Dziewczyńska bajka? O Córce Czarownic Doroty Terakowskiej

A Feminist Fairy-Tale? On a novel Witches’ Daughter [Córka Czarownic] by Dorota Terakowska Highly awarded novel by Dorota Terakowska, Witches’ Daughter [Córka Czarownic], is considered by many critics as a piece of a YA feminist writing. The article asks not only if feminist ideas could be present in the novel written in 1988 but also if it could be seen as emancipatory by Polish readers after socio-political transformation (the novel was published for the first time in 1991). The author recreates three contexts to consider this possibilities: formal, socio-cultural and socio-political. Analysis of style, chronotop and characters of the novel prove that fairy-tale elements are only an ornaments in the novel, not always harmonically used in it. The statements about the female fairy tale made by I. Dan and S.S. Jones leads the author to a recognition that structure of a plot in Terakowska’s novel follows not female, but male script of the initiation present in the fairy tales. The socio-political transformation which took place in Poland in 1989 is a milestone put between the writing and publishing of the novel. Changes in women’s rights and women’s movement transformed the ideas that could have been read in 1988 as emancipatory into the backlash traits.