Source: Netflix poster – Fair Use

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

–Karl Marx

No, it’s not Ibsen’s feminist three-act play A Doll’s House and it’s not Harriet Arnow’s working class novel The Doll Maker. It’s the new Netflix series, The Doll (Lalka in Polish), inspired by the novel of the same name by Boleslaw Prus, a troublemaker born in Poland in 1847. A foe of the tsar and imperial Russia, Prus was arrested and imprisoned for his revolutionary activities. He wrote The Doll, a most revolutionary novel, in the late 1880s. Poet and social critic Czeslaw Milosz, the author of The Captive Mind, has called it the greatest of all Polish novels. Wikipedia describes it as a work that “exposes the social inequalities, class divisions and contradictions of 19th century Warsaw.” The Netflix series takes up these same themes and brings them to the screen triumphantly.

The  Dollalso offers oodles of eye candy for viewers who are enthralled with costume melodramas. But anyone and everyone with a brain will watch it for the narrative it offers about the clash between the emerging bourgeoisie and the declining aristocracy. True, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie are no longer at one another’s........

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