What is Kraszewski’s Mermaid Silent about?

Abstract

The article is dedicated to a novel by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, originally published under the title Syrena [The Mermaid] in the Warsaw paper Gazeta Codzienna [The Everyday Daily] in 1859, then as a book under the title Piękna pani [The Beautiful Lady] in Lviv in 1871. The novel was appraised negatively by literary critics, mainly due to the role played in it by a strong demonic female figure threatening the male world, which for the reviewers was difficult to accept. Taking into account the contexts of Kraszewski’s other novels (e.g. the novel Orbeka, 1867) which presented the image of the femme fatale and feminocentric mythological themes, the article proposes a reading of this work as an open, ambiguous, controversial text, and thus one creatively recorded in the history of the 19^th-century literature and criticism. The mermaid’s silence mentioned in the title becomes a metaphor for what is not said directly in the novel and what is connected to the experience of femininity – an experience that is disturbing, difficult, painful – the metaphor also translating into the Polish collective experience.