Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose

Grażyna Borkowska

Gaczycki, who has a romantic interest in Mrs Rodowska, gives her a harsh lesson, telling her how she should respond to the emerging feelings and what her married partner should do. “Mr Przybicki will abandon X” (C, chapter XVIII), he states authoritatively. In order to make it easier for August to make a decision, he offers him a lucrative position in distant lands. He declares his love for Wanda in a peculiar fashion that is nonetheless typical of him: by reciting an improvised, quasi-Hindu fairytale about a while magnolia and the sunshine. (He also reveals the identity of the parents of the abandoned child raised by Mrs Starowolska using a faux-Chinese fairytale). Mr Przybycki does indeed leave X. After some time, Wanda accepts Gaczycki’s declarations of love. When the widowed August visits her six years after separating, she is happily fulfilling the role of head of the household in her husband’s absence:

“Look,” she said, “lots of people live there and they all owe their existence, peace and electricity to him. This is the factory that he built and which nobly drives the industrial growth of the whole province, giving work to lots of people, work that secures their physical existence while increasing their moral dignity. And over there, a school is being built that he founded, where the children of workers and villagers acquire knowledge and learn to be honest citizens. And here is a hospital that he created, offering shelter to those suffering physically and exhausted by many years’ labour. And over there are the villages full of poor and unenlightened folk for whom he, wealthy and noble-born, serves as an example of honesty and hard work; they all respect him and call upon him to settle their arguments, supporting them in their misfortune and providing guidance in their difficulties” (C, chapter W sześć lat potem [Six years later]).

This novel features fewer examples of bookkeeping than in Pan Graba yet everything here is also accounted for and values are treated as goods. They are subject to the law of exchange: feelings in exchange for a lucrative position or comfortable life.^[1] Furthermore, such exchanges are viewed positively by Gaczycki’s mentor as the actions of a “wise and mature person” (C, chapter XVIII). In this arrangement, values such as sexual attraction or marital love become equal signs in equations built on the logic of an exchange of gifts: he “pours the power and content of his spirit into the woman” (C, chapter W sześć lat potem [Six years later]), while she gives herself to him. But this exchange does not involve equal subjects. As Luce Irigaray has noted, the guiding principles that put women on the market do not foresee their agency.^[2] The precondition for the stability of the system of values and exchange is a man, the head of the family, or a man of providence. Wanda speaks of Gaczycki precisely according to such conventions, expressing admiration and a sense of the natural order of things. She speaks more as a daughter (or apprentice) than as a wife.