Zuzanna Ginczanka and the Body's Cage

Abstract

The article aims at analyzing the self-portrait of the female body in Zuzanna Ginczanka’s works. By comparing biographical and poetic text, it will be shown how the body entertains a complex web of meaningful relationships with respect to the concept of “cage”. In juvenile compositions, the cage consists of social and cultural constraints – seen as an obstacle to free self-expression – from which the first-person narrator tries to escape by means of the body. Later on, discovered the impossibility of a definitive break from cultural boundaries and gender stereotypes, attempts are made to circumvent them by manipulating social norms. Finally, to be understood as a cage is the body itself, as an object of orientalization and eroticization, a “foreign body” that is systematically mortified and masochistically portrayed as dead and shattered.