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The Eighth Day of the Week

Summary/Abstract: The Eighth Day of the Week is a short story by Marek Hłasko revolving around the topic of losing virginity. Literary scholars consider Hłasko as a representative of machismo; a masculine and male-centred narrator. This text analyses and deconstructs the short story defending it as a comprehensive record of misogynist culture written from the perspective of the main female protagonist and not the expression of misogyny of the author himself. The tools of discourse analysis and feminist philosophy applied to Hłasko’s text produce surprising results. Agnieszka – the main female protagonist of the short story – turns out to be a figure of non-conformity universalised by Hłasko, while the virginity and its loss become a part of female fate used by Hłasko as a motif to show the power of society over an individual. Meanwhile Agnieszka struggles for autonomy from domineering cultural patterns and gains it with the help of not so much barricades and spectacular gestures typical for male protagonists as wit, intelligence and trickery.

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