Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose
The second story is merely a fairytale fantasy. It serves a revelatory function (revealing who the parents of the abandoned child are) and a moralizing one. With the references to Ignacy Krasicki’s novel Pan Podstoli (Royal Pantler) and perhaps even to Michał Dymitr Krajewski (Pani Podczaszyna), it provides further evidence of Orzeszkowa’s borrowings from Enlightenment writers.
In this work, Orzeszkowa puts her skills as a writer to the test. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, she turned to the past, excavating the depths of the genre. The references to Enlightenment-era works serve a didactic function, presenting the message that it is possible to achieve happiness on Earth if there are hardworking men and good, modest women who serve themselves and others. This retrospective filter enabled Orzeszkowa to also draw on Romantic conventions (the love between Wanda and August) that are ultimately overcome in the most common way: forgetting! The filter also means that certain aspects of old romance literature can be updated, thus offering a warmer depiction of the protagonists without harming the sense of plausibility in the work (the Oriental fairytales as implanted narratives). However, the main driver of such experiments, i.e. the presupposed challenge, is a situation stemming from outside the world of artistic concerns. Orzeszkowa demonstrated a Neophyte zeal in seeking to find a way to do justice to the harsh historical realities of the time. She looked for a way to maintain a state of subtle spirituality at a moment of marked by the economization of life, a general need for labour and the degeneration of the landed gentry.
