Orzeszkowa understood very well that this national tragedy shook Polish social structure as well as gender balance. Thousands of women—wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and fiancées of the fallen or imprisoned heroes whose estates were confiscated by the occupying government—were reduced to poverty and left without means of support. The women, who had been trained exclusively for the domestic sphere, suddenly found themselves forced to seek employment for which they were sadly unprepared. In Orzeszkowa’s novel, even though Marta loses her husband to an illness and not to the armed struggle, she shares the fate of these desperate genteel women whom she encounters in employment agencies and in garment sweatshops.
The immediate aftermath of the January Uprising marked also a personal turning point for Orzeszkowa and contributed to the development of her writing career. She invested heavily in this patriotic enterprise of Polish independence. She served the military cause by taking up the important and very dangerous job of a courier responsible for securing lines of communication between different clandestine cells. Understandably, after the failure of the uprising, her despair at the scope of the national tragedy and the realization of the hopelessness of the political situation led her to reassess her own life and mission in society. Even though she was spared punitive measures for her active participation in the uprising, her husband was sentenced to exile to a penal colony in Siberia. In a rash decision that she would regret for the rest of her life, she refused to follow him into exile and would eventually divorce him. She did not love Piotr, and as she explained later, she did not know then that she should have sacrificed her own happiness in order to support the man who suffered for Poland.
With her husband in exile, Orzeszkowa quickly learned about financial difficulties. The expensive and lengthy divorce proceedings cost her the estate she inherited from her parents. Even the personal happiness she dreamt of appeared elusive. Her romantic relationship with Dr. Zbigniew Święcicki became impossible due to social pressure. Such a complicated personal life increased her sensitivity to the situation of single women in a society that neither respected nor provided a safety net for them. Likewise, she gained awareness of the constraints placed specifically on women of her social class and learned of the price women paid for breaking social rules and taboos. She, like her protagonist Marta, desired to work in order to support herself. She wrote in her memoirs that she dreamt of becoming a teacher or possibly a telegraph operator in Warsaw, the capital of Poland then under Russian occupation. Her fluency in several languages qualified her for a job at the telegraph office, yet her application was rejected because she was Polish. She recorded in her memoir, “After I returned home, every memory of this humiliation caused me to shake with anger. How was it possible that in Warsaw, we Polish women had no right to work.”10 She explained that at the time her attempts to find employment were not particularly rooted in the emancipation ideology, but instead were necessitated by economic reality. As a divorced woman without a steady income from a landed estate, she needed to work just to survive.
The ideological awareness came a little later, especially after the publication of Marta, when the reaction of her female readers made her realize that she had hit a nerve. The fictional situation of her protagonist was a reality for thousands of Polish genteel women, whose lives had been changed by the loss of estates due to punitive confiscation or poor management in the changing economy and who suddenly found themselves, like Marta, needing to earn a living. Orzeszkowa wrote,
For the first time I began receiving letters from women who were strangers, belonged to different social circles, were of different ages and talents, but they were all thanking me for this book and asking me for practical advice. Many readers told me that they reacted emotionally to this novel and became extremely fearful about their own future. Many began to seek education and work.11
Orzeszkowa’s novel about a young Polish widow resonated with many women all across Europe. Shortly after its publication, Marta was translated into several languages including Russian, German, Czech, Swedish, Dutch, and even Esperanto.12
Eliza Orzeszkowa selected the city of Warsaw13 as the setting of her novel probably as a response to the social changes she observed, and especially to the growth of middle-class culture. She knew the city from the time she attended boarding school there. However, since the school was run by a women’s religious order exclusively for the daughters of the landed gentry, students probably had limited opportunities to explore the entire city and very few occasions to interact with its inhabitants. Yet it was in Warsaw that Orzeszkowa solidified her devotion to Polish freedom and her involvement with the issues of social justice. The early 1860s marked significant political, social, and economic upheaval in Warsaw and in the entire Congress Kingdom, which became completely absorbed into the Russian empire after the failure of the January Uprising. Norman Davies argues that changes including population growth, urbanization, and industrialization in parts of the Russian partition were stimulated by the decree issued by the Tsar in 1864 granting emancipation to Polish peasants. Now free of serfdom and for the first time owners of the land they worked on, peasants became more prosperous, increased in number, and started migrating to urban centers, mainly to Warsaw, or abroad in search of employment, thus fueling the growth of the urban working class. In addition, because of the elimination of tariffs, “the products of Polish industry could penetrate the vast Russian market.”14 Warsaw grew in population and became a fairly important center of industry, and even though it could not compete with the economies of the Polish western cities under Prussian rule, Davies contends that the progress achieved by Polish urban economies far surpassed the development of Ukraine and central Russia.15 This modest progress notwithstanding, the Polish population remained generally resentful of the foreign rule.
Like many fiction writers of her time, Eliza Orzeszkowa saw herself as both a student of the society and its mentor. It is not surprising, then, that in Marta she brings her protagonist into contact with several distinct strata of Polish society while at the same time Marta’s own social standing undergoes an important evolution. Like Orzeszkowa, she is born into the landed gentry. But both of them, Marta through her marriage and Orzeszkowa through her divorce, migrate to the Polish intelligentsia, an educated class for the most part descended from the gentry. However, while Orzeszkowa’s literary talent and the commercial success of her novels kept her well positioned within the intelligentsia, Marta eventually descends into the working class only to end up among the destitute. In her search for employment and in her daily struggles to survive, Marta’s encounters might point to the author’s sympathies and preferences. While the young woman meets many kind and generous representatives of her own class, the intelligentsia, and receives some support from a few sympathetic working-class characters, Orzeszkowa focuses her social critique on the bourgeoisie, represented in the novel by the rapacious, and even cruel, owners of the garment shops and workrooms. Marta never interacts with any representatives of the Russian occupying forces, and readers might be hard pressed to realize that Warsaw at the time was not a free capital of a free country. It is possible that this was a deliberate decision on Orzeszkowa’s part not only because of her single-minded focus on women’s issues but also in an attempt to ensure the novel’s open and legal circulation without any interference from Russian censors.
In general, Orzeszkowa pays very little attention to the uniqueness of her novel’s setting. The city exists as a vague background to her protagonist’s lonely struggle for survival. The reader’s perception of urban spaces becomes limited to Marta’s unhappy experiences. When the city is not mediated by her husband, it takes on a menacing quality. Its ever-present disquieting din intensifies Marta’s yearning for the past by bringing back her memories of the idyllic childhood on her father’s country estate and the blissful and carefree years of her marriage. At present, the streets of Warsaw seem to Marta at best indifferent, if not openly hostile. They are populated by servants,
