THE CONFLICT OF CORPOREALITY AND SPIRITUALITY IN THE PATRIARCHAL WORLD OF ELIZA ORZESZKOWA’S NOVEL “THE BOOR”

Abstract

The article examines the novel «The Boor» by Eliza Orzeszkowa – one of the leading writers and publicists of the era of Polish literary positivism. The main attention is focused on the literary and psychological analysis of the work and the anthropological interpretation of the conflict of corporeality and spirituality as dominant in its artistic integrity. The author’s opinion on the position of women in patriarchal society and the strategy of the poetic embodiment of the author’s emancipative concepts in the interpreted work has been clarified. The emphasis is on the discourse of psychological prose in Polish literary criticism. Through a review of the feminist movement in Poland, the emancipative context in the writer’s works has been investigated. The psychological novel «The Boor» has been interpreted in different contexts and the conceptual differences of this work from the tendentious novel «Marta» by Eliza Orzeszkowa have been clarified. Special attention is paid to the Ukrainian reception of the writer’s works that was intensively initiated by Ivan Franko. The key interpretive strategy of the article is based on comparing the natural psycho-emotional preferences of the literary subject with the unnatural, inauthentic environment imposed by stereotypical models of patriarchal society. The interpretive message focuses on the insurmountable conflict that arises between the corporeality and spirituality of the female character, who confronts the patriarchal morality of feminine-masculine relationships and falls into the trap of her own feminine nature, experiences the inevitable trauma of the anthropology of corporeality and – also inevitably – must choose suicide as the only possible escape from the humiliatingly unacceptable reality dictated by patriarchal morality, religiosity and the archaically established family life. The female character in Eliza Orzeszkowa’s novel «The Boor» becomes a victim of the limitations of her own corporeality for spiritual liberation, but the victim of the same conflict also becomes a male character who is unable to comprehend the otherness of a woman alienated from the patriarchal paradigm that represents her and with which this male character is identified.