennych powieściach Ewy Szelburg-Zarembiny

Abstract

This paper focuses on selected mid-war novels by Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina. Today known mainly from her children’s literature, in her writings for adult readers she presents extremely interesting and highly complicated figures of insane women and beautiful but weak and sick men. The source of suffering for her protagonists is most frequently their own body, often referred to as a chunk of meat. Almost all of them dream of getting rid of it as if it were a dirty garment, and in so doing of freeing themselves from the “burden of bodily possession.” The texts by the author of Dziewczyna z zimorodkiem are interpreted using the tools developed by feminist literary criticism (Irigaray and Kłosińska) and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan). Madness, after the body the second category mentioned in the title, allows the protagonists to break free from the world which humiliates them, while chaos encapsulates their life condition – the condition of people who have lost their uniqueness and become a defenceless part of nature.