The anthropology of pregnancy as resistance to cultural stereotypes: the case of Manuela Gretkowska’s novel “Polka”

Abstract

The authors focus on the interpretation of Manuela Gretkowska’s novel “Polka” (2001) from an anthropological perspective, viewing it as an example of the literary representation of pregnancy as a form of resistance to cultural stereotypes of motherhood, primarily the Polish national myth of the “Matka Polka” (Polish Mother). Drawing on Mary Douglas’s and Victor Turner’s classical concepts in the anthropology of the body, Iris Marion Young’s phenomenology of the pregnant body, and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, as well as on the research of Iryna Smarovoz, the article demonstrates that the novel’s diary form, its frank discourse on the physiology and psychology of pregnancy, the narrator’s ironic distance from her own experience, and the comparative Poland–Sweden perspective constitute a coherent artistic strategy for deconstructing the idealized, self-sacrificing image of motherhood. The article also examines the relationship between the text and Polish studies of the “Matka Polka” myth (Mrozik, Szczuka, Titkow, Imbierowicz), as well as methodological approaches associated with corporeal feminism in literary studies (Świerkosz, Korolczuk). Particular attention is paid to the role of the Swedish context of emigration, which enables the author to perceive the Polish model of motherhood as culturally conditioned rather than as a natural norm. The analysis further considers the spatial symbolism associated with the liminality of the pregnant body (the home, the hospital, and the border between Poland and Sweden), the anti-medicalization narrative that restores the pregnant woman’s subjectivity in opposition to biomedical discourse (Martin, Davis-Floyd), and the practical realization of Hélène Cixous’s principles of écriture féminine through the recording of immediate bodily experience. A comparison with the work of Izabela Filipiak highlights a range of strategies of resistance to stereotypes of motherhood, from tragic exposure to ironic deconstruction from within the experience of a desired pregnancy. The novel is situated within the broader “corporeal turn” in Polish autobiographical literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which personal writing functions as a form of cultural testimony. The article concludes that resistance in the novel is expressed not through direct polemical statements but through the very texture of candid, bodily, and ironic writing, which affirms a mother’s right to experience ambivalence. Finally, prospects are outlined for a comparative reading of the novel within the context of the writer’s entire “maternal” trilogy and for introducing Gretkowska’s work more extensively into Ukrainian literary scholarship.