The article interprets the micronovel ‘Island’ by Róża Ostrowska from the perspective of Julia Kristeva's theory of melancholy, the category of text-afterimage and the process of regaining speech by the female subject writer. Seen from this perspective, Ostrowska's masterpiece describes the phenomenon of regaining the ability to produce meanings and overcoming the disease resulting from the cultural consequences of patriarchy. Regaining the ability to assign meanings entails breaking social norms, an effort to integrate female subjectivity into the narrative act, and working through the mourning of the loss of what previously constituted the deepest dimension of the narrator's psychobodily identity.
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