Forms of Masculinity

Adam Dziadek

Following Forms of Masculinity 1, this collection of essays explores “Polish masculinities” from multiple perspectives. What does this term actually mean? First and foremost, it emphasizes the absence of one unique or dominant form of Polish masculinity. Many Polish masculinities exist, and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they transformed in significant and varied ways. Research and numerous works published as part of the project Męskość w literaturze i kulturze polskiej od XIX wieku do współczesności (Masculinity in Polish Literature and Culture from the Nineteenth Century to the Present) clearly demonstrate this fact. But the wide diversity of masculinities marks every national culture, not only that of Poland. Studies worldwide have attempted to define masculinity, often resulting in encyclopedic publications. Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia1 can serve as an example. As its editor Michael Kimmel writes in the introduction, the eponymous term “masculinities” highlights the absence of a single masculinity which we could associate with a specific physical being. Instead, the term refers to a set of various ideological attitudes that shape these physical beings: “masculinity is elaborated and experienced by different groups of men in different ways.”2 A similar conviction guides the editors and authors of American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia. This work defines many diverse models of American masculinities, including those related to ethnic or national origin, for example African-American manhood, Asian-American manhood, Irish-American manhood, Italian-American manhood, Latino manhood, or Native American manhood. Other entries concern class affiliation, such as middle-class manhood or working-class manhood, and American political traditions and beliefs, like democratic manhood. In turn, passionate manhood—typical of the middle class—relates to primitive masculinities, military virtues, and competition in both sports and business.3

The International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities4 arranges its entries somewhat differently, yet it still reveals a vast range of masculinities, depending on the assumed scholarly approaches. The editors intentionally designed the entries’ structure to reflect the “multidisciplinarity” of viewpoints in the humanities and social sciences. They also expanded the research scope with fields such as popular culture, feminist studies, women’s studies, and gender studies. As a result, the encyclopedia includes entries on gay masculinities, female masculinity, military masculinities, marginalized masculinity, and East European masculinities, which we find particularly interesting. This last entry comes from Michaela Mudure, a Romanian scholar specializing in English literature. Unfortunately, its text contains frustrating generalizations and simplifications of the historical and national phenomena that occurred in Eastern Europe over the past several centuries. According to this entry, Adam Mickiewicz, Józef Piłsudski, Lajos Kossuth, and Tomáš Masaryk belong to the same category labeled “representatives of new masculinities.” Moreover, as Mudure unambiguously states, the definition of masculinity that “supposes that man must desire and lead woman” prevails in this region even today.5 Naturally, this rather bizarre claim does not discredit the entire encyclopedia. However, it demonstrates the need for research on Polish masculinities and for efforts to share that research internationally where possible. Scholars must analyze and describe Polish masculinities—as well as Central or Eastern European masculinities, which prove similar in many aspects—to extract them from the realm of myth in which they function in the West. Of course, the easiest option entails situating these masculinities in the post-dependence system that encompasses the former Eastern Bloc and Russia. But such simple generalization ignores individual features of specific cultures and their entanglements with complex traditions, histories, and religions. From this viewpoint, the work of Serbian sociologist Marina Blagojević on Balkan masculinities—which she approaches from a very interesting “semiperipheral perspective”6—may prove useful for studying Polish masculinities as well. Still, one cannot transfer her methodological foundations passively.

Like the preceding volume Forms of Masculinity 1, the present book owes much to the thought of Michel Foucault and psychoanalysis. Grażyna Borkowska, a reviewer of this volume, rightly indicates that academic discourses still use these approaches “too modestly and too unilaterally.” Throughout the project, we relied on the basic conviction that our analyses would have an anti-metaphysical nature, which becomes visible in most essays in the first volume and manifests even more sharply and strongly in Forms of Masculinity 2. The essays in this volume draw substantially on diverse deconstructions rooted in the study of various discourses, including both journalistic writing and artistic texts. Gender theory, queer perspectives, and feminist literary criticism all play a crucial role in analyzing masculinity as a cultural category. Without these approaches, any examination of multiple Polish masculinities would prove incomplete.

The contributors to Forms of Masculinity 2 meticulously reconstruct transformations of Polish masculinities from the nineteenth century to the present. They seek to understand specificities that characterize these masculinities—their singularity, uniqueness, and originality. Their attempts at providing definitions aim to clarify the identity of contemporary men, grounding their efforts in necessary cultural, historical, and political contexts. Polish masculinities remain inextricably linked to the concept of valor. Historical dictionary definitions show that it significantly shaped Polish ideas of masculinity. Notably, the word męskość (masculinity) remains absent from Samuel Bogumił Linde’s dictionary, but Jan Karłowicz’s Słownik języka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language) already connects it directly to męstwo (valor). Krzysztof Kłosiński’s essay uses valor as its starting point. Departing from source texts, including those by Kajetan Koźmian and Maurycy Mochnacki, Kłosiński excellently reconstructs the “catastrophe” of Polish valor, beginning with the period of Stanisław August Poniatowski’s rule. He also traces the process of becoming manly, imagined as a break from eighteenth-century effeminacy. The titular pubertas immatura aptly captures the condition of Polish valor/masculinity—or even non-masculinity—at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, when one carefully reads the numerous quotations Kłosiński offers for reflection, it becomes clear how the “ghosts” or “specters” of old-time masculinity continue to leave their mark on masculinity today.

Krzysztof Kłosiński University of Silesia in Katowice

The keyword for this study is “valor.” In the volume on the history of virility in nineteenth-century France, editor Alain Corbin notes that the concept does not function as a synonym for masculinity understood in opposition to femininity: “ Many individuals display a certain lack of valor, although no one would dream of questioning their ‘masculinity’, a term that dictionaries of the time nearly forget and which therefore does not belong to common usage.”1

Samuel Bogumił Linde’s dictionary confirms this observation, as it lacks a separate entry for męskość (masculinity). Instead, this word appears as the final derivative under the entry męski, męzki (manly), explained as “valor, courage,” which refers the reader to the subsequent entry: męstwo, męztwo (valor) with two definitions: “courage” and “adult male age.”2 Thus, based on this lexicographic play, one might conclude that the ideal of valor or courage dominated masculinity in the early nineteenth century. This also affected the connotations of the root noun mąż (man/husband), initially defined as a “man, a human in serious speech.” The accompanying examples repeatedly emphasize attributes of valor: “A man does not cry unless he shuns valor” or “Him who has a big heart and is courageous we call a man,” followed by “honorable man,” and only lastly by “husband.”3

I will now refer to a longer passage from Corbin’s preliminary findings:

This perspective identifies valor with the crucial concept of power, with superiority, honor, and strength understood as virtue, as well as with self-control, a sense of sacrifice, and a readiness to die for one’s values. Valor thrives in exploration and territorial conquest, in colonization, in all acts that demonstrate dominion over nature, and in economic expansion. All of this generates power. … Valor does not constitute a simple individual merit; it provides order and rhythm to society by sustaining its values. Valor results in domination, in which the subjugation of women functions as only one component. Thus, valor gives structure to the representation of the world. For the individual of that era, valor does not denote a biological given but a set of moral virtues that one must acquire, maintain, and be able to prove.4

In Poland, scholars commonly associated the crisis of valor at the end of the eighteenth century with the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski. Bronisław Trentowski classifies the latter within the category of “eternal boys,”5 alongside Alcibiades and Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł. Other noblemen referred to Radziwiłł as “Panie Kochanku” (“My Beloved Sir”), after the phrase he used to address his interlocutors. Trentowski writes:

A good-natured boy, gently raised, internally senses his inability to exercise either religious or political authority. Seated on the throne, he carefully looks around for someone to obey. Anyone willing to control him can do so. And if the sword of Damocles hangs above his head, he trembles before the one who suspended it, becoming that person’s most disgraceful subject. Such was our Stanisław August.6

In his memoirs, Kajetan Koźmian recounts an unusual scene that somewhat allegorizes this condition of “subjection”—no longer before a master, but before the master’s servant. Ernest Gonteryn Goltz told Koźmian about a significant episode that contributed to his decision to resign from heading the king’s cabinet:

The king made a misstep in a dance figure. Repnin began correcting him, but with such mockery and such indecent familiarity that, as he manipulated the king without any respect, he winked and smiled at the women to signal how lightly he regarded him. Whether the king failed to notice the mockery or remained too absorbed in himself or the dance, he leapt at his master’s command and, with theatrical grace, extended his hands to the dancers’ chain.7

Goltz, whom the Czartoryski family designated to replace the “all-powerful” Heinrich von Brühl, embodies the king’s dependency in some sense. Submitting to protectors, the king “demanded to have him near and bind him to his person.” After all, Goltz appears as “a man of integrity, enlightened, capable, and familiar with diplomacy.” However, upon witnessing the scene, which concludes with the ambiguous metaphor of the king extending hands to the chain “with theatrical grace,” Goltz erupts in outrage against the “crowned fool”:

That sight provoked such indignation in me that I resolved never to serve this crowned fool for any treasure in the world.8

An excellent opportunity to reveal the crisis—or rather, the catastrophe—of valor during Stanisław August’s rule emerges in various characterizations of that era’s literature. The Romanticists, best represented by Maurycy Mochnacki, regard literature as “the nation’s conscience.”9 In their writing, we immediately encounter the familiar “fool.” Mochnacki ironically and dismissively labels the pseudo-classicists “belletrists.” He describes them as “fools and courtiers favoring cooking and womanly literature, who, when called to think and act, seek entertainment in shoddy dilettantism” and likens them to “a butterfly insect that flies from flower to flower sucking their sweetness” (p. 70). Unsurprisingly, instead of cultivating self-awareness—namely “recognizing oneself in one’s own being” (p. 66), a condition necessary for the nation’s survival10– the literary output of Stanisław August’s era led to the recognition of the self in another being: