Jagna as a potential character. About the Peasants by Dorota Kobiela Welchman and Hugh Welchman

Abstract

The article concerns the 2023 adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s Chłopi. The text presents the consequences of the truncation of the problematic character of Jagna, a peasant heroine whose legal and human status in the rural hierarchy was completely defined by the patriarchal system. Analysing the plot and form of the film, the author points to the simplification of the realities of rural community at the time, which squandered the opportunity to trigger a social amnesia of folk origins in the audience. The story contained in Reymont’s work has performative potential; it can be a kind of contemporary intervention. However, Jagna, as a film character, does not create a potential history (in the sense that Ariella Azolay assigned to the notion), but becomes a Polish icon of popfeminism, used as a deliberate marketing trick to influence the attractiveness of the film image and its sales. An appeal further reinforced by references to the paintings of Józef Chełmoński, which were paradoxically deprived of their emancipatory dimension.