An Absolute January

The Real Me?

This week I participated in Paris Fashion Week. Much like that episode of Sex & the City when Carrie knew she wasn’t one of the actual models, I had a moment of deep reflection backstage when my friend who invited me to help rehearse the show’s pacing told me it was time to step aside for the real models to take their place. I wasn’t offended but it did make me think about our capacity to enter into the performance of society or “real life.” I wasn’t one of the “real models” I wouldn’t be there for the “real show” with the “real guests” who belong to the upper stratosphere of society. I wasn’t invited to attend, I was invited to help. But I observed anyway. I observed and I wondered about what it would take to climb that social ladder and participate in that real performance of high fashion and high culture. Not in the opportunist sense of taking immediate advantage of proximity, but to get there on my own merit, through consistent effort and arriving at a new station in life because I believed in the absolutism of said effort. Would anyone say I was undeserving? Would anyone say I was an imposter?

When I wasn’t cosplaying as a model this month, in my real life, I was consumed with one book and one character in particular. Thanks to Bolesław Prus’ The Doll (Lalka), I was able to explore this idea of climbing social ladders and whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be.

Our protagonist Stanisław Wokulski has a rather impressive rags to riches arc in that he starts off as a waiter, goes to war, marries a rich widow, and inherits her wealth that he then invests and multiplies. However, the stench of his humble beginnings can’t seem to come up off the middle-age bachelor who finds himself in love with the daughter of an aristocrat named Izabela. The aristocracy of Warsaw can’t forget who Wokulski really is, even though he’s proven himself to be a man of means, and so the story pulls you in on the tried and true intrigue of… will he get the girl? Will she be able to see and judge him by the purity of his heart now that he’s paid the price of entry?

I’ll admit, Izabela in the first half had me intrigued because she was giving “woman with her own mind” but I had to quickly check my expectations with the reminder that this was still written by a man. However, I wouldn’t reduce her character to the limitations of the male gaze as Prus is generous with details that make her a conundrum to understand.

“So, at the age of eighteen, Izabela knew how to tyrannise men with her coldness.”

Instead of anticipating some sort of Bechdel-adjacent character development, Izabela turns out to be merely symptomatic of a society consumed with class and status. A symptom that can be read as an object of desire or even a product of power, because after Wokulski buys up her family’s debt (way to raise the bar on romantic gestures btw), he learns of Izabela’s duplicitousness and must swallow the bitter pill that money, and furthermore love, may not save the day after all.

This was a tough read. Not in terms of story but in terms of the telling. It was very hard to follow and so I had to call in reinforcements by watching the 1968 film adaptation. I know, I know it’s technically cheating, but I couldn’t get a sense of this world, which was so foreign to me in more ways than one. Not only did I have to watch the film, but I had to reread passages multiple times to orient myself in the narrative for the main reason that I was approaching the tale with preconceived notions of what it was purporting to be about. I wanted it to be about Wokulski’s ascension into this society, his earning the affections of his heart’s desires, I wanted the romantic version in which the forward movement pays off because of his moral fortitude. Instead, the story moves nowhere, just circles around a truth that I feel but still can’t quite understand or intellectualize. Maybe because I don’t want to accept that it’s true, or maybe because it’s just too damn pessimistic to think that we can’t actually have or be all we can be. Forgive my parroting the US Army, but you get my drift.

All in all, reading The Doll felt like watching a troupe of Polish men dancing to a beat I couldn’t quite hear or follow but also couldn’t keep my eyes off of. Which is to say that it’s a story that I’ll revisit because as I have been describing it, I feel something that I can’t quite put my finger on.

If you’re interested in watching the film with the English subtitles, comment down below and I’ll share the link.

As always, thank you for reading and for being here. :)