Images of Manhood and Transformations of Masculinity in Polish Prose in the Period 1984-1939

Renata Ingbrant, Stockholm University

2010-2014

In Search of the "New Man": Changing Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Polish Prose
My project suggests a way in which a study of writing the masculine may be undertaken. It aims to contribute a new dimension to reading and interpreting Polish canonical novels such as Without dogma (Bez dogmatu) (1891) by Henryk Sienkiewicz, The Doll (Lalka) (1890) by Boles?aw Prus, Stefan ?eromski's Homeless People (Ludzie bezdomni) (1899), or the less-known novel, A Specialist (Fachowiec) (1895) by Wac?aw Berent.

The initial plan to study masculinities in the novels written during the period 1884-1939 was changed to focus only on the novels written in the last decade of the 19th century. The scope of the study has been narrowed to the study of the new literary heroes who represents new models of masculinity which I call the "New Men". Also, what I do is a literary analysis of the fragments of chosen works is carried out against the theoretical background of "gender and masculinity studies" rather than a discourse analysis of the construction of masculinity.

Changing paradigms: changing fictions of masculinity - the Polish case.
Many scholars have noted the significant shift in the gender paradigm taking place with the advance of capitalism and modernization, on the one hand, and modernism in literature, on the other. They have recognized the signs of a "gender anxiety" in European decadence. Also, the growth of the middle class all placed various pressures on male and female stereotypes in order to accommodate change. The supposed "fin-de-siècle crisis in masculinity" has often been understood as an effect of the general crisis in culture and described as a searching for new models, the evidence of which is to be found in literature.
"Polish masculinities" of that time faced different challenges from forces in society (and culture) than masculinities in Western literature. In relation to Polish masculinities one cannot ignore the effect of the Romantic ideals and the ethos of rebellion on the generations of Poles. Since the partitions of Poland (1795), throughout the Romantic period, and into the twentieth century, the main trait of Polish masculinities has been their "confinement," or "imprisonment." "Constricted" masculinity was the outcome of the symbolic bondage that has repeatedly forced Polish men to adapt to a set of given roles - brave soldiers, protectors of their fatherland, insurgents, political prisoners, deportees, exiles, and so on. Among the models of masculinity that Polish culture has generated, one can hardly find any other than these traumatized ones.
After a series of unsuccessful uprisings, the Polish struggle for political freedom suffered a great setback in the defeat of the January uprising of 1863-64. This was also the time when Poland entered the modern world. Serfdom was finally abolished in 1864, and a viable middle class appeared to be on the rise. Following the suppression of the January uprising, an outburst of activity called Positivism emerged in the Kingdom of Poland as a reaction to the national trauma after the defeat of the uprising, the economic crisis, and tsarist repressions.
The major shift in the masculinity paradigm found in the literature of that time is the transition from masculinity of the noble class ("m?sko?? szlachecka") of the feudal era into masculinities of the "middle-class," "intelligentsia," and "common man" of the modern era.
This is the time when new models of masculinity associated with the progress of capitalism began to appear in literature. Recurring types of literary heroes in the tendentious, programmatic works by Positivist authors, included aristocrats and members of the landed gentry who managed to retain their estates through hard work or scientific farming, or lost them, yet managed to find other employment. The Positivists maintained their affirmative heroes for about fifteen years before the injustices and brutality of capitalism forced them to reconsider their approach. They moved towards an ambiguous position on capitalism. This ambiguity is evident in the works that I have chosen to examine.

The New Men and the Modernist trends in fiction.
The studied novels were written during the last decade of the nineteenth century in the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, then part of imperial Russia, when huge socioeconomic and political changes were taking place in a new sociopolitical context. This period in Polish literature is often referred to as "mature (or psychological) realism". The new models of masculinity, which I call the "New Men", challenged the traditional models of masculinity but, at the same time, reflected growing Polish ambivalence toward capitalism and skepticism toward the Positivist program.
These ambivalences, which I call "Modernist trends", are apparent on several different levels. Structurally, the novels are all marked by a characteristic incoherence and a certain inconsistency as to how a new hero should behave. The elusive character of the male protagonists is a puzzling feature that these novels have in common: each protagonist experiences a personal conflict which, in a way expresses the author's skepticism towards positive heroes, promoted by other writers according to the Positivist project. The protagonists in these novels are actually portraits of failure which involves the collapse of formerly successful plans, material and spiritual losses, personal degradation and in two cases - the loss of life at the end of the story.

The New Man and homosocial climbing. The world described in these novels is a "man's world" where the male protagonists are predisposed to participate in the power structures of the patriarchal world dominated by men's relations with other men. The ways in which male characters interrelate with one another are often referred to as "homosocial". In the context of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of "male homosocial desire", the novels with the "New Men" as protagonists are studied as stories of unsuccessful homosocial climbing.
The studied novels are arguably the most homosocial of nineteenth-century Polish novels, different however from western novels of the so-called "social advancement" type. The protagonists strive to achieve public legitimacy through financial, entrepreneurial or professional affiliations. Yet, they are judged by the criteria of public masculinity which is based on hierarchical male orders of privilege, exclusivity and exclusion, defined by their ethical code of the given class. The salon is the semi-public homosocial sphere which demarcates insiders and outsiders, and where homosocial credibility is negotiated through discussions of male-to-male and male-female relations.

Girardian plots and active females. Female protagonists play crucial roles in the New Man's homosocial climbing. In the Romantic tradition it is often a woman who inspires a hero in a man. Her love and devotion is the ultimate reward for his heroic struggle (whatever the struggle is about). In the discussed novels the woman is desired as long as she is unattainable. To each novel one could easily apply Girard's model of mimetic desire (1961), where two active males compete for an apparently passive female. Female protagonist's point of view does not influence the action of the novel. This homosocial set-up within the romantic plot has shaped and canonized literature since the Renaissance. However, I argue that, in this case, the female protagonists are far from being passive "objects of desire". They are endowed with enough psychological depth and opinions to be treated as "speaking subjects". This crucial moment when a woman figure becomes the speaking subject and initiates or influences action contributes to the disintegration of the plot and the homogenous form of the novel - a development which is seen more clearly later in Modernist novels. Given more psychological depth they do not really fit into the structural concept of the workings of desire within the triangle of a man-woman-man relationship, as described by René Girard in his classic work. Disintegration of the homogenous form of the novel is in a way connected with the birth of modern emancipatory discourse, where all protagonists have equal opportunity to speak their minds.
My analysis proves the cultural impossibility of the New Man, at least a convincing role model, in terms of psychological makeup and social competence. Characters such as Wokulski, Judym, and Zaliwski reveal that the main conflict of the New Man as a literary hero is not a strictly social one (the lack of acceptance of social newcomers), but depends on certain cultural/literary conventions that inscribe specific gender roles on characters. These roles are strongly tied to class identity. Any attempt to go beyond the given paradigm of behavior emasculates the hero. For although certain frictions and fissures appear in the gender pattern and create tensions within the story, the narrative seems to reproduce the prevalent "Romantic templates," where the choices that the New Man makes eventually prove to be the traditional ones, and the only possible ones within the particular literary convention of the literary hero that Polish culture has created.

The ideas generated in the course of writing were presented at several international conferences in Poland, Norway, United States, and Spain, which resulted in two publications:
"In Search of the New Man. Changing Masculinities in Late Nineteenth- Century Novels", published in The Polish Review (University of Illinois Press) - a multi-disciplinary, peer-reviewed quarterly devoted to Polish topics. The journal is available through the digital library JSTOR.
"The New Man and Male Homosocial Desire" has been submitted to the international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to Slavic studies (published in Granada, Spain) and is coming out in its December-issue (2014).
The outcome of the project is to be published as a monograph (written in English) in our open-access series Stockholm Slavic Studies next year.

Publications:

Projektet har hittills resulterat i två publikationer:

"In Search of the New Man: Changing Masculinities in Late-Nineteenth-Century Polish Novels", The Polish Review (Special issue on gender studies) Vol. 59, No 1, 2014.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/polishreview.59.1.0035

I tryck:

"The New Man and Male Homosocial Desire", Mundo Eslavo 13 (2014), kommer ut i december, 2014
www.mundoeslavo.com