Fairy tales stand as romantic visions of unchangeability. In such worlds where time ceases to flow, merely pooling around the concluding moment, the future exists to provide only that which further ornaments the characters' luxuriously indulgent love.These are stories of constancy... but also of stagnancy, whose connotation calls to mind a sense of spoiled movement.
Másha as well as Sergéy, despite the sagacity of his age and the wisdom that supposedly entails, allow themselves to be "carried away" by the promise of the fairy tale. They enter in to marriage with such idealistic expectations: the outside world will never change; its consequences or temptations will never enter in to their romance. The future can only be a continuation of their "playful" love-- of a perpetual spring time with all of its "dreams and vague hopes and desires" (Tolstoy 8).
But winter is inevitable (Tolstoy 48). For both of them, the coming of winter brings fear, (Molly's comment from class), threatening what they believe to be the full expression of their love. But a love based on feeling already evokes a certain sense of finitude because feelings are transitory things. They are utterly reactionary and as we all know, love sometimes invites the paradox where you may love someone without necessarily "feeling" like you love them at the moment (remember Kim's comment from class?).
I think you can feel Tolstoy interjecting at moments like this as he observes his characters' futile attempts to still time. The reader is constantly bombarded with images of the passing seasons: autumn, winter, spring, summer... Tolstoy inserts us in to the cycle of seasonal life only to make the progression towards change seem inevitable for Másha and Sergéy. Change is necessary for survival. It is the promise of adaptation that allows Nature to get through "dark and sad" winters (Tolstoy 3). But without adaptation, there can be no true flourishing. The lilac-bush that lingers throughout the story survives the cyclic passage of the seasons, from its spring infancy to the desolation of winter. And when Sergéy reasons that "Each time of life has its own kind of love," (Tolstoy 78), I am reminded of Ecclesiastes 3:1,4,8-- "To everything there is a season... a time to dance... a time to love and a time to hate." That book of the Old Testament portrays life as empty if pursued only for its "vanities" which, I think, is how we're supposed to view Másha at the novella's end. She enters marriage, seeking her "Happy Ever After" and not finding it there, enters society where she is "lead astray" by the vanities of the socialite world. Although the ending makes it seem as if the two salvaged some form of contentment from what was left of their marriage, Másha seems to have been dealt with harshly as Kim and Molly described in class.
But turning away from my digression, I think the alternate title resonates with the reader more than "Family Happiness" because it sets us up to hold the same expectations as Másha. We enter and share more with her character than Olenin's, partly because everything is filtered through her eyes and not a disembodied, omniscient entity. We feel her distress and poignant confusion when her life's story does not unfold in to bloom like she imagined. And really, we can sympathize with Másha disillusionment...especially when society seems to lend itself to pursuing her same, initial understanding of what love is.
"To make life a romance is the one thing worth doing." (Tolstoy, Family Happiness 68).
(Not that I agree, but I do that alot...)
1 comment:
Now that you've also read Anna K., it would be interesting to compare and contrast this early vision of family happiness with the version depicted through Kitty and Levin in the later novel. Do you think that Tolstoy manages to paint a more convincing picture of the happy family in the union between Kitty and Levin?
Post a Comment