THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish Literature by Ursula Phillips. MARIA KUNCEWICZOWA – Baby Striga: Childbirth and Motherhood as Experience not Myth
This month I am handing over the reins of The Polka to Ursula Phillips, a wonderful and very accomplished translator of Polish literature and a big advocate of Polish women writers, especially those a bit forgotten but definitely worth our attention. So, drum roll please! Here is the first guest post in The Polka series…
Anna Blasiak
When Maria Kuncewiczowa (1895-1989) published her short story “Covenant with a Child” (Przymierze z dzieckiem) almost one hundred years ago, the physiological, emotional and psychological experience of pregnancy, delivery, postpartum, breast feeding and early maternity described from a woman’s perspective was more or less taboo in Polish fiction. Only Gabriela Zapolska (1857-1921), in her early novel Kaśka the Caryatid (Kaśka Kariatyda, 1885-86), had portrayed so viscerally the female body. Regarded as Kuncewiczowa’s debut, the story provoked outrage amongst readers who regarded references to breastfeeding, for example, as pornographic, leading to a scission in the women’s journal Bluszcz (Ivy) in which it was originally serialized (1926).
At the same time, as in the nineteenth century when Poland did not exist as an independent state (1795-1918), literary culture had invested heavily in the topic of “motherhood” as an ideologically sanctioned ideal where the emphasis was on women’s societal and patriotic duties. The cult of the Polish Mother, urging women to bear sons to fight for the national cause, is regarded as having been inspired by Adam Mickiewicz’s poem “To a Polish Mother” (Do Matki Polki, 1831). Worked into conceptions of motherhood promulgated by the Catholic church, it foregrounded sacrifice and suffering, including the assumption that women should suffer in childbirth to atone for the disobedience of Eve. Kuncewiczowa’s story flies in the face of this, not because she was antipatriotic (there are no overt political references) or rejects motherhood per se, but because her version is unorthodox: she is concerned above all with individual choice (not all women want to have babies), with a woman’s need to maintain control over her own body (it’s a devastating shock when she discovers she can’t), with her reactions to her newborn child and with the ways in which relationship with it develops; she does not endorse suffering (viz. the description of the lonely forceps delivery with no pain relief). The work established Kuncewiczowa as a writer of psychological prose, interested in cognitive, emotional as well as unconscious processes.
Crucially for Kuncewiczowa, the traditional understanding of motherhood was compounded by the conviction that maternal feelings were “natural”; not to wish to be a mother was regarded as “unnatural”. An automatic bond was assumed between mother and child; knowledge of the latter’s needs was allegedly innate, inherited from generation to generation, not learned on the job. Teresa, the protagonist of Kuncewiczowa’s story, does not want to be pregnant, is totally unprepared for the violent hospital birth, is disgusted by the physical changes to her body (distortions to her figure, weight gain, heavy painful milk-laden breasts), and feels no immediate love towards the red-faced howling newborn, whom she nicknames a ‘striga’ (in Slavic folklore, a type of female vampire); not for several pages, until the child is at least six months and begins to be bonny and responsive, do we learn that it is a boy. Mutual understanding between mother and child is shown to be impossible initially because of the lack of a common language.
In her defence of the story, published in Bluszcz in response to the criticisms, Kuncewiczowa emphasises how Teresa does not shirk her responsibilities; on the contrary, she breastfeeds the child, spends her days hovering around its basket trying to interpret its needs from its cries, feels the striga’s call when in another room or away from home, and is instantly propelled back. Relationship, however, has to be constructed. Through Teresa’s experience, Kuncewiczowa demonstrates that motherhood is not instinctive, but a myth perpetuated by culture (religion, tradition, social pressure) and, through implication, by ideologically-driven imperatives and sexism (like the contention that women ought to suffer). Although shocking to many of her contemporaries, Kuncewiczowa was ahead of her time and has since been vindicated by science (see, for example, Chelsea Conaboy, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, 2023).
So, upon what does the covenant with the child depend? The relationship is eventually portrayed as a “gentlemen’s agreement of fair play” between two emancipated beings. As the boy becomes more communicative and his own personality flourishes, mother and son meet halfway: he is healthy, bubbly and self-contained, starts to explore inquiringly the world around him, learns to express himself, makes friends with other children, whilst she gradually returns to her previous social life as the effects of pregnancy on her body wear off; as he grows more independent and articulate, so she regains her autonomy. In the final scene with the toy bricks, when he declares he is always building a house for his mother, she has no hesitation in choosing between him and a predatory lover. Clearly, this is a middle-class, financially secure situation: the child has a nanny, who relieves Teresa of the constant hands-on care that less privileged mothers would have undertaken.
One wonders to what extent the story can be described as feminist, bearing in mind it was published over twenty years before Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Certainly, it exposes both social and cognitive processes affecting the ways in which standard behaviours, traditionally regarded as natural and inborn, are imposed on the female body and psyche. For this reader, however, the most shocking image is not that of the forceps delivery but of the young girl standing outside the locked door to a room in which she believes real life is taking place and passing her by. As she grows into womanhood, the door remains closed, and the knowledge contained in it inaccessible. When she eventually gets married, she suddenly comes to her senses in her comfortable new apartment: ostensibly she has everything she needs for material life, but realises that the mysterious door will never open, for this is as far as things go. How many of Kuncewiczowa’s contemporary readers, with no realistic future ahead of them other than marriage, identified with this, even as others were offended by her portrayal of physiological (natural!) processes?
In the next decade (1930s), novelists such as Irena Krzywicka and Zofia Nałkowska would address further questions surrounding motherhood, pregnancy and abortion (and in Nałkowska’s case, also menopause). It was not until the 1990s and 2000s, under the impact of western feminism, that childbirth, delivery and postpartum, would again be confronted by a number of female authors, including Izabela Filipiak, Manuela Gretkowska, Anna Nasiłowska and Olga Tokarczuk. Revelatory has been the recent novel Midwives (Akuszerki) by Sabina Jakubowska (2022) which introduces rarely explored experiences of birthing in the Polish village between 1885 and 1950. Zapolska and Kuncewiczowa, however, remain the pioneers.
By Ursula Phillips
Maria Kuncewiczowa, “Covenant with a Child” translated by Ursula Phillips has recently been published in The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories, edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Penguin Random House, 2025.
Ursula Phillips is an award-winning translator of Polish literature into English and a literary historian. She has been instrumental in introducing Polish women authors to Anglophone readers and researchers. Translated authors include Maria Wirtemberska, Narcyza Żmichowska, Zofia Nałkowska, Pola Gojawiczyńska, Maria Kuncewiczowa and Agnieszka Taborska. She is the translator of Jacek Dukaj’s 1000-page sci-fi-cum-alternative-history epic Ice, to be published in November 2025.
Read previous posts in The Polka series:
THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. The Chameleon that is DANIEL ODIJA
THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. MAŁGORZATA LEBDA has it all
THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. JOANNA BATOR and her bears
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