When marriage was the only plan
There is something disconcerting about watching a 19th-century woman dream of a career rather than a husband. Not because the idea is particularly radical today, but because The Doll keeps reminding us how radical it once was — and how little some of the underlying circumstances have changed.
Netflix’s Polish adaptation of Bolesław Prus’s classic novel has arrived with all the ingredients of a prestige period drama: magnificent costumes, sumptuous interiors, grand ballrooms, complicated romances, social hierarchies and enough money visibly spent on every frame to make 1878 Warsaw look like a place one might actually want to visit on a time-machine trip.
But The Doll, directed by Paweł Maślona, is not really interested in offering us a comfortable historical getaway. Beneath all that velvet, crystal, Victorian showpieces with figurines and roses, and beautifully restored architecture is a rather less decorative story about money, marriage, class and what happens to women who want a life that does not fit neatly into the role assigned to them. That may also explain why the series has proved so contentious in Poland.
Prus’s novel, originally published in the 1880s, is not simply another period classic there. It is required school reading and part of the country’s literary and cultural identity. Netflix’s decision to give it a distinctly contemporary treatment therefore amounted to more than an adaptation. And when that happened, it sparked a conversation across polish society about who owns a classic — the author, the teachers who have taught it, generations of readers, or the filmmakers attempting to make it speak to a new audience.
Maślona certainly does not approach the text reverentially. The characters speak contemporary language, including profanity that would have been unthinkable in a traditional screen version. Some of the liberties are even more startling. Stanisław Wokulski and Rzecki are shown snorting cocaine, among other departures from the familiar literary world. Netflix’s social-media campaign was equally determined to drag Prus into the present, describing relationships in the language of the internet, with references to such things as “daddy issues” and “toy boy!”
For admirers of the novel, this was not modernisation but sacrilege. For others, it was precisely the point: a classic survives by being reinterpreted rather than embalmed. The debate continues.
The result is a series that has clearly touched a nerve. It reportedly entered the top ten most-watched lists in 41 countries, while in Poland the arguments around it became sufficiently heated for Prime Minister Donald Tusk to appeal publicly for calm. Yet the most interesting modernisation is not the profanity, the cocaine or the marketing.
It is Izabela Łęcka, the lead character. Played by Sandra Drzymalska (a highly acclaimed Polish actress known for her prominent roles in international cinema) with an almost unnerving restraint, Izabela is beautiful, aristocratic and accustomed to privilege. But she is also considerably more purposeful than the decorative society woman one might expect from the setting. She does not particularly want a husband. She wants a life.
She dreams of travelling to Paris and writing about what she sees for a local, proto-feminist magazine. She watches women around her being dismissed and belittled and appears unwilling to accept that this should simply be their fate. She rejects suitors, sometimes quite mercilessly, and has little patience for the expectation that her future should consist of selecting the least objectionable man from a queue. There is a practical problem with all this. She is a woman. And, more importantly, she is a woman whose family finances are collapsing.
Her father, Tomasz Łęcki, has placed a considerable amount of money in a mysterious business venture while already carrying substantial debt. When the arrangement fails, the consequences are not merely financial. Izabela's carefully imagined future begins to disappear with it. And suddenly the question becomes much larger than whether a young aristocrat should marry.
What happens to a woman when the society she belongs to has given her no other viable way of surviving? This is where The Doll unexpectedly brought to mind My Brilliant Career, based on a 1901 semi-autobiographical novel heavily inspired by the real life and mindset of Miles Franklin, its teenage author. The two stories belong to very different countries, periods and social worlds, yet both give us young women who look at marriage and think: surely there has to be something else.
There is something particularly revealing about seeing the same problem emerge in such different cultures. We often imagine the enforced marriage of women as a particularly South Asian or Eastern phenomenon, something that belongs to societies where daughters are still expected to be married off rather than encouraged to become economically independent. The Doll is a reminder that this was hardly a problem confined to our part of the world.
Women in the West were being channelled into marriage too, and not so very long ago. The difference between being born a son and being born a daughter could determine whether a child grew up with the expectation of supporting a family or with the expectation that somebody else would eventually support her.
That is one of the harsher truths beneath the beautiful surfaces of The Doll. Izabela may live in a grand mansion and wear exquisite clothes, but privilege does not automatically translate into independence. A woman can have education, intelligence, opinions and ambition and still find herself without the financial machinery to turn any of those things into a life. A son could be an heir. A daughter could be an expense. A son could be expected to earn. A daughter could be expected to marry. Unfortunately, if the marriage failed to materialise — or if she refused it — the family could be left wondering what exactly she was going to do with herself.
The cruelty of that arrangement becomes particularly stark when one thinks of the phrase “support the family”. We have traditionally imagined this as something sons do for parents while daughters are married into another household. But what happens when a daughter is perfectly capable of contributing? What happens when she can write, work, run a business, teach, create or earn — but the social order has decided that these are not respectable ambitions for her? That is the real anachronism The Doll exposes.
Not that women in 19th-century Warsaw spoke like people on Netflix today. That they were expected to live as though economic independence were an inappropriate ambition. Izabela is therefore more interesting than the argument over whether she is faithful to Prus's original characterisation.
Traditionally, she has been read as cold, superficial and self-absorbed: a beautiful aristocrat who looks down upon others. The series gives her considerably more interior life. This has pleased some modern critics and irritated others who believe the adaptation has distorted Prus's intentions.
What is undeniable is that Drzymalska makes Izabela difficult to ignore or forget. She does not play her as a cheerful feminist heroine transplanted from the 21st century. There is very little sweetness about her. Izabela is calculating, proud and often severe. She can be blunt to the point of cruelty. She does not soften herself to make her ambitions palatable. Her face is frequently unreadable, and when emotion finally breaks through, the effect is all the stronger.
Drzymalska's best work is done in these silences. A suppressed reaction, a flicker of vulnerability, the moment when composure gives way — these become more eloquent than dialogue. Sometimes, her incredibly beautiful smile says it all.
Around her, the series assembles an entire society struggling with its own contradictions.
The mini-series also offers romance, obsession, revenge, business intrigue and the divide between the aristocracy and those who serve it. The servants are not simply background furniture in the magnificent houses. Some are given lives and personalities of their own, allowing the series to move beyond the drawing rooms and remind us that those who kept those drawing rooms functioning were humans too.
Much of The Doll was filmed in Poland’s Lower Silesian Voivodeship in the southwest, with the production making use of numerous historic locations across the region to recreate the look and feel of Polish society in the 1870s. . Joanna Macha's sets were painstakingly constructed period interiors. The ballrooms and noble residences have scale without feeling like empty showcases. The production design is extraordinary, capturing both the opulence of the aristocracy and the grimy poverty of the lower classes, making the contrast between their worlds impossible to miss. Because, ultimately, the story is about people trapped by the systems that surround them.
One does feel at times that The Doll tries to tell too many stories at once
Six episodes are asked to accommodate business, class, feminism, romance, revenge, betrayal and social ambition. There is enough material here for a much longer series, and the show occasionally feels as though it is racing to complete an argument just when it has persuaded us to care about the characters. This is perhaps its strangest weakness: The Doll does not overstay its welcome. It leaves rather too soon.
It takes considerable time to establish its world and its people, only to end before we have fully settled into them. Some of the intrigue consequently feels compressed, while some of the relationships could have benefited from more breathing space. Yet the series is difficult to dismiss because of what it leaves behind. The uncomfortable recognition that the distance between Isabela’s world and ours is not always as great as the costumes suggest.
We may have changed enormously in many ways. Women today have vastly greater access to education, employment, property and financial independence in many parts of the world. But the old assumption that a woman's security is fundamentally tied to marriage has hardly vanished everywhere. In different forms and to different degrees, daughters can still be treated as future wives rather than potential earners; careers can still be regarded as secondary to family expectations; and financial dependence can still become a mechanism through which choices are quietly narrowed.
That is why the modernisation of The Doll may be less outrageous than some of its Polish critics fear. Not just the profanity, the social-media slang will date even faster. But a woman asking what she might do with her life when everyone around her has already decided what she should be doing? That question travels remarkably well. Perhaps that is what a classic is supposed to do.
In the 1878 Warsaw that is beautifully reconstructed, the dresses, mansions and ballrooms belong to another world. The predicament does not, and that, more than the controversy surrounding its modern language or its provocative reinterpretations, may be the reason this Polish doll has found an audience far beyond Poland.