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A short feminist novel set in 1870s Warsaw, published in English translation by Ohio University Press for the first time in 2018. Marta is a young upper-middle class woman whose husband has just died, leaving her almost no money. She discovers that her perfunctory education in ladies' accomplishments has not equipped her for the limited range of jobs available to women - while working-class women of her age already have years of experience under their belts - and she struggles with increasing desperation to support herself and her small daughter.
Eliza Orzeszkowa is most famous in Poland for On the Niemen (1888), a longer, rural, novel which is on the school curriculum. (It has so far only had a self-published translation to English.) So far as I can tell, Marta is the first new professionally-published English translation of any Orzeszkowa work for decades, which is quite exciting if you want to read Polish classics in English. (There was previously The Forsaken (1980?) and The Argonauts (1901).)
Marta has been variously described as melodrama, as social realism and as naturalistic. Eliza Orzeszkowa was part of the Polish Positivist cultural movement, of realist writing influenced by Dickens, Balzac and Zola, of watchful stoicism about Poland's occupied status, and, as was was popular in much of 19th century Europe, middle-class advocacy for hard work and social and technological progress. The Positivist outlook was also a pragmatic way of staying safe whilst maintaining a public voice, especially under the more repressive Tsarist regime that ruled Warsaw and the rural area where Orzeszkowa lived for most of her adult life. (Somewhat greater latitude was possible in the Austro-Hungarian zone in the south.) As Prof. Grażyna J. Kozaczka explains in the introduction to Marta,
"The Polish intellectual elite, the intelligentsia, found Positivist ideas very attractive as they justified the rejection of military actions in favor of refocusing attention on rebuilding Polish society and ensuring that cultural connections persisted in the nation split among three separate foreign empires. Positivists set their goal on organic work that involved using only legal means to achieve the cultural and economic growth of Polish society."
Marta is based on a "there but for the grace of god go I" scenario. Some years earlier, Orzeszkowa had taken the unusual step of divorcing her husband, and her opportunities were also limited by the ruling Russian regime's restrictions on Poles who, like her, had supported the 1863 uprising. But due to her considerable language skills, she was able to support herself with translation, writing and publishing work. She was aware that similar financial independence was not possible for most of her female peers.
In the years immediately after it was written, Marta had a significant impact in Polish and other Continental European languages. The protagonist's situation was commoner in Poland than in some other countries due to "the loss of estates due to punitive confiscation or poor management in the changing economy", as Kozaczka explains in the introduction; and that it was soon translated into, among others, "Russian, German, Czech, Swedish, Dutch, and even Esperanto". Borkowska says that it "became the bible of German feminist movements".
This pan-European impact was probably enhanced because, as Kozaczka notes, the Polish setting is not strongly emphasised. Locations are mentioned, but the novel's subject is the unprepared woman struggling to stay afloat not in Warsaw in particular, but in the city in general, which "takes on a menacing quality" now she is unprotected by her husband: the late-19th century city a-bustle in the process of industrialising and commercialising.
"the great city assumed the form of a huge hive in which a multitude of human beings moved, surging with life and joining in a race. Each one had his own place for work and for rest, his own goals to reach, and his own tools to forge a way through the crowd."
"Here, as everywhere else, the degree of a worker’s well-being is in direct relation to the excellence of what he produces." [Whilst these days, at the level of work Marta is trying to obtain, consistency, presenteeism and promptness are probably more important provided there is basic competence.]
A handful of features pop out as locally distinctive. There are some attitudes and thoughts more Catholic than Protestant, although none which changes the story. The most noticeable was the preference, even in shops selling goods of feminine interest such as haberdashery, for dapper male staff - who were considered good for business because they were attractive to wealthy female customers; this is also a major feature of The Doll by Bolesław Prus (1890), the greatest Positivist classic. (These men were expected to flirt, but not *too* much.) It contrasts with the popular figure of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century shopgirl in Britain, and Zola's The Ladies' Paradise.
As someone from a professional middle-class background whose capacity for work and earning is, for health reasons, not what I once thought it would be, I expected I would feel a connection and sympathy with Marta, regardless of the story's overt didacticism and its fairly basic style of writing. I also anticipated it would be interesting as a historical document.
In a translation where one is reading both the author and the translators for the first time, and the translators are also quite new to book-length fiction, it's not easy to be sure how much of the style reflects the original. However, the small amount of commentary I've been able access in English suggests that the flaws were in Orzeszkowa's writing. "Her first works are not very well-written and may only be of interest as testimony to the author's sympathy for the trends of modernization,", says Grażyna Borkowska in Ten Centuries of Polish Literature (2004) (p. 182). Czesław Miłosz, in his History of Polish Literature (1969, rev.1983) implies that although novels were her most famous output, they were not, perhaps, her forte: "their technique is old-fashioned and perhaps not up to the level of the exceptional mind which she revealed in her correspondence with the most eminent intellectuals of Poland and Europe" (p.303). She recognised this herself, saying in one letter, "If I was born with a creative faculty, it was a mediocre one. That spark was a little enlivened by considerable intellectual capabilities, and great emotional capabilities, perhaps too much for one heart." (p.314).
Whatever one thinks of Orzeszkowa's writing, she had an interesting life and mind: perhaps a biography would be more interesting than some of her novels, and she may have been better-suited to non-fiction writing. But novels were where the opportunities lay in her day. Between the lines of Miłosz's (and others) descriptions of her, I'm seeing an intellectual writing "accessible" fiction to earn money to live off, and because it got her message across:
"the most open to new intellectual trends, and until her death in 1910 she reacted with understanding to currents which seemed to the Positivists just madness" (p.304)
"her abundant literary production could be qualified as 'populist' although the term has not been used in Polish criticism" (pp.304-305).
The simple style made it readable on occasions when I might have been too tired for more complex writing, and - though it's much long since I read Frances Hodgson Burnett to be wholly confident of similarities - I often thought of A Little Princess when I started reading Marta, not least during the scenes in her new, spartan accommodation. Although unlike a children's book, one shouldn't necessarily expect a happy ending. I always felt that likelihood that made it better and more honest. This feeling was captured by some lines in an article about burnout that went viral the weekend just before I finished writing this post: "In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive." Yes, that kind of stuff gets annoying and obscures real problems. I found myself preferring this 19th century story to many contemporary ones, because it seems truer to those who fall through safety-nets, whilst so much recent material still assumes a greater level of security than actually exists now for plenty of people, as compared with 10-20 years ago.
This was one of those novels in which the author seems to be warming up, as the writing becomes more gripping further into the story. Its trajectory follows Marta through increased levels of need, from early stages which will probably be most recognisable to other people originally from comfortable backgrounds, such as trying to refuse wages from a kind employer for work of a low standard, although she had put a lot of time into it and needs the money. It is about the process by which such principles are whittled away as she becomes better acquainted with real need and what it entails. She learns to work backbreakingly hard for a while and survive on a couple of hours' sleep a night for weeks doing two jobs. But because her skills are few, and training opportunities non-existent, there is further to fall.
As the novel's crescendo built towards the end, I found a description of a state of mind I hadn't seen written about so recognisably before - it was possibly the character's background as well as the timing. Of moments of discovering the operation of a clawing, reflex-level, almost spasmodic desperation for the means of further survival - who knew little bits of money could matter that much, not that they looked like little bits any more - in which former care about manners and propriety is sunk and unfelt; and how it feels depersonalised, dreamlike and surreal, for this is not an existence one ever expected - expectations still lodged in a subconscious quite untrained for these circumstances, built for a life in which requests would mostly be answered and sometimes not even necessary. I read much of Marta around the same time as Vernon Subutex 1 - very contemporary but also dealing with a formerly comfortable character's descent into destitution - and for a few days the two novels were a small chorus, showing a situation which is a social problem, but one not seen as so bad now, because these people have been more privileged in the past, and there will always be some decisions people will say they could have made differently (albeit more so in Vernon's case than Marta's).
Kozaczka makes a powerful argument which quotes Kelleter and Mayer from Melodrama!: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood: “the melodramatic mode has always lent itself to stories of power struggles and to enactments of socio-cultural processes of marginalization and stratification.” There are plenty of occasions when seeing real life in melodramatic terms can be positively disadvantageous on a personal level. But extrapolating from this cultural relationship between melodrama and inequality both prompted me to re-evaluate forms and tropes that have often been derided in more recent times - and to consider that rather than being antiquated, it may be a form and tendency *increasingly* suitable for arts in the contemporary landscape of growing inequality and political polarisation, manifest climate change and mass population movements - shaking up the background complacency remaining after the stability and optimism of recent decades in most Western countries. (The news has already become more melodramatic over the past two and a half years - illustrating some of the drawbacks of melodrama as a real-life format, full of, in Kozaczka's words about the form in general, "the unambiguously drawn conflict between good and evil set on the stage of a “modern metropolis”; the effusive expressions of feelings; and the presence of stock characters who may not have deep “psychological complexity,”¹⁹ such as wealthy villains and beleaguered heroines whose virtue is constantly tested—should not to be discounted altogether.")
Despite what I thought when starting Marta - and my reservations in recommending it for anything other than historical interest - the style and the melodrama doesn't seem to have been an obstacle to other recent English readers either: several, on GR and one in this blog post by a judge for the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award, have also found the book more involving and affecting than expected - so there seems to be something about it; maybe it's not just me.
(Read Oct-Nov 2018; reviewed Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.
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