On several ways in which the motif of freedom, or lack thereof, is present in Paulina Wilkońska's novels

Abstract

The main subject of this article is the several ways in which the motif of freedom, or the lack of it, is made present in the novels of Paulina Wilkońska, a representative of the 19th-century popular literature. The issue is discussed in relation to three aspects. The first is related to the thematization of the desire for freedom and the experience of national bondage. The second issue concerns the limitations of subjectivity in the social space, with particular attention to the situation of young people, enslaved by prejudices and financial pressures. The third dimension of the analysis includes strategies of authorial freedom, expressed in the pleasure of writing and its self-therapeutic function, as well as selected treatments that sustain the bond with the reader. For it is the reader who is treated here as the implicit but extremely important protagonist of Wilkońska's fiction.