Romance at the Health resort

Magdalena Kreft

Hidden deeper

One of the novel’s key words is “masculinity” – though understood not as courage or heroism in life, or as social traits. A fascination with masculinity is a deeply hidden signature in the text (so well hidden, perhaps, that it’s invisible to the author). The narrator declines the word “masculine” with obvious satisfaction. However, she uses it to describe attributes and categories belonging almost exclusively to positive characters.^[1] At a basic level, it signifies closeness to a man, being a gender equivalent (“two male figures,” “male tread,” “muffled male voice” –  chapters V and VII), though it also brings to it an element of affirmation (“a fresh male voice,” “on his masculine face” – chapter III). However, Orzeszkowa goes further: masculinity itself proves to be an advantage. It deepens the value of an everyday state, which in its setting gains significance (“drenched in an expression of true, masculine goodness,” “the power of masculine conviction” – chapters II and VIII). It carries beauty and attractiveness (“He was a man of […] a masculine and energetic exterior,” “in his masculine and thoughtful face” – chapter VII). Finally, at the highest level, it makes the experiences the exclusive domain of a true man,^[2] inaccessible to women, foppish men, or “apparent” men. The “masculine” experience is not only better, but more genuine, more intense (“a man’s pain flooded his face,” “with an expression of manly calm throughout,” “flashing with the fire of deep, manly sadness,” “an outpouring of fire that burned in his manly chest,” “with all the might of his masculine and unspent strength of spirit and body” – chapters VI, V, II, VIII).^[3]

Dreams of love for “another man” and the inability to reconcile with one’s own marriage mark the lives of many literary heroines: from Flaubert’s Emma Bovary to Emilia Korczyńska (Nad Niemnem), from Franka Chomcówna (Cham) and Jagna Borynowa (Chłopi) to Róża Żabczyńska (Cudzoziemka). Compared to similar heroines, Regina Różyńska is astonishing. She is monolithically perfect and innocent. Responsibility for her tragedy rests with others, while she is a helpless victim.^[4] Full of hope but thoughtless before her wedding, she transforms into an apathetic and despairing person afterward. Yet she is always portrayed as pitiful and wronged. Meanwhile, in the novel, it is difficult to pinpoint her husband’s specific “faults.”^[5] Even if he enjoys horses and hunting, smokes cigars and falls asleep while reading, if he can’t hold interesting conversations and has limited horizons, keeps peasants at a distance and doesn’t enjoy walks with his wife, Regina hasn’t managed to convince the reader that these are serious sins – and yet the novel also contains many of his strengths: he sings beautifully (which is how he once seduced her), he is wealthy and keeps his estate in order, he is generous to his wife – he has furnished her a beautiful house and presents himself “with his usual gentlemanly courtesy” (chapter VIII).^[6] When he hears the shocking news that Regina is leaving him, he reacts gently and understandingly, and then offers her a horse. So what makes Regina flee Alfred?

This factor is aversion: disgust, physical revulsion towards her husband.^[7] The novel, which ostentatiously declares the superiority of the spirit over the flesh (and even contempt for matters of the body and form), simultaneously secretly pulsates with a desire for passion, a longing for the desired body. Meanwhile, Alfred, in Regina’s eyes, increasingly resembles a corpse. A ghostly pallor, coldness, apathy, and taciturnity transform his face into a mask. He does not approach Regina, and they do not sleep together. His wife increasingly recoils in disgust when her husband even approaches her. His appearance and behaviour, so often described in a similar way, may conceal another piece of information: either Alfred is a drug addict (“a morphine addict” – like Różyc in Nad Niemnem)^[8] or a homosexual (and that’s why his wife isn’t attracted to him). Regina and Alfred’s marriage appears devoid of any erotic element. She feels fear and repulsion towards him, and he rarely approaches her. On her wedding day, the young bride dreams of kisses and closeness with her chosen one, but the moments after the wedding bring disappointment. The first kiss after the wedding is marked by indifference (“It seemed to me that Alfred had a cold hand and cold lips. I withdrew to the back of the carriage, and we were both silent” – chapter VII). Regina’s first days in Różanna are spent alone, in a cold distance, and her wedding nights do not come (“And having kissed me once more, he turned to his room” – chapter VII).^[9] Sometimes her husband hugs Regina, telling her perfunctory words of love. That’s all.^[10] There is no desire, no closeness. Nothingness – this word hidden between the lines of the novel is revealed by the white aster, whose petals are torn off by the distraught young wife. In the Różyńskis’ marriage, there is a lack of physicality, a lack of eroticism.^[11]

The paradox of the novel’s situation lies in the fact that the recurring phrase – like a refrain developed in variants – that “body and form” are not as important as “soul” turns out to be a false, deceptive truth. Indeed, Regina made the mistake of trusting that Alfred’s beautiful body concealed an equally beautiful soul. However, her diary is a record of her longing for the body and the desire to be desired. Her relationship, devoid of erotic charge, dramatically deprives her of her happiness. The body may be merely a shell for the beautiful spirit, but without it, the spirit withers.^[12] It is not without reason that Stefan Rawicki’s beautiful spirit was given an incomparably beautiful body. Orzeszkowa was clearly unaware of this internal incoherence of her novel.

Regina enviously watches the tender relationship of the Mileckis, who are mutually attractive and desired. Their relationship is full of hidden eroticism, which results in a child. Meanwhile, childlessness is yet another cause of Mrs. Różyńska’s despair. Her cry for a child is a dramatic and deeply hidden personal confession from the writer who has never become a mother. Regina expresses this grief in many ways – she writes about it directly in her diary and observes Mrs. Milecka’s motherhood with envy: “So I will never pursue the same goals with a wise and beloved companion, will a child never smile at my womb? Yes, I was certain I would never be a mother; I felt the curse of fate weighing on my relationship with Alfred!…” (chapter VII). Even four years after the divorce, Regina still dreams of having a child.^[13] For her, it is the guarantee of the relationship’s continuation (“the child bound these two people with a link woven of smiles and chirping”; “their fair-haired child was their third lever… hope!” – chapter VII). She feels incomplete without the experience of motherhood.^[14] Over the years, the thought of unfulfilled femininity becomes increasingly insistent and causes intensification of depression (“Oh, there is another great and holy feeling that compensates unhappy women for all their pain and disappointments: the feeling of motherhood! But I was not a mother” – chapter VII).

The key, and perhaps most valuable, fragment of the novel under analysis is Regina’s diary – Moje wspomnienia. Being a young woman’s autobiography, it focuses primarily on several years of marriage. It is a puzzling study of depression. It remains a mystery how much of Regina’s experiences stem from Orzeszkowa’s personal experiences – whether all the stages of mental breakdown (including suicidal thoughts) recorded there were also her own.^[15] What strikes the reader of Ostatnia miłość is the overwhelming, devastating suffering^[16] that encompasses Regina. In the novel, suffering is attributed to several people (including Stefan and Wanda), but only in Regina’s case is the experience hyperbolized. At some point, the reader may begin to feel consternation, even irritation, instead of the expected sympathy, because, after all, no events have occurred in the heroine’s life so tragic that she would have to relive and constantly re-describe exaggerated states of suffering for years.^[17] Constantly brooding over her own fate leads Regina to conclude that certain kinds of suffering are superior: “There are those who, suffering themselves, do not understand the suffering of others because they suffer thoughtlessly. But whoever, in every suffering, their own or that of others, examines the sources and the entire course of this bloody river that flows with pain, will say ’forgiveness’ to many things in the world instead of ‘curse!’“ (chapter VII). The impression that the heroine is not so much suffering as draping the garments of suffering around herself is reinforced by moments in which we hear pride and deceit in her voice, as when she describes herself in the words of Jesus: “Yes, Henry […] my soul is sad even to death” (chapter I). In her own eyes, she is a martyr.

But it’s not suffering that drives the heroine into depression. Several factors underlie Regina’s illness: loneliness, a sense of boredom, and a belief in her own uselessness and low self-worth. There’s also the fear of life turning into a mere vegetative state. Months, then years spent under the same roof with Alfred deepen the symptoms of her deteriorating health. Depression creeps in slowly and unnoticed. We go through successive stages with the heroine (“after two years of sadness, then pain, then despair” – chapter VII): from hope and joyful anticipation immediately after the wedding, through impatience and rebellion, then desperation and apathy, and finally – to the awakening of the will to fight to break free from the trap. However, before this final phase arrives, we witness Regina’s long descent into depression. Orzeszkowa describes it with thought-provoking expertise.^[18] The lack of hope robs her of the will to act and the will to live. Regina cries, sits motionless, or lies for hours in a darkened bedroom. Sometimes she goes to the Milecki family, but there she is consumed by envy for the life she will never experience. The passage of time creates a traumatic sense of old age in the young woman. In the descriptions of her experiences, words suggesting despair and hopelessness are increasingly common (e.g., “grave,” “agony,” “deceased,” “tears,” “nothing,” “withered,” “pale,” “bitter,” “grave like,” “monotonously”). A deep depression sets in: “It was like a tidal wave: at first calm and slow, then increasingly violent and swift, until finally, furious waves crashed against the rocks and covered the expanses with a murky, roaring foam. Oh, who can count these silent, gnawing pains that gnaw at the heart with a thousand stings? Who can weigh this weight that crushes the chest, choking the breath?” (chapter VII), and then the temptation to end her current life through escape or suicide.^[19] Regina is plagued by insomnia, the woman sinks into an apathy close to catalepsy (“I sat with my forehead buried in my hands and sat motionless for a long time, not hearing the clock beside me announcing the death of many hours” – chapter VII).

Orzeszkowa equipped her protagonist with her own experience of existence. She forced her to formulate personal conclusions about her mental state, such as the one that says that a person is destroyed not so much by a single, devastating event, but by long-term stress and constant sadness.^[20] Reading Ostatnia miłość reveals what the young author failed to fully control or conceal; it speaks to her disposition and character, but also to her dreams and longings, and finally, to the transformation of her worldview (which becomes apparent only in the balance of her entire body of work). Contrary to the trend stemming from European realist literature – and for herself, in a sort of self-therapy – she wrote a work not about the loss of illusions, but about their realization. The novel (especially the Moje wspomnienia section) pulsates with female longings and dreams, spun in a dense atmosphere of unfulfillment, even despair, in an atmosphere of boredom and abomination: for a husband, a home, for the life she leads, but also in a tone of jealousy and rebellion. Regina, galloping on Arrow, away from the hated house, jealously spying on the Milecki manor, absorbing literature and walling herself off from her repulsive husband, cannot help but recall the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s novel, riding a horse and living a “pretend” life. Madame Bovary was written in the same year that Ostatnia miłość may take place – 1856.^[21] Regina, like Emma Bovary, is also a victim of naive reading of romance novels and her own imagination, exalted experiences, and an infantile vision of married life (though Orzeszkowa does not yet make her a negative character for this reason).^[22] The failure of her marriage to Alfred stems not only from the man but – something Regina will not admit – also from her, from the fact that after the wedding she wanted to impose this infantile-exalted lifestyle on her husband. The character of Ostatnia miłość is the first in Orzeszkowa’s gallery of neurotics, but the only one different from the others. Only she is a positive neurotic, because she alone emerged as the writer’s alter ego.^[23]

Twenty years later, when writing Nad Niemnem, Orzeszkowa no longer possessed such forbearance. Emilia Korczyńska, who resembles the young Regina, was condemned to readerly disapproval.^[24] The words Benedykt addressed to his wife: “Just let me tell you that your ‘flowers on the sands,’ ‘shocking lightning bolts,’ ‘stars of fate,’ ‘graves,’ and similar lofty things are not poetry at all, as you imagine, but outdated and bad-tempered romance” – Regina Różyńska might have heard.^[25] Perhaps Orzeszkowa was aware of this when, years later, she wrote of her first novels as “misguided works.”^[26]