Maciej Boryna and Jagna

Maciej Boryna and Jagna’s marriage is at once a personal union, a public village ceremony, and a consequential arrangement over land. The settlement of six morgen makes Jagna a prospective landholder and household mistress, but also provokes Antek Boryna’s resistance and contributes to the rupture within Maciej Boryna’s family. The marriage’s pageantry cannot conceal the harder terms beneath it: in Lipce, property secures a woman’s future even as it makes her position a source of conflict and scrutiny.

Land, marriage, and household power

The marriage takes shape within a village economy in which cash is scarce and household decisions are pressured by the seasons. As the fair on St Kordula’s Day approaches, families debate what to sell and what they must buy before winter; taxes, commune contributions, debts, and servants’ wages fall due together. Even households with fifteen morgen must consider selling a horse or cow. Against this background, Maciej Boryna’s land settlement is more than a private gift: it links marriage to the distribution of a family’s most important resource.

The arrangement unsettles Antek Boryna, who has already seen land signed over to Jagna. Advice offered to him is tactical rather than consoling: Maciej Boryna can still withdraw the settlement while he lives, so openly angering him may only worsen Antek’s position. The proposed course is to let the marriage proceed and seek a promise, witnessed by others, concerning the remaining land. The advice makes plain how family relations are conducted through property claims and negotiation, while also showing the limits of a son’s authority over land still controlled by his father.

Dominikowa understands both the promise and the danger. She has wanted the match and believes that Maciej Boryna is a good man who thinks highly of Jagna, but she fears the consequences for Antek’s household and the resentment of the stepchildren. She also insists that land is what people in the village quarrel over, litigate for, and strive to possess. Her counsel to Jagna is therefore practical: treat the older husband gently, avoid renewed gossip, and remember that he might withdraw the land or keep his ready money. Jagna answers with impatience, revealing the distance between her mother’s material calculations and her own apparent indifference to them.

A wedding that makes the settlement visible

The wedding begins with a leave-taking from Dominikowa’s home. Maciej Boryna takes Jagna by the hand, and they kneel while her mother removes a holy picture, makes the sign of the cross over them, and blesses and sprinkles them with holy water. Jagna then falls at her mother’s feet in tears and asks forgiveness of the others. The women embrace her one after another; the farewells make the marriage not merely a change of status but a separation witnessed by family and neighbors.

At Maciej Boryna’s home, the threshold is marked with protective and blessed materials. Dominikowa carries bread, salt, coal, wax from a blessed candle, and ears of grain blessed at the Assumption. Women scatter loose threads and hemp hurds as Jagna enters, warding off the Evil One and wishing that all will go well. These rites place the new wife within the household through a combination of welcome, blessing, and protection. The marriage is publicly acknowledged as a transition into another home, where Jagna is expected to take up a new role.

The celebration gives that role a vivid form. As the walking dance winds through the room, couples circle like a field of ripe corn, and Jagna and Maciej Boryna lead the first pair. During the meal, however, Jagna can scarcely eat: hot and weary, she accepts only a sip of beer while her husband puts an arm around her and coaxes her. He promises that she will be mistress of the house and that he will hire a girl so she need not work too hard. His tenderness is joined to possession and material provision; the future he offers is defined by household authority, land, and relief from labor.

Jagna changes into her best ordinary clothes to receive the guests, but Dominikowa will not let her touch anything and urges her to enjoy herself while she can. Some guests mock this maternal tenderness. Others, including mothers of grown daughters and the young women themselves, respond with envy or unease: Jagna has entered a household with considerable land and property. The wedding thus makes her altered prospects visible to the village, turning private advantage into public comparison.

Conflict within the family

The settlement and marriage intensify the existing conflict between Maciej Boryna and Antek Boryna. When the family confronts Maciej Boryna, he has first been making his rounds of the farmstead, checking the horses, cows, barn, and pigs and scolding Kuba and Witek over their work. He returns to find the others waiting and calls the gathering a courtroom. The dispute soon becomes an open quarrel: father and son threaten one another, thump the table, and enumerate old injuries. Antek Boryna repeatedly grabs at his father’s arm or collar and is ready to strike; Maciej Boryna pushes him away but tries to avoid a full brawl in front of the neighbors.

The women and children are drawn into the confrontation. Amid the shouting and crying, Antek Boryna’s wife laments that the family has worked like servants and now faces destitution, while Maciej Boryna has signed over six morgen and given Jagna clothing and beads. Her outburst conveys the domestic cost of the settlement as she sees it: Jagna’s gain appears alongside the threatened loss of security for Antek Boryna’s household. The marriage therefore divides not only land but claims to past labor, inheritance, and recognition within the family.

Marriage, desire, and reputation

The wedding’s public celebration does not settle the emotional conflicts surrounding the marriage. At a later inn dance, Antek Boryna and Jagna dance for a long time, paying little heed to the watching villagers. Their physical closeness becomes the center of the scene: the crowd notices, whispers, and frowns, while the two appear absorbed in the dance. The episode places Jagna’s marriage beside her continuing attraction to Antek Boryna, making the union’s public legitimacy sharply different from the desire that persists outside it.

That relationship is not presented as uncomplicated escape or romance. When Jagna hesitates to meet Antek Boryna as he wishes, he reads her reluctance as betrayal and accuses her of being ready to abandon him along with everyone else. His anger turns her divided position into a test of loyalty, even as the village’s hostility makes their connection increasingly dangerous. Later, Jagustynka challenges the unequal judgment imposed on women: men may pursue affairs without comparable condemnation, while women bear blame for conduct shared by both. Her protest illuminates the social rules surrounding Jagna’s marriage and the unequal burden of reputation.

Meaning and consequences

Maciej Boryna’s marriage to Jagna gives her a recognized place in a substantial household, but that security is conditional on the land and authority he controls. Dominikowa’s warnings, Maciej Boryna’s promise that Jagna will be mistress, and the family’s dispute over six morgen all show how closely her marital position is tied to property. The wedding rites make her transition communal and sacred in form; the arguments over inheritance reveal its material stakes.

The marriage also becomes a pressure point in Lipce’s wider social life. Its consequences reach beyond the couple, shaping Antek Boryna’s estrangement from his father and the insecurity of his household, while the village’s gossip and moral judgments attach themselves to Jagna’s conduct. The contrast between Maciej Boryna’s assurances of protection and Jagna’s later exposure to suspicion makes the marriage’s promise unstable. It is a bond formed through land and ceremony, but one that cannot contain the conflicting desires, generational claims, and gendered judgments gathered around it.