Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose
The young Orzeszkowa indeed turned Cnotliwi into an arena for experimenting with genre conventions. We find in it references to Romantic depictions of love, pre-empting scenes from Bolesław Prus’ Lalka [The Doll], filtered through a countermodel of what Bakhtin calls the “adventure novel of ordeal.”[28] In the Ancient Greek works, lovers hurt by love are, after a series of adventures, typically united in a happy relationship. In Orzeszkowa’s work, the protagonists Wanda and August ultimately drift apart, like the symbolic boats that spend a long time floating side-by-side, in order to make space for another couple (Wanda-Edward Gaczycki). The fairytale about the white magnolia and the sunshine offers an anticipatory, happy-end to this second story, that of Wanda and Edward. If we were to submit this fairytale to a Jungian interpretation, following Anna Czabanowska-Wróbel’s approach to Leśmian’s fairytales,[29] for example, then we might be in for something of a disappointment: the joy of the white magnolia is preceded by suffering and pain, it is achieved thanks to reworking one’s own psyche and thus achieving psychological maturity. This act of transformation, acceptance of life, treating it as an objective and an outcome of psychoanalytical therapies has been incorporated here into a mechanism of omnipresent exchange. Wanda is given and accepts an opportunity to have a good life, becoming a rational wife and mother who appreciates the effort required as part of industrialization and serving society. What we are presented with, then, is an image of a genuine marital Eden, the kind that T.S. depicted ironically in the abovementioned article.[30]
