Ivona, Princess of Burgundia by Witold Gombrowicz
"Ivona, Princess of Burgundia" is a play by Polish author Witold Gombrowicz that explores themes of individuality and societal conformity through its central character, Ivona. Set in a royal court, the narrative revolves around Prince Philip, who becomes infatuated with Ivona, a woman marked by her dullness and lack of appeal. While the court engages in superficial dialogues about beauty and societal expectations, Philip finds himself drawn to Ivona's unique demeanor, which starkly contrasts with conventional norms.
As the story progresses, Philip’s fascination turns into an obsession that leads him to confront the absurdity of social roles, ultimately leading to a crisis that challenges his initial rejection of societal standards. The play employs Ivona’s silence as a dramatic device, amplifying the tension as other characters reveal their own insecurities and motivations. The plot culminates in a darkly comic conspiracy against Ivona, reflecting the court's desperate measures to maintain social order and the lengths to which individuals will go to conform.
Through this satirical lens, Gombrowicz critiques the rigidity of societal expectations and the inherent folly within human behavior, earning "Ivona, Princess of Burgundia" a place among the author’s notable works that question the nature of identity and authority. The play's blend of humor and poignancy invites audiences to reflect on the complexities of individuality in a conformist society.
Ivona, Princess of Burgundia by Witold Gombrowicz
First published:Iwona, księżniczka Burgunda, 1938 (English translation, 1969)
First produced: 1957, at the Teatr Dramatyczny, Warsaw, Poland
Type of plot: Absurdist
Time of work: Unspecified
Locale: Burgundia
Principal Characters:
Ivona , a repulsive and ugly womanPrince Philip , the heir to the throneKing Ignatius , Prince Philip’s fatherQueen Margaret , Prince Philip’s motherLord Chamberlain , the king’s adviserIsobel , a lady in waitingSimon , a friend of the prince
The Play
The first act of Ivona, Princess of Burgundia is set on a promenade, with the king, queen, prince, and their court gathered together in conversation. While the king and queen engage their court in conventional praises of the sunset, their son Philip sets himself aside, obviously bored with the routine. Clearly he is looking for a change and is impatient with his male companions, who engage in all too typical commentary on the good looks of any woman who interests them.
Ivona catches the prince’s attention. Not only is she not attractive to men, but even her female relatives find her a trial, for she is virtually inert, rarely speaks, and has an offensive demeanor. Ivona’s aunt goes so far as to say that her phlegmatic attitude is a constitutional defect. In other words, it is unlikely that anything can be done to make her more appealing. However, this unique behavior is exactly what Prince Philip says he likes about her: She is not the kind of woman a young man should love. He is determined to act like an original and not like every other young man out to find a beautiful, charming woman. He takes pride in adopting an attitude that checks his inclinations and that defies the constricting dictates of nature and society.
Act 2 opens in the prince’s apartments, with him declaring that Ivona is the dragon he must slay, the challenge he must undertake to prove his heroic distinctiveness. His friends are appalled; his mother and father are dismayed. The court, however, tries to be agreeable by accommodating his choice of this repulsive woman. It is tough going for everyone, including Philip, who manages to extract only a few enigmatic sentences from Ivona. He has never met anyone so self-contained, so impervious to external influences. She is her own being and is virtually immune to every attempt to draw her out. At first, he finds this a remarkable, even fascinating quality, perhaps because he has resolved not to be like anyone else, too. Soon, though, a note of hysteria creeps into his speeches, which grow longer as he tries to gauge her responses.
In the third act, the prince begins to suspect that people are laughing at him. For all of his rejection of conventional social attitudes, he is beginning to weary of his idiosyncratic stance. In fact, he succumbs to the attractiveness of another woman and breaks his engagement to Ivona, even as his parents and the court have been pondering what to do about Ivona. She makes them all uneasy, including the king and queen, who begin to have feelings of inadequacy.
In the fourth and final act, everyone is plotting to get rid of Ivona. The queen loathes her, for somehow Ivona reminds her of the poetry she has kept secret from the court and from her husband. Something about Ivona makes the queen feel deeply ashamed of herself. The king is in a foul temper, saying outrageous things and plotting with his chamberlain to have Ivona killed. They start by planning a huge state dinner—just the kind of event at which Ivona (a commoner) will feel uneasy. They have noticed how out of place she seems to be in such gatherings, so they will surround her with dignitaries, disconcert her with constant attention, serve her a boney pike, and generally contrive a situation in which she chokes on a bone at the dinner.
The plot proves entirely successful, and everyone is relieved and pleased. “Ah, yes, a bone. I see,” Philip remarks over Ivona’s dead body. It is a perfect ending for the court because everything appears socially correct—a point that is emphasized when Philip joins the court in kneeling beside Ivona’s lifeless body.
Dramatic Devices
The most important dramatic device of the play is Ivona herself. It is remarkable how the playwright has been able to use such a simple stratagem—a character who almost never speaks—to precipitate action. As the various characters address Ivona and try to get her to agree or disagree with their observations and advice, they reveal themselves more fully than any dialogue between characters could do. For each time Ivona does not speak, her interlocutor must speak longer and more pointedly. Not only does this device help to define the other characters sharply, but it also increases the tension in the play. Everyone wonders when Ivona will speak.
Except for act 1, the setting of the play is indoors, in various rooms of the castle. The playwright does not describe the rooms. Indeed, the play contains almost nothing in the way of stage or set descriptions, since Witold Gombrowicz is not interested in the period or in the specific social customs of the court. Rather, he presents interior scenes that are meant to raise questions about the structure of society itself and about how rigid role-playing within society must be. The court itself can be viewed as a dramatic device, as a way of emphasizing how fixed human beings are by their societal functions.
Critical Context
Ivona, Princess of Burgundia is very much of a piece with Witold Gombrowicz’s other plays and novels. Ferdydurke (1938; English translation, 1961), a novel about a thirty-year-old man turning into an adolescent, is the author’s fullest expression of a certain immaturity he finds in the human character. As his other novels Pornografia (1960; English translation, 1966) and Kosmos (1965; Cosmos, 1966) suggest, Gombrowicz has little faith in the wisdom of civilization. Rather than growing into responsible roles, many of his characters seem coerced into adopting guises.
Although the playwright’s characters seem to speak nonsensically at times, and although his depiction of society is satirical, it is perhaps going too far to say that his dramas are absurdist in the sense that they imply that there is no meaning in existence. Gombrowicz was a skeptic and certainly saw the vacuity of social relationships, but he was not a nihilist. Indeed, many of his characters have a compulsion to put their world in order, even if that order is rather trivial or ridiculous.
It is perhaps inevitable that Gombrowicz, a Polish writer who left Poland in the 1930’s and took up a life of exile in Argentina, should be suspected of writing allegory. His plays and novels are sometimes interpreted as elaborately indirect studies of the way his country has been oppressed by other nations, chiefly Germany and the former Soviet Union. There may be some point to this approach, especially if Ivona, Princess of Burgundia is taken as a drama about how individuality is crushed in a conformist, authoritarian society. Gombrowicz himself, though, denied such allegorical interpretations. What seems more certain is that his historical experience as a Pole made him skeptical of any form of social or political control. All forms of policing human behavior, he implied, are only rationalizations for society’s compulsive need for each of its members to submit to authority.
There is much humor in Gombrowicz’s work, which is accentuated in Ivona, Princess of Burgundia by making the royal figures behave so foolishly. Once they are caught in the grip of their scheme to kill Ivona, they cannot stop talking about it. They become possessed by their plan to such an extent that the king expresses his murderous feelings at the very moment when he should conceal them: “As we have said, we are giving this modest but elegant entertainment to celebrate the violent end . . . I mean, the happy betrothal of our future daughter-in-law.” As Gombrowicz said in an autobiographical work, Entretiens avec Gombrowicz (1968; A Kind of Testament, 1973), in writing Ivona, Princess of Burgundia he was “assailed by the limitless anarchy of form, of human form, of its dissoluteness and licentiousness.” He appears to have had in mind the utter unreliability of human beings who, like the king, rule and yet are overwhelmed by impulses they cannot control. In the very act of trying to reimpose stability at court, the king loses control of his tongue. A deeply ironic writer, Gombrowicz nearly always had a wry smile, if not outright laughter, for the human pretense of self-government.
Sources for Further Study
Gombrowicz, Witold. Diary. Vols. 1-3. Edited by Jan Kott. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Jelenski, Constantin. Gombrowicz. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1971.
Kott, Jan. Theatre Notebook, 1947-1967. Translated by Bodesław Taborski. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968.
Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
Thompson, Ewa M. Witold Gombrowicz. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
Ziarek, Eva. P. Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.