SOURCE: “The Puzzle of Tadeusz Różewicz's White Marriage,” in Drama and Philosophy, edited by James Redmond, Cambridge University Press: New York, 1990, pp. 211–23.

[In the following essay, Filipowicz traces the different feminist readings of Różewicz's White Marriage.]

Why Tadeusz Różewicz's White Marriage (Białe małżeństwo) should have earned a reputation as an unequivocally feminist play is perhaps more a question for a cultural historian than a literary scholar.¹ All the same, it is an issue that can hardly be ducked in the context of current feminist debate.

The most eloquent case for White Marriage as a feminist work, indeed the first major feminist play in Polish, has been made by Rhonda Blair and Allen Kuharski.² Both Blair and Kuharski regard White Marriage as a play that questions the gender-based habits and assumptions imposed by a rigidly patriarchal culture. They do not subscribe to the concept of écriture féminine which links sex and style, hence they are hardly amazed that a man should have had such enlightened insights into what it means to live as a woman in a male-dominated, traditionally Catholic society. They arrive, however, at conclusions that are markedly different.

To Blair, the play's central character, Bianka, is a victim of the phallocratic order of things, which makes it impossible for her to find ‘room for moderation or tenderness between the sexes’.³ Bianka can cast off the shackles of conventional gender-roles only at the expense of self-deformation:

In the course of the play Bianca is increasingly cornered by the social and sexual demands of her world as she is pushed into the role of the ultimate stereotypical woman-child-virgin-bride, that is, the appropriately passive female. She struggles to create an identity which both fits the demands of her patriarchal society and allows her to be at peace with herself, but this proves to be impossible. She finally denies her womanhood altogether and thereby lets go of her humanity. In doing so, Bianca becomes a kind of feminist tragic hero.⁴

In Kuharski's view, Bianka emerges victorious rather than victimized. There seems no way out of the gender-fix except by renouncing sex-roles as well as transcending gender itself. Bianka succeeds in doing both:

Through Bianca's refusal to consummate her marriage with Benjamin on their wedding night, not only is her feminist revolution begun in the most fundamental way, but her spiritual marriage with Benjamin is made complete … [T]he couple's rejection of sex also marks the death of the degrading old patriarchal order and the start of a new era … Against the squalor and tensions of the world around them, Bianca and Benjamin assume a blazing luminosity at the end of the play.⁵

The closing scene,⁶ in which Bianka burns her clothes, cuts off her hair, and declares to Beniamin that she is his brother, signifies, to Blair, Bianka's ‘spiritual death’.⁷ This desperate act of Bianka's deformation of herself is an indictment of the patriarchal society which denies her full human potential. By the play's end, then, the opposition of male and female is left firmly in place. Not so in Kuharski's view. Unless I have wholly misunderstood his article, Kuharski deploys a deconstructionist strategy of undoing binary oppositions such as male versus female. He conceives of gender as a complex and shifting formation beyond all reach of reductive determinist thinking. Regarded from his perspective, White Marriage is a systematic process of displacement which deconstructs sex-role stereotypes and phallocentric presuppositions. To Kuharski, the final scene represents Bianka's

inner transformation and her invitation to [Beniamin] to a new kind of life … With this androgynous new ‘supercouple’, Różewicz challenges not only the duality of male and female but the very principle of dualistic thought.⁸

Blair's and Kuharski's exegeses rest on the assumptions that Różewicz has converted to feminism, that the characters in White Marriage always mean what they say, and that the linguistic structure of his play is a logically ordered sequence of referential assertions. Both Blair and Kuharski are willing to burke those aspects of Różewicz's creative biography that might contradict their interpretation. They do not, moreover, seem to be aware of the ways in which Różewicz's rhetorical stratagems work to complicate the ostensible logic of his argument beyond its express meaning. Although deconstruction is silently present in Kuharski's article, he finds no use for the deconstructionist ways of reading that have demonstrated rhetorical fragility of texts. In a marked departure from the deconstructive practice, Kuharski believes that White Marriage somehow offers a stable meaning. To him, the contradictory elements in the play invite a dialectical interpretation: he has proposed a ‘resolution’ of the binary opposition, or a displacement of the unresolved opposition by a third category, the ‘spiritually androgynous union’.⁹ But such an interpretation assumes that the oppositions are related in some scheme of hierarchical subordination, and thus a synthesis is possible.

White Marriage is certainly a treasure-house for feminist interpretation—almost too obviously. We watch Bianka destroy her trousseau, and we inevitably conclude that she rebels against the crude biological determinism of a phallocentric world. We see a wedding-feast table turn into Bianka's bride-bed, and we cannot help thinking that sexuality itself is seen as a process of ingestion. The play, no doubt, remains relevant both to ordinary life and ordinary human concerns, but this is only one part of the story.

If White Marriage is a statement about the politics of sexual oppression and liberation, why, then, has Różewicz filled his play to the bursting point with extraneous material, much of which is hardly feminist in nature?¹⁰ The play is a kind of vacuum sucking in whatever phrase or fact may be nearby. Many of them are dazzling coruscations which are not backed up by any very solid content, others are marred by some rather facile mythologizing at the point where Father establishes his identity as a priapic bull, and Bianka hers as a virgin Athena. In even the most apparently simple passages there are enigmas introduced by the permeation or pervasion of everyday conversations by extended literary quotations. This situation is further complicated by a conjoining of the inherited material with Różewicz's own literary pastiches.¹¹ The fabric of quotations, references, and correspondences which crowd the play is, obviously, crucial to the way Różewicz experiences reality. In an age of deepening illiteracy, when even the educated have only a smattering of literary knowledge, erudition is of itself a kind of fantasy, a surrealistic construct.

When the allusions, quotations, and pastiches are juxtaposed with ordinary speech, what effect do the vagaries of the text have on our perception of the characters and their behavior? Audiences are not likely to identify all the references in Różewicz's catalogue of erudition, but they will hear the stylistic registers shift between prose and poetry, between trivial exchanges and overembellished pronouncements, between a textbook fragment and a turn-of-the-century advertisement. Blair does not acknowledge the borrowed material and considers it written by Różewicz himself. Kuharski concedes that the play is embedded in the Polish literary tradition, but he immediately cautions us that White Marriage is ‘a bold departure from that tradition’.¹² When he does discuss the play's debt to the past, he privileges those references in the play (to Maria Komornicka and Narcyza Żmichowska) that support his principal thesis.¹³

Before we approach White Marriage as a play impelled by literature as well as a text of male authority that comes up against the limits of its own explanatory force, we must consider more closely the premises underlying Blair's and Kuharski's explication. There is certainly no good reason why male writers should not address themselves to issues of feminist politics. To deny this would be to subscribe to the sexist mystification that perpetrates the idea of some deep ontological divide between the sexes. However, when Blair and Kuharski declare White Marriage the first major feminist play in Polish and accept Różewicz as a well-meaning fellow-traveller, they are a bit too willing to indulge in their assumption that Różewicz has broken clean out of the prison-house of his creative biography. Stanislaw Barańczak has pointed out the ‘definitely nonfeminist sexual obsessions expressed in [Różewicz's] poetry’.¹⁴ His plays too confront us with the male-sanctioned order of things, in which women's proper place is that of natural providers of male domestic security or of male sexual gratification.

However outspoken their respect for human dignity, the plays of Różewicz reveal a nervousness about feminism, indeed an alarming tendency toward misogyny whenever female characters are involved. Różewicz can be astonishingly cruel to the women in his plays. They are, almost without exception, mere stereotypes: the repulsive Fat Woman (in The Card Index) and Old Woman (in The Old Woman Broods); the demonic housekeeper in On All Fours; the lame-brained young women in The Card Index, The Interrupted Act, The Old Woman Broods, and On All Fours; the cloying wives and fiancées in The Card Index, He Left Home, and The Trap, for whose affectionate simplicity the male characters come to feel a cold detestation. The few intelligent, articulate women in Różewicz's plays are viewed by the male characters with suspicion and condescension.¹⁵ Young and attractive women exist in Różewicz's work primarily as orifices: the war bride, the Secretary, and the female Journalist in The Card Index; Kowalski's mistress in A Funeral Polish Style; the Young Woman in On All Fours; Gretchen in The Trap; even the Impresario's Wife in Departure of a Hunger Artist. Given this context, it would not be impossible to view White Marriage as another flight of phallic fancy.

Yet a writer's œuvre need not be the ultimate criterion in judging a work at hand. Perhaps White Marriage indeed represents Różewicz's conversion to feminism, and he intended his work to be read as a feminist one. If so, we must also confront the perennial problem whether, and how, to honor the principle of authorial intentionality.

There is no paucity of statements by Różewicz about the genesis of White Marriage. The play, he said in a French interview, is firmly rooted in modern culture:

My literature doesn't come from Freud. It is, like Freud, from our epoch. And so are the existential and feminist themes which are very obvious in White Marriage, for example. But the play is also a reaction against the surge of pornography in the 1970s, against the brutalization of eroticism as we saw it in Genet.¹⁶

It is tempting to surrender to the author's overt intention so freely dispensed. As we compare several explications by Różewicz, however, we begin to realize that we will not go very far if we take them uncritically. The proposition that White Marriage is an engagé play, conceived to counter the pornographic exploitation of sex, had already been dismissed by Różewicz himself six years before the French interview. In a conversation with his Polish scholar-friend, Józef Kelera, he had this to say about the origins of White Marriage:

It's impossible to tell why I've written this play. I could have come up with sham answers [pozorne odpowiedzi]. I could have said, for example, that by writing this play I tried to stem the tide of pornography in the world, that I tried to return the human face to eroticism and sex which have been rendered inhuman by pornography.¹⁷

Further, Różewicz did not diminish his ‘purely playful motives [motywy czysto zabawowe]’ in writing White Marriage, but he sought to explain why it ‘holds a very special place’ in his creative biography although ‘it's not a step forward in the development of [his] dramatic technique’.¹⁸ The theatre at the time, he said to Kelera, was shrouded in mysticism; White Marriage was to bring the theatre down to earth. Nonetheless, Różewicz emphatically denied that his intention in White Marriage was to show a conflict between biological and social aspects of human existence. Throughout the conversation, he indeed dwelled on those elements of White Marriage which have more to do with literary tradition than with real life. He called White Marriage ‘a layer cake [przekładaniec]’ of quotations and allusions.¹⁹ He is indebted, he said, to Piotr Skarga, Adam Mickiewicz, Aleksander Fredro, Narcyza Żmichowska, Gabriela Zapolska, Maria Komornicka, Stanisław Przybyszewski, Jan Lemański, Tadeusz Miciński, and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. He compared the ‘movement of the play: “up” and “down”, forward and backward’, to ‘copulation, to the rhythm of life, to an act of conception’.²⁰White Marriage, then, emerged as a tale of the erotic relations between master and matter, of the unique intimacy he achieved with his writing as begetter.

Such a confession of phallic authority and literary paternity may well prompt misgivings about the author who is elsewhere presented as a crypto-feminist, if not a fully fledged convert.²¹ Let us turn, however, to Różewicz's explanation of the play's last scene. Bianka, he told Kelera, destroys the traditional social ‘forms’ that have constrained her, causing her ‘complexes and obsessions’:

This ending means, above all, that Bianka does exist: I am here, in this world, I am a person, I am an individual … Second, she doesn't say: I'm your loyal wife with whom you can do in bed whatever you want and so on, but in her innocence she says: I am. Understand that I also exist.²²

The motives of defensive male prejudice seem to have blinded Różewicz to his best insights on the subject of gender relations when he immediately negated the second part of his explanation. Bianka's final line, he said, is a proclamation of ‘her human condition, not of her gender [płeć]’.²³

For her boldness Bianka must pay with her sanity. This is essentially what Różewicz told Kazimierz Braun, a noted theatre director. He chided Braun, who directed two of the early productions of White Marriage, for missing the point of the final scene: ‘Even you didn't take Bianka over the edge of sanity.’²⁴ He reminded Braun that the scene had been inspired by an actual incident in the life of Maria Komornicka who, in Różewicz's explanation, went insane after declaring herself a man.²⁵ The original title of the play, as Różewicz tells us elsewhere, was in fact Madness (Szał).²⁶

In the conversations with Konstanty Puzyna as well as Kelera, Różewicz repeatedly said that it was the situation in the theatre at the time that prompted his response in the form of White Marriage. His diagnosis of the situation, however, changed. In 1976, when he spoke with Kelera, it was the separation of the theatre from the rest of human life that concerned him. In 1974, when he talked with Puzyna, it was the theatre's scorn for drama as literature. In no uncertain terms he rejected the theatre which favored either a collective creation or the arrogated authoritarianism of the director and the designer at the expense of the playwright. As he told Puzyna, White Marriage was conceived out of the desire to have the authority unconditionally surrendered to the dramatist. He wanted to write a play resistant to manipulations by theatre artists. White Marriage, he contended, is such a work. It can do very well without directors and designers: ‘I feel like “playing it out” in a notebook and reading it to my friends … [in] my “one-man's theatre” at home.’²⁷

If Różewicz's authorial intentionality is so hard to pin down—shifting incessantly from interview to interview—it is because he insists on his right to self-contradictions:

I have left the door open so that I can experiment. I don't want to be held accountable for my theories. Otherwise someone will grab me by the lapels and say: You said this and that and you better stick with it.²⁸

On epistemological grounds, then, it is necessary to deny that authorially determined meaning can be reliably ascertained at all. Even if an author were to follow through his or her intentions, a text inescapably exceeds the limits of what its author set out to assert. Indeed, the author's intention is a condition whose fulfillment neither the author nor the audience can know with certainty and one which cannot control the play of meaning.

Whatever Różewicz may have consciously undertaken to say in White Marriage, it is ultimately the play's language that speaks to us in ways often unbeknown to the author. We must therefore confront the play on its own terms. It is a procedure that both Blair and Kuharski seem to have adopted. But since their authority is the English translation, they are compelled to carry their argument at a considerable sacrifice of the Polish original's linguistic richness and complexity. Further, Blair and Kuharski regard White Marriage as a human document, that is, as a representation of characters who think, feel, and act in a way that is enough like ours to engage us in their experience. In their approach to White Marriage as a human document and a feminist critique of patriarchy as well, language is taken as a more or less transparent device conveying meaning. But, to quote the Hero of Różewicz's The Card Index, ‘It's a lot worse with words than we think.’²⁹ Apart from the fact that language is never fully transparent to meaning, the imagined world of White Marriage is generated by literature and thus foregrounds the linguistic medium itself. This aspect of the play—its play of language—is often overlooked or insufficiently stressed.

The outpouring of quotations, allusions, and pastiches in White Marriage is not merely a literary stylization to convey the intellectual ambience of the Polish fin de siècle when the action takes place. The play's main rhetorical strategy is, in fact, that of decontextualizing rather than setting up a context, of a de-montage rather than a montage.³⁰ The spoken lines constantly oscillate between the language of everyday conversations and the language of borrowed or parodied fragments. When the fragments are lifted out of their context and placed in a new linguistic milieu, they merge but do not meld. This is underscored by the fact that the extraneous materials are usually either read aloud or recited rather than delivered in the style of casual conversation. The most immediate result of such a rhetorical strategy is an unsettling sense of incongruity. The recognizable details of life compete with the power of the language that draws attention to itself.

Moreover, when the action is repeatedly interrupted to allow a reading or recitation, we begin to distance ourselves from the reality on stage. And since the lines in an inherited fragment compel a character to assume a different expressive identity, the play's textual workings deny the characters any stability or psychological continuity. After the work of expressionist dramatists, it is, of course, no longer safe to assume that a play is going to present characters, each of whom has a total unity. On the contrary, one of the major achievements of modern drama has been to put that notion of selfhood in question, to present it as an aggregation of conflicting selves. This is in fact one of the unspoken premises in Kuharski's article. But White Marriage goes even further. The identities of the characters become functions of language rather than a pre-existent given which uses language. It is not that there is no such thing as identity, but that it is a changing set of linguistic conventions.

In White Marriage, then, we have a dramatic text whose perfidious play of language inescapably undoes the ostensible meaning which, in Blair's and Kuharski's interpretation, has to do with a fully rationalizable conflict between individual self-assertion and society's crudely reductive, biological view of sexual difference. To discover signs of the strain and self-division in the text, let us look at the characters of Beniamin and Bianka, who are central to Blair's and Kuharski's feminist reading of the play.

Of all the characters, Beniamin is the one who rarely speaks in his own voice, and before he says any text of his own at all, before he has a chance to establish his identity, he gives a poetry recital at a soirée. He appears in six of the play's thirteen scenes; in one of them, he asks a short question, and in the remaining five he usually recites poems. His quotations occupy a rhetorically significant position: they either open a scene and prompt a response (in scene 4),³¹ or they counter a preceding text as a scene draws to a close (scenes 7, 9, and 11). In scene 12—the crucial scene of the wedding feast and the wedding night—Beniamin's own text is minimal; the linguistic centerpiece of the scene is his exchange with Bianka of excerpts from Żmichowkska's The Heathen Woman. Once we see the character of Beniamin as generated by literary quotations, then his identity becomes precarious rather than fixed and unified, and his spoken lines can hardly be taken as a reliable source of determinate meaning.

Bianka, even more than Beniamin, emerges as a literary construct. Indeed, she describes herself, in scene 9, in the words of Żmichowska's letter to her brother Erazm,³² and in scene 13 she assumes the identity of Maria Komornicka. Her own spoken lines are more extensive than Beniamin's, but so are her inherited fragments. As soon as the play opens, we see her read a book. The fact that it is a textbook of zoology, rather than a poem by Wincenty Korab Brzozowski, is a welcome, if unexpected, change from the point of view of Paulina, Bianka's vivaciously practical friend.³³ Bianka's identification with the precious turn-of-the-century writing, such as Brzozowski's, is confirmed in scene 2. She is present in this scene through her diary that is read aloud by her parents; the diary fragments are excerpts from Komornicka's ‘Black Flames’. In scene 8, after Beniamin has proposed marriage to her, Bianka reads from the journal herself:

I shall dwell with thee at the bottom of a lake in a golden temple like a bell, which thou wilt toll with thy strong arms like boughs … and the still heart will stir … The heart of the bell, thine heart, to hold it in my hand like a frightened little bird … The heart pounds and bursts with happiness … with my claws I shall toll thy silent bell … Oh, the bellringer of my temple! Toll the silent bell of my body with thy bronze heart, follow me to the top of Mont Blanc, wrap me with the flame of thy desire …³⁴

The passage throbs with the most embarrassingly jejune emotionalism. It invites a smile at the reiterated ‘bell’ and ‘heart’. It may even provoke a growl: heart me no such heartness. It cannot, however, be taken seriously; it is, indeed, a parody of Komornicka's overembellished poetic prose.

In scene 12, on their wedding night, Bianka declares to Beniamin:

Have you seen a woman who is beautiful, strong in her passion, holy in her soul? Her forehead glows with the power of thought which could determine the fate of Athens. Her lips burn with desire, her gaze with irresistible seduction … Have you dreamt of her? If her eyes are downcast, 'tis only because a flame of hope or of memories is too bright and must be concealed; her blush is her blood, 'tis her life which springs forth for it cannot be contained in her body … and her love … believe me, brother, such women there are … if you meet her, you might succumb to the desire to die in her embrace, to be no more …³⁵

The lines are from Żmichowska's novel; removed from their context, they strike us as extraordinarily muddled and pretentious. In the same scene farther away, Bianka turns to the imagery and the diction that filled the pages of the turn-of-the-century Chimera:

My legs have grown together … from my feet up to my navel I am covered with cold fish scales … Ben … your beloved has a fish tail instead of legs … you know? I am a siren … you've married a siren … a chimera. Look! I have a lioness's head, a goat's body, and the tail of a snake …³⁶

Bianka ends scene 12 with another excerpt from The Heathen Woman. It is in plain idiom which may be more appealing to contemporary audiences, but it nonetheless points up the stylistic instability of Bianka's language.

Throughout the play, Bianka seems in opposition to the phallocentric world that surrounds her. However, different linguistic effects in her spoken lines are at times concordant with, but most often directly subversive of, the manifest content of the play. The seemingly peripheral quotations and pastiches work to deny Bianka a psychological identity and hence credibility as a character. Locked in textual combat with Bianka's own lines, the inherited fragments rarely fail to embarrass the apparent logic of her rebellion. In no other scene is this more evident than in the penultimate scene 12. The events of this scene are, of course, the turning point of the play: Bianka refuses to consummate her marriage to Beniamin. Yet there is an insoluble antagonism between action and word. Bianka's and Beniamin's recitations provoke laughter but not without a sense of discomfort as if our laughter were inappropriate, perhaps even irresponsible. This sense of discomfort is hardly relieved by scene 13 which, unless we are familiar with Komornicka's biography, catches us unawares. The humor of the ridiculous excerpts does not eliminate an awkward sublimity in scene 12, but it does little to prepare us for the rueful pathos of the play's closing scene.

Różewicz's use of inherited material is not limited to White Marriage. In the earlier plays, such as The Card Index and The Laocoon Group, it was his way of recovering and re-examining the past, of evaluating its inherent cultural value through new context. But the pervasiveness of quoted and paraphrased fragments in White Marriage (as well as Departure of a Hunger Artist and The Trap, written immediately afterwards³⁷) suggests a more radical strategy. According to Różewicz, he used the many references in White Marriage as a scaffolding to assure a cohesive structure. At stake for him was a closed dramatic form, as opposed to the looser, more open forms of his plays such as The Card Index:

I would like … to make sure I am contained in time and space, that I won't disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces but that I will begin to coalesce again … My complete surrender to the open dramaturgy had become a threat in the sense that dramatic elements might continue to disperse and thus leave an empty center. I was aware of that, and so I tried to pull these elements back to the center … to contain them within a framework [of quotations and references], to compress them … until they release a new energy.³⁸

As we have seen, however, the inclusion of the borrowed material in the spoken lines undermines the very thing Różewicz said he was trying to accomplish: a stable form. It is not only that White Marriage, wavering between different linguistic registers, stubbornly refuses to yield an exact meaning. By outrageous peculiarities of language, the play also betrays an internal struggle for an appropriate language. In White Marriage, there is a very precise identifiable movement back and forth among many stylistic possibilities none of which, however, is decisive. The rhetorical practices within the play break the text down into contradictory elements, put in question and at times suspend an ostensibly determinate meaning, and prevent the text from being read as a unified whole, as an organic unity. It would not be too much to say that these discordant dynamics of the text are a source of the palpably disturbing effect the play has on us.

Most of the inherited material in White Marriage comes from the Polish modernist movement, known as the Young Poland. It was notorious for its linguistic license and stylistic liberties, which for many decades made the style of the Young Poland writers ‘a synonym for bad taste’.³⁹ When White Marriage recreates this linguistic chaos, it literally makes the most of it. The world we see on stage is a world structured of fragmented visions as well as verbal fragments which clash with one another. It is a world denied a center, deprived of a single linguistic authority.

We might be tempted to conclude that the play seems to touch on feminist aesthetics precisely in its defiance of the unifying power and rigid discipline of logical reason, which, we are told, has been the domain of male power par excellence. Such a conclusion, however, would be based on a belief that each of the sexes has its own, essential attributes—a belief, in other words, that re-enforces the old stereotypes about gender difference. The trouble is, moreover, that while White Marriage may indeed not be reducible to a single interpretation, it is not reducible to interpretations taken out of context of the play's linguistic system.

Notes

1. The play was written between May and October 1973. It was first published in 1974, and had its world première in 1975 in Warsaw.

2. See Rhonda Blair, ‘A White Marriage: Różewicz's Feminist Drama’, Slavic and East European Arts, 3 (Winter/Spring 1985), 13–21; and Allen Kuharski, ‘White Marriage and the Transcendence of Gender’ in James Redmond (ed.), Themes in Drama, vol. 11: Women in Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 129–38. In Poland, where feminist theory has not yet arrived, critics are generally satisfied to carve the play up into the oppositions of body/soul, culture/nature, social contract/bestial instinct, high/low, mature/juvenile. See especially Marta Fik, ‘Mariage blanc’, The Theatre in Poland, 17 (September 1975), 13–14; Tadeusz Burzyński, ‘Białe małżeństwo po raz drugi’, Kultura (Warsaw), 13 (12 October 1975), 13; Marek Jodłowski, ‘Między Operetķͣ a Rzeźni̧ͣ’, Odra, 15 (September 1975), 77–81, and ‘“He, he” Różewicza’, Odra, 15 (December 1975), 107–8; Barbara Osterloff, ‘Białe małżeństwo inaczej’, Teatr, 30 (1–15 December 1975), 11–12; Józef Kelera, ‘Od Kartoteki do Pułapki’, [introduction to] Tadeusz Różewicz, Teatr, vol. 1 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1988), pp. 51–7. Marta Piwińska has cautiously discussed White Marriage as ‘a historical drama’ about ‘a vague [niejasna] revolt of artists, women, and children surrounded by swinishness’ (see ‘Cukiernia ciast truj̧ͣcych’, Dialog, 19 [March 1974], 92). No less cautiously, Tadeusz Drewnowski has described it as ‘a play about the emancipation of a woman’ (see ‘Poeta zostaje sam …’, Polityka, 30 [25 October 1986], 9; emphasis added). And Irena Bołtuć has, with irresistible logic, applauded the play as ‘a defense of women, which is concerned not with the superficial and deceptive equality of professional and social status, but with partnership in life, including its most intimate aspect, sex’ (see ‘Z czym na festiwal wrocławski?’, Teatr, 30 [16–31 March 1975], 4).

3. Blair, ‘A White Marriage: Różewicz's Feminist Drama’, p. 20.

4. Ibid., p. 13. Blair's idea that Bianka is a tragic hero anticipates Kelera's conclusion in ‘Od Kartoteki do Pułapki’, p. 56. His essay originally appeared in Dialog (April-May 1985).

5. Kuharski, ‘White Marriage and the Transcendence of Gender’, p. 136. He finds the ending tragic only to the extent that Bianka and Beniamin are compelled to reject physical sexuality. In Kuharski's interpretation, Beniamin appears a willing participant in Bianka's ‘feminist revolution’, despite that her declaration in the last scene catches Beniamin unawares. Dressed in his Sunday best, he stands speechless. Różewicz, a master of open-ended dramatic forms, would not have it otherwise. Worth noting is a significant change from the conclusion of the first edition of White Marriage, in which Bianka extended her arms to Beniamin in a gesture of welcoming (see Białe małżeństwo, Dialog, 19 [February 1974], 33). In all the subsequent editions, this gesture is absent, and thus Bianka appears cautious toward Beniamin.

6. Both Blair and Kuharski have conceded that White Marriage consists not of scenes, but of tableaux, the term adopted in the English translation (see Tadeusz Różewicz, Marriage Blanc and The Hunger Artist Departs, trans. Adam Czerniawski [London: Marion Boyars, 1983], pp. 5–69). The Polish text uses the term ‘obraz’; when applied to drama, it simply means a brief act or a scene, without the visual connotations suggested by ‘tableau’.

7. Blair, ‘A White Marriage: Różewicz's Feminist Drama’, p. 20.

8. Kuharski, ‘White Marriage and the Transcendence of Gender’, p. 137.

9. Ibid., pp. 135, 136.

10. Among Różewicz's sources was Felicjan Faleński's unfinished play, The Dances of Death (Tance śmierci, c. 1860–c. 1885), which, in the character of Princess Febronia, ridicules emancipated women as unkempt and neurotic spinsters (see Archiwum Literackie, vol. 8 [Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, 1964], pp. 115–293). A biography of Maria Komornicka, another source for the play, is in the same volume of Archiwum Literackie.

11. Jerzy Paszek has identified the following verbal fragments in White Marriage: a poem by Wincenty Korab Brzozowski in scenes 1 and 8; Maria Komornicka's poetic prose, ‘Black Flames’ (‘Czarne plomienie’, 1901), in scene 2; a poem by Komornicka in scene 3; poems by Stanislaw Korab Brzozowski and Jan Lemański in scene 4; a poem by Tadeusz Miciński in scene 7; Juliusz Slowacki's drama, Balladyna (1839), and Różewicz's pastiche of ‘Black Flames’ in scene 8; Narcyza Żmichowska's letter to her brother and her novel, The Heathen Woman (Poganka, 1846), in scene 9; Lives of the Saints (Żywoty Świetych, 1579) by Piotr Skarga, Różewicz's pastiche of hagiographical poetry, and a poem by Stanislaw Wyrzykowski in scene 11; The Heathen Woman in scene 12; and the diction of the leading Polish modernist journal, Chimera (1901–1907), scattered throughout the play. (See J. Paszek, ‘Aluzja literacka w dramacie [Biale malżeństwo Różewicza]’, in Sztuka aluzji literackiej: Zeromski, Berent, Joyce [Katowice: Uniwersytet Śļͣski, 1984], pp. 146–55.) It is worth adding that a folk song in scene 4 appears in a similar context in ‘Little Frog’ (‘Żabusia’, 1889), a short story by Gabriela Zapolska whose works were a major source of inspiration for the play.

12. Kuharski, ‘White Marriage and the Transcendence of Gender’, p. 130.

13. The text of White Marriage does not bear out Kuharski's claim that ‘Bianca's initial narcissism and excessive aestheticism can be seen as an allusion to the early life of [Zofia] Nalkowska’ (‘White Marriage and the Transcendence of Gender’, p. 132).

14. Stanislaw Barańczak, [an untitled review of the special issue of Slavic and East European Arts which carried Blair's article], Slavic and East European Journal, 30 (Summer 1986), 298.

15. See, for example, the scene between the protagonist of Departure of a Hunger Artist and the Young Woman. She interviews the Hunger Artist using the formal and respectful pan, but he addresses her with the familiar ty. He thus underscores his own position as master while relegating the woman to a position of inferiority.

16. Irène Sadowska-Guillon, ‘Tadeusz Różewicz: le théâtre de la mythologie a venir’ [an interview with Tadeusz Różewicz], Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle, 61 (April 1983), 164.

17. Józef Kelera, ‘Na temat i nie na temat’ [an interview with Tadeusz Różewicz recorded early in April 1976], Odra, 16 (June 1976), 65.

18. Ibid., pp. 67, 66.

19. Ibid., p. 66.

20. Ibid., p. 66.

21. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have pointed out, ‘In patriarchal western culture … the text's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis’ (see The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], p. 6).

22. Kelera, ‘Na temat i nie na temat’, p. 66.

23. Ibid., p. 66.

24. Kazimierz Braun and Tadeusz Różewicz, Jezyki teatru (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośļͣskie, 1989), p. 40.

25. For a biography of Komornicka, including a description of the clothes- burning episode in July 1907, see reminiscences by her sister and brother: Aniela Komornicka, ‘Maria Komornicka w swych listach i mojej pamieci’, and Jan Komornicki, ‘List brata’ in Archiwum Literackie, pp. 294–341, 350–3. According to Jan Komornicki, Maria Komornicka looked upon women as ‘inferior creatures’ (p. 352).

26. See Tadeusz Różewicz, Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorskiego (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1977), p. 81. He later replaced Madness with Black Flames, borrowing the new title from Komornicka's ‘Black Flames’, which is quoted in scene 2 and parodied in scene 8. According to Paszek, White Marriage is a negative of ‘Black Flames’ (see ‘Aluzja literacka w dramacie’, p. 154).

27. Konstanty Puzyna, ‘Koniec i pocz̧ͣtek’ [an interview with Tadeusz Różewicz recorded on 23 January 1974], Dialog, 19 (June 1974), 122.

28. Ibid., p. 122.

29. Teatr, vol. 1, p. 116.

30. For a different explanation of the role of the quotations and allusions, see Paszek, ‘Aluzja literacka w dramacie’. According to Paszek, they serve as cultural ornamentation to evoke the atmosphere at the turn-of-the- century, as a source of humor, and as a means of characterization.

31. In scene 4, Father recognizes that Beniamin, by leaving out the last two words (‘O, death’), has turned Stanislaw Korab Brzozowski's poem into an erotic verse. He picks up Beniamin's verbal game and responds with Lemański's carpe diem poem ‘Novena xxv’, to which he has added a final couplet.

32. See Teatr, vol. 2, p. 154.

33. Ibid., p. 109. In scene 8, Paulina once again identifies Bianka with the same poem, ‘Affinité d'ombres et de fleurs en le soir’ (1899) by Wincenty Korab Brzozowski (see p. 150). Incidentally, there is no evidence in the text to support Blair's and Kuharski's claims that Paulina is Bianka's sister or half-sister. By the premises of the play, her identity must remain an enigma.

34. Ibid., p. 150.

35. Ibid., p. 168.

36. Ibid., p. 169.

37. These two plays, written between 1975 and 1982, are based on Franz Kafka's fiction, diaries, and correspondence.

38. Puzyna, ‘Koniec i pocz̧ͣtek’, pp. 120, 123.

39. Czesław Milosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 329.