Jagna’s abuse and entrapment in marriage

Jagna’s abuse and entrapment in marriage are defined by a reconciliation that restores her place in Boryna’s household without restoring affection or freedom. Boryna takes her back but treats her as a servant, while she has nowhere she can confidently go: her mother will not shelter her, and the wider world seems frightening and unknown. Her continued meetings with Antek arise amid this confinement, but the passion that once seemed to lift her has been changed by fear, resentment, and disillusionment.

Marriage After Reconciliation

Since the day Boryna made up with Jagna, he has changed in ways that surprise the household. Once hard but capable of yielding, he now seems immovable. He accepts her back without remonstration, yet treats her not as his rightful wife but as a servant. The apparent repair of the marriage therefore brings no return to intimacy or mutual regard: Jagna is again under his roof, but on terms that make her subordinate.

Boryna has regained his health, stands upright again, and retains his proud glance, but his authority has hardened into control. He takes matters into his own hands and will not relinquish them; he guards the storeroom and his money, personally distributes what the household needs, and insists that nothing be wasted. He is severe with everyone, but especially with Jagna, whom he drives to work and refuses to indulge. His recovered strength restores his command of the home while making its daily conditions more oppressive for her.

The treatment is not limited to coldness or labor. The couple quarrel continually, and Boryna uses a strap against Jagna, sometimes resorting to something harder. Jagna answers his harsh words with harsh words of her own, and his shouts provoke loud scenes that the whole village can hear. Within the cottage, each seems intent on getting the better of the other; neither willingly gives way. Her resistance makes the conflict visible, but it does not remove the imbalance that leaves her captive to her husband’s authority.

A Household With No Safe Refuge

Eating her husband’s bread, Jagna understands, means bending to his will. She gives in when compelled, not because the terms of the marriage have become acceptable. She tries to defend herself and to spite Boryna, but the yoke presses more heavily, and she sees no rescue from any side. The passage makes dependence material: the home supplies her place and sustenance, yet the same dependence binds her to the man who controls her work and punishes her defiance.

Dominikowa attempts to soothe the couple and make peace, but she cannot overcome their stubbornness or the injuries and resentment that have taken root between them. When Jagna wishes to return to her mother, Dominikowa refuses and threatens to send her back to her husband by force. Her mother is therefore neither a refuge nor a route out. The prospect of the wider world offers no clearer escape: it stands open, but appears so strange and frightening that Jagna imagines herself like a small bird caught beneath a pot. Her sense of confinement is thus both domestic and emotional; she cannot find a safe destination beyond the marriage, nor a way to make life inside it bearable.

Jagna knows that other women endure unhappy marriages, denying themselves pleasure and lovers, quarrelling with their husbands and then going to bed reconciled. She cannot make herself live that way. Her days of conflict leave her frightened, aggrieved, and embittered; at times she cries through the night until her pillow is wet, and at other times feels ready to run away anywhere. Yet the open world frightens her almost as much as the cottage. The contrast between an apparent freedom to leave and her inability to imagine where she could go gives the state its central tension.

Antek: Attachment, Fear, and Disillusionment

Jagna continues to cling to Antek, but the reason and character of that attachment have changed. After the terrible night when she fled to her mother’s, something in her seemed to snap and dim. She no longer hurries to his summons with the joy and eagerness she once felt. Instead, she goes because life at home is dull and tedious, because she wants to spite Boryna, and because she imagines that their former great love might return. The meetings persist, but they no longer mean the same thing to her.

Resentment grows alongside this attachment. Jagna connects her present woes and hard life with Antek, and privately suffers the more painful realization that he is not the man she had fallen in love with. The contrast between the remembered lover and the man she now encounters is severe: once his affection seemed to lift her and set him apart from everyone else; now his gloom, suffering, and ferocity make him seem like other men, or worse. The bond that once appeared to offer an escape from ordinary cruelty has become another source of fear.

That fear is reinforced by the village’s judgment. The priest of Lipce has singled Antek out at church, and the villagers shun and point him out as especially wicked. Jagna imagines mortal sin surrounding him, and his voice can frighten her almost to fainting; she associates him with the devil and with the eternal torments invoked by the priest. The relationship is thus pressed between private desire and public religious condemnation, while the village’s rejection of Antek intensifies Jagna’s dread rather than restoring confidence in their love.

Jagna does not understand herself as sharing Antek’s guilt. When she reflects on the change between them, she focuses on how he has changed and feels, without fully comprehending it, that her own feelings are diminishing. At times she stiffens in his arms as if struck by lightning. She nevertheless lets herself be taken, overwhelmed by what she experiences as his ferocity and by the difficulty of resisting him. Her response is divided: she fears him, feels less for him, and still yields with physical passion. The narrative distinguishes that bodily surrender from the spiritual abandon she once associated with their love.

Confinement in Daily Life

Jagna’s desire and resistance are shown within ordinary work rather than apart from it. In the yard she drains water from the potato pit, works reluctantly and only in obedience, and watches to see where Boryna is. While Pietrek works zealously, sending clods and mud through the air, she does only enough to appear occupied. The scene makes her constrained agency concrete: she cannot simply refuse the task, but she manages a small evasion by watching for the moment when Boryna goes into the house.

Once he is inside, Jagna pulls her apron over her head and carefully climbs over the stile by the Płoszka family barn. The gesture follows the chapter’s account of her trapped marriage and her changed attachment to Antek; it turns that interior conflict into an immediate act of movement away from the watched yard. It does not resolve her dependence or offer a secure escape. Instead, it leaves her poised between the oppressive household she is trying to evade and the relationship to which fear, habit, and disillusionment have bound her. Her marriage is therefore not simply a loveless union: it is a condition of economic dependence, physical abuse, social scrutiny, and narrowing choices, with resistance surviving in quarrels, private grief, and brief departures.