“Less emancipation than anywhere else” – masculinity and femininity

Agnieszka Bąbel (The Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences)

A separate issue that is worth analyzing is the attitude towards women as expressed in the texts from the American period. On the one hand, the dislike towards American women, believed to be spoilt lazy coquettes, who were prevented from debauchery only by their cold calculated nature, is accompanied by words of respect for perfect American men. On the other hand, we can see a clear fascination the freedom and exoticism (expressed, for instance, in the description of young Indian women^[1], and in a far more reserved form – in the famous bachelor letters to Julian Horain or Daniel Zgliński).

An unusually casual language of those letters reflects some more important quality than just fondness for spicy jokes among close friends^[2]. The Libertarian form coexists with social severity, probably adapted to the nature of the addressees and the relation of “manly conversation”, out of the scope of official social occasions. In the letter to Zgliński, the complete honesty of the author and the lack of pose are supposed to be confirmed by the delicate subject matter, which consists in a detailed discussion of the intimate preferences and experiences of both interlocutors, stressing of the private nature of the correspondence (“Don’t show this letter to modest people, Sir”^[3]), as well as the ample number of obscenities, and the resulting persistent directness of language. In fact, one cannot escape the impression that all these elements were used very consciously in order to construct another auto-creation. Correspondence with Horain, however, contains not only the evidence of social provocations but also of intellectual courage – it stands testament to the epoch of internal quests, doubt in moral values, “the crisis of the soul consumption”^[4] (the letter as of  August 1,1876).