19th -Century Polish Womenʼs Literature of Personal Document – 21st -Century Reception

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present a contemporary view of memoirs, diaries, letters, and autobiographies of nineteenth-century Polish women authors, seen from the perspective of feminist literary criticism. It draws on feminist-profiled theories of autobiography, cultural theory of literature including gendered readings, in this case taking into account the social, political, moral, historical contexts that shaped womenʼs perception in the 19th century Central and Eastern Europe. The corpus of the article is composed of texts by Henrietta Błędowska, née Działyńska, Helena Szymanowska-Malewska, Zofia Szeptycka, née Fredro, Emilia Heurich, née Szwarc and her daughter Teodora, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Helena Mickiewiczówna, Jadwiga Ostromęcka and Zofia Nałkowska. The wide chronological spectrum (Błędowska closes the 18th century and opens the 19th, Orzeszkowa symbolically closes the 19th century, and Nałkowska shows how 19th-century diarism begins to turn into 20th-century, modernist writing), the genological diversity of texts, the juxtaposition of professional women authors and those for whom autobiographical (epistolary) narratives were the only form of literary activity, enable the demonstration trajectory of womenʼs emancipation in Poland under the partitions. Moreover, this study illustrates the way nineteenth-century autobiography builds and complements history in its broad sense, the history of development of genres belonging to womenʼs literature of personal document, the way it becomes a component of individual and collective biographies, and, above all, the way it can contribute to changing the hitherto optics (e.g. seeing womenʼs autobiography only as factography and not as a separate literary genre). The 19th century was favourable to diaristics and epistolography authored by both men and by women (frequently being the only form of female expression), and from the perspective of the twenty-first century, with an increasing number of interpretative and analytical tools, nineteenth-century female authors are seen as fully-fledged creators of the literary field of Polish autobiography, which is part of the current national, but also Central European, literature.