men-about-town, intellectuals, and even high-class prostitutes who both individually and collectively fail Marta. To authenticate her novel’s setting, Orzeszkowa names a few well-known Warsaw streets and some churches, but she takes care not to turn Marta’s story into an exotic and uniquely Warsovian or even Polish plot. In this novel of purpose, Orzeszkowa’s primary focus is to illuminate women’s economic and sexual vulnerability and the failure of society to allow women equal participation in the economy.
Eliza Orzeszkowa introduces her protagonist at Marta’s most vulnerable moment, soon after her husband’s funeral, when she must move out of her comfortable upper-middle-class home to a substandard lodging in a poor neighborhood, and when she comes to a realization of her complete financial ruin. She is destitute. This young woman who must support both herself and her small daughter has absolutely no assets left after her husband’s illness and death, she has no living relatives or friends who could offer help, and her father’s estate has been lost to bankruptcy. Orzeszkowa uses this initial situation to highlight several social issues that stem from women’s disempowerment. As a woman of her class, Marta has not been educated but rather has been groomed to fulfill the role of a wife and mother and thus perpetuate the patriarchal power structure. Her search for employment reveals her total lack of any marketable skills and qualifications. Even though she is a natural artist and an intuitive writer, her skills were never developed through rigorous education. She can speak French, but not very well; she can draw, but not very well; and she can write, but not very well. She is not able to compete in a tight job market because she has not been prepared for an eventuality of not achieving her success through, as Perkins Gilman put it, “a small gold ring.” Even though she meets many kind individuals who are willing to provide charity, nobody can offer practical solutions to her situation because the problem is not unique to Marta but systemic.
Marta’s job search teaches her also about gender and class discrimination, social norms that women cannot transgress with impunity, prejudice against working mothers, the lack of good-quality child care, abominable working conditions and worker exploitation in sweatshops, cruelty in relationships with other women, and the double standard. She learns about the victimization of women by sexual predators who prey on the weak and vulnerable and shirk their responsibility for destroyed lives. She is shocked to realize that a young man will be admired for having numerous affairs or even keeping an expensive mistress, but a young woman’s reputation will be irreparably damaged by nothing more than being seen engaged in a conversation with a man in a public space.
Through Marta’s story and a detailed analysis of her changing emotional states and responses, Eliza Orzeszkowa traces a young woman’s journey of self-discovery from her carefree childlike persona controlled by her father and later her husband to independent, responsible adulthood. It is also a process that allows Marta to move beyond self and develop social consciousness. At first, she understands failure exclusively in personal terms—if only she had gained the skills required, she could have kept the job. But facing repeated disappointments leads her to recognize the restrictive power of social norms placed on women, especially on women of her class. Through this heart-wrenching process, Marta, originally so clearly identified with the upper classes of Polish society, begins to appreciate and understand the suffering of the economically dispossessed. She rages against the society that prevents her and many other women from fulfilling their sacred responsibility to themselves as well as to their children, from realizing their dreams of a fulfilled life and motherhood, and even from sustaining physical survival. How much more powerful this realization is than the awakening Edna Pontellier experiences in Kate Chopin’s feminist novel The Awakening (1899).16 After all, Edna’s journey of self-discovery, no matter how emotionally draining, is not hindered by the real existential issues that Marta faces. Edna, who is financially secure, whose children are cared for by a doting grandmother, and whose friends offer her emotional support, has the luxury to focus exclusively on her own psychological growth. Marta, a single and isolated mother, must find a job and earn a living to save her seriously ill child, for whom she cannot provide nutritious food, medicine, or even a warm bed. Orzeszkowa’s message is driven home over and over again: Marta succeeds in gaining psychological and social maturity, but society destroys her. The tragic resolution of the novel suggests that Orzeszkowa cannot identify a safe social space for this changed Marta. She appears to pose too much of a threat to the patriarchal status quo.
During her lifetime, Eliza Orzeszkowa was a popular writer and a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, and her literary legacy earned her a prominent place in the history of Polish literature. Together with such writers as Aleksander Świętochowski, Maria Konopnicka, and Bolesław Prus, she represents the Polish Positivist movement. Tracing their ideological roots back to the philosophy of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, Positivists asserted that by the mid-nineteenth century, the world entered a period of systematic and continuous growth evidenced by numerous scientific discoveries grounded in experiment and reason. They perceived societies as living organisms to be described and analyzed using the language of natural sciences. In Poland, such theories fell on fertile ground after yet another failure of armed struggle, the January Uprising, to regain independence. The Polish intellectual elite, the intelligentsia, found Positivist ideas very attractive as they justified the rejection of military actions in favor of refocusing attention on rebuilding Polish society and ensuring that cultural connections persisted in the nation split among three separate foreign empires. Positivists set their goal on organic work that involved using only legal means to achieve the cultural and economic growth of Polish society.
Positivist ideals permeate Orzeszkowa’s literary output. In addition to women’s issues, Eliza Orzeszkowa focused on social improvement, education, and promoting self-fulfillment through hard work. Her interest in problems of her times led her to study the Jewish minority and resulted in two novels, Eli Makower (1875) and Meir Ezofowicz (1878). Meir Ezofowicz is especially interesting. Its title character, a young and sensitive Jew, rebels against his narrow-minded community. Undoubtedly, her greatest literary achievement was the publication in 1888 of her masterpiece Nad Niemnem (On the Banks of the Niemen), a beautifully written family novel that outlined Orzeszkowa’s Positivist social plans. The novel’s heroine, a young but impoverished genteel woman, has the courage to break social barriers by marrying an uneducated yet naturally intelligent and patriotic farmer. Through this marriage, she will bring education and progress to the whole village community, thus building a strong Polish society, which will be ready for independence when the time comes. Published almost twenty-five years after the disastrous end of the January Uprising in 1864, this novel suggests ways of coming to terms with a national tragedy of such magnitude.
In her personal life, Eliza Orzeszkowa continued to search for love and happiness, with mixed results. After being rebuffed by a much younger man for whom she formed a decidedly one-sided attachment, she finally found fulfillment in a relationship with Stanisław Nahorski, a well-known lawyer. Yet even this relationship was not without heartache. Nahorski was already married when he met Orzeszkowa, and he was unwilling to divorce his seriously ill wife. Orzeszkowa and Nahorski married only after his wife’s death. He was sixty-eight and she was fifty-three. Orzeszkowa continued writing and lecturing on social issues until her death in 1910. She devoted her entire life to the work for public good.17
Taking up a novel of social reform written almost 150 years ago, in a far-away country and in very different sociopolitical circumstances, we might be tempted to dismiss it as a quaint historical document replete with nineteenth-century melodrama. Yet the typical melodramatic tropes—the unambiguously drawn conflict between good and evil set on the stage of a “modern metropolis”;18 the effusive expressions of feelings; and the presence of stock characters who may not have deep “psychological complexity,”19 such as wealthy villains and beleaguered heroines whose virtue is constantly tested—should not to be discounted altogether. As argued eloquently by Kelleter and Mayer, “the
