SOURCE: “The Puzzle of Tadeusz Różewicz's White Marriage,” in Drama and Philosophy, edited by James Redmond, Cambridge University Press: New York, 1990, pp. 211–23.

In the following essay, Filipowicz traces the different feminist readings of Różewicz's White Marriage.

Why Tadeusz Różewicz's White Marriage (Białe małżeństwo) should have earned a reputation as an unequivocally feminist play is perhaps more a question for a cultural historian than a literary scholar.¹ All the same, it is an issue that can hardly be ducked in the context of current feminist debate.

The most eloquent case for White Marriage as a feminist work, indeed the first major feminist play in Polish, has been made by Rhonda Blair and Allen Kuharski.² Both Blair and Kuharski regard White Marriage as a play that questions the gender-based habits and assumptions imposed by a rigidly patriarchal culture. They do not subscribe to the...