A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature

The Judgment of Anna Karenina

Amy Mandelker The Judgment ofAnna Karenina FEMINIST IDEOLOGICAL criticism seems a particularly appropriate tool with which to critique Anna Karenina, a novel that strenuously interrogates the gender implications of marital relations and romantic love. The critical issues that yield to the probe of gender-oriented criticism adhere to the central thematic concerns of the novel, and most important, to the ways in which its eponymous heroine is judged in both moral and aesthetic terms. Curiously, Anna's status as a heroine and the tragic tenor ofher narrative is frequently denied, not only by traditionalist, masculinist critics, but by more recent feminist readings as well. Thus, both masculinist and feminist readings of the novel have tended to diminish the potential heroism of Anna's transgression and to mute the mytholOgical tones of her quest and fall. Both feminist and masculinist readings concur in finding Anna gUilty and in labeling her a bad, even an evil woman. Her failure according to these interpretations is both proximate and ultimate since she transgresses against the values of a patriarchal society, yet fails to liberate herself and thus remains a compliant prisoner of the patriarchy. Even if the profundity of Anna's conflict is recognized, her emotional reaction is condemned: "A whole society, perhaps the species itself, is at stake, and here a wretched woman temporizes about it, numbs herself with opium, whimpers over her own precious individuality, and finally jeopardizes everything by suicide."! Alternately, Anna is castigated because she fails to assume responsibility for healing her own psychic conflicts and repressions: Anna's story is not a tale of social oppression or a drama of failed liberation. Tolstoy , it should be recalled, insisted that people have no rights, only responsibilities .... Anna abandons her flawed human relatedness to which she is responSible. . . . But Anna is not destroyed by others, and self-indulgence is not her fundamental flaw. Anna is not punished by Tolstoy for her sexual fulfillment. In a fuller sense, Anna's story is a moral tragedy of self-enclosure.' 33 Amy Mandelker Sexual stereotyping is common to both traditionalist male-dominated criticism and to the more recent feminist criticism. The following view expressed by a nineteenth-century reader ofthe novel still seems to underlie contemporary judgments: All the meaning of the family, all its potential and all its morality depend, do they not, on the wife and mother, and ifshe destroys the family will not the woman perish along with the purpose ofher life and any meaning she might have as a person? ... Ifonly [women] could understand that in the self-denial and self-sacrifice of a wife and mother there is more value and more moral satisfaction than in the pursuit of their own appetites and fantasies.' Even Mary Evans, in her recent avowedly feminist reading of Anna Karenina , relies on the perpetuation of these attitudes in contemporary society when she subscribes to the notion that mothering is natural while fathering must be learned: "After all, the mother, a married woman, who deliberately chooses an adulterous relationship rather than her maternal responsibilities, would still today be labelled as a deviant and 'unnatural' woman."4 ANNA KARENINA AGAINST ANNA KARENINA The case against Anna, the "strategy of the novel" that "is directed against [her]" so that "Anna must be destroyed,"5 is based on readers' perceptions of the inevitability ofher suicide, which is construed as a death sentence, a form of divine or social retribution, prefigured in the novel's epigraph, ''Vengeance is mine, I will repay." So common is the death of the transgressing heroine in nineteenth-century fiction that it has come to be seen as an obligatory sop thrown to conventional morality that gives the author the latitude to portray his or her heroine sympathetically or, alternately, reveals the author's discomfort in affirming deviance. According to one feminist critic : "The overall message is to all intents unequivocal; in Anna Karenina Levin makes the right choices and so lives and flourishes beyond the back cover of the book; Anna chooses wrongly, and therefore must die even before the last chapter. Nothing could be clearer."6 However, most critics have found this aspect of the novel extremely problematic and far from clear. To begin with, Tolstoy'S use of the biblical epigraph, especially in its incomplete form (omitting "saith the Lord"), creates a disconcerting uncertainty in the reader as to who is speaking: Does Tolstoy quote God or speak for God or as its surrogate? Or is Tolstoy God? Is authOrity...