Lipce’s villagers and Jagna

The relationship between Lipce’s villagers and Jagna is defined by a collective turn from accusation to punishment. What begins as accumulated grievance becomes a claim that the village must protect itself by expelling her; the ensuing violence exposes how communal authority can convert moral condemnation into degradation and physical harm.

Accumulated Resentment and the Call for Exclusion

The campaign gathers force not around a single newly established offense but around a store of old resentments. As the villagers’ anger breaks into a tumult, they bring forward envy, hostility, and grievances they say they have long harbored against Jagna. One accuser links her to Maciej’s death; another portrays her as a threat to the village’s sexual and religious order, alleging that she tried to draw Jasio into an affair. These claims are voiced as accusations, not independently verified explanations, but together they give the crowd a language for treating Jagna as the source of many different injuries.

The call to expel her takes shape as a collective remedy. The villagers urge one another to drive Jagna from Lipce and banish her to the woods, comparing her to a leper. Led by the organist’s wife, the shouting crowd goes to the Voyt’s home, where the Voyt’s wife is already distraught. When Jagna is brought up, she joins the accusation and blames her for her own shame and unhappiness. Her grief and the crowd’s sympathy for her initially provide a separate focus for their distress; once Jagna is named, that distress is redirected into the demand that she be cast out.

At the inn, the organist turns the proposed expulsion into an argument about the survival of the village. Speaking from a bench, he compares the community to a house whose supporting beams and walls are being taken away, and presents sexual wrongdoing as a danger that could bring ruin on everyone. He invokes divine punishment and argues that both wrongdoers and those who tolerate wrongdoing share guilt. In this account, Jagna becomes more than the accused individual: she is represented as the danger whose removal will supposedly defend Lipce. The sermon gives the crowd’s hostility a communal and religious justification, while making collective punishment appear to be a duty.

Antek’s Public Alignment with the Village

Antek’s silence at the inn is not calm agreement. He stands by the bar, pale and anguished, his jaw clenched; the crowd’s shouting makes him so sick that he drinks glass after glass and curses under his breath. At moments he wants to seize a bench and smash it across the faces of those condemning Jagna. Yet when Płoszka calls on him before everyone to speak, the room falls silent: the villagers expect him to object, and his response instead makes his position public. He says, “I live in the village, and I stand with the village! You want to cast her out, then cast her out; and if you want to stick her on an altar, then stick her on it! It’s all the same to me!” His words place communal membership above any defense of Jagna, even as his visible anguish and private rage reveal that this declaration is not simple indifference. The scene makes his choice a fracture between feeling and public allegiance: he refuses to oppose the village, and that refusal clears the way for its collective judgment to become action.

The Mob’s Assault and Expulsion

The crowd’s judgment becomes a physical invasion of Dominikowa’s home. Led by the organist’s wife and the Voyt’s wife, the villagers surge into the cottage, trampling Dominikowa when she tries to bar their way. Jędrzych rushes to defend her and is knocked down; Mateusz attempts to hold the crowd back with a bar, but is struck on the head and left unconscious beside the wall. The assault reaches Jagna in the storeroom, where she stands pressed against the wall, white with terror and making no sound. When the mob tears down the door, a mass of reaching hands seizes her and drags her into the yard.

The villagers bind Jagna and throw her onto a cart harnessed to two black cows and piled high with pig dung. The procession carries her through a storm of insults, laughter, and curses. It stops in front of the church, where Kozłowa calls for Jagna to be stripped and whipped in the vestibule; the proposed public punishment makes the church setting a further stage for the crowd’s degradation of her. By then Jagna’s clothes are in rags, and she lies on the dung as though unable to hear or feel, tears running down her bruised face.

At the woodland boundary, the villagers lift the cart boards and dump Jagna onto the ground with the dung. She falls on her back and does not move. The Voyt’s wife kicks her, threatens to set the dogs on her if she returns to the village, and throws a clod or stone at her in the name of the injury she claims Jagna caused her children. Others strike her for having shamed the village. The expulsion thus ends not with a formal sentence but with public bodily punishment and a threat of further violence: the community has carried its chosen scapegoat beyond its boundary and treated her exclusion as both moral correction and spectacle.

Narrative Significance

The episode’s governing contradiction is that the organist declares the whole village answerable for allowing wrongdoing to spread, yet the crowd resolves that shared guilt by concentrating punishment on Jagna alone. Its judgment gains force through repetition, public agreement, and sheer numbers rather than through any formal hearing shown in the episode. The sequence moves from accusation to sermon, from sermon to invasion, and finally to expulsion beyond Lipce’s boundary: each step turns a claim about communal order into a more immediate exercise of power over one person’s body. The crowd calls its violence a defense of the village, but the spectacle reveals the cost of that defense—Jagna is made to carry the community’s accumulated grievances outside its limits.