“The Mother” by Witkacy: A Family Tragedy—a Killing of Humanity in a Human Being

Lech Sokół

Abstract

Witkacy’s play The Mother (1924), widely praised for its brilliant inventiveness and shocking avant-gardism, is sometimes considered to be a family drama, or a family tragedy or grotesque. Witkacy himself confirms the adequacy of classifying The Mother as a family drama by openly using other family dramas in his play: Ibsen’s Ghosts and Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. What sets these family dramas apart is their eeriness; they feature vampiric motifs; they expose putrid decay hidden behind the façade of a happy bourgeois home that has lost all flavor of tragedy and thus belongs to the category of grotesque. The analysis of the Eely family in Witkacy goes further than to show a crisis, or downfall, of the bourgeois world; it aims at showing the gradual downfall of man, and of humanity in a human being. When all that has been stable and solid is disintegrating, a rejection of the values and principles of the world as we know it becomes something done easily and unabashedly. To put it in Witkacy’s own terms, religion, art, and philosophy will die away one by one, and what comes next could be called dehumanization. The Mother brings a concrete vision of the downfall. People who are de facto human, i.e. Individual Beings sensitive to metaphysics, will perish forever, replaced by people only nominally human whose whole existence is reduced to the processes of production, consumption and reproduction, people who hate metaphysics of any kind and are just post-human, “mechanised” individuals.