Narcyza Żmichowska's Novel from Life Czy to Powieść? (Is This a Novel

Narcyza Żmichowska’s Novel from Life Czy to powieść? (Is This a Novel?) (1876) Author(s): Ursula Phillips Source: The Polish Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2014), pp. 17-34 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/polishreview.59.1.0017 Accessed: 18-05-2015 21:32 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Illinois Press and Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Polish Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Polish Review, Vol. 59, No. 1, 2014 © The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Ursula Phillips Narcyza Żmichowska’s Novel from Life Czy to powieść? (Is This a Novel?) (1876) The article discusses Narcyza Żmichowska’s final novel. Like most of her other fiction, it is incomplete, although the extant part consists of over 250 published pages. Żmichowska left a general outline of how she envisaged the text would develop, as well as another document and letters that all shed light on her original conception of the project as a collaborative effort with her former pupil Wanda Grabowska. The novel was conceived as the “writing of a woman’s life” and raises crucial issues surrounding distinctions between the genres of autobiography, biography, and fiction. It also highlights Żmichowska’s concerns about authorship and authenticity, as well as more specifically about the problems affecting female authorship in the nineteenth century. The part of the text she managed to complete portrays the protagonist’s childhood in the 1820s and also the stories of several female members of her maternal family stretching back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, which provide an interesting critique of the social, psychological, and emotional lives of Polish women in the pre-partition and early nineteenth- century noble manor. Czy to powieść? (Is this a novel?) was the final text published, the last of four main novels or novel sequences, by Narcyza Żmichowska (1819–76), the most significant Polish female writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, of the generation preceding that of Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910).1 Like most of her other fiction, it remained uncompleted. The very title itself—posed as a question—immediately raises issues surrounding the “novel’s” genre status and the author’s purposes, sug- gesting that she herself is unsure how to present the text to her readership, or that 1. This article is a reworked and expanded version of a paper presented at the AAASS Annual Convention in Boston, November 12–15, 2009. This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 18 The Polish Review it is a deliberate mystification. The narrator’s stated intention is to write a woman’s life, more precisely that of “a type”: “a female type between the second and seventh decade of our century,” a life span that coincides precisely with Żmichowska’s own.2 However, I should emphasize that whatever else it may be, the “novel” is not an autobiography of Narcyza Żmichowska, it is a fictional work: the “facts” of the life of the novel’s protagonist have marked differences from those of Żmichowska’s own,3 yet in its broader sweeps and concerns, it could be said to be her internal autobiography, a record of some part of her mental and emotional life. What is important, however, is that the subject, described as “that unhappy yet honest crea- tu re ,” 4 is somehow representative of a generation of women from Żmichowska’s own social class (the relics of the impoverished landowning szlachta or minor gentry, rapidly transforming by mid-century into an urban middle-class and professional intelligentsia); and that the writing of the life is intended not so much to be a great work of art as to be useful to the envisaged readership, namely, other women.5 The woman’s life is not conceived as an exemplary one, as a model to be imitated or emulated, where a specific ideological model of ideal womanhood is extolled, but a life story in which the envisaged readership would recognize something of themselves and with which they could identify: namely, their common psychological and emotional experience. It is no militant call to arms, but rather a more subdued, muffled appeal for greater personal autonomy, by provoking empathy; it is an expression of sisterly solidarity, even a call for female friendship and bond- ing, above all a record of those features that defined the average female position in mid-nineteenth-century Polish impoverished gentry or bourgeois society: exclusion from the dominant discourse, emotional suppression, silencing, nonspecific feelings 2. “typ kobiecy między drugim a siódmym dziesiątkiem naszego stolecia.” Narcyza Żmi- chowska, Wybór pism [Selected works], vol. 2, ed. Maria Olszaniecka (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1953), 210. References in this article will mostly be to the 1953 edition, in which Czy to powieść? appears in the second volume of two, 193–470. Żmichowska’s incomplete novel was originally published in the journal Wiek [Century] on December 2, 1976, three weeks before her death on Christmas Day. It was included in the five-volume collected works Pisma Narcyzy Żmichowskiej (Gabryelli) [Works of Narcyza Żmichowska (Gabryella)], ed. Piotr Chmielowski (Warsaw: Ateneum, 1885–86). It was republished as an individual work in 1929, with an introduction by Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński; see Narcyza Żmichowska, Czy to powieść? (Warsaw: Dom Książki Polskiej, 1929). There are no other editions. Boy includes a crucial document, omitted from the 1953 edition; hence, when referring to this document, I shall use the 1929 edition. All translations from Polish are my own. 3. One example is that Żmichowska lost her mother shortly after birth and never knew her, an early loss with emotional and cognitive consequences, whereas her protagonist Leona has a loving mother—almost too angelic to be true, who dies, however, at a young age. Leona’s father commits suicide whereas Żmichowska’s did not, and so on. Certain characters, however, reflect elements of Żmichowska’s background, notably the military careers of Leona’s maternal uncles. 4. “to nieszczęśliwe a poczciwe jednak stworzenie”; Żmichowska, Wybór pism, 2:210. 5. Ibid., 2:209; Żmichowska, Czy to powieść?, xxix–xxxii. This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:32:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Żmichowska’s last novel 19 of guilt, resentment, purposelessness, boredom, lack of fulfillment—elements that are perceived to be the direct consequence of the subject’s gender and that become painfully apparent when, for example, she is denied access to a serious education (when she is obviously cleverer than her elder brother Józio), not allowed to enter the stables, or accused of doing things she has not done: When Józio made the solemn promise that he would exert all his powers to enjoy study even more than horse-riding, when both women, my mother and my grandmother, were occupied exclusively with him, admonishing him and giving him advice, I stood in the meantime to one side, left to my own devices, so I began to look around and scrutinize various things. Józio learned that he had rights and privileges because he had been born a man; Napolcia learned that for her there were certain limits and prohibitions because she had been born a woman. At first many lonely moments oppressed me with their terrible boredom. When Mother was writing letters and Marcyna [the maid] was occupied with the laundry, I did not know what to do with myself.6 A profound feeling of injustice cut me to the quick. Perhaps a better little girl than I would have tried to protest her innocence and explain herself, but it didn’t even occur to me. My grandmother’s suspiciousness of me aroused a sense of my own dignity, or maybe it was pride—it’s hard to judge—slumbering in the depths of my heart. Yet what was to remain with me for the rest of my life was the fact that I could fight such false accusations only through silence; I would often indict myself, confess my guilt, sometimes with great humility, but I could never defend or justify myself.7 Sound familiar? A declared aim is to describe “the things that have been forgot- ten” (rzeczy zapomniane), “sins and mistakes” (grzechy i pomyłki), and “unfair accusations” (niesłuszne zarzuty),8 in other words, sources of frustration and unhappiness experienced by the female protagonist as a consequence of her gender—namely, 6. “Kiedy Józio w dobrej wierze uroczyste składał przyrzeczenie, że wszystkich sił dołoży, aby naukę lepiej nawet od konnej jazdy polubić, kiedy obie panie, matka i babcia, nim jedynie zajęte, napominały go i radziły mu kolejno, ja tymczasem na boku, sama sobie zostawiona, zaczęłam się dokoła rozglądać i różnym rzeczom przypatrywać.

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