„Dlaczego Pana powieść nie jest homoseksualna?" O Zmowie mężczyzn Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza
„Why isn't your novel homosexual?" About Collusion of Men (Zmowa mężczyzn) by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz)

Author(s): Wojciech Śmieja
Subject(s): Gender Studies, Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the established way of reading the novel by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. The so-far analyses were focused on the thread of the battle of the sexes in the novel, while the following one tries to reveal the vagueness of sexual categories in the work. // Main characters - Władek and Alinka - are interpreted as a couple of castrated heroes. Władek is an androgenic - not to say a feminized - figure, who is/is being a subject to the power of „Mrs. Regina”, who is his substitute-mother. His wife, Alinka, is an imperfect woman. Her aunt - the already mentioned Regina - makes her undergo an abortion, and because a child is a substitute of a phallus - according to Sigmund Freud - thus Alinka is castrated as well. // An attempt at reading the wavering sexual identities of the heroes as the „signs of an unwritten homosexual novel”, which is mentioned by the writer in his correspondence, was made. // In original version, Regina the castrator was to be substituted by a homoerotic hero - Count de la Preyrie. The castrative power of Regina - the hypothesis is advanced - results from the fact that she herself is also a castrated character, who in a vampire-like way appropriates the sexuality of the two main heroes of the novel. // The roundness of the field of biological sex together with the symbolic field resulting from castration - it is the conclusion - makes the consciousness of sexual identity in the piece closer rather to contemporary constructionist concepts of sexuality than to the 19th model of clear sexual oppositions.

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