Poles Apart: Women in Modern Polish Culture

7. The Wound of History: Gender Studies and Polish Particulars

The Wound of History: Gender Studies and Polish Particulars Halina Filipowicz "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." 1. P. Hartley, The Go-Between >1II< To address some of the questions I have raised, we need a time machine . Accordingly, I shall go back to the Enlightenment in order to compare what women were writing in England and in Poland during that time. After all, the push for the recognition of the agency and rights of women began as part of the Enlightenment project in defense of individual rights. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which demonstrated the negative effects of men's oppression of women and argued for the necessity of developing women's intellect and moral independence. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth , the year 1792 brought a Russian military intervention and a civil war that led to the second partition of Poland-Lithuania in the following year. The issue of women's rights was never raised at the time. As Janusz Duzinkiewicz has remarked, rather apologetically, in the preface to his book on the Parliament of 1788-92: Unfortunately, this study reflects the gender bias of the old political system it studies. Women do not fit into the discussion because they did not fit into the political processes. Their position in the Commonwealth was typical of women in early modern European society.... King Stanislaw August was fond of saying "we rule the world and women rule us." But in the parliament being studied women could only be vocal spectators who quite often in approval would drop perfumed hand- 156 Halina Filipowicz kerchiefs over the railing onto the debate floor that they could not enter. (x) One might qualify Duzinkiewicz's statement by pointing out that a number of women in Enlightenment Poland had much more agency than some contemporary moralists would allow, and more than some modern scholars would credit. For example, Izabela Czartoryska, one of the grandes dames of the Warsaw scene, was vigorously uninhibited as she watched legislative proceedings from the public galleries in the Parliament. She loudly cheered and applauded some speeches, and, together with her female companions, waved a shawl over the debate floor (see Kalinka 1: 203-04). These parliamentary theatrics were part of Czartoryska's and other aristocratic women's carefully designed (and effective) campaign of political agitation in support of constitutional reform.1O That said, the fact remains that Polish women in the eighteenth century, like women elsewhere, had no vote and no institutional involvement beyond family, church, philanthropy, and cultural patronage. These constraints, of course, do not mean that women's voices were not heard. In 1816, Maria Wirtemberska, Wollstonecraft's near contemporary, published Malvina, or The Heart's Intuition (Malwina, czyli domyslnosc serca), "arguably the most accomplished novel" written in Polish until the publication of Narcyza Zmichowska's The Heathen (Poganka) in 1846 (Phillips, "Polish Women," 66). Rather predictably , however, Malvina has not become part of the canon of Polish literature. Instead, the critical establishment, the academy, and the publishing industry have promoted male writers. Thus, the credit for being the first modern novel in Polish goes to Ignacy Krasicki's The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom (Mikolaja Doswiadczynskiego przypadki , 1776), even though it lacks the artistic daring and psychological complexity of Wirtemberska's Malvina. As Ursula Phillips has shown, a modern variant of gender bias is a crucial element in understanding the critical neglect of this once famous, now far less widely known Polish woman writer (see Phillips, Introduction). 10 Their campaign, together with the political agitation by the National Theater , the press, and political clubs, was effective in the sense that it mobilized public opinion and thus helped to get a constitutional bill through in the Parliament. The new constitution was adopted on May 3, 1791. I discuss Czartoryska's political activism in "Democracy at the Theatre." The Wound of History 157 Three years after Malvina, a very different book by another Polish woman-Keepsake of a Good Mother, or Her Last Advice to Her Daughter (Pamiqtka po dobrej matce, czyli ostatnie jej rady dla corki, 1819) by Klementyna Tanska Hoffmanowa-achieved spectacular success. This fictionalized treatise on women's education was so well received that it went through eleven editions by 1901, thus becoming one of the most popular works written in nineteenth-century Poland. As a result, Hoffmanowa was the first Polish woman to earn her living as a writer.l1 Keepsake of a Good Mother was indisputably the central pedagogical text in Poland in the nineteenth century. Its widespread resonance is unsurprising; indeed it makes sense. Hoffmanowa's views on women were anti-emancipatory. She subscribed to the stereotypical model of femininity prevalent across contemporary Europe. Accordingly, Keepsake of a Good Mother upholds the patriarchal model of a woman who knows her "proper" place and lives to please others. She is socialized to be modest, shy, and obedient-qualities that are embodied signs of disempowerment. As far as her vision of women's future was concerned , Hoffmanowa was stuck in a culture where girls grew up to be wives and mothers-capable, loved, admirable women, but essentially wives and mothers. The worst-case scenario would be to grow up and not find a husband, in which case a woman would use her capabilities and accomplishments to teach girls to achieve the status of wife and mother. So far, so routine. According to Hoffmanowa's conduct book, a young Polish woman should strengthen her command of Polish and learn about the Polish cultural tradition rather than invest time and energy in the study of French language and culture. This view seems to suggest yet another restriction imposed by Hoffmanowa's maleoriented perspective: Women should not be "worldly," and thus need no access to foreign cultures. Citing Hoffmanowa's treatise, Karen Offen notes in European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History that Polish women's "vital role of keeping the national language alive ... could also serve antifeminist ends" (101). I, by contrast, propose that for women in Poland under foreign rule the emphasis on cultivating proficiency in the native language was a political act of patriotic resistance that could (and did) also serve feminist ends, as the career of 11 For overviews of Hoffmanowa's career from Polish and American perspectives , see Borkowska 65-91; Lorence-Kot, "Klementyna Tariska Hoffmanowa "; Lossowska. 158 Halina Filipowicz Narcyza Zmichowska (1819-76), educator, writer, patriotic activist, political prisoner, and advocate of women's emancipation, makes evident . In other words, Hoffmanowa's book, which would have served a conservative social function in the West by promoting patriarchal practices, served a potentially radical one in partitioned Poland by advocating patriotic education and, implicitly, patriotic engagement. Ultimately, one is even tempted to conclude that while "[t]he rapid development of capitalism in western countries involved an ever more distinct division between the private and public sphere" and an increasingly rigid restriction of female agency to the private sphere (Ostrowska, "Filmic Representations," 420), Poland's economic and political circumstances complicated this patriarchal paradigm and its model of the woman as the angel of the domestic hearth.12 But was the patriotic education of Polish women sympathetic to the idea of their direct participation in political activities? Did the patriotic education of Polish women lead to a gender-blind patriotic partnership ? These questions bring me to the issue of Polish women's involvement in the struggle for Poland's political independence in the nineteenth century. How was gender negotiated in the public discourse of Polish patriotism, focusing on the struggle for national selfdetermination ? A tentative answer to this question may be given on the basis of activities by Jadwiga Prendowska and Emilia Plater. As Carol Coulter has observed in The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women and Nationalism in Ireland, anti-colonial struggles have often brought women out of the house and onto the public stage, but their political involvement tends to be part of history's "hidden tradition" (5-7). Polish cultural mythology, however, has engaged a rhetorical ploy that is subtle yet powerful. This ploy upholds the familiar as12 For the argument that lived realities in Poland under foreign occupation blurred the boundaries between private and public domains, see, e.g., Lorence-Kot, "Konspiracja"; Ostrowska, "Filmic Representations." For a pivotal study of the nineteenth-century doctrine of "woman's sphere," see Cott. In this context, it is helpful to remember that recent American scholarship questions the usefulness of the concept of the separate spheres as an explanatory model for nineteenth-century American society and culture. Cathy Davidson notes that "the binaric version of nineteenth-century American history is ultimately unsatisfactory because it is simply too crude an instrument -too rigid and totalizing-for understanding the different, complicated ways that nineteenth-century American society or literary production functioned" (445). The Wound of History 159 sumption that political authority is the province of the male, while it simultaneously nourishes Poles' collective pride in the uniqueness of their experience of history. Collective pride is predicated on a claim that the Polish struggle for independence was empowering for the entire national community because it authorized the political activism of women and other Others such as peasants. In constructing this fantasy , Polish cultural mythology has engaged historical memory. The question is: whose history and which memory. When Polish cultural mythology claims that Polish women were patriotic peers of Polish men in the national drama of rising from the dead, it conveniently evades the fact that the lives of Polish women, like the lives of women elsewhere in Europe, were constrained by social conventions. Admittedly, certain historical periods-in particular , the early 1830s and 1860s-offered more freedom than others for Polish women's political activism. Full political empowerment was not yet possible for women, so patriotic heroism was an alternative that said: "Look what we can do if given the chance." There is no denying that Polish women were involved in the struggle to regain Poland's political freedom. They smuggled arms and ammunition, delivered dispatches, supplied food and clothing, cared for the wounded, hid partisans and weapons, provided help to families of captured and fallen men. Some Polish women took up arms. This is not to say, however , that the liberationist project created a gender-blind patriotic equity or that women's involvement in that project was always socially approved. Unsurprisingly, those activities that corresponded to women's socially acceptable roles as household managers, cooks, nurses, and seamstresses were much more likely to gain public approval than women's military service. The new role that some women performed as insurgents was often seen as deviation from a "normative" patriotic desire and hence did little to alter the notion of gender-appropriate behavior. Moreover, even those women whose participation in the liberationist project did not involve combat risked being ostracized as gender transgressors. Here, the case of Prendowska, a woman of the minor gentry, is instructive. When the 1863 uprising broke out, she and her husband left their four children in the care of Prendowska's mother and threw themselves into energetic work for the patriotic cause. Prendowska organized an underground mail network and served as a courier, delivering weapons, military dispatches, and money. Arrested and exiled to central Russia, she returned to Poland 160 Halina Filipowicz in 1866 to find her and her husband's estate confiscated by Russian authorities . After his death six years later, she and her children were left homeless and destitute. One would have assumed that relatives and neighbors would rush to help Prendowska, a paragon of patriotic perfection , but one would be wrong. Condemned and shunned in her community, she lived from hand to mouth (see Prendowska). Can it be, then, that Polish women's political activism, even when approved, was seen merely "as a temporary expedient arising out of dire national circumstances?" (Lorence-Kot, "Konspiracja," 42). As Bogna Lorence-Kot points out, "There is evidence that the men resented the [politically active] women" ("Konspiracja" 32). Prendowska 's case indicates that women also resented, even despised, their female compatriots' political engagement. That resentment, however, has not prevented Polish cultural mythology from making its most cherished claim: While women in the West were merely spectators of history, Polish women were participants in history. In other words, the fall of Poland compelled the rise of Polish women. This belief resonated outside Poland as well, reinforcing the claim made in Poland. Reporting from Europe for the New- York Daily Tribune in 1848, Margaret Fuller insisted that Polish women are "[w]omen indeed -not children, servants or playthings" ("These Sad But Glorious Days" 223). She taunted her American readers: "[W]hat other nation has had such truly heroic women?" (223). And in her groundbreaking book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), she highlighted one of Poland's "truly heroic women": Plater, who cut her hair to shoulder length, put on men's clothes, and fought in the insurrection of 1830-31. Although Plater's example did not affect the status of ordinary Polish women, Fuller deployed the precedent of Plater's celebrated heroism to encourage American women to challenge patriarchal norms and to participate in public life. In short, Fuller eulogized Plater as a feminist foremother. Fuller's enthusiasm for exceptional Polish women such as "Countess Colonel Plater" raises fundamental questions about cross-cultural negotiations of gender (Woman 36). When Fuller repeatedly voiced her version of the cliche admirable Polish women, she did so for a good cause, as part of her campaign against patriarchal practices in American society. However, reading for gender is necessary but not enough; it is helpful to bring in intersectional analysis-a patient, sometimes dogged study of both normative and nonnormative intersections of gendered, sexual, class, national/ethnic, and racial identities-that sig- The Wound of History 161 nificantly complicates (and even dismantles) earlier paradigms by noting the limitations of a theory that relies exclusively on gender as a marker of difference.13 In other words, glorifying the gender transgression of an aristocratic woman like Plater, as Fuller did, may serve only to obscure the complex nature of social structures that mediate gender and cultural authority. For example, one could argue that Poland, a small nation striving for political independence and world recognition, quite willingly celebrated the talents of prominent women. This strategy appropriated Plater's military career for a nationalist script, especially in the nineteenth century- a script that defensively proclaimed the national uniqueness of Poland and its moral superiority over the rest of Europe, East or West. The story of Plater's patriotic heroism was useful for the project of Polish selfpresentation and self-legitimation; therefore it was transformed into hard cultural currency. There is more to Plater's posthumous career, however. Today, when she holds a prominent position in the pantheon of Polish heroes and heroines, it is easy to forget that her model of heroism was seen as a mixed blessing. She made many Poles ill at ease precisely because, as a female soldier, she transgressed the boundaries of "respectable" gender norms. In the Plater family tradition, for example, she was remembered as "an eccentric grandaunt" who deviated from the decorum of her sex and imposed herself on male insurgents, hindering their actions and making them cringe with embarrassment (Illakowiczowna 15). Some nineteenth-century accounts about Plater speculated that she fought in the uprising to escape an unhappy domestic situation that included a troubled relationship with her father. Other accounts built a fantasy about her, proposing that her gender insubordination must have been caused by loneliness and emotional privation14 Still other accounts circulated scabrous tales about her, claiming that she joined the military to have easy access to sex with men1 S In more general terms, then, even though Plater's gender transgression 13 For studies that use intersectionality as critical praxis, see especially Crenshaw ; Friedman; Smith; Somerville. 14 The term gender insubordination comes, of course, from Butler (Gender Trouble). 15 For a detailed analysis of accounts about Plater, see my article, "The Daughters of Emilia Plater." In that article, I also compare Plater with her Russian contemporary, Nadezhda Durova (known as the Cavalry Maiden). For a recent study of Durova, see Holmgren. 162 Halina Filipowicz served the patriotic cause, it provoked an anxiety about her undermining the foundations of the social order with its investment in discipline , propriety, and cohesion. To complicate Plater's case even further, I want to return to the question of cultural translation that makes the problematic of difference most evident. As Virginia Woolf and others have argued, "[T]he values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex," and this gender divergence has caused problems for women because "it is the masculine values that prevail" (Woolf 73-74). Seen from this perspective, which is often invoked in Western gender studies, Plater does not represent a specifically female mode of defining authority. After all, she embraced masculine values: the male heroics of action. Her authority, though resented and challenged , can be attributed to her courage of willing self-sacrifice for the relatively abstract cause of nation. In other words, it is tempting to see Plater as a conformist who constructed a position for herself within the male system that excluded women. One could conclude that at most her story implicitly exposes the negative values of male heroism (i.e., willingness to die), since survival, not death, constitutes meaningful self-sacrifice. Dying is easy; living is hard. While such may be the case in other historical contexts, I would argue that Plater's willing selfsacrifice resonates differently because the cause in which she was engaged was not a nationalist show of masculine military prowess, but a struggle for freedom in a country that had been incorporated into a foreign empire. During the past two hundred years, a complex and often contradictory gender stereotyping has been imposed on Polish women. On the one hand, there is a common perception, which perhaps arises from the familiar association of Poland with Catholicism and maudlin Mariolatry, that Polish women have been deeply religious, overwhelmingly conservative in the area of gender roles and identities, passionately attached to the traditional values of home and family, and therefore backward1 6 On the other hand, Polish women have been regarded as courageous rule-breakers and path-blazers, or, to invoke Fuller's phrase, "truly heroic women." As the example of Plater shows, there are moments when Western gender theory helps illuminate these stereotypes and mythologies. As the example of Fuller's response to Plater indicates, however, well-meant but narrowly focused enthusi16 For this argument, see, e.g., Katzenstein 130; Owen 101. The Wound of History 163 asm for exceptional Polish women has supported self-congratulatory gender stereotypes in Polish cultural mythology. In her important study, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, Susan Stanford Friedman has argued eloquently that we must think about women in relation to a fluid matrix instead of a fixed binary of male/female or masculine/feminine. We must take into account women's different and often contradictory positions within systems of privilege and alterity. In building on Friedman's argument, it would be illuminating to think through the implications for Polish culture of what she calls "the new geographics of identity," which construes gender identity as a situational phenomenon, perpetuated by both internal and external processes (17). However, I do not merely seek to broaden Friedman's frame of reference, hoping to fill gaps in Western theoretical frameworks with Polish cultural difference . As Nelly Richard has cogently observed, Celebrating difference ... is not the same as giving the subject of this difference the right to negotiate its own conditions of discursive control, to practice its difference in the interventionist sense of rebellion and disturbance as opposed to coinciding with the predetermined meanings of the official repertory of difference.... Even when their current hypothesis is that of decentering , those who formulate it continue to be surrounded by the reputation, academic or institutional, that allows them to situate themselves in "the center" of the debate at its densest point of articulation.... [I]t will be necessary to de-symbolize difference, opening it to a differential multiplicity of practices not included in the arena of theoretical-cultural prestige of the authorized signature. (160-61; italics as found) To meet the methodological challenge of de-centering in the context of Polish gender studies, it will be necessary to open up a more sustained dialogue among "native insiders," "foreign outsiders," and "outsider-insiders" who are "between" worlds. It will also be necessary to encourage revisionist perspectives and to bring them to the ongoing conversation between "foreign" theories and "native" texts in order to test one against the other, to raise questions about both, and to rethink, perhaps even redefine, current theoretical paradigms in new and unexpected ways17 17 I presented earlier versions of this essay at the International Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on 4 April 2001, and at the Women's 164 Halina Filipowicz Works Cited Bell, Susan Groag, and Karen M. Offen, eds. Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents. 2 vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983. Borkowska, Grazyna. 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