of socio-cultural processes of marginalization and stratification.”20 Thus, it is hardly surprising that in Marta, Eliza Orzeszkowa successfully links the realistic with the melodramatic21 and employs this strategy to critique patriarchal power relations that marginalize women. She does not allow us to easily file away her ideas and concerns. While reading Marta, we are repeatedly struck by the author’s approach to women’s issues, which is decidedly contemporary—so much so, that we still struggle with many issues she outlined so long ago: the inequality in earnings between men and women, the lack of affordable child care, the educational difficulties that girls face in many countries, and the existence of the glass ceiling women still have not managed to shatter. Eliza Orzeszkowa’s Marta still has a message for us and still calls us to action.
Notes
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1898), 71.
2. Eliza Orzeszkowa, Marta, transl. Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, intro. by Grażyna J. Kozaczka (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 000.
3. Edmund Jankowski, Eliza Orzeszkowa (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1964), 150–51.
4. Now in Belarus.
5. Eliza Orzeszkowa, O sobie (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1974), 43–44. All translations from Polish-language publications are provided by the author of this introduction.
6. Poland regained independence in 1918.
7. The date of the dissolution of the Congress Kingdom of Poland has been disputed.
8. The tragedy of the January Uprising was captured by the Polish painter Artur Grottger (1837–1867) in a series of nine black-and-white drawings titled “Polonia.” These illustrations are housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary, and can be easily viewed online (http://www.pinakoteka.zascianek.pl/Grottger/Grottger_Pol.htm).
9. Orzeszkowa, O sobie, 102.
10. Ibid., 107.
11. Ibid., 110.
12. Jankowski, 154.
13. Ignacy Aleksander Gierymski (1850–1901), also known as Aleksander Gierymski, a Polish artist of the late nineteenth century, painted contemporary urban views of Warsaw.
14. Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 170.
15. Ibid., 171.
16. Both Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” can be useful companion texts to Marta, as all three illuminate powerful social forces restricting a woman’s ability to construct an autonomous and fulfilled self. Each uses different narrative techniques to achieve a similar goal and to reach a strikingly similar conclusion. Perkins Gilman in her book Women in Economics suggests some solutions to the problem of women’s economic disempowerment that could also provide interesting material for a comparison with Orzeszkowa’s proposed solutions.
17. Further information about Orzeszkowa’s life and work can be found in Józef Bachórz, introduction to Eliza Orzeszkowa, Nad Niemnem (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1996); Grażyna Borkowska, Pozytywisci i inni (Warsaw: PWN, 1996); Grażyna Borkowska, Alienated Women: A Study on Polish Women’s Fiction, 1845–1918, transl. Ursula Phillips (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001); Jan Detko, Orzeszkowa wobec tradycji narodowowyzwoleńczych (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1965).
18. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 13.
19. Ibid., 16.
20. Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer, “The Melodramatic Mode Revisited: An Introduction,” in Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood, ed. Frank Kelleter, Barbara Krah, and Ruth Mayer (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2007), 9.
21. More information about the connections between realism and melodrama can be found in Neil Hultgren, Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).
Questions for Further Discussion and Writing
1. What social, political, and familial forces shape Marta’s character and life? Are they responsible for her tragic end?
2. How do some of the novel’s episodic female characters manage to subvert male power and achieve substantial financial success? What do they sacrifice in pursuit of their success?
3. Orzeszkowa’s Marta illustrates the oppressive power of patriarchy that is detrimental to a healthy development of all members of society. How does the author present the system of power relations between men and women and the disempowerment of women? What attitudes toward patriarchal oppression do her female characters represent?
4. Marta has a very keen moral sense, and the necessity to transgress her moral code causes her great anguish. What is the source of Marta’s moral code, given that Orzeszkowa does not characterize her as a religious person?
5. Is Marta’s tragic fate at the end of the novel a predictable and logical outcome of her story? What is the root cause of Marta’s tragedy, and could it have been averted?
6. In her search for employment, Marta meets several kind men and women who attempt to help her, yet each time their efforts are in vain. Why? What prevents them from solving Marta’s problem?
7. Marta’s childhood friend Karolina uses men to secure a comfortable lifestyle for herself. What is Marta’s view of such an arrangement, and does she pass a moral judgment on Karolina? What does the novel suggest about the sexual vulnerability of women?
8. What are Orzeszkowa’s views on motherhood?
9. Orzeszkowa’s passion for her topic influenced her narrative technique. She repeatedly interrupts the flow of her narrative by including authorial commentary and analysis. Does this technique still appeal to contemporary readers?
10. How does Orzeszkowa connect gender and class as two powerful forces oppressing Polish women in the late nineteenth century? Was this a specifically Polish intersection of oppression or a broader problem highlighted in other literatures?
11. What does Orzeszkowa’s Marta contribute to the feminist conversation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
12. Some literary critics analyze the tragic outcomes of such feminist texts as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The
