Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose

For a country like Poland that’s struggling with both democracy and religious fundamentalism, the problem of sexual difference can give art a margin for subversiveness and even revolutionary potential.”^[1] In referring to dissident voices of today, the contemporary art historian Paweł Leszkowicz indicates the premise and the purpose of this volume on Polish prose of earlier times: to explore how issues of gender and sexuality not only emerge as imaginative elements, but also how they may challenge and transgress social as well as cultural norms. In no sense is our project intended as a comprehensive survey of Polish “gender and sexuality writing”; neither does it claim that such writing constitutes a coherent tradition. The title Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose therefore operates as a set of interrogations into selected texts rather than of direct assertions: Is gender socially and ideologically constructed or conditioned? Is there such a thing as essential sexual difference? Is sexuality something given by nature, and is it universally the same? In this connection, gender and sexual ethics, like all ethics, is, as Leszkowicz’s committed quote implies, an ongoing conversation, and this collection is but a voice in the dialogue.

Well into the twenty-first century, few would doubt that the established category that Poland has long understood as “sex” (“płeć”) is under considerable strain. Whereas the term has referred traditionally to the sense or state of being male or female, as well as to all the members of one or other sex, a distinction between “sex” and “gender” (“płciowość”) began to be made only in the mid-nineties, as a very belated result of the impact of feminism and women’s liberation as they occurred in English and French from the 1970s onwards. Although theories as to how gender is produced and reproduced vary greatly, a widely accepted understanding, in Poland as elsewhere, is that people are either male or female in biological terms, but in cultural terms are pressured to be or become masculine or feminine through processes of socialization; in this way, “Polish gender” appears only to be as solid as the social and cultural practices that have constructed it over time. By the same token, the term “sexuality” (“seksualność”) may be taken principally to mean not biologically precise events or bodies in the physical world, but rather discursively constituted and changing entities that people have imagined and lived with in various ways throughout Polish history. But while gender and sexuality, their practices and discourses, are now commonly studied by western scholars in an ethical context,^[2] we still know much less about gender and sexual representations with regard to Poland.

The word “ethical” in the title of this book may suggest, mistakenly, a project that will concentrate on limited behavioural standards — of honesty, decency, tolerance, for instance. We intend a much broader approach, where “ethics” implies one or more moral visions that challenge fixed mental attitudes and provoke a range of effects on the personality and the self of fictional characters. Hence for us “ethics” may include any aspect or quality of character, or ethos, in authors and/or their texts, whether or not these have been generally, or conventionally, judged good or bad. As we seek to describe a writer’s ethical programme as reflected in his or her presentation of gender and sexuality in one or more works, the topics and key questions for consideration will therefore include: the construction of femininities and masculinities, that is formulations or conceptualizations of “maleness” as well as of “femaleness”; gender as it relates to issues of national identity and/or religion; the representation of heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual practices and eroticisms, or of the blurring of boundaries between these — and thus the various strategies employed in the formation of sexual identity (masquerading or sublimation, for example).

Within the literary “periods” covered by this essay collection — ranging from nineteenth-century Romanticism to “post-Thaw” People’s Poland of the early 1960s — the ostensible terms of the ethical vision are, more often than not, those of a male heroics of action. It is important here, for a start, to bear in mind the enormous political upheavals at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which witnessed the partitions of Poland, deprived the Poles of their own unified state and left them divided between three dictatorial empires (123 years were to pass before a sovereign Polish state reappeared). Neither the old Age of Reason nor the relatively buoyant mood of contemporary western Europe could answer the question the Poles were then putting to themselves: why had Heaven allowed the martyrdom of their country when it sought only justice, and how or when could it be resurrected from the tomb? Against the background of intense Catholic faith, there developed the haunted idea of Messianism which, in its extreme form, presented Poland as the collective Christ, crucified to redeem the nations, one day to be resurrected by a new embodiment of the Holy Spirit. Models of “natural” heroic behaviour were now prescribed, with extreme martyrdom and meaningful self-sacrifice — mostly male — for the patriotic cause presented as ideals.

And yet the political and cultural climate of partitioned Poland did not only inspire the works of Polish male writers; it was also the background to the writings of many works of prose by women authors, who represented widely differing constructions of femininity which were by no means limited to so-called “womanly” familial, down-to-earth, closer-to-home subject matter. An intriguing example is the only well-known woman writer of Polish Romanticism, Narcyza ˚michowska, and her semi-fantastical portrayal of an “evil” dominant older heroine who has a passionate love affair with a young and inexperienced man. As shown by Ursula Phillips, in her essay “Femme Fatale and Mother-Martyr: Femininity and Patriotism in ˚michowska’s The Heathen (1846),” the writer articulates a model of Christian love (a fusion of eros and agape) whereby happy, healthy individuals who are satisfied in their personal lives are judged to make better, more useful citizens than tormented martyrs. In so doing, ˚michowska deconstructs traditional patriarchal stereotypes of “female nature,” but does not prescribe any programmatic ideal for women to follow, including that of emancipation. Rather, with her anti-martyrological stance, she “anticipates Judith Butler’s formulation of woman as ‘a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot be said to rightfully originate or to end.”’ In contrast to the opposition — “priestess” of the domestic and national hearth versus cosmopolitan fatal woman — ˚michowska presents in the frame scene of her novel a range of positive, highly differentiated, contemporary female models, taken from real life, from experience, not based on ideals or stereotypes. Romantic emphasis on “the ethics of the struggle for survival,”^[3]  that is on the national consolidation of identity, was a feature of other European peoples too, but in the case of Poland the most decisive influence was undoubtedly the Catholic Church; Phillips reveals how ˚michowska undermines the model of femininity promoted by Polish Catholicism and, in so doing, also undermines any essential conception of femininity at all.

It seems fair to say that the Church’s “anti-sexual” ethic from the early nineteenth century onwards became a permanent fixture of the Polish religious and indeed cultural system. Or, as expressed by Małgorzata Anna Packalén in her comparative study of Eliza Orzeszkowa, Władysław Reymont and Maria Dąbrowska, which continues the femme fatale theme with reference to the Polish village: “The obvious ‘degradation’ of women in these works goes hand in hand with existing cultural codes and conventions. It conforms above all to views long established in the social consciousness — and dictated by the Catholic Church — concerning sexuality.” A case in point is Orzeszkowa, who, as the leading woman writer of the so-called “Positivist” period from the mid-1860s, belonged to a sober-minded and commonsensical generation that resisted Romantic stereotypes of national martyrdom, urged instead involvement with social reform and generally espoused the realistic and the pragmatic. However, as Packalén demonstrates in her analysis of the novel The Boor (1888), Orzeszkowa never fully dissociates herself from the myth of woman as the ideal stereotypical Polish Mother (“Matka-Polka”), priestess of the domestic and national hearth, but instead opts for a middle course: “she both disturbs and yet sanctions — remaining ever faithful to the inflated ethical norms of her times — the canon of accepted standards.” 

In continuation, Grażyna Borkowska picks up on Orzeszkowa’s “limited” feminism as expressed in her impressive publicistic works, while tracing its origins back to the writer’s intellectual interests as well as to her life experience. In what is best described as a marginalization of the Christian tradition, Orzeszkowa states: “It is not entirely true that Christianity liberated woman. I am strongly convinced and wish to prove that the only act of kindness that Christianity did to woman was to establish the institution of monogamy; but here too there are reservations since monogamy existed earlier. Christianity, by introducing the notion and custom of asceticism, by raising the Judaic legend of the fallen Eve to the level of dogma, did much to retard the development of justice in relation to the lives of women.” (1891). According to Borkowska, Orzeszkowa constructs her own brand of emancipatory programme, where a most original and separate feature is her idea of “the Polish woman-citizen.” Ultimately, however, the most important thing for Orzeszkowa was the ethical component, as articulated in her confidence that “the world is gathering itself for a renewal and awaits a female messiah.”

On the whole, we might say that the overwhelming need of fragmented Polish society was to proscribe those forms of gender and sexual behaviour which were seen as inimical to its survival. These proscriptions would then be elevated to the level of taboo and transformed into “morality,” as becomes most apparent in Polish twentieth-century literature. Brought up at the so-called “anti-Positivistic” turn of the twentieth century, the fin de siècle generation of “Young Poland” (“Młoda Polska”) writers were responsible for assimilating the main artistic and philosophical ideas of the western Europe into the Polish arts, above all the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud: the idea of the autonomy of art; of a connection between literature and knowledge about humankind; of the supra-national and cross-national character of artistic motifs and media, and, most importantly — the idea of the literary work and its multiplicity of meanings. In this connection, the influence of Stanisław Przybyszewski, due largely to his intellectual daring and magnetic personality, cannot be sufficiently emphasized. In his article on gender and sex in early Polish Modernism, Włodzimierz Bolecki highlights Przybyszewski’s constant probing into the question of what differentiates a human being from the external world: from things, collectivities, Nature, social institutions, cultural norms. Significantly, Przybyszewski treated these categories “as taboos and often provoked scandal by questioning them.” Similar problems were broached, but in a wholly different way, by his contemporary Karol Irzykowski. Whereas the former conceived of literature as the expression of repressed impulses of the life of the psyche, the latter, says Bolecki, “recognized literary conventions themselves as the chief source of falsification or distortion in our knowledge of human beings.” In his novel Paluba (1903), Irzykowski maintains that the bedrock of eroticism may be fear; hence his association of dreams and of extreme emotions with sexual activity and cruelty. Indeed, “eroticism as presented in Irzykowski’s work exposes and violates social, moral and linguistic taboos.”

German Ritz follows this up by asking: does Paluba have a sex? In his gender-oriented reading of Irzykowski’s novel, whose main hero becomes a decadent in his combative encounter with the other sex, Ritz reveals how the plot enters into complex competition with metafictional reflections concerning the narrative itself. Moreover, Paluba is not a construction, but a deconstruction of contemporary pronouncements about sex that seek to avoid any link with gender; and, by way of conclusion, “the text ends up with a new definition of the essential nature and difference between the sexes, but with the recognition of gender, that is of culturally determined sexual identity.” A divergent, in this connection, treatment of the sexual sphere in relation to fictional characters can be observed in the Nobel prize-winner Władysław Reymont and his voluminous novel The Peasants (1904–1909). In this story about, on the one hand, the romantic entanglement of a peasant-farmer with a village femme fatale, and his strained family life with his unattractive but devoted wife on the other, sexuality reflects not only the lovers’ sexual drive but also the complex emotional and psychological configuration of human feelings involved in tragic conflict. As argued by Packalén, Reymont does not believe an alliance between sexual passion and social stability and acceptability to be possible, which “clearly expresses the Modernist conviction that sex was a power undermining the harmony of human and family relationships.”

The optimism, euphoria even, which followed in the wake of restored political independence in 1918 was loyally recorded by Polish writers. The new state turned out, however, to be something of a disappointment to many of them — especially to those who had envisioned their “promised land” in individual terms, but realized more and more that they would have to live it collectively. Whereas the literature of the 1920s was dominated by a feeling of expansion and unlimited possibilities for art and culture, the 1930s took the new artistic techniques for granted, and developed an interest in the psychological and social complexities of the human being, in the feeling of crisis facing civilization and in the premonition of imminent catastrophe. Seen through the lens of gender and sexuality, these two decades contain such well-known “transgressive” writers as Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) and Bruno Schulz. According to Bolecki, what links these two male writers is their shared “fascination with male-female relations, especially perverse ones” based on various forms of sadism, masochism and fetishism. But whereas Witkacy explores, notably in his novel Farewell to Autumn (1927), the erotic almost as a social experiment, subjecting his protagonists/guinea-pigs to various processes of initiation (heterosexual, homoerotic and narcotic, marital and domestic, erotic and religious), Schulz, in his prose and graphic works alike, mythologizes the erotic itself. More precisely, his accounts of sex and gender are not inscribed into the problem of demystifying reality in art (as is the case with Przybyszewski, Irzykowski or Witkacy), but into the opposite, that is the mythologization of reality. In this context, woman and man emerge as two different “perverse” modes of being, strong/self-sufficient and weak/unable-to-be-self-sufficient, respectively.

One work of Polish prose from the early twentieth century which presents a relatively optimistic approach to women’s issues is Maria Dąbrowska’s cycle of short stories Folks from Over Yonder (1926). In striking contrast to Orzeszkowa and the male writers of early Modernism mentioned above — all of whom view sexuality, especially in its female version, as a threatening and destructive force — Dąbrowska conceives of sexuality as a potential source of fulfilment for both women and men. In so doing, she raises female sensuality and sexuality to a level at least commensurate with that of men; moreover, she “contributes to a redefinition of the sexual contract, of the ‘power’ dependencies between the sexes, and as a result of this to a definite advance in the literary presentation of female figures” (Packalén). Interestingly, a similar inclusiveness on the level of gender can be found in Zofia Nałkowska, who belonged to the same period. Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik, in her essay “Family Nausea: Attitudes towards Family Values in Nałkowska’s Snakes and Roses and The Impatient Ones,” traces the significant evolution of this “rebel with a cause.” In her early novel of 1915, most of the heroines are driven by the desire to free themselves from “the monstrosity of family relations,” that is from the passive or active gender roles that arise from biological determinism and the oppressive forces of “clan” that form identities, in order to become “New Women.” In her more mature years, however, Nałkowska resigns from her utopian vision of a gender-differentiated morality that asserts the importance of the individual, and comes to realize that there is no way out of collective relations — that each human being must take responsibility for her or his interaction with other members of the human family. “Such empathy and sense of existential duty towards other human beings,” says Rembowska-Płuciennik, “would later be confirmed by Nałkowska’s prose about the trauma of World War 2.”

As to their involvement with woman’s and sexuality issues, both Dąbrowska and Nałkowska may be said to occupy a secure place in the Polish “canon” of women’s writing. But the same period also features several fictional works by women writers who have scarcely been examined by scholars. If so, they have usually been compared to the works of male writers, having their “unwomanly” or “questionable” qualities highlighted. One poignant example is the case of Elżbieta Szemplińska, whose ambiguous personality and short literary career, as well as dramatic life history, contributed to her rather dubious reputation as an inter-war feminist with strong communist leanings. Ewa Kraskowska, in her reading of Szemplińska’s novelistic triptych entitled The Accretions (1938–39), argues that the writer strays far from traditional Catholic ethics by promoting what must be unique in Polish literature — a case of animalistic empathy, actualized for example in the representation of the heroine’s relationship with her cat. In this way, Szemplińska’s empathy, which Kraskowska appears to endorse as an attribute more “womanly” than “manly,” differs radically from the empathy of the mature Nałkowska, who in The Impatient Ones embarks on an empathy project from the point of view of a male protagonist. In turn, this is a far cry from Irena Krzywicka, whose novel Flight from Darkness (1939) tells the story of a provincial girl who, once confined to her parents’ care and the cruel comments her mother makes about her ugliness, chooses to live with and love a man who is sick physically as well as emotionally. As shown by Urszula Chowaniec in her discussion of Krzywicka’s portrayal of initiation into womanhood, the writer departs through and through from a literary tradition where the sexuality of women is treated as something of which they should be ashamed. In contrast to Nałkowska’s anti-motherhood, Krzywicka, “in her innovatory — for Polish literature — attempt to represent the New Woman, introduces a heroine for whom motherhood is her strength and creative power.”

Perhaps the Polish critical establishment has been more welcoming to date towards certain male writers and their challenge to normative sexuality, than towards many women writers and their challenge to the male-centred ethics of Polish patriotic mythology?^[4] Nonetheless, the primacy of a particular form of masculinist patriotism in Polish writing has led, inevitably, to the suppression of a number of counter-discourses, such as feminism, radical socialism, lesbianism and the homoerotic. In Poland, where the religious and judicial codes refused legitimacy and public space for gender-bending and “non-heterosexual” desire, any homo- or bisexual sensibility could have existed only in contradistinction to mainstream cultural discourse. The fact that the latter did exist, more often than not in a hidden or sublimated form, is implied by Knut Andreas Grimstad in his essay on Witold Gombrowicz’s “Gothic” boy-meets-girl exploration in the novel Possessed (1939). In an ambiguous representation of the main heroes’ relationship, the novel’s “implied” third-person narrator creates a psychosexual realm, where the key to the story is a confrontation between the central male/female character and his/her second self or alternative identity — as represented by the leading female/male character. As argued by Grimstad, Possessed is not only about challenging one-sided, suffocating forms of gender and sexuality; one of the more striking effects of its destabilizing scheme is “the negation of intimacy between two like-minded individuals and the rendering of their love as unattainable.”

A more in-depth treatment of the interconnection between inexpressible desire and narrative poetics is offered by German Ritz who, in his second contribution to this volume, traces homosexuality in works by four inter-war and post-war writers: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Maidens from Wilko (1933), Tadeusz Breza’s Adam Grywałd (1936), Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia (1960) and Wilhelm Mach’s Mountains by the Black Sea (1961). Taking as his starting-point Poland’s hybrid status as an in-between place, a so-called “threshold country,” situated between the repressive and clearly defined culture of western Europe, on the one hand, and the neutral, that is less clearly defined, culture of eastern Europe on the other, Ritz recognizes the inexpressible as an expression of homosexual desire pertaining to four very different “homosexual” imaginations. As emphasized by the author, the homosexual imagination of Gombrowicz is — against all appearances — the most difficult to describe, because in reading him, we are hard put to keep the text separate from his philosophical and aesthetic conception of “Form.”

Bearing in mind the above considerations, it appears that the Polish understanding of gender and sexuality has long been problematic and diversifying. Moreover, we can surmise that neither gender nor sexuality is ever wholly protean or totally fluid; at any given time and in any given place each is configured within a range of technological, socio-economic and religious-cultural constraints. Accordingly, the purpose of this book is to present investigations into not only the effect of unsanctioned and divergent gender/sexual identities on certain Polish creative imaginations, but also into literary contestations of the antiquated mind-sets that have persisted, and still do, in representing these aspects of our common humanity. As editors, we hope that through this exploration some sense of the interface between two ways of thinking — one ethics, the other gender and sexuality — may be clarified.

The present volume was completed with the generous financial assistance of the Bergen University Foundation; the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature, and the Program on East European Cultures and Societies (peecs), Norwegian University of Science and Technology. We owe our principal debt to Ingunn Lunde, general editor of Slavica Bergensia, for her dedication and professionalism in producing the finished book. The intellectual support we have received from Astrid Brokke, Felix Corley, Halina Filipowicz, Dorota Krawczyńska, Jadwiga Kvadsheim, Henrik Lous, György Péteri and Nina Witoszek has been likewise invaluable. Above all, we would like to thank our contributors, without whose cooperation and constant enthusiasm this book would never have materialized.

Knut Andreas Grimstad & Ursula Phillips

Note on translation

German Ritz’ essay “Inexpressible Desire and Narrative Poetics: Homosexuality in Iwaszkiewicz, Breza, Mach and Gombrowicz” was translated by Knut Andreas Grimstad. All the other contributions, excepting those by Grimstad and Ewa Kraskowska, were rendered into English by Ursula Phillips. Also, unless otherwise stated, she has translated all quotations from the original Polish into English.

^[1]Pawel Leszkowicz, 2003, “Poland: The Shock of the Homoerotic,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 3, pp. 19–20; p. 19.

^[2]See such diverse contributions as Aline Kalbian, 2005, Sexing the Church: Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism, Bloomington, Ind.; Susan Frank Parsons, 2002, The Ethics of Gender, Oxford; Luce Irigaray, 2002, The Way of Love, trans. H. Bostic & S. Pluháček, London; Toril Moi, 2001, What is a Woman? And Other Essays, Oxford; Michael Warner, 2000, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, Cambridge, Mass.; L. R. Holben, 1999, What Christians Think about Homosexuality: Six Representative Viewpoints, North Richland Hills, Texas; Andrew Sullivan, 1998, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival, New York; Roger N. Lancaster & Micaela di Leonardo, eds. 1997, The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, New York; John Corvino, ed. 1997, Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homosexuality, Lanham, Maryland, 1997; Harry W. Schaumburg, 1997, False Intimacy: Understanding the Struggle of Sexual Addiction, Colorado Springs; as well as such “classics” as Toril Moi, 2002, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, 2^nd edn, London; Judith Butler, 1999, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2^nd edn, New York & London; and Butler, 1993, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” New York & London.

^[3]We are indebted for this phrase to Brian Porter, 2000, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland, Oxford, pp. 207–219.

^[4]Referring to the recent popularity of Witold Gombrowicz, Halina Filipowicz has suggested to us that in Polish culture, paradoxically, it seems to be much easier to be accepted as a gay man than as a woman, regardless of her sexual orientation.

Ursula Phillips: Femme Fatale and Mother-Martyr: Femininity and Patriotism in Żmichowska’s The Heathen

Małgorzata Anna Packalén: The Femmes Fatales of the Polish Village: Sexuality, Society and Literary Conventions in Orzeszkowa, Reymont and Dąbrowska

Grażyna Borkowska: The Feminism of Eliza Orzeszkowa

Włodzimierz Bolecki: Gender and Sex in Early Polish Modernism: Przybyszewski, Irzykowski, Witkacy, Schulz

German Ritz: Does Paluba Have a Sex? Irzykowski’s Paluba in the Light of Gender Studies

Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik: Family Nausea: Attitudes towards Family Values in Zofia Nałkowska’s Snakes and Roses and The Impatient Ones

Urszula Magdalena Chowaniec: Initiation into Womanhood: Irena Krzywicka’s Flight from Darkness

Ewa Kraskowska: Femininity and Communism: The Case of Elżbieta Szemplińska

Knut Andreas Grimstad: Gombrowicz’s “Gender Trouble” or, the Problem of Intimacy in Possessed

German Ritz: Inexpressible Desire and Narrative Poetics: Homosexuality in Iwaszkiewicz, Breza, Mach and Gombrowicz

Contributors
Index of Names