On one of these girls’ trips this month, your friend’s friend said, “What’s your fiancée like? Is he funny like you?” (Her words; your flex.) You had been in full girls-trip mode. Ripping bits, telling stories, taking shots, dancing on tables, eating a stranger's abandoned fries.

You tell her that Luke is silly, but you’re also not comedically on like this when you're at home on the couch. “I’m not always in show mode,” you say.

“Are you in a show mode now?” she asks with a sweet wonder and wide eyes. To her, your behavior is an enthralling case study, like a viral video of a dog on hind legs.

You pause. “Absolutely.”

Today, the Saturday before your move, you reminesce on show mode. Oh sweet, sweet, Show Mode. How you miss her! As you pack up bandages and pantiliners and Benedryl to throw into a box you labeled "bathroom stuff." Oh! To fiend! To sleep in a bottom bunk in a quasi-rural Airbnb after spending the day making jokes at the expense of some new-to-you trip acquaintance, making these strangers laugh. A mania stronger than tequila.

Is that version of you with us in your half-packed apartment?

Absolutely not.

There’s a nice ebb and flow to a summer bachelorette trip. In your experience, people often travel to the rented house on Thursday night, sometimes in the afternoon. One or two shamed 'n' stressed girlies work on the following Friday, but it's implied you take the day off, lest you miss some mildly boozy opening ceremony: a beach day accompanied by a fat cooler, a winery tour, an aerial yoga class.

Friday night: huge group dinner followed by a night out at a bar.

Second day: a boat. A bachelorette essential. What better simultaneous exposure therapy for your hangover and your motion sickness than to rock on a party pontoon for several hours? If you consider drowning or vomiting, don't worry, that's part of the party package you paid for.

After you regain your land legs, most trips peeter out on this second night. Take-out, loose discussions of Sunday travel plans, an overview of the Airbnb check-out instructions.

But there's something rare to these trips, an element that holds the glue of this trip together and therefore allows you and the other girls to transcend the boundaries of your past.

When this element arrives, it doesn't matter who you were ten years ago, or three days ago, or an hour ago. You could unite kings, let alone 12 women of moderately similar backgrounds introduced through a mutual friend.

It's not kindness, hospitality, or an impressive alcohol tolerance. All that matters is A-game.

When Tinashe famously said "I got stamina, he say I'm an athlete," she distilled the experience of the A-game bachelorette guest. A-game is the element that transcends the awkwardness of being in a group house full of 75-95% strangers. It is a stubborn grip on having a good time, despite how you really feel. Anyone on the Friday night can put on a good face and sip a watery well-drink and bounce their knees to "Despacito." The A-game guest keeps their Thursday energy until Sunday morning, even when they're sleep-deprived from bunking with a snoring cousin.

The A-game is unique to each athlete. Some are party animals Thursday to Saturday, and how they are needed. One might clean the kitchen. Another might strike up a conversation with that lone and lost coworker and offer her a place that's not next to the bride. Another steps in with logistics after the maid of honor dissociates from planning overload. Whatever your strength is, you play it full-court for 72 hours straight. And, most importantly, you never complain.

Watch for the A-game to come through on Saturday. Look around at the other girls. They are not the frontline fighters you met Friday. They wear their headaches like medals of service as they sip club soda with a lime in it, passing it off as a vodka soda. The bridesmaid who did handstands last night with her palms in bar sludge? She now scrolls through pictures of her daughter on her phone’s camera roll. The high school friend who conned a man into buying the party a round of shots? There she is, asleep on the bar.

The bride, radiant in white and unprecedented levels of dopamine, sees none of this. She is oblivious and blissed-out. Or, if she does, she is taking quiet notes and assigning you a table next to her booze-bag cousin as payback. You don't know how bridal retribution works, and if it turns out to be a real thing, like a yeti, you fear it.

(As you’re writing this, you’re wondering about your family members and friends who read this newsletter and did not realize you were grading their performances. Or worse, didn’t realize your bachelorette in a year from now will have a rubric.)

The A-game contenders step in. They are the same person they were on Thursday, unloading their trunk full of surprise booze or food. They steel their eyes into an alert enthusiasm. If there's something behind those hazel eyes, they will karaoke Kelly Clarkson before they complain.

These women are mothers. Sometimes in the child-bearing sense. Always in the vibe sense.

Are you, dear narrator, an A-game player?

It depends how you, reader, would define A-game. If it looks like jumping into metallic lake water in a shark suit that tried to Horcrux you down to the bottom of the lake, then you have something.

In Swann’s Way, Proust's narrator observes his aunt Leonie, an old widow self-constrained to one room of her house near a window. She spends her days staring out this window and manufacturing gossip. She welcomes one guest who gives her the street gossip, and otherwise spends her days asleep, fighting some ephemeral sickness. Aunt Leonie operates on this realm because she has a loyal house servant, Françoise. Françoise operates on his aunt's schedule, facilitates the market trips and the huge meals and prepares asparagus because she knows the narrator's childhood self loved it so much. To this child, Françoise is a beloved figure, someone who extends her care to her mistress's great-nephew. After he witnesses her kill one of the chickens with her bare hands, he senses the cruelty beneath the facade of their beautiful meals of their breezy summer lifestyle:

But who would have prepared me such cozy hot-water bottles, such fragrant coffee, and even...those chickens? And in fact, everyone had had to make this cowardly calculation, just as I had. For my aunt Léonie knew--as I did not yet know--that Françoise, who would for her daughter, for her nephews, have given her life without a murmur, was singularly hard-hearted toward other people.

Françoise, commanding the forces of nature, which were now her assistants, knows everyone's favorite meals and how to cook them. She tolerates a slumbering and physically decrepit gossip, appeasing her sharp tongue and slathering her with compliments. She withholds her complaints about the other servants, sick with fever and still shelling peas, until the guests leave before Françoise tells this servant to buck up and get with the program. Case in point:

(...the kitchen maid was seized by appalling cramps: Mama heard her moaning, got up, and woke Françoise, who, quite indifferent, declared all this wailing was a sham, that the girl wanted "to be the center of attention.")

You know it when you see it. Françoise would be a hall-of-fame bridesmaid.

Subscribe now

This week, you hosted a pizza trolley tour for you and your friends as a farewell to New York before you move to Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Now, your modes as guest versus host are astronomically different.

As a guest, your hooligan-ery acts as a distraction to the logistics, an affirmation of the plans, a signal that everyone is in fact having fun!

This is not the job of the host. You have to go into full mom mode. Check every detail. Prepare for the worst-case scenarios. Then wait for them to happen. Or not.

Surprisingly, you didn't have the hosting anxiety that normally coats the hours leading up to an event. You felt calm. You had handled everything in advance. You had placed three pizza pick-up orders to pick up and bring onto the trolley. You had made a playlist. You had texted your driver with a pick-up location and sent a text out to your friends telling them where to meet you. And everyone was on time.

Then you boarded the trolley. Your driver, Daniel, said, “We have a small problem.”

The AC on the trolley broke.

You’ll quickly clarify that this isn’t one of those surreys where people pedal in an open-air vehicle like it’s Nashville. It’s an automobile with wood paneling and, oddly, a ceiling strobe light inside.

The air whipped through the open windows, and you returned to your body for a hot second. You couldn't tell if your friends were having a good time. You sweated through your rented dress. The sweat cooled to grease as the trolley picked up speed on the West Side Highway.

Then Daniel detoured the trolley into Times Square.

An apocalypse of people loitered on sidewalks, medians, and crosswalks as the sky retreated from the fluorescent blue light of the lit ads. Some people pointed at the trolley, waved to your friends in the windows. The strangers clamored to pull out their cameras, to keep the garish spectacle of New York with its souvenir shops and billboards, in their pocket. You can't blame them. You bought into the idea enough to move here, then stay here.

At this point, you gave up hosting. Slick-faced, you sat on a bench while your college roommate Maddie dug through a “Middle School Grind Train” playlist to keep the energy at a happy 2008 T-Pain level.

When Maddie played Charli XCX, Driver Daniel spoke into the overhead speakers from his walkie: “You can turn the music up.”

You cranked the volume to its max from your phone.

When he pulled into your old go-to pub, now bloated with summer interns, your party flees from the trolley into the air-conditioned bar. He told you all to leave the trash, that he would take care of it.

When you step off, the last guest to climb down the stairs, Daniel said, “You didn’t get a picture.”

He gathered your friends and took the photo on Nora's phone. Before you thought to offer him your leftover slices, he drove off, the sweat stains of you and your friends marked in the eroded wood polish on his seats.

How can you best describe Ned to someone who doesn’t know him?

Ned may be more myth than man. The closest thing to Paul Bunyan you will ever meet. He drinks vodka out of glass skulls and loves Infinite Jest. He does something in advertising that warrants a Manhattan corner office. A bucket list item, someday, would be a weekday martini lunch in a steakhouse with Ned. (You both, according to your dad, like to eat the gristle off steaks, a relish for the fatty pockets flavored with a drive for survival.)

As story has it, in a time long long ago (the nineties), a stranger in Chicago stabbed Ned in the stomach. He yelled at the mugger, “What the hell did you do that for?” Then he walked himself to the hospital. For years, in the version you secondhand regurgitated to other people, Ned also beat the mugger with his bare hands and a leaking torso wound before taking himself to a hospital in a new city.

In more recent times, almost seven years ago, your phone number routinely made the rounds with every scammer under the sun—and you obliged two scammers, which is two too many scammers. In this summer of solicitors, you received a voicemail. The audio had a stroke, its words garbled, pockets of consonants sometimes rising to the surface of the static.

When you send this phone number along to your boyfriend, wondering if he has this number, you mentally accept you may walk two miles to a deposit your hundreds of dollars in savings to transfer into iTunes gift cards. (Not again, you think.)

But then your boyfriend texts you. The number is your uncle Ned.

That’s odd, you think, because Ned and your boyfriend have never met.

Your boyfriend, also aware of your complicity to strangers, saw the number and called it. He threatens this anonymous glare of marbled audio to leave his girlfriend alone.

Then, like a lion emerging slowly from a cave, the static dies down.

“I’m her fucking uncle,” the voice barks. “Who the fuck are you?”

Oh, you thought as he explained it to you. Oh no.

The stabbing story does not calm your boyfriend down.

But back to Proust.

A few summers ago, someone in passing joked how your uncle Ned in the middle of a day of tailgating slumped into a loose-backed lawn chair and started reading. “Ah, Proust,” my uncle said, expanding his shoulder to mirror Ned’s linebacker posture. Proust as a punchline. As an allusion plunked heavily into conversation. An intellectual’s reference.

You never realized how long you held onto this hypothetical story. How real was the story? Was it a tailgate? When?

You don’t care about the lost details.

What you remember is the sensation of hearing Proust associated with Ned.

You’ll have what he’s having.

Share

And now, you’re reading this fatty steak of a novel. And you don’t know if you want to finish it or if it’s the determination to get to the end, force the nutritious luxury until you choke.

For the record, the writing is some of the most inventive figurative language choices and stylistic choices you’ve ever seen.

But you also understand why it wouldn’t be a tailgate read. It requires hours of focus. Who has that resource available? Even your commute, usually a good standard for you to finish a series of pages before walking from the subway up the stairs into the night, a physical return to reality, you re-read the same sentence over and over because each sentence is long and lengthy, unending, like this one.

But but but.

There’s a flash of something outside of the language that foreshadows a familial tension.

That you can get behind.

Subscribe now

The 68 pages of unbroken paragraphs monologize sleep and childhood and his great-aunt’s housemaid Francois and his desperation for his mother’s affection. All of this and more!

One page tickles something in your own memory:

…if my great-aunt called out to [the narrator’s grandmother]: “Bathilde! Come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!” To tease her, in fact (she [the grandmother] had brought into my father’s family so different a mentality that everyone poked fun at her and tormented her), since liqueurs were forbidden to my grandfather, my great-aunt would make him drink a few drops. My poor grandmother would come in, fervently beg her husband not to taste the cognac; he would become angry, drink his mouthful despite her, and my grandmother would go off again, sad, discouraged, yet smiling, for she was so humble at heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others, and the lack of fuss she made over her own person and her sufferings, came together in her gaze in a smile in which, unlike what one sees in the faces of so many people, there was irony only for herself, and for all of us a sort of kiss from her eyes, which could not see those she cherished without caressing them passionately with her gaze.” (pg. 12, translated by Lydia Davis)

Within this triangle of personalities is a universal conflict. A long-married couple joining a docile woman and a defensive man faces an intervention from another woman exerting her dominance over the wife.1

The characters are soapy in a way that doesn’t align with your grandparents or great-grandparents. The striking piece is the vantage point. You remember sitting in your own chair at the table with adults. As the only child, your presence is almost invisible, and the conversation continues into adult dynamics as if you’re not there, because you’re quiet and happy to be somewhere where they let you listen.

Growing up, most of your cousins were older. In the early years when the difference between second and third grade is a chasm, you spent a lot of time watching your teenage cousins, but it made you nervous. At some point, you thought, they might ask you to join in on the conversation, where you would prove you were not quick or funny, and you would be voted off the quiet island where you observed them.

Adults didn’t care that one of the eight-year-olds sat at the table. If you were quiet, you could listen to your uncles and aunts tell stories about another life, as they played out their childhoods and characters from when they were your age. The patio light shone on the picnic table where they huddled, their laughter booming across the house. (When you were with the teenagers, you could hear your uncles and aunts laughing.) You thought yourself invisible until the f-bombs flew and your dad called out “language,” a referee pointing to a seemingly uncorrupt youth in the midst. Then, spotted, you would leave or your dad would shuffle you out. “Okay, okay, that’s enough,” he would say as the censorship barriers eroded.

It surprised you, this familiarity. Looking back to your past has been a challenge like throwing a football or, you imagine, launching spit in the back of your throat across a green field. How far can it go?

Once, your dad came back from a funeral and brought your youngest brother out to the yard. They threw around the baseball. When someone asked what he was doing, still in his funeral suit, your dad replied, “I don’t want my eulogy to be about how I didn’t throw the ball around with the kid.”

The first images to surface can be definitive to your idea of history. To some extent, legacy is a game of memory association.

Back to Proust again.

Against his reputation, Proust wrote these family members with a screenwriter’s economy. He impressed—pressed into the mind—who these people were, what their basest instincts were. You have a villain and an endeared hero who offers a sort of kiss from her eyes after her humiliation. And you have the narrator, now an adult discovering the pain underlying the habit of his childhood.

This kickstarts the narrator’s exploratory return to his childhood. How far can he go? What will he preserve—or challenge—by recalling everything? Does it make it better to have it available and then transcribed for an impartial third party? Will Proust, who claims this novel as his life styled as a novel, dive deeper into his family’s dynamics or preserve the sanctity of his blessed childhood?

You’re curious, so you keep reading.

• He’s born in July of 1871. (A year like a ripple in pond. Does that number mean a thing? Does it mean anything when attributed to a bookmark in the chronology of our man-made history? No, not to you.)

• His father is a French Catholic doctor, well regarded. His mother comes from a wealthy Jewish family.

• He spent his childhood summers in the towns Illiers and Auteuil, which become the launchpad for his fictional Combray.

• He attended an elite secondary school, Lycée Condorcet, where he maybe loved a female classmate, worked on the paper, befriended the children of Paris’s most prominent social figures. He enlists in the military for the year and likes the discipline before he enrolls at the School of Political Sciences for a degree in law, then a second degree in literature. He polishes off his educational journey in 1895.

• His first published book, Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days), is a collection of short stories.

  • In 2019, 97 years after Proust’s death, French publisher Éditions de Fallois publishes the short story collection, Le Mystérieux Correspondant. Proust wrote them alongside the poems and short stories published in Pleasures and Days but withheld the stories from publication.

  • According to The Guardian, Proust specialist Bernard de Fallois, head of the publisher, found these stories in the 1950s, and the house published the stories after Fallois also died: “Proust is in his 20s, and most of these texts evoke the awareness of his homosexuality, in a darkly tragic way, that of a curse … In different ways, the young writer transposes, sometimes barely, the intimate diary he could not write.”

This, you think, is where the drama sets in.

But it doesn’t.

The biographical entries focus on his publication history, all the stepping stones toward the seven-volume opus In Search of Lost Time. Proust wrote a novel for four years he never finished. He offers legal assistance and petitions for Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer wrongly convicted and imprisoned under harsh conditions. He wrote a short story imitating the voices of his favorite writers, like Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac. He, alongside his mother, translated John Ruskin’s art criticism into French. Ruskin, a Romantic painter, railed against the Aesthetic critical conversation that suggested art exists for art’s sake. Instead, Ruskin stipulates that art serves as a foundation for social and moral thought, an idea Proust holds tightly.

In fact, Proust by the end of his life will take this idea to the farthest extreme. As he wrote in In Search of Lost Time, "The only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.”

Does that mean the only way to know Proust is to read him?

Subscribe now

Read more

She took us to examine rare books, turning the large crackling pages with pencils or small wooden rods to avoid damaging the aged paper. We observed the difference between a folio, a huge publication with long and full sheets, and a quarto, the same page size folded into fourths. The folio was a richer collector’s item, lavish with illustrations. The smaller and less expensive quarto aimed to find a wider audience. While writing is a solitary and abstract escape, the publisher’s illustrators, printers, and artists take the writer’s prose to objectify the writing.

I thought about this a lot when I learned Leo Tolstoy’s publisher denied his new ending of Anna Karenina.

The novel, syndicated from 1875 to 1878, was incredibly popular when it was published. The story originally ended with Anna’s suicide in what is now Part 7. As a war breaks out in the Balkans, Tolstoy writes an Epilogue about the debate of Russians fighting for other Slavic countries and the private spiritual debates he confesses to his wife have exhausted him.

But the publisher refuses to publish Tolstoy's epilogue.

Out of spite, Tolstoy eats the cost to circulate this new ending as a brochure. These pages live on as Part 8 and the built-in ending of most contemporary editions.

We lost a saucy argument to history when we lost the publisher’s side of the story. What made this publisher go head-to-head with one of history's most successful authors?

I wish I could know what his rationale was, because there's a part of me that agrees with this publisher. The book should have ended with Anna.

What do we gain from Part 8?

Two months have passed since Anna threw her body in front of an oncoming train. Levin’s brother, Sergey, returns to his brother’s estate and runs into Vronsky’s mother, the old countess.

Tolstoy intentionally places Vronsky’s mother in a train car. When Vronsky picks up his mother, the old countess introduces him to Anna. The countess loves her and leaves Anna, saying, “I speak plainly, at my age, and I tell you simply that I’ve lost my heart to you" (Part 1, Chapter XVIII). This maternal endorsement attracts Vronsky to Anna.

The old countess only appears in Part 1 and Part 8, though she lingers as a ghost figure in Anna and Vronsky's illegitimate household. Anna suspects the old countess invites Vronsky to her estate to meet eligible princesses he can legally marry. He can restore his reputation as a technically unmarried bachelor. By the time Anna lives with Vronsky, the affair forever stains her reputation.

In Part 8, when Sergey runs into Vronsky’s mother on a train leaving St. Petersburg, she despises Anna. “Even the death she chose was low and vulgar…Why, what is the meaning of such desperate passions? It was all to show herself something out of the way. Well, and that she did do. She brought herself to ruin and two good men—her husband and my unhappy son” (Chapter IV).

A car or two down, Vronsky is alive, and his grief is silent. He decided to join the independent Russian forces defending Serbia and Montenegro from the Ottoman Empire in what we now consider the Serbo-Turkish War from 1876 to 1878. (Russia declared war on Turkey in support of this Pan-Slavic movement in 1877.) As Sergey finds him alone in another car, Vronsky looks out on the rails and has a flashback:

“As he glanced at the tender and the rails…he suddenly recalled her—that is, what was left of her when he had run like one distraught into the cloak-room of the railway-station—on the table, shamelessly sprawling out among strangers, the bloodstained body so lately full of life;… the strange, fixed expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the still open eyes, that seemed to utter that fearful phrase—that he would be sorry for it—that she had said when they were quarreling” (Chapter V).

Vronsky and others use Anna’s death to characterize a vicious vengeance. Her morality makes her a villain easily forgotten. Even Stepan feels more pity for Vronsky than grief for his sister. When he hears Vronsky is on their train, he “looked sad, but a minute later” walks to find Vronsky and has “completely forgotten his own despairing sobs over his sister’s corpse, and he saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend” (Chapter II).

As the rest of the chapter returns to Levin and Kitty’s idyllic countryside life as new parents and hosts surrounded by family and guests, Levin wonders at his philosophical dissatisfaction. He eventually settles on the vast beauty of the universe, an awareness of a divinity he long ignored. He weeps and runs into a storm to save Kitty and baby Mitya, trapped in a shed on the estate.

Part 8 offers a positive ending. It suggests that the search for meaning and over-philosophizing erodes our connection to other people, keeping us tethered to this world. The more disconnected characters become from each other or their setting, either in their robotic politicking or their familial neglect, the less satisfied they are.

Anna abandoned her family and refused to compromise a relationship to work for her husband and child in the pursuit of real love. She allowed her dissatisfaction to take over her life. If she could have been more like Levin, she would have saved her life.

Now let’s go back to Part 7.

The final chapters of Anna Karenina carry a propulsive energy of self-destruction the best good-for-her novels could only dream of writing. When it comes to the oncoming divorce literature trends, Anna’s story feels like the precursor. Marriage is a trap. The prospect of divorce is a trap. She is unmoored, and no person can offer a safe harbor for her spinning out. She is unwelcome in conservative Moscow and Westernized St. Petersburg crowds. No matter how she bends herself to fit a world where someone might accept her, she finds hatred.

Anna’s struggle is a universal contemplation. If you had the chance to start a new life, would you take it, even if it cost everything?

All of Tolstoy’s characters ask this question with varying dosages. Does Dolly want to entertain an affair in her loveless marriage? Would Kitty reconsider Levin's proposal, despite the embarrassment of refusing him before? Can Alexey Alexandrovitch welcome emotion to keep his family together?

Tolstoy’s omniscient third person allows him to step into everyone’s thoughts at some point. Tolstoy steps into her thoughts to confirm her intentions, but most views of Anna come through the observations of other characters. Kitty catches Anna and Vronsky talking at the ball, though she can't hear what they say. Dolly watches Anna change from bright-eyed to half-awake.

Even Levin meets her and finds her attractive:

“Levin was all this time admiring her—her beauty and her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her feelings” (Chapter XI).

Tolstoy disappears into his characters’ minds to reveal Anna. With her affair, Anna opted to become an attraction for others to observe.

The wall around Anna’s thoughts crumbles at the end of Part 7, one of the most gripping sections of the novel.

Anna has shades of the selfish, vengeful woman Vronsky’s mother sees. When Vronsky and Anna get into their final fight, her jealousy veers into paranoia. His shielding a telegram from her suggests how he might act when he begins an affair with a new woman. She fights about his mother and his mother’s desire to marry him with a respectful princess. When they go to bed without a reconciliation, she feels the imminent end of their relationship coming and assumes his disgust at her: “All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them” (Chapter XXVI).

In the middle of the night, she falls into a vindictive spiral:

"When she poured herself out her usual dose of opium, and thought that she had only to drink off the whole bottle to die, it seemed to her so simple and easy, that she began musing with enjoyment on how he would suffer, and repent and love her memory when it would be too late" (Chapter XXVI).

This dark temptation manifests as her room's shadows “with fresh swiftness" attack her, "and all was darkness.” Anna wakes from her haze and weeps: “No, anything—only to live! Why, I love him! Why, he loves me!” She enters his bedroom in the middle of the night and watches him sleep, afraid to be alone.

By seeing Anna’s thought process, Tolstoy defies Vronsky and his mother’s belief that Anna used her death as a permanent punishment. She has veered into a tornado of madness and morphine. Her depression evolves as a separate persona, a final iteration of Anna.

Anna walks into the morning afraid of the darkness, but when Vronsky’s mother sends a princess to deliver documents to Vronsky, Anna’s anger overtakes the fear. They fight before Vronsky leaves to go to his mother’s estate, and the last thing she says to him is “You…you will be sorry for this,” as Vronsky remembers on the train (Chapter XXVI). After her death, he forgets her notes and telegrams sent after his leaving, desperate for his return: “For God’s sake come! I’m afraid” (Chapter XXVII). When she passes a mirror, she doesn’t recognize her face or remember when she did her hair. More than a fear of divorce, she has learned to fear her madness.

To shake it off, she takes a carriage to visit Dolly. Staring at town, she decides to leave Vronsky. She hopes Dolly will give her a human connection, even if Dolly disapproves of Anna’s decision to leave Vronsky. When she arrives, she finds Kitty at Dolly’s house. It’s safe to say that between Anna's flirtations with both of Kitty's beaus, Kitty and Anna have beef. But Anna detaches from reality. As Kitty looks “compassionately into [Anna’s] eyes,” Anna taunts her: "'I have heard so much of you from every one, even from your husband. He came to see me, and I liked him exceedingly,' she said unmistakably with malicious intent." Before this biting comment that Kitty naively ignores, Anna projects her societal inadequacy on Kitty’s expectations. She imagines Kitty will see her as other women have: “I know that in my position I can’t be received by any decent woman. I knew that from the first moment I sacrificed everything to him” (Chapter XXVIII).

Because of her social exile, Anna judges other people the way they have judged her. She assumes they think the worst of her because her constant rejection from Vronsky and society has, understandably, destroyed her self-esteem. When a stranger nods at her on the street, Anna says, “Well, he knows me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say” (Chapter XXIX). She concludes everyone operates on hatred, and it makes everything disgusting for her. Now, the darkness Anna feared has taken over her agency, as “[t]he house threw a shadow now right across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in the sunshine” (Chapter XXIX).

She travels down to the train station, intent to surprise Vronsky at the old countess’s home. As she hallucinates talking to imaginary people in a train coach, she cuts through at truths of Vronsky’s view of Anna as an accomplishment rather than a partner: “Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success…My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is waning and waning…I’m not jealous, but I’m unsatisfied” (Chapter XXX). She understands he resents any sacrifices of his societal position to be with her, and whatever sacrifice she makes can’t fix the constraints on her life and the dissatisfaction.

Anna’s internal fight against despair is one of the most seamless in literature. She assesses her life with clinical objectivity, critical of her past and her desires for more. While her despair drives her to see life as an exercise in hatred, she questions if that’s true, her hope diluting the intensity of her conclusive depression: “Is there possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery?”

She sits dazed at the train station, confused about her original plan. She has left the physical world for the battle inside her mind: “And again at all the sore places, hope and then despair poisoned the wounds of her tortured, fearfully throbbing heart” (Chapter XXX). This frustration and hatred for how her life turned out and whether she knows love enough to continue living leaves her afraid at the train station.

In the final chapter of Part 7, she wields the same disgust she had felt reflected toward her to strangers. For Anna, life is made for misery. “It’s all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all cruelty!...” (Chapter XXXI). Her train car passengers, the conductor, and a young girl all disgust her, and she enters into complete isolation, emotionally removed from the world. Full of irredeemable hatred, she decides, “I will punish him and escape from everyone and from myself.” As she goes under the train, ignoring the disappearance of the shadows and the brightness of life’s joys playing in her mind, she wakes up and wonders where she is and how she ended up here as if possessed.

Compared to Levin's definitive conclusion of goodness, Tolstoy places us in ambiguiety with Anna’s final moments: “And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever” (Chapter XXXI). What does she see in the darkness and the light she couldn’t see before? Does she find her philosophies confirmed?

The truth is that Tolstoy probably didn’t know how to defeat despair when he wrote this. While writing Anna Karenina after several significant family deaths, he stopped hunting because he was afraid to hold a gun for fear he would turn it on himself.

This is the distinction between Part 7 and Part 8. The endings feel separate because they feel that two different Tolstoys wrote them. The same writing styles and philosophies, but in Part 7, we are in a portrait of despair. By the time the brochure circulates with a new ending where Levin concludes life “has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

This disdain for Anna’s despair and the apathy its characters, including Dolly, feel toward her loss continue to isolate her, assuming a narrative for her. Tolstoy may have turned on the light for himself, but Anna encapsulates the truth of his despair.

Read more

At the time, I hadn’t known much about Woody Allen’s allegations from his stepdaughter, Dylan Farrow, and his marriage to Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. This was the first time I watched a Woody Allen film since I saw the documentary, and I recognized Alfy’s no one wants to sleep with me shrugging persona in how the HBO documentary Allen v. Farrow described Allen’s public denial of the Farrow allegations.

Rewatching Annie Hall while I ping-ponged this question—Is Anna Karenina sexist? How do we measure an artist and their biographical evidence?—I felt a symbiotic approach to Woody Allen and Leo Tolstoy.

As much as Tolstoy’s rocky marriage and womanizing past and Allen’s sexual assault allegations should portend a shallow understanding of female characters, neither Annie Hall nor Anna Karenina blow sexist dog whistles for me.

So naturally, I made a “sexism questionnaire” to parse out these small icks I feel when I read something and think, Oh, that’s not good. What is that “that”?

Luke oversaw this document on my computer screen and stopped mid-walk to the kitchen sink. “Are you taking a sexism questionnaire?”

“I made the questionnaire,” I replied.

“For who?” he asked incredulously.

“Me,” I said.

He paused, then cracked up. “This is how you want to spend your Sunday? Investigating your internal sexist beliefs?”

Don’t be silly! For now, I’m just examining the inherent codes I have either learned or adopted and figuring out how to apply them across cultural fixations. Light and breezy!

Subscribe now

SEXISM QUESTIONNAIRE

These questions also align with looking at characters of underrepresented races, nationalities, genders, and identities. To avoid boiling the ocean in a newsletter, I’m framing these questions toward cis female characters for our two fictional Anns.

• What is the author’s ethos? Simply put, does the author identify as a man or a woman as they write female characters? (This isn’t to say men can’t write great female characters or women always write non-sexist female characters. It's good to note, regardless.) How does their historical setting influence how women are seen or treated? Does their position in society influence how they view women? Do they have a public history of undercutting women in their personal life?

• What is the character’s role in the story? Does the writer include female protagonists, or are female characters relegated to the background? Are the primary players who make decisions men?

• Are all women defined the same way or on extreme ends of the same spectrum? If there are multiple women, do each of them only have one (1) trait? Is this trait based on a stereotype or an unflattering vice? Are the women pitted against each other as examples, or do they have a more significant role in the story? If there is only one female character, that’s also a choice.

• What is this female character’s role in the story? Do the other characters use this character as a punching bag or punchline? Or is this character given the opportunity to change?

• Does their character arc feel prescriptive or complex? Based on the story’s arc, what is the author suggesting readers should take away from knowing this character’s beginning, middle, and end? Is this a warning tale of vice with a tragic ending or a prescription toward virtue with a happily ever after?

Is Annie Hall sexist?

When I watched Annie Hall, I saw it wasn’t so simple.

I’m a generation removed from Woody Allen’s artistic apex, but I see his techniques of implicating the comedic reality and the vulnerable internal dialogues retrospectively in my favorite films.

• The Manhattan-philic shots and scenes of a life where a dialogue-heavy relationship in New York is an adventure enough (Frances Ha)

• The reality vs. expectations scene in 500 Days of Summer.

• The romantic heartbreak subgenre where two characters end the relationship changed for the better (La La Land, Past Lives, Normal People)

• The eye-roll of other people’s self-important habits, seen when Alfy calls out that professor in line for the movies, feels like the prototype of a Curb episode.

Woody Allen’s Alfy is both the underdog and the obstacle to his happiness. He is awkward, divorced, and Jewish in an industry and environment of WASPs. He steps in the way of relationships. He chases sex as a validation, an uncomfortable but honest-feeling assessment. As Annie (Diane Keaton in the role of her lifetime) grows within their relationship to become braver and confident, Alfy retreats into his same insecurities. She moves to LA for a blossoming music career when her first show was a nervous mess, the crowd’s conversations drowning her out. He wants her when she no longer wants him.

At the end of the film, when Annie and Alfy meet at a diner to catch up, Alfy relays the joke about the brother who thinks he is a chicken: “I would bring him to a doctor, but I need the eggs.y the " Alfy thought he would be better without the relationship, but once Annie leaves, he realizes he is still left with the same question about what he needs and his expectations in how a relationship can make him feel whole.

While Alfy assumed he created Annie's confidence, he realizes after she leaves that he relied on Annie for his self-esteem. Annie has moved on, but Alfy has only started to ask how he might change and move out of the past. This feels universal to any relationship and incredibly raw, and Allen points the finger at Alfy. Instead of a tirade against Annie, Alfy creates a play where characters, dressed like Alfy and Annie, write a new ending to Alfy's break up. He knows he can't have her back because he hasn't changed. Annie is incredible, the target of admiration by both the writer and the audience. That's why the movie's vulnerability, in places, still works, pointing the finger toward the protagonist's flaws.

So let’s try to assess Anna Karenina and Leo Tolstoy in the same vein.

ANNA KARENINA SEXISM QUESTIONNAIRE~*

What is Tolstoy’s personal relationship to women while writing Anna Karenina?

Tolstoy lost both parents when he was young and was raised by female relatives. Tolstoy slept around a lot before he got married. He has an illegitimate son with a peasant woman on his family estate. He reveals this to his bride-to-be in diary entries the night before his wedding. And his marriage to Sophia Tolstoya was potentially one of the most publicly complex marriages of the 19th century. (See more here.)

The Levin-Kitty foil to the Anna-Vronsky affair is a veiled biography of Leo and Sophia’s courtship and early marriage.

This era also introduces “the woman question.” As Europe and Russia modernize, men question whether women should work outside the home or have certain privileges previously exclusive to men. When Tolstoy’s Levin and Kitty rekindle their romance, gentlemen bat around this question. The woman’s role as the domestic head was a given in Tolstoy’s upper-class lifestyle.

How is Anna introduced?

She is a fallen angel. Anna is the noble-born wife of Petersburg bureaucrat Alexey Karenin. She comes from a well-connected, wealthy family. She arrives at the Oblonskys as the best version of a woman.

When Vronsky meets her, he notices “[h]er shining grey eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes …It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile.”1

A recurring character key for Tolstoy is the breakdown of the eyes against the smile. The mouth, carefully crafted with how it presents and what messages it utters, is a realm of deceit. As the cliché would have it, the eyes are the windows to the soul. The lid is the only barrier between the eye’s operator and the outside world. Anna’s synchronized goodness from eyes to smile suggests a pure impression to match her genuine nature.

We first meet Anna when she comes to the Oblonsky’s domestic rescue. She mediates her brother Stepan’s affair with her sister-in-law, Dolly. Dolly’s children rush Anna like birds and mice flock to Cinderella’s aid. Anna tears up, showing pictures of her son, confessing this is her first trip away from her estate since his birth years ago.

The Oblonskys insist Anna join them at a ball. Despite her initial refusal, she attends, and she and Vronsky connect. Anna is stunningly beautiful. Kitty, Vronsky’s latest beau, notes how Anna wears an elegant, black velvet dress against her youthful lavender ensemble. She sharpens against Anna: “Yes, there is something uncanny, devilish and fascinating in her.”2

The reader can empathize with Kitty's criticism. Her imagined fiance is now flirting with Anna. To think of the woman as "devilish" might be a polite way to phrase it.

The interesting thing Tolstoy includes is Dolly's children. After the ball and before Anna’s return to her estate, the children change like a bird that abandons a nest soiled with a human touch. They “had abruptly dropped their play with their aunt, and their love for her, and were quite indifferent that she was going away.”3

Again, these are children. Would they know what happened at the ball? Would they recognize Vronsky as someone courting their Aunt Kitty? Probably not. However, something fundamental has shifted for Anna after this interaction with Vronsky. She has chemically changed as if she gives off different pheromones, repellant to children.

Tolstoy wants us to see the low bar for Anna to step into a new character. When she returns home to her son, her last hope at feeling reassured in the life she has, she’s disappointed: “She had imagined him better than he was in reality.”4 Before, she isolated from the world to maintain her roles as a mother and wife, and this maintained her purity. After stepping outside of her estate, she discovers this life feels thin compared to Vronsky’s flirtation, and it has damaged her life.

How is Anna defined compared to other women? Are all the female characters in Anna Karenina the same?

First, we know Tolstoy ridicules men with a blunter blade than he does the women in his novel. (See here for the tea.)

And we know that Tolstoy respects the physical labor of the peasants in his field and the difficult domesticity based on how Tolstoy describes Dolly. (Double serving of tea.)

If a contemporary novel wrote about a woman's sole purpose as a mother and wife, it would go over poorly, but for Tolstoy in a moment where men don't recognize women's agency to lay out the mental overhead domestic household heads like Dolly and Kitty have to keep their family happy, it feels revolutionary. Couples still can't parse the invisible emotional labor that falls on wives and mothers.

So for that sake, I see these passages as timeless and flattering. A household is a huge operation in Tolstoy's eyes, and the best outcome of a life for a wife--and a husband--is their contribution to a happy family.

One of my favorite elements of this novel is the relationship between Anna and Dolly. I love Dolly. Her life stinks. No argument. Her husband spends all their money, including her inheritance. He goes out to elegant dinners and gambles while Dolly can’t pay the bills to keep her and her six children fed.

After Anna visits the Oblonskys to repair their damaged marriage, Dolly ecstatically accepts Anna’s advice to forgive Stepan’s affair. How could she not? Anna is a peer, a silent soldier in marriage. Anna doesn’t speak against her husband, but Dolly understands their external presentation as the perfect couple isn’t the full picture:

“I know nothing but kindness and affection from her towards myself.” It was true. That as far as she [Dolly] could recall her impressions at Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself; there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family life (Part I, Chapter XIX).

Dolly sees through the perfect veneer the Karenins propose to society, and she can understand the nuance of a complicated marriage, even if she can't tell where the "artificial" framework of Anna and Alexey's marriage comes from.

So if anyone deserves an affair, it’s Dolly.

And she contemplates it.

Anna and Dolly don't see each other again until Anna returns from Europe. She has settled in the country with Vronsky after promising to reconcile with Alexey Karenin, causing Vronsky to shoot himself, then still feeling she can't love her robotic and sarcastic husband. Anna at this point is exiled from St. Petersburg after being mocked in an opera box. (Vronsky notes how others "would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman without a suspicion that she was undergoing the sensation of a man in the stocks," a sympathetic note from Tolstoy.)

Dolly offers to visit Anna, and Anna graciously welcomes her. On her journey, Dolly wonders if she, like her admired Anna, could have an affair. Wouldn’t it be nice to quit this life? Feel adored? Abandon the domestic shackles?

From the beginning, Tolstoy uses Anna and Dolly as parallels. They start as women whose children make their disastrous marriages meaningful. Anna and Dolly love their children first and foremost. On the Oblonsky house visit, Anna weeps talking to Dolly about her son at home, and Dolly’s children leap on their aunt like birds to Cinderella. Anna is the only person who can convince Dolly that she must find some untapped well of love for her delinquent husband to stitch the family together.

So when Dolly arrives in the countryside to Anna and Vronsky’s gilded European estate, she sees the gilding of Anna’s life. Anna welcomes Dolly into the nursery where Vronsky's love child, Annie, sits with a mean nurse. Anna is unfamiliar with the baby's toys and doesn't know how many teeth her child has. Dolly, disturbed by the changes in her friend and her half-lidded eyes: "she remembered that Anna drooped her eyelids just when the deeper questions of life were touched upon" (Part 6, Chapter XXI).

While Anna’s motherhood bonded them, her distance from her daughter with Vronsky is Dolly’s key clue something is wrong. Dolly leaves early, eager to get back to her children where her life gives her meaning.

By the time Dolly leaves, Anna is trapped in her lifestyle. She can't leave the house like Vronsky. She has no social life because her affair ostracizes her while Vronsky maintains his social and political connections. She still misses her son, and she sneaks into the Karenin household to see him on his birthday, causing him more distress.

As I read this book for the second time, I sympathized with Anna. She has no options, and she falls to a real despair. How can she reconnect with family based on the choices she’s made? How can she stitch together a connection with her son when her quasi-ex-husband uses their son as punitive leverage against Anna? As a woman, she has limited agency in where she can go and how she is seen.

At points, Tolstoy empathizes with Anna as the man in the stocks, cast down by the people who promised her this decision to pursue the affair wouldn’t change her life.

But he also dislikes her, and uses his other characters to provide alternative ways of living. To Tolstoy’s credit, he places her as a foil to other female characters like Dolly, but he also places her head-to-head against Levin. Since Levin, in some respects, is a younger Tolstoy, Tolstoy pits his fictional Anna against himself as a morally complex equal. They act differently, but their internal challenge is the same. Both characters are examples of how we can approach temptation and justify our actions with self-interest.

What happens when we give into our base instincts, even if it might hurt other people around us? Can this European ideal of self-interest save society as promised, or does it have costs? What does a family look like, and how do you construct a “happy” family?

What does Anna's evolution from idyllic mother to half-lidded pariah to her ultimate end tell us?

Most people know the ending of Anna Karenina even if they haven’t read the book.

Next week, we'll break into the difference in Tolstoy’s original ending with the final, gripping scene in Part 7 versus his circulation of the current ending, Part 8, as a post-publishing brochure.

My dad talks about how his brother prefers to watch The Deer Hunter, the Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro film about Pennsylvanian friends ripped apart by the Vietnam War, on VHS. It comes in two tapes. My uncle watches the conclusion first, the concluding Russian Roulette match in Vietnam now the halfway mark. Then he would start the first volume. It ends a huge wedding, the soldiers-to-be tuxedoed and dancing. “It’s happier that way,” my dad described.

My rain-altered edition has produced the same effect. The volumes cleave as Anna Karenina pursues Alexey Vronsky and a rejected Levin joins the peasants in the fields. The optimistic might read this first accidental volume as a contained story of hope, the promise to defy ancient property agreements in marriage and land.

Here, the rain warned, is where the spine gives out.

Share

Reading Anna Karenina that summer at 17, the pages mildewed from July to the September classrooms, I groaned whenever the story switched to Levin. Especially if he was in the fields.

I interpreted his story as a filler, a moral contrast to adulterous Anna. (Look what St. Petersburg can do to a marriage!, Tolstoy finger-wags.) Levin, quiet and patient, suffers but is rewarded with the family he wanted. Anna feeds her impulses so she, and her family, suffer. As a writer who would leave you flat dead in a New-Testament-quote showdown, Tolstoy wields allusions to Matthew 6, the warnings that those rewarded on Earth should not expect a heavenly admission. I spoke this language of subtextual parables fluently as a Catholic school student.1

I still carry these Biblical allusions, the lessons, the poetic bangers in my back pocket, and, to my parents’ relief, I always will. That said, the Christian morality of challenged good and slippery evil is only one lens to read Tolstoy’s work.

With a better understanding of Russia and its political attempts to quell its shifting population—with a century of Westernization, Alexander II’s serf emancipation and decentralized government attempts and other constant reforms to bandage a society evolving toward individualism—I see how Levin stands on the cusp of societal collapse. Torn between Westernization and Slavophilia, between holding the archaic Russian structures while socially industrializing toward the shared humanity of peasants working his land, Levin’s lost.

In 1908, Vladimir Lenin wrote the article “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution.” The founder of the Soviet Union and, in Tolstoy’s time, intelligentsia member thought constantly about Tolstoy’s written attention to the impoverished peasantry. Though Tolstoy and Lenin would not stand on the same ideological team, Lenin appreciates how Tolstoy encapsulates the confused Russian identity:

“That Tolstoy, owing to these contradictions, could not possibly understand either the working-class movement and its role in the struggle for socialism, or the Russian revolution, goes without saying. But the contradictions in Tolstoy’s views and doctrines are not accidental; they express the contradictory conditions of Russian life in the last third of the nineteenth century.”

Two futures are available for Russia. One disappears into the past. One into the European present. The population, still under Alexander II’s autocracy, is split.

Subscribe now

At the beginning of Anna Karenina Part III, Levin hosts an unexpected, long visit from Sergey Ivanonitch, a famous author and Levin’s half-brother. Up to this point, Levin has retreated from society after Kitty refused his proposal to try her chances with Alexey Vronsky, a Russian playboy.2

Vronsky will jilt Kitty after she rejects Levin. Kitty becomes sick enough that a doctor recommends she leave the country. (Walken voice: “You have a fever, and the only cure is traveling abroad.”)

Levin doesn’t know about Kitty. He’s retreated to the country where he nurses his broken ego, a hungry newborn.

Sergey, a philosopher and still a teasing brother who sees through his brother’s emo “it’s not a phase” phase, goads Levin to talk about his decision to stop participating in the courts. Earlier in the book, Levin admitted he stopped attending because he saw the local government systems as ineffectual.

With his brother, Levin admits the frustrations that caused him to resign from the local government. Levin doesn’t see the point of funding doctors and education for the peasants. New roads don’t impact him when his horses can carry him over the existing roads. The trips to courts take days, and he has to stay at bug-ridden inns. If Bentham and Mill, one of Europe’s strongest philosophical exports, suggest self-interest is the key to a functioning society, why does Levin need to travel into town to hear boring cases or give away money for doctors and education for the peasants, not Levin, to use?

Sergey points out his brother’s contradictions with a question:

“How can you think it a matter of no importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert…”

“I never did assert it,” thought Konstantin Levin.

“…dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don’t help them because to your mind it’s of no importance.”

And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so undeveloped that you can’t see all that you can do, or you won’t sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.

Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to submit, or to confess a lack of zeal for the public good. And this mortified him and his feelings.

Sergey argues these investments in society improve life for everyone and mentions how they campaigned for the serf emancipation. How can he argue for the freedom of serfs, a Russian slavery, but not advocate for a public good for their improved quality of life? Wouldn’t an educated peasant bring more value to Levin’s own fields?

Levin responds:

“I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me…my interest, I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when they made raids on us students, and the police read our letters, I was ready to defend those rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to education and freedom. I can understand compulsory military service, which affects my children, my brothers, and myself, I am ready to deliberate on what concerns me; but deliberating on how to spend forty thousand roubles of district council money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka—I don’t understand, I can’t do it.”

Sergey responds, “But to-morrow, it’ll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited your tastes better to be friend in the old criminal tribunal?” (Part III, Chapter IV)

Both brothers know their bureaucratic nightmare of a reformed court is better than the corrupt system it overhauled.

In the next chapter, Levin escapes Sergey by joining the peasants who scythe his crops. That’s how much he does not like his brother’s company.

At first, Levin is slow and uneven in his strikes compared to the mechanical bodies of the peasants, but gradually, he improves. After enduring their light ridicule, Levin earns the peasants’ respect for working as one of them. And he admires, maybe adores, the effects of a day of physical labor. He leaves work renewed. Sergey, leisurely drinking a coffee, notes Levin’s eager mood, his increased appetite, his vocal gratitude.

As a 17-year-old discussing these sections, we discussed mindfulness, the transformation of a good effort and a cleanly finished job. Ironically, when I thought of Anna Karenina in the last decade, I thought of the peasant scenes I hated as mindful and wholesome. It was a relief to see this conclusion echoed in blue ink as a class seminar annotation. beauty & dignity in hard work, I wrote.

The labor provides Levin an escape from structure, time, institutions:

He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible…Levin lost all sense of time and could not have been told if it was late or early now (Part III, Chapter IV).

With this, he could take a needed break from thought, philosophy, ego.

Today, mindfulness is a post-pandemic dog whistle. It conjures BetterHelp seminars on coping with intrusive thoughts and efficiency hacks regimenting life’s mess. The disappearance into an auto-piloted ritual is soothing if optimized.

This experience works as an escape for Levin, the owner of these fields, if the peasants work efficiently. If every individual mindfully wandered through their own corner of the meadow, leaving uneven patches of tall grass, Levin, a capital-p Perfectionist, would have lost his mind.

Tolstoy even alludes to bliss-by-results. At the end of the day, he and the peasants completed an unprecedented amount of work:

The work done was exceptionally much for forty-two men. They had cut the whole of the big meadow, which had, in the years of serf labor, taken thirty scythes two days to mow…Levin felt a longing to get as much mowing done that day as possible, and was vexed with the sun sinking so quickly in the sky. He felt no weariness; all he wanted was to get his work done more and more quickly and as much done as possible (Part III, Chapter IV).

This cusp of collective work and increased output are the “contradictory conditions” Lenin noted of this era of Russian history. In 1872, as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital circulated Russia, Tolstoy witnessed the corpse of Anna Pirogovna at a train station and sparks the idea for his novel.

Tolstoy’s characters can smell the change coming, too. In a city apart from Levin, Vronsky’s military colleague tells Vronksy to drop the affair to prepare for a potential promotion: “Such men as you are wanted…Russia needs men; she needs a party, or else everything goes and will go to the dogs” (Part III, Chapter XXI). Something is bound to change, though no one yet can see the 1917 Revolution on the horizon.

From the fields of the Russian countryside, Levin has swallowed the pill of Western modernization and oriented his happiness around the final product. He is an optimized, perfectionist, self-oriented capitalist with a dash of communism stirred in. He has swallowed the mustard of society, and it has poisoned him.3

Subscribe now

But I find something beautiful about this passage, despite Tolstoy’s righteousness at his fictionalized self.

After his day in the field, Levin evolves. He will always have a ripe pride easily bruised, but his world expands. He changes. He has a chance to start fresh, to put his morals to work, to question whether he agrees with the stances he swallowed. Does he agree with his theoretical self-interest after joining the peasants? This lives in the next volume, after page 302.

Need a cram session on Tolstoy & Anna Karenina? Start here:

Tolstoy’s Dolly is workin’ 9-to-5 (and then 24/7)

Dolly is the unfortunate spouse to our laughable Stepan Oblonsky.

My high school classroom annotations note that, in the wake of Stepan’s discovered adultery, she is to blame for not holding it together. Tolstoy doesn’t sympathize w/ Dolly b/c she puts herself before the household > broken fabric of family.

There is no similar annotation calling out her cheating husband Oblonsky’s frivolous three-day bender, dissected in last week’s post.

By Part III, Dolly has reconciled with her husband, who “never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children,” a.k.a. nothing ever changed in his philandering and over-spending lifestyle.

Outrunning Oblonsky’s unpaid bills, Darya Alexandrovna runs her household and six children to the country house near Levin’s estate where she came as a child. She finds the estate’s livestock malnourished, the house ill-equipped, the peasants available to staff out hoeing potatoes. She returns home, hoping for relief, and she finds more work.

“Darya Alexandrovna was at first in despair,” Tolstoy writes (Part III, Chapter VII).

Unlike Levin, she doesn’t adopt all the work and dissolve into the mindfulness of milking “hard-uddered” cows. She has a servant, Marya Philimonovna, who finds servants and supplies to pull the household out of the disarray they knew in the city. Dolly’s hands stay perfectly soft.

That said, she doesn’t have time to rest, unlike our rural bachelor, Levin. “Peaceful with six children Darya Alexandrovna could not be,” Tolstoy writes. Her entire life isolated from her husband’s bachelor lifestyle is an effort. She doesn’t step in and out of her domesticity. Even with a gratitude toward her household staff, her work overwhelms her. It is her life.

Yet this section yields one of my favorite passages in the entire book:

…the children themselves were even now repaying her in small joys for her sufferings. Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but the sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.

As the oldest of six kids, I loved that when I was 17, and I love it now.

A family is work. Growing your life around other people is hard and isolating, but it produces the richest intangible feeling, a fleeting piece. There are no metrics to optimize. No additional corners to mow. It is what it is, and it changes moment to moment. The change can be pain, or it can be gold, but both are guaranteed to leave and evolve.

To me, Tolstoy bookends Levin’s transformation in the fields with Dolly’s countryside collapse because he places Levin’s physical labor as a parallel to Dolly’s domestic oversight. This is incredible in a man who had a famously tumultuous marriage.

The work doesn’t always guarantee a streak-free mind, but the change Levin and Dolly undergo when they roll up their sleeves makes them, and the people around them, better.

It makes them more empathetic and aware of people outside their household. They understand the peasants, whose lives exist in the opposite spectrum of wealth and material satisfaction. Dolly finds the peasants to be the only people in the country as her maternal equals, “so interesting to her was their conversation, so completely identical were all of their interests” (Part III, Chapter VIII). The work isn’t about the increased yields for their households. It’s about weaving their lives into the community surrounding them.

Why do we care about Levin today?

This month, I watched No Other Land at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a Sunday night audience who arrived late and gnashed popcorn.

The Academy Award-winning documentary follows residents in Palestine’s rural Masafer Yatta villages resisting Israeli displacement. It provides an inside eye to the families pushed into caves or under tarps after losing their homes.

Of the film’s four directors, two become on-screen protagonists. Masafer Yatta activist Basel Adra leads Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham through his village.

The movie is strikingly necessary. It provides specificity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the perspective of Palestinians years before the Hamas attack on October 7th. Israeli forces bulldoze homes and elementary schools built independently by Palestinians. They usurp residents’ cars, color-coordinated with yellow or green license plates to indicate a Palestinian or Israeli driver, without explanation or compensation. The Masafer Yatta residents yell at the incoming soldiers, who ignore them. They explain they have nothing left to take and no authority to protest what is taken from them.

The only jurisdiction Adra, a law student who couldn’t find work after his graduation, directs his protests is in the court of public opinion. Adra broadcasts protests to social media, though eventually the military diffuses these protests with tear gas. These protests are on-going, particularly as Hamdan Ballal, one of the film’s directors, was attacked this month by Israeli settlers and detained by Israeli military.

What struck me the most watching this film was how it brings dry textbook discussions of government-backed militaries encroaching on an Indigenous population. Every archetype from every imperialist struggle operates here: the well-intended liberal, the faceless bureaucrat, the angry population justified by state media in their hatred of the Indigenous group, the gradual exhaustion of the native hero.

The strongest moments come from the Israelis with good intentions. One journalist tells the mother of a paralyzed man, his condition a result of an Israeli soldier’s gunshot, that he could never be strong enough to endure her life. She silently receives this and cries after he leaves. When Abraham leaves Adra for dinner with his mother across the border, Adra tosses a barbed comment about Abraham, as an Israeli, being able to leave this conflict behind. Adra has to live it, every second. He can’t get a job in Israel and has no jobs in Masafer Yatta. Because of this conflict, his life is political, his activism always activated.

I, too, was in this movie. I was an invisible participant, an American funding this war and, more immediately, a Brooklyn tourist in someone else’s struggle who walks away when the lights come up.

Because of this frustration toward my inaction, I wanted to take it out on Levin. What does one day of working in the fields really do? Is he tokenizing these peasants? Stepping in for a day to feel restored while the peasants have to continue this body-breaking work, day in and day out, without education or opportunities to grow? Is this the Russian equivalent of a Magical Negro?

Son I returned to the section and re-read Levin and Dolly’s work. I saw their exhaustion. I saw, despite this, the work was worth it. I saw in Sergey’s question about “to-morrow” the poem, “First They Came” by Pastor Martin Niemöller.4

Tolstoy mocks the St. Petersburg elites who stay in the sphere of their navel-gazing. He prides the characters who step outside of their comfort and work toward something aligned with their values: of family, of equality.

Tolstoy, later in his life, stopped writing novels and gave away his land and book royalties to the peasants. He’s not there yet in the years he’s writing Anna Karenina, but he uses his writing to find a compromise in a confused Russia.

That is something that gives me hope. It’s something I can work with.

Think about land in your story/writing. What is the geography of this land?

Now, who lives there? What is the human relationship with the land? Who believes they own it? How do they interact with each other, and how do they treat the land?

Before we meet our titular Anna, the Oblonskys are the manifestation of one of the infinite variations of an unhappy family. Before assigning names to the characters, the Oblonskys are “husband” and “wife,” a set of implied and broken obligations after the the wife finds the husband was “carrying on an intrigue” with the French governess.

While the marriage hovers uncertainly, the household’s dependents are in trouble. The children don’t eat and “run wild.” The second governess writes to her friend about other jobs. The cook leaves before dinner. From the first paragraph, Tolstoy uses one member’s selfish decision to catapult a happy family into chaos.

I’m already thinking about the consequences of Stepan’s affair more than Stepan Oblonsky did. Having left the house for three days of operas and carousing, Stepan’s first waking concern is the party from his dream:

“Yes, yes, how was it now?…Now, how was it?…there were some little decanters on the table, and there were women, too,” he remembered.

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile…And noticing a gleam of light peeping in between one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remembered he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face (Part I, Chapter I).

Stepan is a man of appearances and luxuries. He loves a nice dinner, his slippers, his dressing gown. The below sentence, oriented around objects and rituals, takes place after he remembers his wife knows about his affair and before breakfast:

When his wife discovered the letters, Stepan doesn’t regret cheating on her or hurting her feelings. He regrets how he responded to her confrontation: “This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself” (Part I, Chapter I). He was more concerned with an external manifestation of how it appears, even if the condescension is true to how he feels.

And because of all this, Stepan is funny.

Why?

There’s a Austenite or Dickensian quality to Stepan. Only the reader can spot the hypocrisy Stepan uses as an operating manual. Meanwhile, Stepan considers his virtue, letting the reader into his mind, unaware of how they might snicker behind their hands.

One instance is the delicious irony of his sense of self. Stepan prefers to keep his emotions veiled, preferably with imported fabrics, yet he defines himself as internally honest:

Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct. He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife, the mother of his five living and two dead children and only a year younger than himself (Part I, Chapter II).

While he considers his figure as youthful and handsome, his wife, who is basically his age, is unattractive. Her pregnancies and her evolution as his wife to the mother of his children repulses Stepan, a joke that writes itself. His morality is so off-kilter that his honesty

Like with Dolly, Stepan is a man of appearances. He would prefer to keep up the facade of his marriage. He cringes when he wonders if the maids overhear his and Dolly’s conversations, and he resents her using the words “scoundrel” and “mistress” when they meet. Because he lives on the surface level, he can’t see a solution to the problem he caused: “But what is to be done? What’s to be done?”1

The only solution, according to Stepan Oblonsky, is to disappear:

There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself (Part I, Chapter II).

He escapes. Stepan has never faced difficulty. Despite his low grades in school, his brother-in-law lands him a prestigious job. He runs away from conflict and ignores the pain he caused his wife and the chaos he leaves behind him. To live like this, he has to choose a certain emptiness. He needs the operas and parties away from home to fill the void where he has never tested his morals.

As much as a life full of parties and dinners and silks sounds incredible, there’s a cost to Stepan’s life. The bill comes in the emptiness of his life. He doesn’t care about anything. He never has to work. His life is a shadow of what it could have if he embraced suffering, and the reader can see how Tolstoy dresses him in elegant clothes to reveal there is nothing underneath. His life only makes sense if it exists as a dream.

For Stepan’s expensive tastes in his entertainment, food, and outfits, he is a Macramé Easter egg with an ornate exterior and a hollow center.

Share

(We’ll get into Dolly, Stepan’s wife, next week as a foil to this apathetic escapist.)

Tolstoy & Tulathimutte

Rereading this made me think of Tony Tulathimutte’s short story, “Our Dope Future” fromRejection: Fiction. This short story collection profiles the fried psychology of two-dimensional trolls and how our defensive online postures alienate us in real world relationships. Everyone from Jia Tolentino to Anthony Jeselnik read this book last year, and Vulture called it “The First Great Incel Novel.”

“Our Dope Future” is written as a forum post, like a Reddit “Am I the asshole?” post with less curiosity about their role in whatever weird interaction they had. It’s told from the perspective of a tech entrepreneur commiserating about a relationship that fell apart.2

As a homeschooled only child, the narrator’s social vacuum breeds an extreme mutation of Silicon Valley productivity:

I gave her the topline: I was homeschooled, and yeah, I know homeschoolers have a reputation for being sheltered and dweeby, but I’ve made it a top priority over the years to study modern social behaviors, pop culture, and slang every bit as seriously as I studied Marcus Aurelius and JavaScript.

He litters his running monologue with slang like a tourist using Duolingo vocabulary in a new country. He understands, at face value, what words trigger certain responses without grasping the emotional weight of it.

For example, the narrator goes on a first date with Alison3 to a $200 omakase dinner: “She was from bunghole Connecticut and never even heard of omakase so I knew this was gonna be lit.” He speaks about their date the way he would discuss a tested formula. He asks her about her life and dreams. He pulls her onto his lap and says he’s never met anyone like her. He doesn’t go home with her after the first date.

Externally, to Alison, he comes off as considerate, while the narrator’s interiority shows a mechanical “if X, then Y” transactionality to his intentions. For example, when he asks about her life, he cares less about the answer than how he will use the answer:

Once Alison was all warmed up, I asked her: What are the biggest problems you face in your life? Girls always want to talk about this, plus while she’s talking it gives me time to memorize her drink order and eye color, something I’ve found makes me look totes on point when I mention it later.

His curiosity is a facade to achieve the narrator’s desired result: make her trust him. As the narrator unpacks his other moves, like reading the Wikipedia entries to her favorites books and films to feign interest or booking an expensive last-minute trip to Barcelona resulting in her losing her job, he sees his actions as noble. His idea of charity is offering her validation, even if it isn’t genuine.

Alison, unemployed and cornered, accepts the narrator’s offer to move in with him for six months with a deposit guaranteed on another apartment if it doesn’t work out: “It actually took a pretty lame amount of arm-twisting considering how generous my offer was; even after I left to take a shiznit and came back she still hadn’t made up her mind.”

Then she sees who he really is. His life is about efficiency, goals, and podcasts on 2.5x speed. His newest start-up product is SweatSeats, a La-Z-Boy combined with a gym to turn TV time into a productive gym sesh. By the time a grand finale of a monologue reveals the narrator’s vision of family and human love, the entrepreneur’s honest belief he will be hailed and validated in the comments shows his lack of connection. His goals see female reproduction as a machinable asset he needs to invest and capitalize, and he also doesn’t see what’s wrong with that.

Why do these characters end up being so funny?

Tolstoy and Tulathimutte both satirize a contemporary masculine figure to expose their selfish, vacant thoughts.

• Like Stepan Oblonsky, the start-up founder sees his romantic relationship as a utilitarian means to an end. It doesn’t matter what the woman feels about the relationship, because the man cares more about how the relationship benefits him.

  • As a character in Anna Karenina expresses, “There’s only one way of having love conveniently without its being a hindrance—that’s marriage…Yes, just as you can only carry a fardeau [burden] and do something with your hands, when the fardeau is tied on your back, and that’s marriage.” To these men, marriage is necessary for their goals, either in pursuing other women or building a family.

• Tulathimutte uses slang to show the robotic dynamic his entrepreneur has with language. He has an A.I. cadence of overusing Internet banter, which makes the entrepreneur’s human interactions alien and unnatural. He is a walking machine who hopes romantic love will dispense a healthy amount of endorphins, like his SweatSeats or meal replacement shakes.

• Similarly, Tolstoy places Stepan Oblonksy in luxury to contrast his barren moral landscape. In the privacy of his room, applying scent and orienting his many accessories, he ignores the disarray in the house. Wherever he stands, he can ignore troubles to produce the world he wants, even if that means never engaging with his family.

• Kerneled in both souls is a willful ignorance. They don’t see how their lifestyles shield them from life’s greatest abstracts. Despite their feigned appearances as knowledgable men of progress, they would rather live an empty life than surrender any piece of it to someone else’s desires. Centuries apart, the emotional shielding stays the same.

The 6.1 Writing Prompt

Read more

After losing both of his parents before he turns 10, he holds onto his brothers and dreams about an idyllic family life. When he marries and has 13 children, he considers sex and lust as sinful and marriage as an institutionalized form of prostitute, according to The Kreutzer Sonata, though, decades earlier as a young man, he contracted STDs and impregnated a peasant woman with an illegitimate son on his estate.

These contradictory cycles of extremes—sexuality and abstinence, overwork and sloth—follow Tolstoy from his childhood to his years at the University of Kazan. He crafts an improvement plan of intense exercise and moral studies. He actively documents his views on morality with quotes from Dickens, Shakespeare, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He also privately lashes, or whips, his body. Then, to the other end, he gambles and visits brothels. He moves back and forth between two polarities throughout his life, often fixated on whatever he doesn’t have.

So he’s a man of ideas and contradictory actions. He’s comfortable living in the idealistic philsosophy and psychology, which made him a great observer of human motivation. As Encyclopedia Britannica writes, “Those who visited Tolstoy as an old man also reported feelings of great discomfort when he appeared to understand their unspoken thoughts.”

Anna Karenina is his thesis on this preservation of the family idyll by exposing its corruption. Konstantin Levin and his love interest, Kitty Scherbatsky, are based in his courtship and marriage of him and his wife, Sophia Behrs. (Sometimes, she is also referred to as Sonya as a diminutive of Sophia.)

In this period, when Tolstoy writes Anna Karenina following War and Peace, is the last peaceful moments of his marriage. He and Sophia married in 1862, Tolstoy is 34 and Sophia is 18. They marry “after much indecision,” according to Amy Mandelker’s notes. Tolstoy was friends with Sophia’s mother (only two years his senior), and he knew Sophia and her two sisters. He pursued all three of them before he married Sophia, the youngest. (“He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love with one of the sisters, only he could not quite make out which,” Levin thinks of Kitty and her sisters in Part I, Chapter VI of Anna Karenina.)

During their 48-year marriage, Sophia is pregnant 16 times. She delivers 13 children, and eight survive to adulthood. The other child, the most important and volatile, is her husband. NPR quoted Sophia’s diaries, where she wrote, “For a genius one has to create a peaceful, cheerful, comfortable home. Must have his works copied out innumerable times, must be loved and spared all cause for jealousy so that he can be calm.”

She handwrote everything Tolstoy wrote and acted as his editor. She corrected misspellings and grammar issues, but she also assisted with negotiating his contracts and advising on the content. She was the one who suggested War and Peace be published in one edition without serialization to maintain the sweep of the world’s sweeping scope. And she wrote, by hand, seven drafts of his 1300-page tome.

For Tolstoy, writing Anna Karenina was one of the most difficult periods of his life. In 1875, three deaths in the midst of Anna Karenina’s success brought him to suicidal ideation. He lost a baby son and a prematurely born daughter. His aunt Tatiana, who raised him and sponsored his education as a mother figure, died. He gave up hunting, one of his favorite pasttimes, because he didn’t trust himself around a gun.

When he turns to Sophia with his dark interiority, she doesn’t understand. Tolstoy turns to philosophical and religious texts for reassurance, beginning his venture away from fiction and toward a Christian revival.

For Sophia, her marriage sours with this turn to Christianity. In 1883, an aristocratic fan, Vladimir Chertkov, usurps Sophia’s role as Tolstoy’s trusted adviser. In 1889, he writes The Kreutzer Sonata, a book about the stream of consciousness of a man who murdered his wife and views the lust of a marriage as the ultimate evil. Though the book is never published, it’s read at social gatherings, sometimes by Tolstoy. Then, by 1891, Tolstoy secretly gives away his property and signs away the rights to his literature, which Sophia believed jeopardized their children’s future wealth. The cracks in their marriage become public, and people pity Sophia. Their marriage never recovers.

When Tolstoy, on October 28, 1910, senses Sophia digging around in his study, presumably to check Tolstoy’s will, he disappears in the middle of the night with his youngest daughter and doctor. They book a train ticket without a destination. When he contracts pneumonia and has to rest at a station master’s house in Astapovo, he refuses to let Sophia to his deathbed. The below photograph shows Countess Sophia Tolstaya peering through a window to glimpse her husband before he dies.

For this context, Anna Karenina is fascinating. It freezes the happiness in this marriage before Tolstoy’s ideas corrupt it. As an orphan, marriage and family is the primary curiosity of Tolstoy’s life, but the reality varied from the description.

Tolstoy’s timeline

1828: He’s born on the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana. (Today, it is approximately a 4-hour bus outside of Moscow, settled in the country.)

1830: His mother dies.

1837: His family moves to Moscow, then his father dies.

Read more

Set in 1829, Eliot wrote Middlemarch as a historical fiction, a glance back thirty years in the past to the anticipation of England’s First Reform Bill. Centuries later, this novel feels timeless and acutely prescient for the twenty-first century.

In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 1800s, the authors of this century grapple with the idea of an individual’s promise in an industrializing and expanding world. Jane Austen’s Persuasion showed how Waterloo admirals disrupted the long-standing class structure based on land ownership. Napoleon came to represent the power of the individual in the furthest, global extreme. Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities warns against mob mentality and advocates for individual morality to defy a blind compliance to dangerous systems. In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky names Napoleon as the example of the individual granted utilitarian impunity for murder and questions who and how we measure this moral license to kill. Across these novels graduating from 1817 to the 1860s, international authors wonder what the role each person has in a changing society undergoing change to step away from a single leader to a more democratic world.

George Eliot uses the fictional town of Middlemarch to represent the ordinary. Following three young couples’ marriages and ambitions, she uses a loving third-person narrator to sneak into the darkest moments of these marriages and their failed attempts to stand apart from their neighbors. As if in response to Rodion Raskolnikov in St. Petersburg, Middlemarch’s narrator brings history’s victors, the “Shining Ones,” back to earth by reminding us of how people who knew the Napoleons in their time would describe them:

Each of these Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbours who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course toward final companionship with the immortals (Chapter 15).

This is a book about failed potential. It’s delicious. It’s empathetic. It’s timeless. Each husband and wife begin their marriage with individual ideas for how their life will achieve domestic ease and professional acclaim, only to project their shortcomings on their partner.

Couple #1: Dr. Tertius Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy

These two copyrighted “messy” in a marriage. Skip this season of Love Is Blind and buckle in for the Lydgate marriage instead, and I promise you won’t be disappointed in the drama.

Tertius Lydgate is an outside doctor hired to take over a retired doctor’s practice. He dreams of making a medical discovery in provincial England that will earn him a spot in the textbooks. Though mostly a stoic man, he is also a love bomber. In France, he quasi-stalked an actress who accidentally stabbed her costar/lover on stage. Convinced of her innocence, he followed her social exile to rural France and proposed. He only leaves when she says, insistent, “I did not plan: it came to me in the play—I meant to do it” (Chapter 15).

He’s more intellectually than emotionally intelligent. He often puts his foot in his mouth. To a table of Middlemarch establishment doctors and players, whose lives revolve around knowing everyone’s business and reputation to make decisions, he says, “Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and put them out of the question” (Chapter 16). The men, including Mr. Vincy, go back to their card game like, good luck, bud.

Now, the Regina George of Middlemarch, Rosamund Vincy, wants his attention. She’s the girl who resents her hometown and the people in it but will never leave because she likes the superiority complex. Rosamund has turned down every suitor in Middlemarch because they’re too boring. Lydgate is new blood, and he has a distant connection to a count, though this noble connection offers no financial assistance for Lydgate’s impoverished lifestyle. (Lydgate has little money and survives on anatomy textbooks alone.) She hits Lydgate with the charm offensive. He’s smitten, which, as we remember from his time in France, is dangerous to his limited sense of judgment.

Though they love each other at the start of the relationship, their joined life spirals quickly. Rosamund, who imagined a life of lavish nobility, spends more money than God. Lydgate signs off on embroidered handkerchiefs and horses and silver platters, though he can’t afford it, because he’s obsessed with making her happy.

Rosamund also has a queen complex and does irrational things with the attitude of, I want to so I will. Like, riding a horse with Lydgate’s cousin while pregnant when Lydgate says, please don’t you’ll get hurt, I am a doctor by the way. Or, reaching out to Lydgate’s rich uncle asking for more money to cover the debts she incurred so they can stay in their house that is twice as expensive as Lydgate’s salary. When Lydgate tries to have a conversation with her, saying…hey, please stop doing that…she weeps, he consoles her, and the cycle repeats.

Lydgate isn’t a martyr. He’s upset that his wife has any desires that conflict or complicate his. He wanted submission, a woman to support his professional gains, but he’s chosen one of the most stubborn-willed people in Middlemarch:

Between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other’s mental track, which is too evidently possible even between persons who are continually thinking of each other. To Lydgate it seemed that he had been spending month after month in sacrificing more than half of his best intent and best power to his tenderness for Rosamund…But his endurance was mingled with a self-discontent, which, if we know how to be candid, we shall confess to make more than half our bitterness under grievances, wife or husband included (Chapter 58).

His resentment at her stubbornness and lack of interest in his scientific pursuits builds. Lydgate calls Rosamund a basil plant, because “basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains” (Epilogue). A great line, but brutal to use on anyone. Particularly, you know, your spouse.

Lydgate’s marriage siphons his medical discovery, while Lydgate’s despair and poor judge of character—platonically as well as romantically—entangle him in town drama, estranging him from the booming practice he wanted. Their relationship is at the furthest extreme of people doomed, desperate to maintain their individual desires within a partnership.

Couple #2: Mr. Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke Casaubon

I talked about Dorothea Brooke and her obsession with the old reverend Mr. Casaubon in my post about the first half of Middlemarch, so we covered how Dorothea’s vision of marriage is a paternal kinship of shared knowledge. To recap: she’s orphaned and raised by her daft and flimsy-opined uncle Mr. Brooke, and she’s passionate about renovating the homes on Mr. Brooke’s estate to improve their tenants’ living conditions. She has a martyr complex and wants to change the world for the better, often through the religious example of subverting her wants for the greater good.

When they travel to Rome for their honeymoon, all the warnings about Mr. Casaubon as an old, stubborn, boring scholar prove true. The scales are wiped from Dorothea’s eyes. When she talks, her husband doesn’t engage with her. She realizes this man whose life goal is a library of an uncompleted manuscript will never listen to her opinions. Dorothea, as Mrs. Casaubon, dictates and reads aloud, her life purpose defined by her husband’s goals. Mr. Casaubon and Lydgate overlap in these professional ambitions minimizing their wives as tools to their ends.

Dorothea bites her tongue and tries to be the Good Wife, and this makes them also “miss each other’s mental track,” like the Lydgates. Mr. Casaubon, a reclusive and rich man, silently despairs at her discontent:

There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him…His discontent passed vapourlike through all her gentle loving manifestations… (Chapter 42).

But this unsettled discontent also makes him jealous of his younger cousin, Will Ladislaw. Will is Dorothea’s peer and a nomadic artist of lost purpose. When Will visits, Mr. Casaubon projects his insecurities onto Dorothea, making her pay for an infidelity she doesn’t commit and battling their marriage’s issues in silent isolation.

Without spoiling how Dorothea’s marriage plays out, I want to highlight how young Dorothea ages out of her idealism of a new life beginning in marriage and grieves her poor decision to ignore others’ warnings and choose a bad husband. She confesses,

“Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that–I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up,” she ended, smiling playfully (517).

Dorothea fell for the fallacy of the exceptionalism. As an idealistic youth, she pictured she could form her life into whatever shape she wanted. After she marries, she sees the realistic, nuanced version of marriage each couple faces and accepts her headstrong determination also placed her in this unhappy marriage.

Couple #3: Fred Vincy and Mary Garth

Fred Vincy comes from the same spoiled family tree as Rosamund. His father paid for his education to become a gentleman and enter the clergy, a lucrative position, but he gambles his money on horses. He has one of the most iconic entrances in the novel:

He wakes up late and demands a grilled bone for breakfast (I’m imagining a fat porterhouse steak). Then harasses his sister while his mom giggles.

Mary Garth, his oldest friend and quiet crush, is the moral answer. Unlike the blonde angels of Dickens and Dostoevsky, Mary is plain-faced and poor. She works as a house servant for Mr. Featherstone, a cruel curmudgeon who uses Mary as his punching bag. Most people, particularly Fred’s mom Mrs. Vincy, dismiss her.

But Mary doesn’t rely on their reassurance:

Yet she liked her thoughts: a vigorous young mind not overbalanced by passion, finds a good in making acquaintance with life, and watches its own powers with interest. Mary had plenty of merriment within (Chapter 33).

A large reason for her secure identity is her parents’ values. As the lowest-earning family in our Middlemarch ensemble, they offer an oasis of harmony. Unlike the Vincys, the Garths stand by each other. Mr. and Mrs. Garth are the only equal partners. They tease each other’s stubborn beliefs, talk together about their family and decisions, and stand by each other when one makes a decision the other doesn’t like. About marriage, Mr. Garth warns Mary,

“...what it must be for a wife when she’s never sure of her husband, when he hasn’t got a principle in him to make him more afraid of doing the wrong thing by others than of getting his own toes pinched. That’s the long and the short of it, Mary. Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear…” (Chapter 25).

All this to say: Fred is a spoiled boy who doesn’t have a sense of consequences, and he wants to marry Mary. Who wouldn’t in a town where the men expect the woman to frontload the emotional work of reforming them? But the more interesting thing is Mary, when she has the chance to be with someone who matches her values, still finds interest in Fred. She sees the danger of his gambling and unmoored sense of purpose and still finds, in her long-standing love for him, she wants to see how his story ends.

In the end? Everyone is ordinary.

None of these characters, whether their marriages work or not, move onto idealized greatness. Some of them forsake it. Some spend their lives chasing it. Few are remembered.

But that doesn’t mean their lives are inconsequential.

This final line of the novel acts as the antithesis of the Napoleon complex—not the one about being short, but the one about forging a global impact in a lifetime.

…for the growing good of the world is partly depending on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully in a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs (Epilogue).

All of our lives are inherently valuable. If no one remembers our names in a century from now, our participation in today forges an unintentional legacy. Instead of carving out a path for a future we can’t see, Middlemarch offers a timeless reminder that our greatest impact can exist in the smallest interactions with the people we love and the neighborhood where we live.

My favorite Middlemarch lines

• We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts–not to hurt others (57).

• If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial (116).

• Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of nations, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite (157).

• I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding benign given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect (265).

• To ask her to be less simple and direct would be like breathing on the crystal that you want to see the light through (352).

• …prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle–solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness (413).

• “To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!” (644)

A playlist of additional reads and watches

• If you like the optimistic side of couples working out their issues, watch Couples Therapy (Paramount+) or Ester Perel’s podcast

• If you’re a relationship sadist, check out the Oscar Isaac/Jessica Chastain’s Scenes of a Marriage (Max) or Noah Bambauch’s Marriage Story (Netflix)

• If you like huge British ensembles on equally huge estates, watch Downton Abbey (BritBox)

• Or if you like realistic and flawed lovers who are their own biggest obstacle, read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

A Middlemarch writing prompt (for paid subscribers)

Read more

You would retain a mental inventory of the pages, an instantaneous memory of every line and plot point, a photographic knowledge of page numbers in a second.

An adjacent hypothetical is, if you could maintain perfect nutrition with a once-daily IV drip, would you?

Sure, it would be nice to offload the mental bandwidth of plotting meals, but what about wandering through grocery stores? Catching up with a friend over a shared plate of chicken biriyani? Eating a pint of Häagen-Dazs dulce de leche ice cream on the couch, even though it tips your daily nutrition into an unhealthy territory?

Share

If I downloaded 1,000 books into my mind, I wouldn’t have the emotional experience of discovering a new necklace of words, pearled together in a sentence. I’m a tactile reader, meaning I crisp physical pages, creasing and cracking the page down to the spine. Life is short, and great books can change lives. I would rather take it slow and fall in love than force a mutual respect. How can I know what I liked about the book if my gut never had the chance to speak up while I read it?

Because this schedule has burned me against a potential great pairing. Middlemarch and I could have been great pals. Eliot’s stunning prose on blunt voyeurism of small-town gossip and doomed marriages is a timeless trifecta. She mixes the psychological and domestic, a Russian Austenite Frankenstein, a culmination of everything I liked in the 19th century novels I’m learning to love!

Instead of unpacking how she stacked her ensembles and set characters across from each other with ulterior motives, I’m cursing every new character to cross the page. (“Oh, great, another tertiary character with a gambling problem!”)

This could have been a book I really loved if I had enjoyed it on a slow, provincial pace—as Eliot intended.

Instead, I tried to download it at a 21st century pace. The issue wasn’t with the book but my impatience at my imposed deadline.

Unlike my cooking self-taught series, my relationship with reading predates my conscious thoughts. When I taught myself to cook, things had the chance to fail, because I had no idea what I’m doing.

Those failures were fun. I never successfully baked croissants or soufflés. And don’t get me started on the existential crisis of de-bearding mussels and butterflying fish.

When I announced this project at the end of last year and found strangers, for the first time, excited about an idea of mine, I felt the pressure to keep up with the plan.

As the resentful, misdirected anger latched onto whatever book I held, I flashed back to being a high school student, gobbling chapters flavorlessly for minimal comprehension retention.

As an adult, I’ve learned my reading style enough to know I need balance to preserve the joyful sense of discovery in these books.

So without further ado! Here’s the improved expectations for self-taught:

I will cover all my original titles on this list in the same chronological order, but the timeline is out the window. If it takes me six months to re-read Anna Karenina, then I will be able to relay what sparked a gut reaction that week. It may be a paragraph, or a chapter, or a single character’s arc. I can have the bandwidth to explore supplementary materials: craft interviews, academic journals. ….Or not. Which leads to the next point.

I will write whatever interests me. Maybe one week I dissect one of the books on our self-taught list, and another, I’m chasing a question itching my curiosity. In the past, this has led me to write about what movie releases to track coming out of international film festivals. Or why Anora is a body comedy. Or why romantasy buyers are a market-shifting demographic. Or how to get into poetry. I’ve stifled current curiosities, and it stiffens my writing to be obligatory and academic instead of earnest and excited.

I will send out posts on Sundays. For my paid subscribers, you will have all the same perks. When I start one of the books from the self-taught list, I will send out a lesson on the author and historical context the Thursday before the first Sunday post. Writing prompts will move out of the chat to the bottom of Sunday posts behind a paywall.

Slowing down this process will make the central questions—What can we learn from this book as readers and writers? What makes this book unforgettable?—easier to answer week over week. I’m excited to have you all at the table.

Catch up with the first 5 (!) novels on self-taught:

When I’m reading Middlemarch about a teenager who enthusiastically marries a cantankerous old man hoping he will educate her, it triggers something for me.

This education will be the beginning of her life, she thinks. Only through marriage can her life start.

Surprise! It’s a terrible mistake.

The Casaubons are a couple’s therapist’s wet dream of miscommunicated feelings.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published in eight parts from 1871 to 1872, is set in provincial 1829 Middlemarch county. Dorothea Brooke is an orphan of landowning gentry who, as a teenager, believes her education and life will begin with her husband. Despite the warnings from her family and friends, she rashly marries Mr. Casaubon, a grey and dull scholar twiddling away on an unpublished tome. She sees no red flags in his reclusive nature or life-long bachelorhood.

This 800-page novel roams from estate to estate, dipping into other families’ messes. And it gets juicy out there in Middlemarch. Gambling debts. A rich curmudgeon who lords his will over his family, particularly over his nephew Fred (who, you could guess, has gambling debts). A doctor whose medical knowledge exceeds his social tact. A library’s worth of conversational literary allusions. A rector’s wife from high birth haggling for poultry.

The narrator, an unnamed and omnipresent “I”, defends each character’s flaws. “Wouldn’t we also be upset in their position? Shouldn’t we spare judging them too harshly?” the narrator coos, as the characters walk into the glass doors of their thoughts.

Share

After reading several novels featuring blond, blue-eyed women as stoic angels descending with opportunities for males to uplift and redeem their pasts, my jaw dropped at Middlemarch’s first chapter.

Though the Brookes are rich-rich, Dorothea and her sister Celia dress like Puritans. They are borderline cosplaying poor. Dorothea’s religious beliefs suggest they should dress hyper-modestly, and Celia, as the younger sister, has to go with it.

Celia nervously broaches the jewelry they inherited from their mother. She’s nervous Dorothea will lash out at her for deviating from their humble dress code. She doesn’t, and they oogle the gemstones together. While Celia picks what she wants, Dorothea withholds from choosing anything for herself: “Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”

Celia, with her silence, says, “That feels like a trap, and I’m not getting into that.”

But Dorothea is only mortal, and she spots an emerald ring. The sun comes through the window, drawing out the gem’s pure green. Dorothea decides she will keep this ring, and that’s it. Celia, relieved her sister condones the jewelry, flies too close to the sun.

“Shall you wear them in company?” said Celia, who was watching her with real curiosity as to what she would do.

“Perhaps,” she said, rather haughtily. “I cannot tell to what level I may sink.”

It’s this type of condescension Celia suffers. Dorothea oscillates in extremes. She operates out of a sense of goodness, but she can also be righteous. Celia, flushed and mad, leaves to ruminate on her sister’s inconsistency. One second she likes the jewelry, the next she implies it makes us gaudy.

Dorothea calls to Celia from another room to look at something together.

As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her sister’s arm caressingly. Celia understood the action. Dorothea saw that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her. Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?1

Instead of apologizing, there’s a silence patching of the tension.

This shook me.

“feels like it’s really written by a woman,” I wrote in the margins.

I wondered if Eliot applied an Austen technique: presenting the older, flawed sister before offering the reader the younger, noble protagonist, seen with the Elliott sisters’ introduction in Persuasion.

Not at all. Here, that inconsistent older sister is our protagonist, and we follow her from one ill-judged decision to the next. Her religious fanaticism holds her hostage to ideals of martyrdom. Before her marriage, she speaks every opinion she has, including new renovation plans for updated tenant houses on her uncle’s estate. “It is not a sin to make yourself poor in performing experiments for the good of all,” she says to her uncle, Mr. Brooke; her withered crush, Mr. Casaubon; and another suitor, the handsome and age-appropriate Sir James Chattam.

“Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, smiling to Mr. Casaubon.2

These passing comments undercut the truth of her statements. Often, these older male characters understand less than the younger generation coming behind them, especially in the wake of the oncoming Reform Bill.

After Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon marry, she silences her opinions out of deferential awe to her learned (but unpublished) scholar. On her honeymoon to Rome, with her humiliation she doesn’t feel or understand the art the way others with better education do, she weeps in a room alone. She knew who she married, but she expected after their marriage a different understanding of each other, an intimacy to allow them to grow as intellectuals:

She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered high-roads: and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been.3

In the margins here, I wrote, “reminds me of the tattoo nightmares.”

There’s the hope that this could be a burgeoning favorite. The nameless narrator drops bars:

• “He was made of that excellent human dough” (Chapter 2): I just love that line.

• “It seemed as if something like the reflection of a white sunlit wing had passed across her features, ending in one of her rare blushes” (Chapter 5)

• “With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near into the form that suited it, how could Mrs. Cadwallader feel that the Miss Brookes and their matrimonial prospects were alien to her?” (Chapter 7) Active as phosphorus! I have a very limited chemical knowledge, and I still dig it!

• “Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others” (Chapter 7)

Eliot’s narrator cuts through with wisdom and sympathy as her characters muddle their intentions in their thoughts. She writes beautifully, particularly when she pulls motifs from nature and light. And when you’re not hit with a block of text to test any 20-20 vision, the dialogue has a nice banter.

She knows and loves her characters, and she has dozens. I used the inside of my back cover to keep track of who is connected to whom. For every flaw, they have a strength. For every hopeless case, there’s a gentle guiding light to lead the misled back to safety.

This isn’t a book meant for fast consumption. This isn’t the Big Mac, it’s a filet, and you will choke from eating it too fast. Plus, why did you pay for a filet if you’re not going to enjoy it?

Subscribe now

I have Middlemarch fatigue. My brain flutters from the pages to tertiary thoughts about chores or things I forgot to text someone. Suddenly, I’m scrolling Substack’s feed like it’s not Instagram.

On top of that, because the pages are so dense and take longer to read, it has eaten up all the time in my life.

Planning anything social? A walk, a dinner, a movie, a gym workout? Your life on keeping up with Middlemarch is wrecked. I spent my Friday and Saturday nights reading Middlemarch and it still fell behind the benchmark I needed to hit.

With the pressure to do what I want while also keeping up with a schedule I’ve enforced for myself, I have ruined something I think I would love. That schoolish taste of resentment at reading something huge with a looming deadline sits in my mouth.

But George Eliot didn’t want me to read it this way. She published her novel in eight parts every two months! In fact, Eliot would love to hear about a reader who, against her better insight, dug her feet into a project that might make her life harder. It might seem oddly familiar…

Hey! Who put this glass door here?!

Catch up on biographies & reflections from the other “self-taught” novels:

• An excessive amount of minor name changes

• “Strauss-sickness” and its ability to change lives

• The saucy radical bastards of G.H. Lewes

• A final lap into Cougar town before she passes

• And also, Middlemarch, we’ll talk about the context of Middlemarch

George Eliot is Mary Anne Evans, who changes her name to Marian Evans, then later takes on the nicknames of “Mrs. Lewes” and “Madonna” in her common law marriage. All of this before she ever decides to write a fictional anything that would require a pen name. She dies as Marian Cross.

Virginia Woolf in a 1919 essay on Eliot’s writing brought her books out of the obligatory school curricula where they had withered out. (Hauling the 800-page tome of Middlemarch in my shoulder bag, I think of my classmates who returned, bronzed and fatigued, with the fat, fat Anna Karenina paperbacks, full of summer annotations. My female peers and I lived on the edge of an administrative coup. Middlemarch would have been damned before we cracked the spine to the introduction.) Woolf writes of Eliot,

“Those who fall foul of George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the whole sisterhood you would leave a much smaller and a much inferior world, albeit a world of greater artistic perfection and far superior jollity and comfort. In accounting for her failure, in so far as it was a failure, one recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven, and that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself with a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For long she preferred not to think of herself at all.”

Who is Mary Anne/Marian/George?

Mary Anne grew up with a father who had a home but on his employer’s estate, separating her from the land-owning gentry. She attended Mrs. Wallington’s School at Nuneaton from 1828 to 1832 when she was approximately 8 to 12 years old. She later moved to a Baptist school in Coventry from 1832 to 1835. Both of these schools instilled a religious zeal in young Mary Anne, a fervent Christian devotion.

She returned home to continue her education after her mother died in 1835. Then she removes the “e” from Anne to become Mary Ann.

To my very preliminary research, there is a gap here in the Evans family life. The names of her parents and siblings disappear from her biographies. She had at least one brother. Woolf gives the biggest clue, hinting that Mary Ann’s becoming “a bluestocking,” or a literary and educated woman, disgusted her nameless brother.
This review of Clare Carlisle’s book The Marriage Question about George Eliot’s marriages references siblings, plural.

Though Mary Ann, as Marian in her adult years, turns over the material from her childhood, her family never comes through in the pages of her history, especially compared to her marriages and literary connections she makes in London. If you got the tea, let me know.

So there’s this weird six-year gap, then by 1841, Mary Ann lives with her father in Coventry. There, she meets Charles Bray, who becomes her door to the world outside her small province. He also introduces her to radical ideas that turn her against religion and, consequently, against her father.

Read more

While reading about 19^th century St. Petersburg, where nobles sweat their clothes yellow and peasants drink away their lives, I’m in a palatial house situated for sixteen with a shed sauna-gym and an outdoor hot tub.

My hate-appreciate relationship with skiing has taken five years and a decent amount of spite and tears. But at the end of the trip, when the group chat sends the Airbnb listing for next year, I ogle the saturated photos of the lofted rooms, A-line windows, and honey-colored wood on the basement walls.

That house for sixteen would be a really nice place to be alone, I think.

Poof. I throw a heart on the message. I’m signed up. I daydream about a nonexistent, book-heavy vacation for six months.

When people warn about the ski pass prices rising, I think, Hmm? Oh. OH. That. The ski part of the ski trip. I hold the daydream alive, imagine the house emptied of skiers on the mountain, my only company the books packed in my back-breaking carry-on pack.

Then I get there, last room pick with three other roommates without accessible outlets to charge our phones. It stands next to a basement bathroom with a revolving door of fan-heavy frequents. My delusions about a cozy cabin retreat fade. I remember how I bought lift tickets. I packed snow pants and googles, purchased on previous trips like this. I come back to reality. My anxiety about my novice skiing in a group of fearless black-diamond shredders, plus the small list of body parts that go “pop!” on bad turns, leaves me short-breathed on the first ski lift of the day. (I rent bright-colored jackets, so if I fall and am left in the snow, my friends can spot me like a flag in the moon.)

When we finally come back to the house, where I can escape to my shared room for an hour to read a book or nap if I wanted, I betray myself. I can’t relax. I assign myself chores. I offer to help and order pizza and set up a dinner reservation in town for later in the week. My individual reputation within the group is contingent on my ability to contribute to the communal harmony. Or so I tell myself. I don’t want to be that girl reading her book while other people (usually the other girls) clean up the kitchen.

As removed as I am from Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, and as much as he would resent my bourgeoise winter sports trip, I loved how present Crime and Punishment feels 200 years later. In short, Crime and Punishment follows a fallen student in St. Petersburg fantasizes about committing murder to promote his career prospects and save his widowed mother and unmarried sister, but he loses his rationale then his mind as police and family and friends and strangers weave through his life to challenge his perspective. The novel’s questions about utilitarian ambition, redemptive religion, and individuality are as prescient today in America as they were when Dostoevsky wrote this in 1866.

Coincidentally, these timeless questions also had an urgency for a Western contemporary: Charles Dickens.

Want to catch up on Dickens & Dostoevsky? Join the discussion here:

D&D: brothers from other motherlands

If you picked up A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Crime and Punishment (1866) at the library and skimmed their printed summaries, these books would feel vastly different. While Dostoevsky, a Russian nationalist released from his Siberian imprisonment, wrote this novel about his contemporary St. Petersburg and a growing interest in nobles committing low-grade murders, Charles Dickens wrote historical fiction about Britain and France during the French Revolution. Their characters live a century apart in opposing cultures, but Dickens and Dostoevsky use the same literary tools.

Mobs, corruption, and justice

• Dickens hates institutionalized corruption and selfishness. He hates both Monsieur the Marquis, who runs over a peasant child without remorse, and Tellson’s Bank, the British financial institution stubborn against change and motivated by profit.

• On the other end of the spectrum, Dickens resents the peasant’s rebellion, comparing it to a sea and a mad dance. Madame Defarge doesn’t recognize her bloodlust as hypocritical to her revolutionary ideals of Fraternity and Liberty, and her ruthlessness has fatal rebounds. If he doesn’t like the new or old guard in France, we have to find other characters in the novel to point to Dickens’ proposed model for change.

• Like Dickens, Dostoevsky resents wealthy individuals who assume their wealth grants them impunity, like Pyotr Petrovitch Lushkin and Arkady Ivanovitch Svigrigaïlov. Simultaneously, he doesn’t love how peasants, typically drunk, can clump into a group and encourage chaos. Our protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov dreams of a memory from his childhood. Drunken peasants beat an old horse to death, assessing it as an asset and not a living creature. As the social structure democratizes ownership with the 1861 freedom of the serfs, it brings an infection of capitalist instinct to prioritize the outcome above the harm it causes:

“‘Don’t meddle! It’s my property, I’ll do what I choose. Get in, more of you! Get in, all of you! I will have her go at a gallop!...’

All at once laughter broke into a roar and covered everything: the mare, roused by the shower of blows, began feebly kicking…

[Rodion] ran beside the mare, ran in front of her, saw her being whipped across the eyes, right in the eyes! He was crying, he felt choking, his tears were streaming” (51).

• Dostoevsky also dislikes taverns, where he often places the poor and poorly-intended. Sydney Carton’s drinking with Mr. Stryver marks his altered character, the largest obstacle between his despair and his potential. When Rodion meets Marmeladov in the tavern, he drinks beer for the first time, opening a gateway to his darker temptations:

“Till that moment he had never been into a tavern, but now he felt giddy and was tormented by a burning thirst…He sat down at a sticky little table in the dark and dirty corner; ordered some beer, and eagerly drank off the first glassful. At once he felt easier; and his thoughts became clear” (7).

• The same way drinking represents a loss of control in thoughts and actions, represented by the impoverished peasants as a cheap escape, Dostoevsky also resents the idealized philosophy of the intelligentsia. When describing the intelligentsia thinker Andrey Semyonovitch, Dostoevsky mocks their adherence to ideals to the point of blindness:

“Andrey Semyonovitch was an anaemic, scrofulous little man…He was a clerk and had almost always something wrong with his eyes…[He] really was rather stupid; he attached himself to the cause of progress and ‘our younger generation’ from enthusiasm. He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarise it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely” (314).

• While the intelligentsia wants to shake up society, like Dickens’ revolutionary mobs, Dostoevsky mocks both the expanding peasantry and freed serfs as well as the educated intellectuals’ utopian arguments. While Rodion’s thought experiment on teh extraordinary Napoleons aligns him with the “younger generation” of thinkers, he doesn’t grant any character permission to commit violence without consequence. Like Monsieur the Marquis, our St. Petersburg ensemble cannot escape the moral consequences of their actions.

Subscribe now

Eyes are the window to your mental illness

• Maybe it’s a more common trait in 19th century literature generally, but both Dickens and Dostoevsky obsess with the descriptions of their characters’ eyes. They indicate emotions and intentions: a squint of skepticism, a hollow smile disconnected from the sinister look. Blue eyes, like Sonia’s, are angelic. Black eyes suggest a primal takeover. With direct eye contact, Rodion communicates a confession to Razmihin and Sonia saying a word. Dounia’s eyes “flashed like fire” as she holds a revolver, seconds before she fires a revolver (427).

• This also reflects a capital-R Romantic trend of the mental duress manifesting physical symptoms. In Crime and Punishment, a fever overtakes Rodion, leaving him faint and fragile and weak before and after his act.

“So he tortured himself, fretting himself with such questions, and finding a kind of enjoyment in it. And yet all these questions were not new ones suddenly confronting him, they were old familiar aches. It was long since they had first begun to grip and rend his heart” (40).

By the next chapter:

“His nervous shudder had passed into a fever that made him feel shivering; in spite of the heat he felt cold”(47).

• The “consumptive” Katerina Ivanova’s tuberculosis leaves her hacking up blood into handkerchiefs while she scrubs sheets, afraid of the contaminating dirt of their poverty on her gentry dowry sheets. Her reluctance to accept her life pushes her to a madness that consumes her as her sickness progresses (not unlike Catherine Earnshaw).

“I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE”

Both authors motif Christianity and its constant hope for forgiveness and its justification for the suffering caused society’s intense disorder. This falls into three camps: the fresh slate of redemption, female characters as angels, and suffering as transformation.

• Redemption

  • Sydney Carton believes he can’t be saved, that his life is wasted, no matter how many characters tell him he can make a change (Lucie, Charles Darnay, Jerry Lorvis).

  • Originally, Rodion Raskolnikov believes that the only way for him to be forgiven is to be infallible. If he is granted the immunity reserved for the extraordinary Napoleons of the world, then he will never have to face consequences of his actions:

“‘Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their eyes. He who despises most things will be a law-giver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right!” (359)

• Female angelic counterparts that call men to their higher powers

  • A Tale of Two Cities’ Lucie is the flawless female. She never has a cruel word. She stands outside the prison daily while Charles Darnay is locked away. She isn’t, at any point, mad at Charles for dragging all of them into revolutionary France or for, let’s say, lying about his history as the heir of French nobility. Despite one of her children dying, she is as resolute and consistent as ever. The only place in the world that makes sense for her is at the side of her father or husband. Her care provides an antidote to their mental destruction. In return, she receives the love and affection and loyalty of everyone in her perimeter.

  • Sonia, also blonde and blue-eyed, has a bit of a messier past. She’s a pubescent prostitute, sent into the streets to earn money for her consumptive mother-in-law and three step-siblings. This gives her a little more flavor, a personal aversion rooting her in the filth of St. Petersburg instead placing her untouched above it. Her father is an alcoholic who loves his family but destroys the family’s chances at improving their lives over and over. So Sonia is not Suffering’s fool.

    • When Sonia introduces her fervent Christianity, her memorized verses in the New Testament about Lazarus, she needs the goodness and forgiveness of a Christian god to give her hope that her life and its good intentions aren’t fodder for someone else to run over. Her fixation on Rodion, a man who offered his last coins to her stepmother to cover Marmeladov’s funeral costs, suggests an inherent goodness, even if Rodion can’t see it.

• The shallowness of the ideal woman is boring enough that even Dostoevsky doesn’t bother to write a conversation between Sonia and Rodion’s beautiful and good sister, Dounia:

“We will not describe the conversation and tears of the two girls, and how friendly they became. Dounia gained one comfort at least from that interview, that her brother would not be alone” (449).

That’s why I love Katerina Ivanova, Sonia’s stepmom! Messy, messy Katerina! Full of spite! Of resentment!

Like Rodion, she sees her life’s unachieved potential. She’s high-born but married two duds. She coughs blood and spends every hour scrubbing. The cleanliness of linens and her kids’ clothes serves as the porous barrier between her gentry origin and her squalid reality. She carries the same pride Rodion does, assuming her life would transcend above the poverty her marriages left. Her arrogance isolates her from the people looking to help her. (The funeral scene in her apartment, where she rips into everyone present, reminded me of the discomfort from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) As a woman, she doesn’t dream as high as Napoleon but holds onto the collapsing noble system to pull her into a life of leisure.

(Dostoevsky married a consumptive widow like Katerina Ivanova. While the character’s sympathetic, her pride devours her from the inside out alongside the consumption, you do get the feeling that he wishes she would accept her lot and stop humiliating herself. I like her spunk, personally.)

• Suffering as transformation

  • Dickens and Dostoevsky adopt the Christian thought that suffering is an essential element to any life. Embracing the pain of suffering has the ability to pull characters, like Rodion and Sydney Carton, above the wreckage of their past mistakes.

“What’s the object of these senseless sufferings? Shall I know any better what they are for, when I am crushed by hardships and idiocy, and weak as an old man after twenty years’ penal servitude? And what shall I have to live for then? Why am I consenting to that life now?” (448)

• As Rodion goes full Walter White and admits his motivations, originally altruistic and family-oriented, were selfishly about the bounds of his ambition, he has the chance to accept the growing popularity from his article on the extraordinary vs. the ordinary man, he also has the option to accept the fame over his consequences. It falls into Rodion’s hands to determine if he accepts the consequences of his crimes or if he justifies it as a launching pad for his burgeoning fame.

• I love that the agency falls on our protagonist, especially as the police in this story seem pretty lax. This isn’t a cat and mouse crime thriller. This is a man fighting against himself for the state of his soul.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS: let’s talk about that ending real quick

It’s hard to discuss Dostoevsky’s thoughts on crime and punishment and redemption and forgiveness without looking at Rodion’s ending, particularly because it wraps up the redemption, angels, and suffering into one Christian roll-up. Sonia moves to Siberia —which, cmon girl, you’re a prostitute but you can probably disappear to anywhere else before you hitch your wagon to this stranger-murderer—and nurses Rodion and the other prisoners with her love and consideration. She will stare outside the prison yard when she can’t see Rodion, like another blonde angel we know. Rodion’s pride makes him sick until he respects the repentance of the other criminals:

“But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible” (469).

It’s not the Napoleons who find the absolute truth but those who fully acknowledge the beauty of their lives and the devastation of their decisions. This erosion of his pride joined with the acceptance of Sonia’s love allows him to start a new life alongside his suffering, not above it:

“He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering” (472).

As much as I question Sonia’s decisions, I love this line. It has a beauty to its inescapable acceptance of the pain and effort. Striving, instead of the blind ambition Rodion implemented in murdering the old pawnbroker, is an optimism a better tomorrow and an endurance for the pain as it comes.

Safe to carry on!

Share

Is there peace in Crime & Punishment ?

Something I’ve known without articulating it before is communal harmony is a paradox. It requires a balance of the utilitarian greatest good without flattening each person into a copy-paste asset.

In our Utah rental house, every housemate has to consider the group’s needs as their own. Everyone has to speed up their bathroom trips to accommodate the fourteen other people potentially also having side effects of three consecutive, bean-heavy Mexican meals. Everyone has to move quieter to avoid waking up the rest of the house when they wake up, and the people who wake up to other people talking need to forgive the impossibility of a quiet vacuum.

Living in a state of constant questioning of other people’s needs is dizzying, but if the group approaches a one-size-fits-all approach, the group falls apart. In the evenings after skiing, people embroider sweatshirts, study film cameras, bake cookies, sneak whoopie cushions ordered to the house under couch pillows. The whole is a collection of individuals with unique strengths and perspectives.

When I’m trying to be a leader or a follower, I constrain my attitude to this agreeable flat-faced doll. It’s confusing even to me. It doesn’t mean I’m always faking a good time. When I look like I’m having a good time—flying down blue mountains for the first time, watching MILF Manor, playing charades in the living room—my smile and my eyes match. I’m happy.

It’s the tinier moments when I assign a silent peacekeeping, that I develop an ironic bitterness. When my room with two double beds has no outlets to charge my phone overnight or because I saddled myself with ordering pizza after everyone else heads to the sauna after our first day skiing, I bite my tongue and adopt a constrictive costume of the agreeable girlfriend. (I’m not an actress, though, so if I’m feeling salty, you also see it in my eyes and face.)

Share

When I review Crime and Punishment on a Thursday alone in the house while everyone else skied in fresh snow, Sam, the other person left behind in the house, spoke in pharmaceutical jargon in his virtual meetings. When he apologized for subjecting me to his meetings, I told him I liked it. And I did. It reminded me of home. Over a decade ago, I lasered focus on my high school homework while my siblings chased each other through the kitchen or conducted silent dance parties while my dad called his patients. Being alone is a great idea, but I always have half an ear out for the door for whoever comes through the door.

The claustrophobia of my desires and my silencing those desires prevented me from seeing how the group stepped in to help me. I loved the Twisted Tea Pain Happy Hour and the improvised margaritas from Rachel and Matt. I loved the mornings on the couch by the windows reading next to Morgan and talking about Fourth Wing and Elin Hilderbrand. I have a belated appreciation for my roommates, Seth and Vasu, who researched the resort routes to check they were novice-friendly. There’s also the patience my friends had when my phone died and they searched for an hour in the resort lodges to find me to head home.

It was lovely being alone on that one day. I won’t lie. Without it, I might’ve been liable to murder the next person to set up shop in the bathroom outside my bedroom. Before the skiers returned home and picked me up a banh mi, I told them to meet me in the hot tub. I like to think Dostoevsky, after hearing my adapted theories of redemption and madness and suffering, would be mildly disgusted. Dickens might get it, though.

If I was a fictional character, this behavior suggests a deviant in the making, a loose foreshadowing of my ability to mend my ethical boundaries to whatever I needed. At the end of the film, before I drive my car off a cliff or cackle behind jail cell bars, I reach into my baggy pocket and release a fistful of wadded-up cotton. A pair of panties! Not my own! “How the hell did she get those?” the prison guard / backseat passenger / lover-to-enemy says. “Wait, are those mine?”

Unfortunately, maybe for all of us, that is not, and will not, be me. (Knock on wood.) My recurring criminal trait is walking in the crosswalk when the red hand tells me to stop. In fact, I could afford to let loose. Do a drug or something. Flambé a dessert. Go to one of those 3 a.m. concerts where the light display blocks out the rising sun. All of this to say, I’m a well-trained pup, I like obedience in my life, and if I had known these underwear belonged to another girl, I would’ve said, “That’s stealing, and that’s against the rules, therefore I will not wear that stranger’s underwear.”

For me to move from complete obedience to walking around in a stranger’s underwear is beyond logic, a work outside of the institutional logic, born of the eccentricities of the individual.

For my cousin’s birthday, my aunt drove five of us to this water park. We went into the locker room. Being elementary-school-aged, I probably had a backpack but no organized bag. We splashed around. I still have dreams about this water park and the water slides on islands of concrete.

When we returned to the locker room to change into our clothes, alongside my heap of clothes was a Ziploc’ed bag of the whitest Fruit of the Looms you’ve ever seen. A brilliant white pair, bundled into a tight cotton éclair. This Ziploc bag slightly grazed the periphery of my discarded clothes sitting on a bench in front of the lockers.

Soaked in chlorine and ready to feel fresh, I thought, “Wow. That was so sweet of my mom to drop these off for me right as I was coming out of the pool. She always knows just what I need.”

Already, this doesn’t make any sense.

But here comes the context, to further confuse anyone who isn’t me at ten years old: I’m the oldest of six kids. In this era, four of my siblings were under six years old. Though in my head this water park is in Rockville, that is less geographically accurate as much as an indicator that we were very, very far from my home. Anything over forty-five minutes to me was considered “Rockville,” though Rockville was maybe a 20-minute drive. My mom, respectfully to my younger self, had other things on her plate. She would not have the bandwidth to even think, “Oh, Chloe is at the water park, maybe she would like some new underwear, I’m going to drive out and buy some, I’ll drop it near her stuff—which won’t be in anything with her name on it—and not say a word to my sister-in-law who drove her there.”

In my ten-year-old head, this was sure fire. And, also, incredibly lit.

So I went into a changing room and put on this girl’s underwear. My tunnel vision around these underwear was unprecedented. I breezed through any yellow lights telling me to slow down and reevaluate. When the underwear were too big for me, I thought, “Does Mom think I’m fat?” I shrugged. Just be grateful! Your mom is a busy woman!

When I came out of that changing room, pulling the elastic high above my Soffees waistband, a girl a year or two older than me was in the corner where I had thrown my stuff earlier. “Where is my underwear?” she kept saying, over and over. Like, we get it, you lost your underwear, the rest of us are trying to deal with saggy pants and an oncoming eating disorder. Chill out, gf.

My cousin, the birthday girl (and fellow yapper), nudged me at one point. “Have you seen her stuff?” Nope, absolutely not. I packed up my things, my wet hair soaking the back of my shirt.

We were getting ready to leave. Then the older girl turned to me. “You stole my underwear,” she said.

And to her face, I said, brow furrowed, “No, I didn’t.” I hate being accused of things I didn’t do. Like, girl, just keep an eye on your things.

Right before we were about to leave the locker room for the car, I had this dripping egg-yolk feeling over my mind that woke me up. Oh, NO. Oh. No.

I snapped to reality.

I returned to the changing stall where I put the underwear on, the bigger size making sense, the reality of my mom coming all the way out to wherever Splash was without saying hi making, finally, less sense. Even in this hypothetical, my mom was catching strays. I’d been mad about the wrong size and the fact that the water park made her too bashful to say anything to anyone. Mom, you can say hi, you won’t interrupt the party! I pulled off those undies, my chance at perfection with a white bright enough to cause momentary blindness, and threw them in the corner where the Ziploc bag used to be and left the locker room.

This was the first time that I remember my assumptions of how the world works in my favor had been horrifyingly wrong. Rarely, though not never, my adult ideas of how something is supposed to work—how convenient, just the way I wanted!—contradicts the actual purpose and blockades the collective intended to use this item. These aren’t real examples, but in a “yes, and” sense, some examples are thinking a platter of Aperol spritzes at a bar is open for the taking when they were crafted for a party of paying customers. Or digging through a donation bag for sweaters intended for a clothing drive and being like, “Wow, can you believe all of this is just up for grabs?!” If you asked my cousins, they would be able to give you real-time examples of this doe-eyed, fairytale “things just work out!” attitude while something burns behind me.

I thought of these glowing underwear while reading the discussion of the extraordinary versus the ordinary person in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Insane, I know, but bear with me.

This week, I read half of Constance Garnett’s Bartam translation of Crime and Punishment. In this first half, Rodion Raskolnikov, a former law student resigned to poverty, wanders 1860s St. Petersburg. With his nonexistent money, he goes to taverns, decides to start drinking—uh oh, he likes it!—and meets Marmeladov, the town clown for his alcoholic self-destruction. Rodion listens to Marmeladov’s sad life story, sipping a beer. Never been more delicious!

Rodion is a well-intended guy. He hands over what little money he has to the women Marmeladov’s desperate wife and children or a drunk teenager found on the street. He instantly regrets it and curses his own generosity, but roubles say more than words. When Rodion reads a letter from his mother explaining how his sister, Dounia, agreed to marry a contemptible noble named Pyotr Petrovitch, he digs his heels into the feverish belief that Dounia has sold herself to this terrible match to fund Rodion’s remaining tuition.

Around this time, he fixates on an old woman, Aloyna Ivanova, who pawns expensive trinkets at a fraction of their estimated cost. She gives him a miserly sum for his deceased father’s watch and ring. Rodion remembers this, paired with an overheard conversation about Aloyna’s will designating her riches to a monastery for prayers for herself while abusing her step-sister and withholding her riches while the poverty floods the city. Rodion fashions himself to be a Russian Robin Hood. He will kill this miserable old woman and collect her coins to redistribute the wealth. And boy, does he ever. With an axe! Multiple blows! Uh oh, the step-sister walked in, so she’s gotta go, too! What else is there to do!

From here, Rodion’s physical health fails as he clings to intellect to justify his secret crime and baits the detectives seeking the murderer. If the cops don’t find him, how will he be punished for his crime? (Aha, the titular nouns!)

His popular and endearing friend, Razumihin, re-enters his life after the murder and cares for Rodion. He’s the door between Rodion and the world, and he’s letting everyone visit.

Rodion’s apartment, St. Petersburg most squalid nightclub, has everything: young prostitutes with innocent funeral invites, day-old soups and teas, his pasteled and heavily perfumed brother-in-law-to-be, the landlady who betrothed her sickly daughter to Rodion in exchange for free rent before the daughter died (and Rodion still stays in this building without paying her...!), Razumihin, Dounia, Rodion’s mother, the police, a man in a painter’s coat who admits he knows he murdered the woman then disappears into the streets. (The halfway point in the novel where I stopped happens as Rodion wakes up to Mr. Svidrigaïlov, a stranger who allegedly murdered his wife, staring at him.)

Is Rodion really seeing these people? As a reader, I trust Dostoevsky isn’t pulling out the “it was all a dream card” but using dreams to accentuate the surreal mindspace of our characters, displaced in the world where they live. Similar to Emily Brontë, there’s a Romantic consideration of how the dreams and super-natural impact the individual. Rodion finds he can’t tell dream from reality:

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are to truthlike and filled with details so delicate, so unexpected, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system (48).

Whatever happens in the dream, Rodion suggests, it will linger in the waking self. And my guy is not feeling alright. He’s disconnected from the world, physically and mentally. He realizes he likes drinking, though he hates taverns. He’s feverish. So feverish. He’s sweating through his clothes. I can smell him over the old ink smell of my novel. He must smell unbelievably bad when his mom and sister show up, expecting their law-educated brother/son living in the city to host them. Oh, no.

By the end of Part III, Razumihin introduces Rodion to the detective, Porfiry Petrovitch, who hides his suspicions of Rodion’s odd behavior behind polite idealogical conversation. Porfiry brings up an article Rodion published on the extraordinary man and the ordinary subject. By Rodion’s logic, the extraordinary man has the leniency—in fact, the right—to conduct crimes to arrive at the scientific discovery that yields global change. Rodion says,

“I simply hinted that an extraordinary man has the right… that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep…certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).”

He continues,

“I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newtown would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound…to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity” (226).

Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler are scientists, mathematicians, and astrologists forging new answers and discoveries in fields with rudimentary right and wrong answers. Compared to theologists or philosophers or even politicians, the answers are irrefutably correct (once accepted by the masses).

Up to this point, Dostoevsky implements a motif I call “the science of morality.” Characters have intellectual conversations around the science of progress at the cost of individual lives. If Peter I in the 18th century hadn’t opened the floodgates of Western texts, practices, and customs, the 19th century Russian authors wouldn’t have to grapple with their split identity, the whiplash between men as a Russian resource and men as individuals per Western liberation.

Psst. Exploring the Russian history around Peter I and his dizzying Westernization on Thursday helped paid subscribers understand this whiplash in Dostoevsky’s Russia—check out the preview here:

Early in Crime and Punishment, Rodion debates the boundaries of science and ethics when he encounters the drugged teenage girl on the street, presumably sent out to the streets after a man took advantage of her. At first, he calls the police to escort her home to prevent a creepy man giving her the eye from repeating the crime. He hands the officer roubles that, again, he can’t afford to give away. (That free rent situation with his ex-future-mother-in-law is not going to end well, brother!) Almost instantaneously, he yells at the officer and regrets giving his money away. Alone, Rodion empathizes with the drugged girl while attempting to soothe his aggravation with Western thought:

“Ugh! But what does it matter? That’s as it should be, they tell us. A certain percentage, they tell us, must every year go…that way…to the devil, I suppose, so that the rest may remain chaste, and not be interfered with. A percentage! What splendid words they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory…Once you’ve said ‘percentage’ there’s nothing more to worry about. If we had any other word…maybe we might feel more uneasy…But what if Dounia were one of the percentage? Of another one if not that one?” (45).

Utilitarianism, like the Benthamite philosophies that influenced Dickens, suggests a paradox. If all citizens deserve individual rights, some citizens will have to suffer for the majority to enjoy those rights. Rodion sees, and also wants to ignore, that a society that favors individual rights has to turn a blind eye to the quiet abuse of a smaller group. If 95% of the country’s population exists with full rights, the neglected 5% are a small cost.

Back to the extraordinary debate. As a former law student, Rodion reverts to his extraordinary theory as an implied “law of nature,” an instinct toward destruction for progress that exists and usurps any human-made institution (229). Yet he contradicts himself. When Porfiry asks about punishment, Rodion relies on both human nature and human-made institutions to rectify any crimes done by the delusional ordinary, assuming they were extraordinary: “If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be punishment—as well as the prison” (230).

The irony of Rodion debating the extraordinary’s license to perpetuate evil for the discovery of the good is Rodion, obviously, has killed someone. Is Rodion exceptional? More importantly, does he consider himself exceptional? According to his theory, we would also know this after he has done something great for the whole. How do we measure the extraordinary without the benefit of legacy, the retrospective biopic of their lives summarized their villainy or heroism in a final image?

To me, at this midway point in the novel, Rodion is a Russian Walter White. We can see through his eyes, but he’s on the cusp of sympathetic, but by the end, I don’t want to like him. While we can empathize with his confusion and appreciate his attempts to free suppressed women from financially constrictive situations, I don’t want to mirror him or his belief system. Taken out of context, however, Rodion’s lines become an endorsement of the Western philosophy he regurgitates. If you don’t have Rodion’s fret about the “percentages” or his constant confusion about his moral compass, his solioquoy of the “extraordinary” who can massacre hundreds for the sake of greatness can look like a justification of autocracy.

Mikhail Zygar shines a light on controversy around this year’s Russian TV adaptation of Crime and Punishment. Putin sympathizers and anti-Kremlin thinkers, like the show’s creator Vladimir Mirzoev, both claim Dostoevsky morally justifies their stances. And it’s easy, to my eye, to see how this conversation about the extraordinary justifies an autocracy like Putin’s—or, frankly, the bulldozer of Trump executive orders in the first two weeks of his second term. With a signature and dozens of executive orders, one person can alter the everyday feel of the country he wants to make great. For Trump, the scapegoating of trans men and women and immigrants and diversity hires is the “percentage,” the demographic he wants to cast off for his skewed idea of greatness while his moves benefit a small portion of the country’s demographic (straight white men, particularly billionaires).

When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be seen. I sang myself to sleep, dreaming from my bedroom that my music teacher would notice my talent and place me, a second grader, in the eighth grade play. In college, I wanted to be the first female late-night host. (Lilly Singh and Taylor Tomlinson have crossed that line since.) I felt, and I still recognize the desire, to stand apart. I mean, here I am writing a newsletter-blog online about classics other people might have already read. In our current culture where we feel we have to focus on ourselves and our immediate loved ones to survive the scarcity epidemic, we are forced into imagining us as “main characters,” as extraordinary. Underwear falls out of the sky at the mildest inconvenience.

But what I haven’t learned, in all this time, is how to enjoy being ordinary. How do I stop worrying about being extraordinary, elbowing out other “ordinary” people to mark myself as exceptional, and appreciate being one of the larger group? Rodion shows us that operating with an eye to our future legacy, in the hope that we’re extraordinary, might be a losing bet. Within one character, there’s a murderer, and there’s a confused boy. By the second half, he may grow out of this lens of thinking about the self, though part of me still wants to see him get punished.

He’s blindfolded and standing above a grave alongside another prisoner. The firing squad lined up behind him. Seconds before they expect to be executed, the guards tell the prisoners the tsar has granted them mercy via an exile to Siberia. The man alongside him is permanently traumatized, diagnosed and treated for insanity in the wake of his execution.

In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky wrote,

“When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness."

At the beginning of the 1860s, Dostoevsky will serve his ten-year Siberian sentence to a different type of Russia. Instead of Nicholas I, whose reign placed Dostoevsky in prison, he arrives in St. Petersburg under Alexander II’s rule, a time of optimism. return to Russia to start a magazine with Mikhail. His wife, then his brother, dies. He accrues significant gambling debts, enough to escape to Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. While living in the West, his Russian nationalism growing while living in Europe, he writes Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment launches him as one of Russia’s greatest writers. His later book, The Possessed, will earn him the title of prophet for its accurate predictions of the Russian revolution of 1917, nearly 50 years after it was published. His last book, The Brothers Karamazov, will announce his greatness to Europe and the West, a region Dostoevsky sees as the inhibition to Russia’s ascension to greatness.

Before we go more into Dostoevsky, it’s important to understand the Russia he inherited.

Let’s go back 100 years in Russia

Over in America, when people discuss “Russian literature” as an academic field, I take it to mean this renaissance of 19th century Russian authorship.

Like, we’re not even going to touch on Lenin and Stalin and the 1997 film Anastasia. As much as I want to! We’re going back to the 1800s in Russia, when tsars’ reigns bounced between huge reform, brutal imprisonment and crackdowns, and back again.

One hundred years earlier, Peter I, or Peter the Great, pushes for a rapid Westernization of Russia. The paradox to adopt European culture comes from a place of Russian preservation, a common theme with this quick adaptation. If Russia can match Europe’s innovation, they are better prepared to conquer and rule it. And, being an autocrat, the population has no change but to adapt to Peter I’s vision. As Hans Kohn writes,

Through [Peter I], Russia laid the foundation of great power and of an unbroken march of conquest in all directions towards an ever-expanding empire. Her subjects, however, enjoyed neither liberty nor law. They were reared, to quote the words of a great Russian historian, "to an atmosphere of arbitrary rule, general contempt for legality and the person, and to a blunted sense of morality." (emphasis added)

In 1703, Peter I moves the capital to the new city, St. Petersburg (named after, of course, himself). He mandates the nobility to speak, dress, and act like European nobles. Students are sent abroad to learn in Europe. By the 19th century, the nobility predominantly speaks French, not Russian.

His later successor and champion of the arts, Catherine II (a.k.a. The Great) encourages this scientific revolution and converses with European philosophers Voltaire and Diderot until the 1773 to 1775 Pugachov Rebellion. This uprising challenges her abstract ideals, and she responds with a clenched fist. For example, she orders the execution, mercifully altered to a Siberian exhile, of writer Aleksandr Raischev. The author of A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), Raischev wrote critically about his travels through Russia and its serfdom.

Through this century leading to the Russian renaissance, Russians are inundated with hundreds of years of Western theology, philosophy, literature, and science. This creates a historic rift and a dissonance for Russian writers. As their education encompasses European history, they have to leave behind the isolationist past of their previous Russia. They adopt Western styles to preserve their Russian culture. As Tolstoy wrote about War and Peace, “There is not a single work of Russian artistic prose, at all rising above mediocrity, that quite fits the form of a novel, a poem, or a story.” In short, the Russian commonality is that it belongs to no form—though from this period, Formism and the emphasis of form as an indicator of literary quality dominates Russian criticism.

Curious about what’s happening in 19th century Britain during this time? Read history through Austen, Brontë, & Dickens:

By the 1800s, a golden age of poetry arrives with Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), “the father of modern Russian literature.” In this century, we have Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852), and Anton Chekov (1860-1904), to name a selective few.

While this time in history is globally unprecedented for the high volume and quantity of authors in a region, these authors existed within this grey area of the deluge of Western literature while trying to create a new Russian identity.

In no other moment in history are so many writers producing such prolific works. This short-circuited history, to my eye, creates a systematic shock as writers conflate their past with their questions about the Westernized future. Who is Russian, what is Russian, and what is humanity in the wake of these reckonings?

There are three distinguishing traits of this era:

• First, Russia considered literature incredibly prestigious compared to Europe. Dostoevsky even stipulated that literature justifies the Russian people’s existence.

• While Europe had dedicated schools for theology, psychology, or philosophy, Russia’s writers had the responsibility and opportunity to bundle all of these ideas into their fiction. Dostoevsky’s novels specifically become foundational to the Russian identity as the intense psychological portraits and his theology become widely consumed and appreciated through his novels. As Encyclopedia Britannica writes, “One can see why the highest achievement of Russian literature was probably the philosophical novel.”

• Lastly, politics and literature in the 19th and 20th centuries are intimately connected. Writers, like Dostoevsky, have the opportunity to become political prophets.

Though Dostoevsky grew up in a rapidly Westernized Russia and sought to become a writer during a Renaissance, his contributions as someone directly impacted by its poverty and imprisonment and nationalism comes to define this astounding period of world literature.

So, who is Fyodor Dostoevsky?

Born in Moscow in 1821, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s family came from poverty. Compared to Tolstoy or Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevsky did not come from landowning gentry class, and he felt poverty’s squeeze throughout his childhood and later in his adult life as a gambling addict.

Read more

In returning to this book, I thought I could open the machinery behind the novel and, hopefully, selfishly, find traces of my younger self in the margins.

What I found instead:

CARTON = PUNCH DRINKER

Within my high school copy, I looked past the green and red pen of my notes on my teacher’s observations, deliberately different from the blue or black pen I used to mark my own thoughts. I found emotionless marginalia by my younger self. Which is fair. It was homework. But I mined it for comprehension. I bracketed a section and marked it “C” for characterization, though often left off the name of the character being described. I summarized sections in the margins, sometimes incorrectly identifying plot points. It was the equivalent of scarfing down a meal to absorb the nutrients without knowing what you’re eating.

Comparatively, my sister Tara wrote her emotions in all her margins. Over the holidays, I packed her edition to see my sisters younger the same way I wanted my annotations to transport me back to 15. Tara has lots of HAHAs scribbled in the margin. When Mr. Lorry tells Lucie her father is alive, she wrote, her mom told her dad was dead woah. At the Guillotine, in the grand finale, as The Vengeance calls out for Madame Defarge to sit in the seat she saved next to her, Tara wrote, wait that’s so sad.

In the final pages, where I know I wept the first time I read it, all I did was throw a fat, unruly squiggle under the novel’s last line.

Share

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, written in 1859, moves between London and Paris from 1775 to 1792, a period covering Britain during American Revolution and the French Revolution. France’s nobility live decadently and tell the poor to eat grass. “In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting,” Dickens writes as he outlines theft on highways, from homes, from mail during this period. Both cities are disordered, but one is unfortunate, struck with a famine, its common people desperate for a change to save their lives.

Within this satirical observation of cities’ rule of recklessness, Lucie and her father, Alexandre Manette, are the nucleus of the story’s ensemble. After 18 years of imprisonment at the Bastille, Dr. Manette was a shoe-making zombie hidden in the attic of a wine shop run by Defarge and his wife. When he and Lucie reunite, she brings him to London and returns him to health. When the Manettes testify at Charles Darnay’s English trial in 1780, they meet Sydney Carton, Charles’ doppleganger whose close resemblance throws doubt on witness testimony of Darnay’s alleged French espionage.

Darnay isn’t a French spy, but he does hide his connection to the hated French aristocrat, Monsieur the Marquis. Darnay refuses the inheritance and starts a new life in London, while Sydney Carton watches Lucie and Darnay fall in love.

This love triangle continues until 1792, when Darnay’s conscience forces him to return to Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror. The French peasants will imprison anyone with the mildest connection to the massacred nobility. From there, Lucie and the people who love her, including Sydney Carton, leave London for the storm of the French revolution.

Dickens returns his readers to a time obsessed with the abstract ideals of Liberty and Death, of Fraternity and Justice, even if the work done in pursuing these ideals betrays the idealistic endeavors. We see this best in the first line of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we have everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

While Dickens writes this during a time of social reform in England, starting with the First Reform Bill of 1832, he mocks how historians or 18th century contemporaries thought of their lives in extremes, offering no space for ambiguity—which he aims to provide.

Pssst! If you’re looking for more history on 19th century Britain, from Dickens to Austen, start here:

The structure of this singsongy first line shows Dickens’ infusion of the oral and written storytelling as someone who loved to read his works, and the natural inclination to raise the voice an octave on the positive (“It was the best of times!”) and pendulum the voice an octave lower in the following phrase (“it was the worst of times.”).

But this first sentence also acts as a key to the Dickens’ motifs in his world of grey. As Richard Maxwell says in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of this book, “it was his intent to make ‘a picturesque story’, i.e. one which would reveal character through action rather than through lengthy explanations, either by characters or the narrator’ (xi). Dickens’ thematic images add these same inflections—“sunshine!” and “darkness.”—to weave both the bright and dismal into the same scenes.

The primary motifs in ATOTC are:

Light (including fires and daylight) vs. Dark (including night and shadow):

Dickens lays this out for us explicitly in the first sentence—“it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness”—and it comes up over and over. Characters confess their feelings by fireplaces. Dr. Manette works in the dark of the attic and refuses the light, stuck in his oblivion. The Marquis’s house is dark at night when a murderer sneaks in. This is one of the motifs representing knowledge and whether characters exist in “belief” and “incredulity.”

Sea and storms

• While the Manettes enjoy a delicious Sunday, they look out the window to an impending storm: “They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as people in a dark room, watching and waiting for lightning, always do” (91)

• Later in France, we will hear the Defarges argue about the revolution as a build to lightning, and the mob will have the force and chaos of an errant sea.

• In contrast, Mr. Jarvis Lorry, our “man of business” who navigates the Manettes’ finances and reunites the father and daughter, wears “linen…as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea” (14). He will be a safe harbor, to continue the metaphor, and a captain in the chaos of what will come in France’s storm.

Footsteps

This serves as foreshadowing of the mob, the hundreds united together to march for a new future. Miss Pross anticipates Lucie has hundreds of visitors, when she only entertains Darnay and Carton. Lucie, a character more divine than woman, hears the ghost steps more than others both in London and France. It’s an ominous drumbeat of the revolution traveling to her doorstep.

Eyes

• Once you see this, you can’t unsee (ha!) the amount of glances, glimpses, looks, and eyes appear in this story.

• Dickens deliberately includes the eyes in the physical description of each character to suggest their inner personality. To include a few apt ones:

  • Mr. Lorry has “a pair of moist bright eyes that must have cost their owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and reserved expression of Tellson’s Bank” (14). Tellson’s requires a stiff upper lip, and Mr. Lorry’s loyalty to his firm has forced him to adopt a stoicism he doesn’t feel.

  • Dr. Manette, when discovered in the Defarge’s attic making shoes, has “haggard eyes…not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical perception” (35). He does not see the other people in the room or recognize his daughter (who, to be fair, he never met). What he saw before and during his imprisonment blinds him from attaching to reality.

  • Madame Defarge had “a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything” (28). Though she’s always knitting, and at first we don’t know why, she sees everything, usually before her husband does.

• The tracked gaze also works for the collective personification of the trial audiences, both in France and Britain. In the English trial of Charles Darnay, the spectators’ glances move en masse when Charles, the object of their attention, stares at Lucy and Dr. Manette: “all the eyes that were turned upon him, turned to them” (56). Their opinions are fickle, easily directed at whatever new and shiny object catches their eyes.

• Characterized against the backdrop of this trial audience and Lucie and Darnay’s looking at each other as witness and defendant in Darnay’s case, Sydney Carton stares at the ceiling, not aligned with the crowd or invited into the triangle of glances between the witnesses and the defendant: “the wigged gentleman who had all this time been looking at the ceiling of the court” (65). This small action, his gaze against the current, aptly marks him as unusual and solitary, an outsider.

“Recalled to life” (graves, ghosts, spirits, and resurrection)

Though we first hear this phrase in the first chapter as Mr. Lorry’s code phrase for his messenger, Jerry Cruncher, it becomes a recurring theme as the characters—like the ghostly Dr. Manette—opt for change to recreate their lives. Like the ideals of the revolution, the characters can alter their lives and redirect it toward something new, usually something aligned with Christian morality. But for every good spirit, there is an ugly grave (or Jerry Cruncher’s grave-digging side-hustle), the rot left behind, and the lingering “buzz-flies,” as Dickens calls the British crowd rabid to see Darnay’s execution sentence.

Who does Dickens want us to root for?

While I read this, it took me a second to think about who Dickens supports.

He makes it pretty clear he does not like the mob of common people who overwhelmed France. In the Dickens Lesson, we learned the liberal-idealed Dickens has a tendency toward the traditional, a fear of the violence that comes with institutional change. As quoted by Algis Valiunas, Dickens said of Wilde and other authors promoting socialism and a laissez-faire government:

“…the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!”

While Dickens empathizes with the poor and delivers the cruelest apathy and violence to the nobles, the Marquis and the Monseigneur, he looks down on the French rebellion. There’s the disturbing Carmagnole dance, fit for “demons”: “No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance…a healthy pasttime changed into a means of angering the blood” (254-5). Once the common people gain control, Dickens sees them as violent, as injust and unattached to a rule of law as their noble predecessors.

Does Dickens like anyone in Paris? The nobles he paints as the worst characters. The Marquis’s apathetic approach to the peasants protects only himself, and this selfishness is rewarded with a murder. The Monseigneur, who requires three men and a cook to deliver a frothing chocolate to his lip in a famine, is villain: “So polite and so impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far more influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and state secrets, than the needs of all France” (93). These nobles fattened with greed are equally despicable.

Madame Defarge, who knits and sees all, has a motive. Toward the end, we peel back the layers to see how the nobles have made her a French angel of death, but she’s hardened into a statue no better than the Gorgon’s head outside the Marquis’s estate: “She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her. It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers. she saw, not him, but them” (332). Set on her path, she denies any opportunity to grow or adapt to the ideals she claims France will hold.

But Dickens also gives us plenty of laughable British characters, the more funny the more terrible they are. Jerry Cruncher, an abusive husband and idiot, has closely-set eyes and robs graves. Mr. Stryver, the lawyer Carton assists, drinks while Carton does all his work while lecturing Carton about improving his rank. Mr. Stryver, one of the biggest farces of a character, is a “shouldering” social climber who arrives at his rank, arrogant that he has earned whatever comes to him. Dickens casts him to a humiliating fate, far from the redemptive kindness of the Manette family.

So who does Dickens like?

Lucie, half-English and half-French, is a perfect woman. She is a Madonna, a loyal daughter, a steadfast wife. She stands by her men, despite the danger surrounding them. So sure, what’s not to like? Unlike Madame Defarge, whose love for her family mutates, Lucie allows the complications of her life as opportunities to love. (Though in a face-off with Madame Defarge, I would not put my money on Lucie.)

We like Mr. Lorry, though Dickens hates the long-held institution he works for, Tellson’s. This bank represents the British old guard, the aging men who prefer their lackluster ways because they abhor change:

“Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place…It was very small, very dark, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness…Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect the House was much on par with the Country, which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable” (45)

Mr. Lorry, as an individual, evolves from a Tellson’s “man of business,” someone loyal primarily to this institution, to someone who softens, his life brighter, when he embraces the friendship of the Manettes. When he takes care of them, he becomes a fuller version of himself, the softer emotional side allowed to peak through.

But what do we do with Sydney Carton, a man stuck in his self-pity who knows what he wants but can’t achieve it?

Sydney Carton

When we met Sydney Carton, he’s odd. He’s a punch drinker. He does all the work for Mr. Stryver and takes none of the credit. He considers his life over. After his resemblance helps acquit Charles Darnay, Sydney Carton looks at himself in the mirror and admits he hates Darnay, because “he shows you what you have fallen away from, and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was?” (75). Sydney Carton has given up. He loves Lucie. He knows he wants to be with her. But he never makes the changes to make himself into the person she wants.

Despite Dickens’ imagery attached to goodness or evil, he also suggests how every person has the secrets within their chest no one on earth will ever know about them:

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!...In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?” (9)

Sydney’s whole personality is a secret. Often, when his kindness or depression leak into conversations with the few people he admires, they are often surprised, as if they have never seen him before. No one knows Sydney Carton but the reader (and a passing maiden at the end—and that’s all I will say about that). When he confesses his love and self-pity to Lucie, she demands, “O Mr. Carton, think again! Try again!” (136). She, the heavenly angel, argues we can always change for the better.

Toward the end, some of our secondary British characters redirect their lives from crime. Mr. Lorry, a Tellson’s loyalist, agrees to forgive and forget Jerry Cruncher’s alleged grave digging, and Jerry promises to give it up.

But does Carton change?

I wanted to share page 288 and my annotations of it. Here, as Sydney Carton walks alone in the night in Paris, something has changed within him. The reader doesn’t know what decision Sydney has made yet, but they can tell from this passage he is no longer the sad drunk weeping into his pillow at night:

We have night, the darkness of our ignorance of Sydney’s plan, broken by the light of the moon. We have the death of the moon and stars as they disappear, leaving a black and voided night, as the sun rises to save them. This is a moment of religious awe, as Carton repeats the Biblical allusion spoken at his father’s funeral. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he repeats, his eyes shaded, the realization and knowledge almost blinding. Then he finds, in this city warped by the changing tides and the flooded sea of change, a boat empty redirected toward the sea. “Like me!,” he thinks, aware of a newfound and secret purpose.

Something, internally, has changed for Sydney. He believes, for the first time, his individual life has consequence. What he will do will be a small ripple.

In the course of my life, I’ve swallowed my emotions instead of voicing small frustrations. I keep a distance between what I feel in case it offends someone else. I will refuse to go to the bathroom if someone else is talking. These are small things, but when I’m writing, I have felt a block between what I really want to say and what I want to keep in these secret cabinets. What is the difference between a brick wall and a delicate cabinet, though?

What do we keep for ourselves? And is there enough time to change?

Because of Sydney Carton, Dickens argues that society is a library of every individual’s intentions. Some people, their positions, and their power have larger consequences. Institutional decisions make decisions for individuals, whether they benefit these individuals or not, but Dickens suggests the power of one is enough to change many lives, that actions from love can make their dent in the forgotten pages of history.

After this, much closer to the end, is where I end up falling into tears. I cried a few times when I read it this year. I still haven’t cried as much in a book ending as I have with this one.

In the annotations on page 288, I marked the page with a cartoon of a crying face. My 2025 pen’s black ink matches the pens I used in 2012. I write, I’m teary again.

Leibowitz—who at first glance I would not put in Austen’s camp, but Team Jane has a big tent—says in the documentary short, “The Divine Jane”:

Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth. Obviously, details change, but writers who date date not because the details date. All details date. Writers date because their ideas date, and that means their ideas are wrong. Her perceptions don’t date, because they are correct, and they will remain that way until human beings improve themselves intrinsically, and this will not happen.

I want this quote in sloppy handwriting on a creased index card and thumbtacked on my wall. If I was fully equipped in office supplies, my security deposit would be in big trouble. Heck, I could paint it on the wall with this set of paint from two years ago! I don’t have thumbtacks, but I have a set of paints from Target!

Vive Le Leibowitz! Down with the landlords!

My landlord, for what it’s worth, is incredibly nice. He will never read this, and I will defend his honor. That’s how nice Vincent is! His decency is the only civility preventing me from slathering Fran Leibowitz quotes on his walls!

[coughs politely]

Anywho.

To the living and ignorant historian—me—there is a youthful sense that Austen and Dickens would have existed in the same timeline as British writers. However, Austen would have been the old guard of the regency, while Dickens became THE face of novels during the Victorian era. She dies anonymously when he’s five years old. So, despite my initial instinct, wouldn’t put them as contemporaries, despite sharing the same country and century.

That being said, this Leibowitz quote connects why I see them as peas in a pod, despite their polar opposite lives of recluse and fame. Both can paint a villain who exists across centuries. They point to greed and pride as flaws we, in any year, can mock. Goodness—humility, compassion, self-sacrifice, justice—can belong to anyone, and unlike the feudal systems of power, they belong to people of any class.

Dickens, like Austen, can make us laugh about these structures, long after they’re eroded, because their inherent vices still exist today.

Who was Charles Dickens?

Part of me has been blasé on Dickens, and I blame Christmas Carol. Like a word repeated until it is just a guttural sound, the story loses its flavor when you see everyone from Miss Piggy to Bill Murray have their way with it. That’s not to say I don’t like Christmas Carol, but if I can tell exactly how and what the story is going to do and when it’s going to do it, I lose sight of the craft. That’s just Christmas Carol. So what, is Dickens a genius or something?

Genius or not, we can debate. (I’m a sucker for a comedian, but that’s for another day.)

But what we can definitively say is long before Kim K. broke the Internet, Charles Dickens broke publishing. During his lifetime, he saw his ascent to become the most famous author to ever exist.

Read more

Normally, I snore to wake the gods and sift, unbothered, through a black sleep, teleporting me to morning.

Since I started reading this book on Monday, my dreams have become insistent.

In one dream, a childhood friend walked through an empty mansion where I hosted an intimate event. She smiled with forced politeness, and potentially disdain, and wandered into the tiled foyer, the rest of the party following her.

In another, my cousin, transformed by dream logic into Adam Brody, arrived in my neighborhood alongside my forty-odd first cousins to watch football in a vacated sports bar.

I woke up from these dream scenarios, picking the pieces up like glass shards washed on a shore. Was this a Jungian field day, or a messy collage of cranial gloop?

And more importantly, why Adam Brody?

Lockwood dreams

Wuthering Heights takes flight from the horror of a dream.

Mr. Lockwood, a pretentious southern Brit who values his company higher than anyone else does, literally overstays his welcome. A surprise visit to his landlord’s estate, Wuthering Heights, turns into a tense (and almost funny) imposition when a blizzard forces Lockwood to stay overnight.

Directed to a hidden room to sleep, Lockwood in typical fashion snoops. He finds a diary of a young girl named Catherine. In his dreams, a child’s ice-cold hand grips his wrist through a broken windowpane. “I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!” the ghost calls.

“Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear,” Lockwood writes.

In his ghostly vision, he cuts a child’s wrist against the glass edge of a broken window. I include that summary because when I first read that, I thought, that can’t be what I read. But it is exactly what your first impression might lead you to believe—an encompassing fear willing to sever the hand off a small child.

I wonder if we are the people in our dreams, the ones who react to surreal situations. In the realms of the impossible, our imagined responses show us what we may do if pushed outside our norms.

Digging this turn into 19th century Brits? Keep it going with more Emily Brontë and Jane Austen:

My boyfriend dreams

Roughly a year ago, my boyfriend routinely had apocalypse dreams. He hopped into the shower in the morning before he started work, and I sat outside the tub to read in my pajamas while the steam collected on the mirrors.

“I had a weird dream last night,” he said after a mild silence, before rinsing out the shampoo. He said it almost apologetically, so I would assume, narcissistically, that I gave him a hard time at the end of the world. From zombies to exploding blimps to collapsing underground societies, he usually had to find Dream Me in another building. He had to run to my apartment while the city burned. Or he had to collect our cats as they squirmed out of their carriers, threatening to run away.

Sometimes, we started the journey into the end together with a mismatched crew of acquaintances and family members and coworkers who, in a dream, make sense as the ultimate people to restart civilization. These dreams where I was in one piece by his side at the journey’s start, I intuited, are harder. The question of what to do next is scarier when the objective is unknown.

I wish I had these superhero dreams. Mine are much more confusing.

Catherine dreams

Lockwood returns to the Grange, obviously spooked. The estate’s maid, Nelly, cares for him, and she reveals she knew Mr. Heathcliff when he was a boy, when she used to work in the Wuthering Heights estate for the family. From there, we fumble into Nelly’s first-person “I” in Lockwood’s transcription, and Nelly will bounce us between other characters’ confessions and reveals.

Sometimes, I can’t tell who is speaking and who has died. Are we in the present or the past? If the past, which past?

Nelly spent her whole life working for the Earnshaws. When Master Earnshaw brings home a “dark gipsy” from Liverpool, his daughter Catherine spits on him. This is our ghost Catherine. After Hindley decides to terrorize his father’s new son, Catherine and Heathcliff become inseparable. While Heathcliff suffers sickness and abuse quietly, Catherine as a child loves mischief and affection:

She put us all past our patience fifty times and oftener in a day: from the hour she came down stairs, till the hour she went to bed, we had not a minute’s security that she wouldn’t be in mischief…when once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened that she would not keep you company, and oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her (42).

Though Catherine has made you cry, she will wait for the storm of your tears to blow over before she asks you to comfort her. And for that, Nelly finds Catherine endearing. Both Hindley and Catherine, despite of—or perhaps because of—their advantages, funnel their energy into using other people as outlets.

Edgar and Isabella Linton, Hindley and Catherine’s peers, live at the Grange, the property Lockwood rents in the present. The Lintons are the unfortunate happy family whose primary trouble comes from small squabbles. Heathcliff tells Nelly he and Catherine spied through a window to see the Linton children crying over the family dog:

The idiots! That was their pleasure! To quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things, we did despite them!...I’d not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton’s at Thrushcross Grange (48-49).

Heathcliff jinxes his life. The Lintons catch faces spying on them and release their bulldog. It bites Catherine. She recovers at the Grange for five weeks, separated from Heathcliff. When she returns to Wuthering Heights, she is no longer the wild child who loses her shoes in the bog but the carefully coifed lady who mocks Heathcliff’s dirty appearance. Catherine marries Edgar Linton, though she loves Heathcliff, because Heathcliff has no prospects with his orphaned background. When he overhears Catherine admit this, Heathcliff disappears for three years.

Catherine and Edgar are happy enough, but Heathcliff comes back, cleaner and angrier than before. For the first time, Catherine has to exist in the same space as her soulmate and husband, which, as you can imagine, Edgar is not thrilled with. With maturity, Catherine locks herself in her room and refuses food for multiple days. Nelly operates on a ground of secrecy between her, Heathcliff, and Edgar for fear of retaliation: “I should wake a domestic storm, by thwarting Mrs. Linton’s pleasure (110). Catherine’s temper, if provoked, alters the temperature of her household.

Catherine basically asks Nelly if her husband is curious where she went.

Nelly says she hasn’t told him about her hunger strike and he’s been pretty happy with his books, tbh.

Catherine’s anger evolves into madness.

She burns with a fever and opens the window to welcome the cold air from Wuthering Heights into the room. She rips apart her mattress and pillows, throwing feathers into the air: “The down is flying about like snow!” Her reality dissolves.

Her dreams prevent her from sleeping. She dreams she’s twelve and living again at Wuthering Heights after her father has died: “Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors—I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hard, and free…and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them!” (125) Like the constant references of summer and winter to foreshadow joy or despair, the characters move between hot and cold, silent grudges and flashing anger.

Before this confrontation, Catherine catches cold looking for Heathcliff in the rain, and she lingers by fires. She lives within both modes. Within her chosen confinement, she burns and blizzards. Her previously neutral spirit usurps control: “The spirit which served her was growing intractable; she could neither lay nor control it” (113). She lets her emotions run through her like a flash of lightening, powerless to how it manifests.

She catches sight of her reflection in a mirror and screams. She doesn’t recognize herself. When Nelly confirms that the face Catherine sees is her own—“you knew it a while since”—Catherine gasps, horrified (123). Is it an honest portrayal of her flared emotions she sees? Or age when she sees herself in dreams at 12? There’s an implication that she spots a black figure, a color associated with Heathcliff and his villainy, that suggests a demonic undertone. Can she see herself as evil?

We have no idea and can only speculate.

Alone with her vanity, Catherine loses her purpose as the object of someone’s desire. Later, as her pregnancy quietly advances and Edgar Linton takes care of her, Catherine hides within the world of her dreams.

Using a family tree to build characters

Technically, this is a powerhouse of a book, particularly in creating an eerie mystery, dark and redeemable characters. Brontë layers a gauze of ambiguity around and around the novel’s core until it appears opaque, solid, singular. Writing about it now, unraveling the loops of bandage, I am consumed by how many circles exist, how many keep coming, and how far I still am from the core.

Brontë, by keeping the character ensemble genetically tight, draws a Punnett square of inherited traits. Our primary five characters are Hindley, Catherine, and Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights and Edgar and Isabella Linton at the Grange.

These five characters—Catherine, Hindley, Heathcliff, Isabella, and Edgar— intermarry and have children. Because we know all of the parents intimately, we can trace the offspring’s inherited characteristics. From the family tree offered in the book, I traced the hereditary vices from mother and father to child, pictured below:

Though children are predisposed to mimic their parents, Brontë blends a new generation with their own voices to avoid a clear foil or parallel to any other character.

• Isabella and Heathcliff’s Linton is weak-willed, physically and morally, though he could have adopted his mother’s strong will to survive.

• Hindley’s Hareton, fostered by Heathcliff’s constant presence in Wuthering Heights, is an outsider with streak of violence and loyalty, depending on how he is treated.

• Catherine and Edgar’s Catherine, or Cathy, has a tender streak from her father with a mischievous narcissism that enjoys male attention and often traps her.

Each character has the freedom to decide who they will be and how they will use their assigned assets, traits, privileges. A paradox of this novel is how the character’s choices determine their fate. Nelly, our narrator with her own superiority complex, gives us a rare glimpse into the moral skeleton when she compares widowers Edgar and Hindley in the wake of their wives’ deaths:

I used to draw a comparison between [Edgar Linton], and Hindley Earnshaw, and perplex myself to explain it satisfactorily, why their conduct was so opposite in similar circumstances. They had both been fond husbands, and were both attached to their children; and I could not see how they shouldn’t both have taken the same road, for good or evil. But, I thought in my mind, Hindley, with apparently stronger head, has shown himself sadly the worse and weaker man. When his ship struck, the captain abandoned his post; and the crew, instead of trying to save her, rushed into riot, and confusion, leaving no hope for the luckless vessel. On the contrary, displayed the true courage of a loyal and faithful soul: he trusted God; and God comforted him. One hoped, and the other despaired: they chose their own lots, and were righteously doomed to endure them (185). [emphasis added]

Within each soul is a blizzard to navigate, a storm to weather.

I don’t resonate with Catherine.

Now there’s a difference between appreciating the craft and the character.

For all the talk of redemptive characters, the brutality and tenderness in each character, Catherine’s only redemption is she exists as the object of someone else’s attention. I don’t see why I should like Catherine. As the oldest of six kids, I relate more to Nelly than I do with Catherine. I’m the person who withholds the information to avoid a flare than exorcises my anger on the nearest living creature.

I don’t know what Heathcliff sees in her. I do see her treat him terribly. Their shared soul is a fact they express to each other, and to the “cool spectator,” their last conversation is animalistic, nonhuman, “a strange and fearful picture” (160). That’s not exactly a winning endorsement. If someone’s “save the date” came through as a “strange and fearful picture,” I would RSVP no to that wedding.

And, as an expression of his love, Heathcliff systematically guides every surviving member of Catherine’s circle to their destruction. He manipulates, kidnaps, beats, imprisons, and forces a nonconsensual marriage as property theft. All of that to his beloved’s daughter with another man.

By the end, almost every one is dead in Heathcliff’s wake to process his grief. (My guy, please just talk to someone.)

Are Catherine and Heathcliff really soulmates? Can there really be love between them, or is their bond born from their shared childhood?

[This doesn’t even touch the siblings-to-lovers dynamic that may or may not be at play here, and later permeates Catherine’s daughter Catherine regarding her cousin Linton: “I wish you were my brother!...people hate their wives, sometimes; but not their sisters and brothers” (238).]

The only positive moment between them is caught behind a closed door as children. After Master Earnshaw, Catherine’s father, dies, Nelly spies on the two children hiding in a room together and making sense of the death. “The little souls were comforting each other with better thoughts than I could have hit on,” she says, “no parson in the world ever pictured Heaven so beautifully as they did, in their innocent talk” (44).

Whatever shared and innocent version of heaven they share as children evolves as they mature. Heathcliff, called the devil by multiple characters, says that the only hell is a life without Catherine.

He says nothing of what heaven may look like.

These two are like the couple that always gets in fights and really should break up, but you think that maybe the thrill of potentially breaking up, the tumult of chaos, is the thing holding their relationship together. What do either Catherine or Heathcliff get from this relationship? Their version of love requires obstacles to house their anger.

As our characters exist in grey spaces, between parents and moral poles, love catalyzes a choice. In the face of love, Catherine and Heathcliff hurt the Lintons to express the love they claim they have for each other.

Another dream

While this week’s dreams left waking me with a confusing puzzle to piece together, thinking of the headlines about Adam Brody’s lost house to replace him in the universe of my dreams, the first dream kneaded my waking actions into the folds of its surrealism.

The dream: the actress who plays “Snail” in It’s Always Sunny followed me down a sidewalk. Incredibly niche reference only a few of you will get, but this video will give you the rest:

The sidewalk belonged to an illustration of a suburb, a Levittown of clipped lawns and painted window shutters. Every time I had an errand within the dream’s primary setting, now forgotten, Snail stood on the sidewalk to accompany me on the walk and continue a conversation we never started.

In the dream, I sensed she was unstable. We had to walk to an exhibit of the largest dinosaur skeleton constructed to date, three times larger than a T. Rex. She came, and if I told her she couldn’t, she may turn violent. The gossiping housewife veneer—since she wore a pink dress and lipstick and a beehive hairdo—had cracks, and I knew that.

On one of a few walks, she said she sent my boyfriend nudes. “No effing way,” I said, willing to risk her anger. She pulled up her phone and let me scroll through their texts. It was a one-sided barrage of photos of Snail putting her hands down her jeans. Based on the variation in shirts, she sent a new photo shoot to my boyfriend every day for a long time.

“Where did you find his number?” I asked, relieved he hadn’t sent anything in return, but also confused he never blocked her.

“On the apps,” Snail said, with of polite condescension: duh.

I woke up at 6 a.m. I blinked, back in my bedroom. I was aware I wasn’t in the dream anymore.

But my mind pushed forward a paranoid anecdote. A friend this summer had checked their new boyfriend’s phone while he slept because she had this gut instinct something was hidden. She discovered his texts with a second girlfriend, discussing her pregnancy.

She saw the shift awake as a tap from the supernatural, a divine intervention.

I tiptoed to the other side of the bed. I pulled his phone off the charger. I went to our downstairs bathroom, the lights on, my brain dark. I unlocked my boyfriend’s phone to see if he had downloaded Hinge. Then Tinder. Then Bumble. Nothing. I blinked, starting to wake up for real, so I ran back upstairs, plugged the phone back into the charger, and disappeared while I still existed in the liminal space between waking and sleeping.

I went back to sleep.

When I woke up, my paranoia was another gossamer texture to the dream, as unreal as Snail herself. Who was that Chloe that came out of the dream looking at a new reality? I don’t know, and we can only speculate.

“I had a crazy dream last night,” I said, as my boyfriend woke up next to me.

The primary, maybe only, anecdote about Emily Brontë involves her punching a bulldog.

Her bulldog, specifically. With her bare fists.

In the biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), published after the Brontë children had already passed, Elizabeth Gaskell includes the Bulldog Anecdote ™️ as an insight to Charlotte’s domestic life with her family. As quoted in Emily Rena-Dozier’s essay, Gaskell’s anecdote in full reads:

The same tawny bulldog . . . was "Keeper" in Haworth parsonage; a gift to Emily. With the gift came the warning. Keeper was faithful to the depths of his nature as long as he was with friends; but he who struck him with a stick or whip, roused the relentless nature of the brute, who flew at his throat forthwith, and held him there till one or the other was at the point of death. Now Keeper’s household fault was this. He loved to steal up-stairs, and stretch his square, tawny limbs, on the comfortable beds, covered over with delicate white counterpanes. But the cleanliness of the parsonage arrangements was perfect; and this habit of Keepers was so objectionable, that Emily, in reply to Tabby’s [the family servant’s] remonstrance, declared that if her pet was found again transgressing, she herself, in defiance of warning and his well-known ferocity of nature, would beat him so severely that he would never offend again. In the gathering dusk of an autumn evening, Tabby came, half triumphantly, half tremblingly, but in great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily’s whitening face, and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily’s eyes glowed in that manner. . . . She went up-stairs, and Tabby and Charlotte stood in the gloomy passage below, full of the dark shadows of coming night. Down-stairs came Emily, dragging after her the unwilling Keeper, his hind legs set in a heavy attitude of resistance, held by the "scuft of his neck," but growling low and savagely all the time. . . . She let him go, planted in a dark corner at the bottom of the stairs; no time was there to fetch stick or rod, for fear of the strangling clutch at her throat - her bare clenched fist struck against his fierce red eyes, before he had time to make his spring, and, in the language of the turf, she "punished him" till his eyes were swelled up, and the half-blind, stupefied beast was led to his accustomed lair, to have his swelled head fomented and cared for by the very Emily herself. The generous dog owed her no grudge; he loved her dearly ever after; he walked first among the mourners to her funeral; he slept moaning for nights at the door of her empty room, and never, so to speak, rejoiced, dog fashion, after her death.

Published almost a decade after Wuthering Heights’s publication, Gaskell eludes to a dark spirit within the novel’s author, a channel to the supernatural powers echoed in the setting of her story.

Was Emily a gothic witch: obstinate, violent, masculine? Or do we craft this reputation in the wake of her novel?

The only other sense we have of our author comes from her sister, Charlotte.

After her siblings—Branwell, Emily, and Anne—die within months of each other, Charlotte releases a second edition of Wuthering Heights. In Charlotte’s version, she lumps together paragraphs and alters punctuation, a correction to perceived missteps by the original publishers. “The books are not

well got up,” she writes her publisher, W.S. Williams.

She also includes a biographical notice of Ellis and Anton, her sister’s pen names. She gives her sisters posthumous credit for their novels and eulogizes them as their editor and sister. On Emily, Charlotte defends her sister as a timid, reclusive soul who doesn’t know the world and, therefore, blindly crafted a fictional world of evil. She describes her with a sharp eye of an editor:

In Emily’s nature, the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might hve informed the brain and kindle the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life; she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world. Her will was not very flexible, and it generally opposed her interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending.

In the margins, I wrote, oof. (Charlotte should meet the older sister from the “Please can I have the red crayon?” video.)

@eszquireharris👭💬 Watch these sisters master the art of communication, learning how to say "no" and setting boundaries! 🚀 Sibling communication is about empowerment, understanding, and respect. Let's cheer for healthy relationships! 💪💖 #SiblingCommunication #EmpoweredSisters #GrowingTogether #BoundariesMatter #SayingNoWithLove #CommunicationSkills #EmpathyAndRespect #SiblingEmpowerment 🌟

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Like her novel, Emily left no bones to pick through.

The same year Wuthering Heights was published and panned by critics, Emily caught tuberculosis. She refused medical treatment. “She sank rapidly,” Charlotte writes. “She made haste to leave us.”

She died, months after her brother Branwell and months before her sister Anne, in 1848. She was thirty years old.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

Forgive my Northern Attitude"

In 1818, in the wake of Jane Austen’s death and into the year Mary Shelley released Frankenstein, Emily Brontë was born as the fifth of soon-to-be six Brontë children.

Read more

The undercurrent toward the past evokes Shakespearean comedies, where the hijinks resolve in a conclusive wedding. At the same time, all my favorite rom-coms creep into my head, their lines rickrolling the longer sentences of Austen’s characters: Billy Crystal’s “when you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody” monologue; Hilary Duff’s zinger about rain in a drought; Regé Jean-Page’s “I burn for you.”

The last example, from the first season of Bridgerton set during the British Regency period, echoes Austen. As we reach the end of long, flowery sentences considering everything but the truth, the confession comes out, and it’s short and fast. A letter in Persuasion, offered with a heated glance from the writer, states, “You pierce my soul.”

Within a line, two people exist, a “you” and an “I,” their connection sealed with a welding verb.

Share

“What’s On Your Mind?”: Dramatic Irony vs. Mystery

My dad says most romances—particularly rom-coms—would end in the first five minutes if the characters talked to each other.

Maybe this is obvious to most lovers of love, but this changed the way I see romance, on- and off-screen. The writer has to craft their characters with interior obstacles that are, first, easy for them to hold without driving themselves crazy. Then, they have to make sure this character’s doubt, self-esteem, or miscommunication sustains the highly attentive audience without wearing their patience. (If you’re yelling at the book saying, “Girl, just say something,” they’ve lost their reader.)

So much romantic tension exists in the gap between assumption and knowledge. What is that flicker of the eyes? Does he love me, or is this room overdue for a dusting?

The unspoken tension of will they vs. won’t they pops with a sparkling relief with the right line at the right time. This is when the directness of a statement like “you pierce my soul” works without being cheesy or creepy. The relief comes only after our protagonists assume the worst, cling to a cold shoulder, and beat themselves with doubt.

In Austen’s final novel, Persuasion (1817), Austen implements this tension with the admirable and overlooked Anne Elliott. We step inside her mind as her assumptions persuade (wink wink) her to retreat from what she wants.

Anne Elliott is the wallflower middle sister. Her older sister, Elizabeth, sides with their dad, Sir Walter, who values his noble title by birth and appearance as the most important things in the world. Mary, the youngest, married the wealthy (but not noble, to Sir Walter’s disappointment) Charles Musgrove. Charles originally proposed to quiet Anne, who rejected him, though this doesn’t bog down the self-interested Mary. Anne’s only advocate is Lady Russell, the rich widow and best friend of her deceased mother, who wants what is best for Anne, even if it means arranging a match Anne doesn’t want. All of this leaves Anne powerless and unheard in her family, her only connection to action or mobility.

As readers enter Kellylynch, Sir Walter’s estate, Anne is nowhere to be found. The same as if we drop in for a visit, we meet Sir Walter and Elizabeth’s vanities before we see or hear more than a passing thought about Anne, who turns out to be our protagonist.

This first chapter, told from Elizabeth’s perspective, is sympathetic toward Elizabeth. As she turns 29, both she and her father worry about her single position. She once was engaged to her cousin and presumptive heir to the son-less Sir Walter, Mr. William Elliott. In a tale as old as time, this heir ghosted them and married someone else, leaving Elizabeth single and stressed about her father’s overspending. You don’t have to live in the 19th century to guess that this stinks. I sympathized with Elizabeth, assuming this eldest daughter had to save the family from debt and despair. (As someone who turned 29 in the last month, I admit I might have underlined, “she had the consciousness of being nine-and-twenty, to give her some regrets and some apprehensions” [7].)

However, by the end of the first chapter, we see Elizabeth’s priorities align with her father’s, oriented toward the shallow pursuits of wealth and nobility at the cost of others: “When faced with her father’s debt, Elizabeth proposes budget cuts to charity and Anne…she afterward added the happy thought of their taking no present down to Anne, as had been the usual yearly custom” (10).

Lady Russell suggests that the Elliotts sublet their estate and move to another residence in Bath to cover their debts, and the Elliots decide to move to Bath. When Anne peels herself away from the wallpaper in her own story, Anne suggests reasonable cuts to the family’s budget, which Sir Walter and Elizabeth refuse. Either Anne gets cut from the budget, or they will keep having debt! No other options!

Since Anne loves the country, she voices concern about moving to Bath, but “the usual fate of Anne attended her, in having something very opposite from her inclination fixed on” (14).

The family’s ignorance of Anne is a threat. As an unmarried woman, her agency exists in what her father decides to give her. This makes rhetoric, to be heard and understood, Anne’s only opportunity to get what she wants, and if everyone ignores her, she could be helpless. The only escape hatch for her to break free and live the life she wants comes from marriage and would vary depending on her spouse.

While Anne sits inside conversations around subletting Kellylynch to an admiral, she pipes into the conversation to offer details forgotten, showing her knowledge of the outside world. Mr. Shepherd, the realtor figuring out the conversation, sits with his daughter, the social-climbing Mrs. Clay, Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Anne, though he is mostly ignored. From Mr. Shepherd, pitching a potential tenant’s ties to their county:

“Bless me! How very odd! I shall forget my own name soon, I suppose. A name that I am so well acquainted with; knew the gentleman so well by sight; seen him a hundred times;…Very odd indeed!”

After waiting another moment—

“You mean Mr. Wentworth, I suppose,” said Anne (23).

There’s something about this that is funny, everyone sitting in silence and letting Mr. Shepherd speak in circles before he gives up. Though Anne isn’t heard, she listens to people around her and has a sharpness her family can’t see.

Anne leaves this conversation for fresh air: “as she walked along a favourite grove, said, with a gentle sign, ‘a few months more, and he, perhaps, may be walking here’” (25). This is the first time we step inside the privacy of Anne’s mind to see what she wants, what other people won’t let her have.

We learn that the Mr. Wentworth mentioned in the conversation and Anne used to be engaged. A twist! Eight years earlier, when the two characters were almost twenty, they fell in love. Sir Elliott, Elizabeth, and most trusted, Lady Russell convinced Anne to break the match with Wentworth. At the time, he had enrolled in the British Navy, but he had no fortune or societal title. Lady Russell believes Anne, who she sees as the best of the Elliott sisters, can do better. Anne complies and breaks the engagement, though she doesn’t marry—even when presented with a fine match to someone like Charles Musgrove. In a cruel twist, Admiral Croft, Wentworth’s brother-in-law, will rent Anne’s estate.

Though we are slow to meet Anne, we’re quick to see the inside of her head. Austen pulls the audience as a dramatic irony. The audience knows something most characters in Anne’s world don’t. Not even Mary knows about the match to Captain Wentworth.

It made me wonder about structure. What do we lose if we don’t know about the match until Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliott appear in the same room, further in the book? What if the audience is left to guess, only given behavioral clues to Anne and Wentworth’s odd reactions to each other?

It’s a better decision to pull the readers in from the start. We can comisserate with Anne. She may not have allies in the book, but she has her endeared readers who see her sweetness, her willingness to help everyone but herself. Plus, as everyone else acts obliviously around her, we feel like Anne’s confidante, her close friend. We laugh and groan with Anne when Mary talks about Captain Wentworth’s visit to the Musgrove estate, oblivious to Anne’s pain:

“‘Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne, though he was so attentive to me. Henrietta asked him what he thought of you, when they went away; and he said, ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again.’”… “Altered beyond his knowledge!” Anne fully submitted , in silent, deep mortification” (59).

Or:

“Charles ‘had never seen a pleasanter man in his life…he was sure Captain Wentworth was as likely a man to distinguish himself as any officer in the navy. Oh! It would be a capital match for either of his sisters.’

‘Upon my word it would,’ replied Mary. ‘Dear me! If he should rise to any very great honours! If he should ever be made a Baronet! Lady Wentworth; sounds very well. That would be a noble thing, indeed, for Henrietta!’” (73)

What does this statement mean? Anne is “so altered” from when he last saw her eight years ago, when they were engaged. Austen chooses a limited third-person perspective. While we can see through Anne’s eyes, we never cross into Captain Wentworth’s. This choice gives us great romantic tension. While we enjoy dramatic irony through Anne’s view of the world, we still have the tension of the unknown, the risk of an unrequited affection.

The other element of dramatic irony is it directs our laughter to the Elliotts. Mary, who eight years earlier would have advised against Anne and Wentworth’s match like the rest of her family, now sees Wentworth in a positive light. They admire his fortune and respectable military rank, while Anne loves him as a person. It’s the ultimate “I told you so” that Anne, sweet Anne, would never say. Even if she did, her family might choose to ignore her.

Want to know more about the world of Persuasion? Paid subscribers had access to biography, historical context, and Austen recommendations on Thursday:

Mystery vs. Dramatic Irony (FYI, SPOILERS)

Though dramatic irony pulls back the curtain on what a character thinks, Austen knows when to implement mystery and leave clues to the unanswered questions our protagonists have.

While Captain Wentworth may or may not, according to Anne, want to marry Henrietta or Louisa Musgrove, Mr. William Elliott—the cousin who ghosted ™️—re-enters their lives as a civil, handsome, well-mannered gentleman. Recently widowed, he explains that their estrangement was a miscommunication. Really, Mr. Elliott loves Sir Walter and Elizabeth, how did you ever get the idea he didn’t! He persuades (wink) Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Lady Russell that he is a good-mannered man. A potential good match for Anne, who he seems to watch very attentively.

Anne senses something is wrong with him. It’s less of an “I think this guy might be a serial killer” vibe and more like “Does anyone else smell something rotten?” (Of course not!, her family says, This guy smells great!) When Mr. Elliott seriously pursues Anne as his second wife, and Captain Wentworth and Anne have thawed their relationship, there’s a threat of a love triangle. Though Anne should be excited, she senses something is off. Austen answers that question her readers and Anne both have, and she pays that instinct off when Mrs. Smith goes full Spotlight on Mr. Elliott. (If you’ve read it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

While dramatic irony injects humor into a work, drama can come from the tension of withheld plot or character details. Austen leaves us clues on both Captain Wentworth’s and Mr. Elliott’s intentions, and she makes Anne discover who they are.

Okay, spoilers over! Sally forth.

“Have a chat?”

Here and now, I will make a public confession: I like romance as a genre.

I don’t think it’s my top choice, but I don’t know if that’s me being a snob or not. In addition to the above rom-coms, I’ve loved Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, and Sally Rooney, all authors who implement romantic plots in varying degrees of realism.

(On the other hand, I love to observe relationships cannibalizing, a somewhat mainstream interest with the rise of content like Ester Perel’s podcast or Showtime’s Couples Therapy. But I digress.)

I rediscovered Austen as an adult during the pandemic. I had recently graduated college, moved back home with my five siblings to quarantine, and read through my annotated copy of Pride & Prejudice. While I circled instances of “irony” like Austen’s novel was a word search for a textbook technique when I was fourteen, a girl who had never been kissed, I could laugh alongside the Bennetts in my early twenties in a long-term relationship.

When I moved back to New York in September 2020, stuck in a tiny apartment with two roommates, I succumbed to reality dating TV shows. (Whether this was a symptom of a mild case of romantic OCD or not is a whole other book.)

I watched every dating reality show available with my roommates. The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. Love Is Blind. Hundreds, and hundreds, of hours of Love Island UK.

The format of Love Island, for my grandpa and the otherwise uninitiated, is single men and women live together in a huge house. They sunbathe by the pool with their Thanksgiving-turkey-skin tans, sit on plush couches in neon bikinis, and spend the days in conversations to find a boyfriend/girlfriend. Compared to the American Bach- franchises, the contestants prioritize friendships alongside their relationships. They don’t backstab. It’s a show of countless minutes of people talking to each other.

Based on the way I’m describing it, it would be boring. At the very least, you might consider it low-brow. It’s not a Jane Austen novel.

And yet?

It might be.

Both shows encapsulate the getting-to-know-you phase of a romantic relationship. The two hundred years apart between Persuasion and Love Island UK present humans in completely different worlds with equally disorienting vocabularies. (Both the contemporary British slang of Love Island and the stilted definitions of Austen’s English feel like trying to turn on a lamp at someone else’s apartment. You know what you’re supposed to do with the lamp and how it should work, but you fumble to find the switch that will turn it on. Once you figure it out, the light stays on.)

Both groups deal with the inherent human questions of belonging. “Do you like me? Do you mean it?”

Love Languages: Anne Is An Acts of Service Girly

Anne speaks little. In Persuasion, other characters speak, assume her response, and continue monologuing. One example is from Admiral Croft in Bath. He says, “How do you like Bath, Miss Elliot? It suits us very well. We are always meeting with some old friend or other…” (169). A paragraph later, the conversation comes back to Anne.

When Anne does initiate a conversation, it falls on deaf ears: “She roused herself to say, as they struck by order into another path, ‘Is not this one of the ways to Winthrop?’ But nobody heard, or, at least, nobody answered her” (83).

Anne values action. When an emergency pulls Captain Wentworth’s naval friends to assist the Musgroves, she stays calm as a nurse. Everyone around her screams and weeps, and she directs one of the naval officers to find a doctor. Anne withholds affirmations from the women who sit and do little and favors women like Mrs. Croft, Mrs. Hartville, or Nurse Rooke. She fits in best with this crowd who acts to help others.

Likewise, Wentworth is a man of short sentences. He engages in conversation, but he rarely talks to hear his opinions in his voice.

The clues about Wentworth’s feelings about his compatibility with Anne hide in the silence.

He pauses or stops when Anne does something admirable, his silence a token of his unspoken attention.

When she overhears Louisa Musgrove explain to Captain Wentworth how Anne refused to marry Charles, he pauses before he responds in surprise:

“‘We do so wish that Charles had married Anne instead.—I suppose you know he wanted to marry Anne?’

After a moment’s pause, Captain Wentworth said,

‘Do you mean that she refused him?’

‘Oh! yes, certainly.’

‘When did that happen?’” (87).

This is Captain Wentworth’s first hearing that Anne, after their failed engagement, refused another match, one that would align more with Lady Russell’s tastes. He moves carefully and plays his emotions close to the jacket. Anne, eavesdropping on this conversation, assumes Wentworth’s silence is a judgment, continuing the pattern.

When Mr. Elliott, a handsome stranger, looks favorably at Anne, she blushes at his attention—and notices that Captain Wentworth also caught this glance, this small win for Anne.

When Captain Hartville and Anne debate the emotionality of women and men, a great conversation and the only one where Anne and another character engage equally, Wentworth drops his pen in the middle of writing a letter. He continues to eavesdrop, more curious to see Anne argue abstractly about the ideals of men and women than to participate himself. By watching her with other people, he sees her best.

Persuasion is not influence

The largest difference between a fictional romance and a reality dating show experience is the awareness of the audience.

The contestants agree to speak in front of a camera, to allow an editor to chop and slice their conversations to fit a narrative that will unfold after the experience is already over, the ending decided. The payoff might be the promise of post-show influence.

Though Austen wrote from a time when marriages, as institutions, valued women as assets, love, or its semblance, has a high market value.

Jia Tolentino writes against America’s expanding wedding industry in her Trick Mirror essay, “I Thee Dread.” As she traces wedding trends from regency roots to today’s $30,000 production for hundreds of guests, she suggests Instagram allows people to adopt their wedding and the identity of bride-to-be “like a production engineered to be witnessed and admired by an audience.”

Marriage, she argues, is a cataloged wish fulfillment of a princess narrative, served by vendors with rising rates. It becomes a spectacle increasingly disconnected from the couple’s relationship. For the bride in hetero relationships, who disproportionately faces the burden of planning the event, she can feel like an influencer, the target of everyone’s admiration.

(After her book’s publication, Tolentino announced via Instagram that she and her 12-year partner reluctantly married for health insurance reasons after having a baby together: “I hated the idea of doing something in the realm of love that I hadn’t freely chosen, and for the gross fact that this country doesn’t believe that people are inherently worthy of healthcare. But we did it”)

Without the concrete castes of nobility, there will always be a social ladder, even if it appears more invisible. The power to influence others, measured in commissions from purchased recommended items, can quantify our ability to persuade others. Some contestants, if their motivations are for their own influence, come across as cheap and desperate as Sir Walter and Elizabeth.

But what about real relationships formed? What is the cost of having the happy beginnings of your real relationship devoured by the public?

One example of a dissolved marriage after Love Island UK favoritism is Molly Mae and Tommy Fury. They announced their divorce with a black screen on socials, a strong disconnect from the fans who watched their love and family grow through a screen.

Most romance novels capitalize on these early days, the moments of excitement about potentially being chosen. You only see the beginnings, where anything—love or pain—is possible. The narratives around these same couples, a few years or decades into their marriage, are less optimistic. (Watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? if you want the acute pain of a newlywed couple seeing their marriage as doomed as their destructive hosts.)

This leaves us with an escape into the best pieces of a relationship, the purity of unchallenged morals. In Austen, the protagonists hold onto the absolute good, their morals in tact, their love blossoming. In the (great) short doc “The Divine Jane,” author Colm Tóibín says,

“If you were goign off for the weekend and said you were doing nothing but rereading Emma, or taking Mansfield Park to bed, that image to me would be one of pure happiness. I mean, you could bring, maybe, a person to bed, and that might be nicer in some ways, but it wouldn’t be as fully satisfying.”

Austen’s last book assesses the power of rhetoric, how we are heard and how we value others based on appearances or character. Persuasion is the thin veil where we choose to adopt other people’s thoughts or watch others absorb our beliefs for themselves. If we merge others’ thoughts as our own without aligning our own beliefs, persuasion turns to poison.

Anne knows her compass. Throughout Persuasion, we watch her tune her pitchfork to her morals, seeking out the morally good, finding disgust at the superficial pursuit of appearances. She has to exorcise the negative narratives about her worth as a daughter and unmarried woman before she persuades herself that Captain Wentworth might not hate her at all.

What happens to Anne and her betrothed in the final pages, we can only assume it’s a happily ever after. They have the foundation of knowing how to hear what the other says through a silence.