Milena Lenderová
Marie Čacká in the context of ‘women's’ hoaxes
Marie Čacká (1811–1882), real name Františka Svobodová, from early 1845 the wife of patriotic
doctor Josef Bojislav Pichl, published her first poems in 1838. She belonged to the circle of
women around Karel Slavoj Amerling and Bohuslav Rajská, co-founded the Czech Girls' School
in Prague and worked there for some time. The rustic themes of her first works led to the rumour
that she was a countrywoman. The figure of a poetry-writing countrywoman had hitherto been
lacking in the typology of Czech female writers and she embodied the intellectuals' fascination
at the time for the rural environment, which, unspoilt by civilization and the Germanizing
education of the era, was considered a reservoir of original Czech-language culture. Marie
Čacká was a figure calculated to bring on the folksiness just at the right moment. Although she
was the complete opposite of a simple Czech countrywoman, her poetry was able to get into the
spirit and emotional naiveté of folksong, and she basically fulfilled the utopian ideal of the folk
poetess: thanks to her rural isolation, her work could not be influenced by ‘fashionable’ literary
trends or the works of contemporaries. The romantic idea of the folk sources of Czech literature
and likewise the desire for a literarily active woman were carried to absurd lengths by the
fictitious figure of the rural poetess Marie Čacká. She became an ideal defined not only by the
gender constructs of the time, but also by the stalwarts of patriotic communication, the Czech
literati, i.e. she came from an idealized countryside, she was literarily active and she was able
to write in polished Czech, although this ideal was actually unattainable, and not just in the
1830s or the first half of the 1840s either. However, literary hoaxes involving or even authored by
women can be considered to be part of the efforts to draw female authors into literary production
and as such were also part of the efforts to create a Czech culture based firmly on the Czech
language.
Female poets – Marie Čacká – literary hoaxes
design by Bedřich Vémola
