Depression is not sexually stimulating, yet there exist multiple cultural representations of deeply unhappy women, who reach the height of their beauty when suicidal, or dead. From Ophelia, damsels in distress and swooning Victorian hysterics, ending with contemporary fashion, female suffering is glamourized. My paper answers the question why female depression is presented as sexy by culture. I seek the explanation in gender stereotypes as well as the tradition of ‘heroic melancholia’.

This article is about selected issues in women’s sports, and above all the modest participation of women in so-called leisure sports. Statistical data concerning Poland and other countries (particularlyWestern Europe) is presented. The fashion for jogging, which is currently being seen in Poland as well, is analyzed. The author’s own research, done in 2013 and involving 865 participants in the Łódź ‘I Care About My Health’ Marathon, documents the smallness of women’s interest in participating in marathon struggles.On the basis of the information collected in the study’s survey questionnaires, it was possible for the author to create a socio-demographic portrait of the female Polish long-distance runner. It was also possible to note the sociologically interesting and elucidating difference between men and women in the sphere of training and in their running careers/biographies.

The thread that runs through this article is made of silk, a fabric with a fascinating history of origins in China and a long record of projects aimed at organizing and mechanizing its production in Europe. The silk motif recurs throughout 19th century literature. As an object of realist description it gives the writer the opportunity to explore its sensuous material appeal and, also, to create around it a web of additional references and associations. For Honoré de Balzac and Bolesław Prus silk carries connotations of elegance, social status and social aspirations. In the fiction of Eliza Orzeszkowa it is one of the regularly recurring elements of descriptions of outward appearance of characters. It can interpreted as a mechanical repetition or, perhaps, the foregrounding of the stereotype meaning of silk intended as an invitation to the moral judgment of characters furnished with that mark.