The Mad Woman and the Nun? Anusia by Maria Konopnicka as an Anthropological Allegory of Growing Up

Abstract

Introduction. In this article, the aim of the author is to analyze how Maria Konopnicka uses the motive of initiation in her early novella called Anusia, bearing a clear resemblance to the author’s past.

Methods. Drawing from sources which could be associated with psychiatry, anthropology or feminist critique, by among others Bruno Bettelheim, Mary Douglas, Mircea Eliade, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Nancy K. Miller or Krystyna Kłosińska, the author has created a background of perspectives which allow Konopnicka show the advantages of a suggestive, subtle and meaningful literary approach.

Results. In nineteenth century literature we often meet a special class of women living in the backstage of the house, where life throbs more intensively than in the parlor, so frequently portrayed as stiff and soulless, a parlor which in the story by Konopnicka is significantly never mentioned. Instead we are invited into a small wardrobe, Anusia’s kingdom and center of the children’s world. Here, undisturbed, freely and wildly, blossoms a kind of culture that is partly oral and partly written, and may be easily described as semi-folk. That places Konopnicka in a rich context which the author Illustrates using examples of fairytales, prayers, legends, ballads, and religious songs, traditionally connected with female audience, and the art of interpretation cherished by them. The other crucial question in the children’s lives is their sudden encounter with a despised outcast and scandalizer, a mad woman known by the entire town and notorious for having formerly been a city harlot. Anusia, a respectable, modest old maid, pities her and nurses her when she falls sick, thereby exposing her pupils to the mystery of erotism and death.

Conclusion. Konopnicka’s novella seems to be consciously shaped after Eliade’s scholarly work, where the initiation process is divided clearly into three parts: sacrum, death and sexuality.