Hidden traces of distance, irony and disintegration

Salon style and anti-Biedermeier

If we examine the architecture of everyday life and the axiosemiotics of artifacts in the novel, the drawing room becomes an important site for reading the cultural history of literature in Cnotliwi. The diagnosis of the motley and vulgar salon vanity fair in this novel without a protagonist reveals just how toxic people are and the consequences of manipulation. Orzeszkowa shows the unproductiveness of high society at Olimpia Rostowiecka’s soirées, during which the reader encounters, among others, ladies “worthy of rest” (as Bałucki puts it in his later Dom otwarty, 1883) – magenta, green, purple – who, like the upholstery of furniture, are meant to serve merely as a silent backdrop to the events. Women are treated here like brooches, defined only by the colours of their dresses and diamonds (similar to Thackeray’s female characters and, as Reymont would later do in Ziemia obiecana in the theatre scenes). 

A counterpoint to the salon-like, fair-like glitz of Olimpia Rostowiecka’s salon is the harmonious and symmetrical salon of Stasia Rumiańska. The dominant colour here is pink, signifying unpretentiousness, gentleness, and love. The space is conspicuous by a piano, a shelf, a multitude of roses (symbol of love, life, health, and beauty), and “marble busts of famous Polish poets” (chapter XIV; who are not identified). The latter allow us to conclude that this place belongs to people who value tradition, that it is a home of the intelligentsia. In the honest and noble Stasia’s salon, trivial and base things do not occur; it is a space of honour and pride. It is in Rostowiecka’s salon that Rokowicz discusses the immorality of Mrs. Wanda’s conduct with August. This salon evokes fear of human laughter and undoubtedly brings suffering. The fear of laughter is a constant feature of Orzeszkowa’s heroines (for Marta from Nad Niemnem, it is the greatest humiliation, because she fears “human laughter” more than contempt). In her early novel, Orzeszkowa diagnoses that the most painful and shameful thing for a person and their sense of pride is the “eternal laughter,” which Marta Korczyńska so feared (as slander). Alongside “eternal sadness,” it became an experience defining the sadness of everyday life. Starting from Cnotliwi, the writer, attentively listening to Hugo’s reflections, will express her belief that suffering is an essential element of human experience. In the novel’s finale, she shows that the main character fears human laughter, which is why her life decision is not neutral, and is not without significance for the idea of laughter as a mask for those who mock the lives of others.

Apolonia Kuderska’s (Antyfona’s) house, on the other hand, is synonymous with kitsch, being old-fashioned, and tastelessness. It is “heaped with an antediluvian garret” (chapter XIII), filled with withered flower bouquets and peacock feathers. It is a stuffy, unaired space, with a musty odour. One of the rooms serves as “a kind of altar”: a painting of Our Lady of Częstochowa hangs there, and there are “crucifixes of various sizes, devotional books in various bindings, figurines and statuettes of saints, colourful stools, silver candlesticks with wax candles” (chapter XIII). Apolonia appears to be in her 40s, has a red nose (probably from drinking wine), wears a flowing, woollen black dress, is not kind, and has no scruples – she eats cheese, ham, and white rolls secretly from her children, while they go hungry. Her daughter, Michasia, acts differently. When she reads La Fontaine’s fable translated into Polish to her siblings, she scolds her younger brothers for discovering food in their mother’s room, pointing out that they are committing theft, a crime punishable by the gallows. This child’s thinking reveals the traumas imprinted on the post-January experience and the methods of punishment observed at the time. 

Irony, understood as a multifaceted and multi-layered exponent of the textuality of Orzeszkowa’s early novel, connects with a broader problematic dimension that allows us to treat Cnotliwi as an anti-Biedermeier novel. It is an anti-Biedermeier work because suspicion of the characters who plan the repair of the world leads the reader to perceive that, in fact, they are not talking about any repair. Gaczycki precisely recognizes all these apparent actions, but he himself is also a character from whom the narrator demands keeping at arm’s length and doubts the sincerity of his intentions. Orzeszkowa thus creates not so much a Polish version of Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur as a cacophonous orchestra of false tones (based on the polyphony of diverging voices and counter-voices), orchestrated by the conductor-narrator. The projects of positive characters and attempts to shake off apparent virtue are often fake from the very beginning, and the only Biedermeier couple who are seriously together are Stasia and Paweł Rumiański.

Orzeszkowa transforms the Biedermeier tradition, still alive in the 1860s, in an original way, marked by distance and an ironic attitude. The houses (bourgeois tenement houses) and their descriptions betray the unease and incongruity of their elements, and the family peace that reigns within them is repeatedly shaken. There is no sense of order, peace, repetition, or a well-understood ritual of daily needs, and the ethics of everyday life are governed by anti-rules. Here, we do not have a manor house, but bourgeois salons. They are not, however, a haven of safety, and it is hard to say they have anything resembling enclaves of privacy (apart from Stasia and Paweł’s warm and idyllic salon). There’s no courage to ask questions (Stasia, unafraid to offer a fable about a heron at the right moment, poses them safely). Perhaps the only Biedermeier possibilities would be the escape from political reality into the sphere of privacy and tending one’s own garden, but then again, privacy also reveals its flaws and is, in most cases, caricatured. In Cnotliwi, the peace of the home garden is shaken to its foundations. Various indicators emerge to define this space: the falseness and phantom nature of family situations, the sham of interpersonal relationships, the lack of friendship. Above all, they demonstrate that spatial semantics are a significant factor in this novel. It demands a filter on the seemingly orderly nature of this world, to see at what moments and in what ways its structure cracks.

Biedermeier (associated with order, harmony, and coherence of elements of reality hic et nunc and with the world of salons – hence the writer’s strong emphasis on sketching two contrasting images of the salon) is contradicted in Cnotliwi, because order is illusory, familial nature is weakened, and the worm of sadness gnaws at reality and the relationships that connect people. Beneath the warmth of the home and the pastel images that provide security, Orzeszkowa reveals a fractured reality and its shattered shape. This textual, existential disintegration is characterized by conflict, fractures in the world, incongruity of components, a divergence between who one is and how one appears, a disagreement with the factual state, and a discrepancy between the characters’ physiognomy and what and how they communicate. This is revealed in numerous narrative passages, for example: “These two people were such a striking contradiction between themselves” (chapter XXII), “her facial expression contradicted her words” (chapter XXI), “Mr. Edward smiled ironically” (chapter XII), “ironical smiles also passed over the lips of Mrs. Olimpia and Mr. Spirydion” (chapter V), Edward and Olympia engage in a “double conversation” in which the body says one thing and the words another (chapter XXI). This world is fundamentally pessimistic, suspicious – the only salvation is distance and critical observation of its sick nature. All this reveals the writer’s position at the turn of the 1860s and 1870s, which will be manifested in novels of mature realism.

Despite its seemingly utopian and idyllic ending, Cnotliwi is a novel with pejorative overtones, disturbing and provoking questions about personal happiness within an economic and social project (which is very optimistic – with the prospect of catching up with Europe in a corner of a provincial town thanks to a railway located half a verst from X). However, the writer’s ambivalence emerges here. The locomotive is linked with astronomy: it flies into the world “like an Earthly meteor” (chapter XXV), trails of sparks “snap and glitter like a comet’s tail” (chapter XXV). It is a “steam and iron miracle of the nineteenth century” (chapter XXV; similarly to W klatce: “a serious, magnificent locomotive, like a queen, leading the army into battle, started and, faster and faster, stronger, with an iron breast began to cut through the thick and misty air, throwing clouds of smoke into the clouds, as if testimonies of earthly power sent to the sky”), but as an image that evokes terror in simple (not to say unenlightened and believing in superstition) people, it also symbolizes hell: “it flies away from the station […] hissing and whistling like a volcano before an eruption, and apparently also the depths of hell, full of the souls of unfortunates fried in tar” (chapter XXV). It also evokes simple comparative associations: “the train was already writhing in rapid progress, like a huge black snake” (chapter XXV). In the novel’s finale, Orzeszkowa unequivocally points to the end of the old Romantic paradigm, the end of stagecoaches and the emergence of a vision of modernity, as well as the need to appreciate the benefits of civilization and its consequences – which are dual and act like a pharmakon: they make the world more accessible, but also destroy the old landscape of tradition and culture with its laws and rituals. This is linked to another reckoning final image, when August, returning from the palace where Wanda lives with her husband, Edward, gazes “at the sky adorned with stars” (chapter W sześć lat potem [Six years later]) and ponders destiny, desires, dreams, and happiness. This is a reference to a much earlier scene in which Wanda tells Stasia that the stars are her and August’s first homeland: “we have already been together somewhere in the lands of spirits, perhaps… there under the stars” (chapter XXIV). The character then ponders how to find happiness, not defying the decrees of marriage and destiny. She knows that one should not act against fate. The moral and virtuous thing (and therefore the thing that brings happiness) is to persevere courageously and not give up, but also not to harm others. Suffering – as young Orzeszkowa says with the words of Wanda, addressed to her former everyday companion – is to be endured bravely. This way of thinking will return in the penultimate chapter of the novel. Cruelty does not go hand in hand with virtue. One cannot trust people who act cruelly. Forbearance as a virtue, a metonym for the philosophizing mind, and goodness as a metonym for religiosity are important. Orzeszkowa – this time through Gaczycki – makes it clear that without them there is no humanity: “Excessive severity goes hand in hand with neither Christianity nor philosophy; the former is goodness, the latter forbearance, and without either, there is no virtuous person” (chapter XXVI). However, the dramatization and melodramatization look different than in later Maria, where an echo of Kantian duty could be heard.

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