#the parallels of this to asoiaf/fire and blood crack discourse about certain female characters are interesting

[la-pheacienne]

Okay nobody asked for this but I have some thoughts about Anna Karenina. I read that book in highschool and it was a pain in the ass but still a rewarding experience. I remember liking it, but at the end feeling like "okay, an adulterous unstable woman, at the time when it was written I suppose it was really ground-breaking, it doesn't seem that relevant anymore, who would condemn Anna today for wanting to leave her miserable cucumber of a husband for a hot blond horse rider with BDE, relatable, no one would stone her alive for that today, that was then".

Wrong. So Wrong.

It was obvious to me that Anna was unfairly punished by society for being human and the author intended to present it that way. Apparently, it is not so obvious to a big part of the readers. The discourse I saw online is extremely disturbing:

"I felt like she chose her lover over her son? To me she just seemed extremely selfish. She has a loving and rich husband".

"yes, she did ultimately choose her lover over her son. It's terrible that she lived in a culture that forced her to make that choice, but that's the choice she made. Her own happiness was more important to her than her child's. That's not a choice most parents would make".

"She is not even a good mother she hated her daughter when her daughter Anya was sick only thing that was important to her was that Vronsky didn't came home at the time so she started using opium".

"I don’t like her. She made a poor decision that left a child without a mother and a husband without a wife. Any woman who puts their own selfish desires over their family is not to be liked".

"I can not abide women who let themselves be pushed around so much by society and the moralists of the day; I keep wanting to give them a good shaking and say "Stand up for yourself, girl!"

"One of the reason that Anna is so hard to like is that she only defines herself in relation to other people. Wife to a husband. Mother to a son. Lover to Vronsky. Who was Anna? What did she like? What were her passions (besides men)"?

"Vronsky said that while Anna seemed only to have him to care for, he had many friends and many interests and responsibilities. Adults usually do. Anna was an eternal child, wanting gratification, indulgence, entertainment". 

The first observation is of course, how completely off the mark these takes are considering the particular female experience in 19th century Russia. Especially the comments about her not acting like an adult or her being boy-crazy are laughable, as if a woman in that time period could just "stand up for herself" or even define her life and choose her course of action indepentently of men in any fundamental way. As if she would have ever comitted suicide if she could do any of those things. If she could still keep the boyfriend and her son, if she could decide to have a divorce whenever she wanted to, if she could be allowed to simply exist on her own, she wouldn't have committed suicide. A person who commits suicide is a person who doesn't have a way out. She didn't. And it is pretty obviously stated in the text.

The second remark is that in this story we have a (female) character that is so appallingly victimized and crushed, entirely at the mercy of other men, circumstances or even pure chance, while at the same time keeping her personality, desires, and agency intact. This is why this story is so great and this is why these people do not get it. Tolstoy, consciously or not (probably consciously) really outdid himself precisely because he told the story of a victimized woman who was also kind of a bitch, to put it bluntly. She was both. You can't talk about Anna just by focusing on gender inequality. Being a victim of patriarchy is not all Anna was. Anna was selfish yes, she was irrational and obsessive and ruthless and she wanted it all and she wanted it now. It wasn't enough for her just to have an extramarital relationship, tolerated by social norms, allowing her to keep her son and her lover. No, that was not enough, she wanted to live with her lover freely, she wanted to make the rules and she didn't understand why she just couldn't. She felt terribly guilty for abandoning her son, yet she didn't give a single fuck about the kid she had after, the one kid she could actually take care of. Horrendous. Her husband offers divorce, she doesn't want it. He later refuses the divorce, now she wants it. She is not ready to travel and wants to wait, and when her lover tells her they have to wait one day because he wants to see his mother, she suddently wants to leave now. She is strongly advised not to go to the opera because that would bring herself and everyone around her misery, she goes to the opera. She does exactly the opposite of what she was supposed to do at any given circumstance. What she wanted was bigger than what life could give her, and she killed herself.

Now that may be Tolstoy just showcasing what happens to lusty restless adulterous women. Tolstoy, after all, had the misogynistic factory settings of his time. He was also a genius. I don't believe there is anything about this thrilling, vibrant, catastrophic portrait of a woman that came by chance. The inequality, the unfairness of it all is so palpable everywhere in the book, her absolute lack of freedom constrasting with the freedom of her husband lover and brother. All of these men can do whatever they want, they can fuck, cheat, dominate, determine their life and other's without any criticism or consequences whatsoever, and she can't even leave the house without it being a major scandal. She doesn't control anything in her life, she is completely ostracized. She is considered an actual criminal, a pariah, for having human desires.

And yet, despite all that, she has the audacity to want for herself. In her ultimate victimhood, seemingly at the loss of all agency she still does not let others define her inner world one bit. She absolutely defines her life, she makes autonomous decisions, she even defines her own demise by suicide. She chose this, she could have chosen differently, but she didn't want to. The social setting was horrible for women, but if she was slightly more reasonable she could have had a better outcome. She didn't want that. Crazy right?

And that's why modern readers cannot get this book. We are used to media that convey a "message", ready to consume on a plate with a pink ribbon. We are used to passively watching women reacting to horrors imposed on them, and feeling sorry for them. We are used to a Handmaid's tale type of social discourse. We are used to dystopias. We are used to good guy - bad guy dichotomies. We empathize with female characters getting killed, tortured, physically and sexually abused, because they are the victims. But a woman who dares to leave her kid and go away with her lover? Abhorrent. Inconceivable. It is so extremely difficult to empathize with a female character that is just palpably human, it is confusing, she is not victimized enough to deserve empathy from the modern audience. A victim is a symbol, it is an abstraction. Give a victim a mind of her own and human desires, and she is suddenly a whore.

Tolstoy in all his moralizing puritanical 19th century glory, gave us an actually "complex" (as much as I have come to hate the word) female character, and by "complex female character" I mean a fictional woman that maintains her spiritual autonomy while seemingly being entirely determined by other people or circumstances. I cannot say the same for the vast majority of "strong female character" models of contemporary media.