Prawda baśni, czyli trudne tematy Agnieszki Suchowierskiej

Abstract

The Truth of the Fairytale – Agnieszka Suchowierska’s Tough Issues Agnieszka Suchowierska made her debut in 2008 and has published three books so far. Two of them: ‘The fairytale is life or, which fairytale are you from?’ or‘Prince the Snow-White. Gender stereotypes in fairytales’ were written collectively with the well-known psychologist Wojciech Eichelberger. They are tales with appended commentaries in the form of conversations between the authoress and the therapist. Already in her debut novel ‘The fairytale is life’, Suchowierska tackles several difficult subjects and poses important questions such as : how can one see the world?; how to be free?; how to find the essence of things? In ‘Prince the Snow-White”, written a few years later, those questions take on the form of reflection on the woman’s cultural condition. The volume contains new versions of traditional fairytales in which men and women switch their roles. This simple gambit lays bare the power of gender stereotypes and manifests the degree to which contemporary culture allows (or disallows) women to do attractive/enjoyable things traditionally reserved for men only. The third book penned by Suchowierska ‘Mat and the world’ was published in 2015. In as much as the potential target readers of her tales are either young people or adults, the last book is dedicated to still younger readers. It tells the story of a plush teddy-bear, manufactured in China, which, due to a curious twist of circumstances, travels around the world. The bear’s journey becomes a pretext for revealing social inequities as well as presenting different cultures and religions. Mat, the bear, is characterized by optimism, activity and self-control in times of crisis. The propagated attitudes and models of upbringing presented in the story are no truisms. The little volume was awarded The Book of 2015 Literary Prize of the Polish section of IBBY.

Keywords

• fairytale
• existentional questions
• gender stereotypes
• multiculturalism