Death is a phenomenon that often appears in many excellent literary works, through the process of a character to death, readers can deeply and clearly perceive the psychological activities of the character, the essence of personality, or the value orientation of the writer himself.
In literature, the death and destruction of women are often inseparable from the unique physical and psychological characteristics of women, and female consciousness sometimes even becomes the motive cause of death.
"Anna Karenina" was written in the period of conflict between the Russian bourgeoisie and feudal patriarchal culture, and in the protagonist Anna, people can see both the shackles brought by the Russian feudal clan concept, the hope of women's awakening at that time, and the dilemma entangled between the two.
Self-awakening and loss
Anna's Awakening of Female Consciousness
The feminist theorist de Beauvoir argued: "Traditionally, society has given women the fate of marriage. ”
And Anna, as a descendant of Russian nobles, fate gave her the status of a high-ranking official's wife that perfectly matched the upper class. Whether she and her husband truly love each other or not, in the eyes of high society, her identity is unchangeable.
At the beginning of the novel, Anna travels to Moscow to make peace for her brother and sister-in-law, not by virtue of her noble origins, but because of her most original self as a woman and her natural duty to mediate conflicts.
The mediation fosters Anna's femininity, and the encounter with the young officer Volynsky makes Anna suspicious of marriage. Before meeting Volynsky, Anna was just a married woman who never overstepped herself, and after meeting him, she began to look at the world out of her wife's role and gave birth to an infinite yearning for love.
Focusing on the self, realizing the self, and even contradicting the self are the root of Anna's female consciousness awakening.
In the context of the times at that time, extramarital affairs in high society were carried out on the premise of not violating sacred marriage.
Anna betrays the patriarchal discourse she has always followed, tears apart the absurdity of "conjugal love", and bravely moves closer to the liberal idea that "power is above good".
Female consciousness and Anna's death
1. "Couple Love"
Beauvoir described a kind of "couple's love" as a "complex mixture of attachment, resentment, hatred, command, tolerance, laziness, and hypocrisy," as between Tauri and Duke Obronsky, Anna and Karenin.
Tao Li was furious when she learned that her husband had cheated and soon after being persuaded by Anna, she forgot her hatred for her husband and returned to the family;
Karenin witnessed Anna's betrayal, wanted to take the initiative to divorce, and followed the religious saint mentality to forgive Anna, and also refused Anna's request for divorce.
Tao Li's modeled approach to marital crises reflects the typical image of women under the patriarchal discourse, while Karenin is a representative of Christian and patriarchal thought.
Anna once described Karenin as follows: "He is not a man, he is a machine of officialdom ..."
Even in the face of divorce, Karenin still calls Anna "dear", which makes Anna even more disgusted.
Although Karenin condoned Anna's cheating, his high authority was actually a torture for Anna. Without understanding, without sympathy, too much respect, too restrained, the yoke called marriage is actually a heavy and misnomerable ornament.
Anna can no longer endure a loveless marriage like Tao Li.
When Anna decides to confess her love to her husband, she crushes herself who once believed in "husband and wife love" and creates a new self.
This directly contributed to her separation from her original environment, becoming a progressive heretic, and laying the groundwork for her final death.
2. Unsound subjectivity
Having children, reconciling family conflicts, and participating in social activities were all that Anna's original life was all about.
In this situation, she wholeheartedly obeys her husband and family, performing her functions as an object.
After awakening, Anna no longer sees herself as an object of the family, but as a "living woman", which gives her the courage to escape from the closed environment.
Because she chases love, she chases her self as a woman and chases identity; And because of losing self, losing identity, and finally losing love.
Such a vicious circle has produced bad consequences.
Given Anna's relatively closed upbringing, in her conception, men have always been subjects, and women are subordinate to men.
The unexpected love gave her the opportunity to examine herself, and Anna discovered her value as a woman, so she no longer resisted the desire to satisfy herself.
But she did not realize that although she escaped from the family, she did not escape from her closed heart, she was still confined to a narcissism, a self-nihilistic dream, gradually lost in the entanglement of the identity of wife, mother, lover, and finally gave up her life.
3. "Hysteria"
Freud said, "Physiology is destiny. ”
According to him, women and men have the same Oedipus and castration complexes, and girls develop with sexual goals that change from active to passive and have some undesirable gender traits, such as narcissism, vanity and shame.
The hysteria shown by Anna in the text seems to be caused by gender.
However, some feminist psychoanalysts point out that "women's gender identity, gender behavior, and sexual orientation are not the result of biological facts." Rather, they are the product of social values. ”
If Freud's view is reinterpreted from a feminist point of view, gender characteristics are a kind of deprivation of humanity in a patriarchal society, and hysteria can be said to be the helplessness that explodes after women are oppressed.
Abandoned by her former social circle, abandoned by her family, abandoned by love, and as a heretic who betrayed the patriarchy, Anna was eventually abandoned by the patriarchal society.
Because her liberation is not complete, her new self is not firm, and her mental fragility and collapse leave Anna with only snowy railroad tracks, death becomes her destination.
The metaphor and expression of death
Metaphor is a rhetorical phenomenon that refers to the direct metaphor of one thing to another, and the ontology and metaphor are connected by words such as "is" and "become".
Metaphor is also a way of cognition, which refers to the mental behavior, verbal behavior, and cultural behavior of perceiving, experiencing, imagining, understanding, and talking about one type of thing under the suggestion of another type of thing.
In "Anna Karenina", the author repeatedly uses metaphors to allude to the thoughts and fate of the protagonist.
"Omen" and nightmares
At the beginning of the novel, Anna and Volynsky and her party encounter an ominous event at the train station: a roadkeeper is crushed to death, which Anna believes is a bad omen.
Later, the image of the watchman often appeared in Anna and Volynsky's dreams. Whenever Anna was emotionally devastated, she always thought of this deathless scene.
This image may indicate the intuition of the characters, whenever Anna is on the verge of losing herself, the old man will quietly appear, he seems to represent the unknown and horror brought by death, metaphor Anna's emotions, the end of life, giving people infinite reverie.
pistol
Volynsky's pistol plays two prominent roles in the text, once at the racecourse and once when he committed suicide.
The author spends several chapters detailing a heart-wrenching horse race, including the course and the reaction of the spectators (especially Anna).
In the race, Warrens lost the race by a genetic mistake, and the horse also broke his spine due to an accident and could not stand up again, so he raised a gun and ended the life of his horse, which "became the most painful and sad memory of his life, which remained in his heart for a long time."
This is also the same as the process in which he indirectly led Anna to death.
Later, Anna became critically ill after giving birth, Volynsky was extremely heartbroken, and after meeting Karenin, he was ashamed and embarrassed, and under a variety of complicated feelings, he shot himself in the heart.
The bullet grazed the point, and Volynsky was so hard to die that he could only pretend that his gun had gone off and was injured.
Volynsky's two sufferings were life-threatening, and finally turned the corner. The pistol is a weapon that has followed him for many years, his second "self", and a witness and participant in his life, which symbolizes Volynsky's persistent and cruel side to Anna, and also carries his deep and warm love for Anna.
After Anna's death, Volynsky returned to the army and wanted to die on the battlefield, and he was once again closely associated with the gun because of Anna.
Volynsky's pistol breaks the male-dominated love model in a patriarchal society, and it is a metaphor for the belief that free souls of that era can also be crazy about love.
"Disease" and "Medicine"
Women's frustration in love is often reflected in physical weakness.
In the text, Kitty fell out of love after witnessing Anna and Volynsky dancing together, and then fell ill. After returning to Petersburg with Volynsky, Anna, who had experienced mental trauma, often fantasized about what to see after death.
She took opium, anesthetized her nerves, and tried to escape life's problems, but her suicidal tendencies slowly accumulated in her heart, eventually making her choose to give up her life.
The image of women in illness is a manifestation of non-acceptance of reality and inner contradictions, and their insoluble depression is either replaced by new problems or become life-killing murderers.
Kitty and Anna have never been real patients, their "disease" is born of desire, or there is no "medicine" to cure, or the search for "medicine" is fruitless, their physical discomfort stems from heavy and unsolvable thinking and the imprisonment they impose on themselves, which actually reflects a deformed concept of marriage.
Women's struggles and dilemmas
Anna is in a triple dilemma
"Women are not born, they are nurtured."
Karenin, Seryosha, and Volynsky, the three men who appeared in Anna's life, raised her as a wife, mother, and lover, and these three identities were intertwined and restrained, putting Anna in a difficult situation.
Karenin believed that his union with Anna was God's will, but behind it was a mixture of authority and religious spirituality. He refused to divorce many times because he wanted to use God to suppress the self that had sprouted in Anna's heart.
He, like most people, could not understand his wife's sudden madness, which he could only protest with moral exaltation.
It can be seen from his behavior that he has love for Anna, but this love does not stem from love, but from the love of a paradigmatic couple.
He forgave Anna with religious spirit and embarrassed Anna with his father's authority, which made Anna sometimes guilty and sometimes angry with Karenin, and Anna's spirit was tortured in every way.
Xieliaosha's love for Anna is relatively constant, but because he is too young and has no right to speak, this love becomes a tool for others to blackmail Anna.
Anna values family affection, she can give up the status of Karenin and the wife of a high-ranking official, but she is not willing to give up being the mother of Seryosha.
Therefore, before she died, she blamed herself for exchanging one kind of love for another, that is, exchanging maternal love for love, and she gave up Xie Liosha in exchange for failed love, for which she felt disgust and guilt.
Volynsky's love for Anna is the biggest reason why Anna is in trouble, and Anna's death is also a major destruction for Volynsky.
Anna awakened because of Volynsky, and then bravely chose to run away and elope, Volynsky also loved Anna deeply and did not hesitate to pay for each other's lives.
But later, real problems and different concepts made them have an "internal resentment" towards love.
Anna felt that Volynsky's love had become "thin", she said: "My love is getting hotter and hotter, more and more want love to be exclusive, but he is getting colder, so we are getting further and further apart." ”
Volynsky hated that Anna had embarrassed him, but it was patriarchal thinking that was at work.
Although he understands and respects Anna better than Karenin, in his heart, like other men, he still feels that his wife should obey her husband and not be pretentious.
During his argument with Anna, he said that girls' education was unnecessary and that it was "abnormal" for Anna to have a preference for the English girls she raised, which indirectly proved that Volynsky did not recognize Anna's progress and sacrifices, and his love for Anna gradually evolved into a tired couple love.
The reason why Anna is in trouble
In the last two stanzas of the seventh part of the novel, Anna is already in a trance, and a large inner monologue spreads out, showing her repeated and drowsy mood to the fullest.
Anna, who is in a difficult situation, does not want to get out of the predicament, but martyrs for love with the idea of punishing those who created the predicament.
After several suicidal tendencies and nightmare descriptions in the previous article, Anna's suicide on the rails pushed the emotions of the whole text to a climax.
Anna delivers the final blow in her war with the world at the cost of both physical and mental destruction, but in the end she fails to win because she cannot change the world's opinion of her, and the world has long lost its pity for her.
As Volynsky's mother, no matter how much she admired Anna, in the end she viciously commented, "Her death itself was the death of a bad woman who didn't believe in religion." ”
Anna could not get sympathy because her actions directly harmed the interests of her husband, son, and lover under the constraints of patriarchal discourse.
For a long time, women have been shaped by society as the second gender, and once they awaken themselves, they will be subjected to all kinds of conquests, and this mental pressure forces some women to return to the shadow of family and men, or as Anna consumes faith in difficult situations, and finally goes to destruction.
Therefore, neither Karenin nor Volynsky wanted Anna to break away from the patriarchal discursive order, because they knew that if Anna was too egoistic, they would lose their original order, and they thought they were saving Anna, but in fact they did not really understand Anna, but increased her pain and entanglement.
The aesthetic value of Anna's death
Anna's dilemma can also be interpreted from another perspective as the dilemma of beauty.
In 19th-century Russian literature, many writers, influenced by the idea of female worship, focused their writings on women and extended their discussions on many issues from the women they created.
In these works, women become the embodiment of beauty, women's gender characteristics become the expression of beauty, and the exploration of women's plight is the exploration of beauty.
Death is one of the most important aesthetic issues, and Anna's death is Tolstoy's creation of deep thinking on women, society, and religious issues, and is a sublimation of women's beauty.
epilogue
Liberal ideas appeared very early in bourgeois political thought, and it was here that the idea of women's emancipation was conceived and gradually grew.
By the 19th century, liberal ideology was widely accepted in Western societies, and Russia was no exception.
At the time of the writing of "Anna Karenina", various changes were taking place in Russia, the rapid social and economic development gradually made the bourgeoisie gradually grow, and the traditional feudal patriarchal system and religious beliefs resisted behind it, and freedom and autocracy violently hedged.
As a devout Christian, Tolstoy felt a lot of shock and inspiration at such a turning point of change.
He integrates the social problems and phenomena he focuses on, the conflict between his beliefs and reality, into his creations, which is a transcendent expression of Tolstoy's works.
Looking back on Anna's life, the emergence of female consciousness has made Anna have herself, but the oppression of the environment has made her lose herself again.
She fought for freedom in difficult circumstances, and eventually tortured to death by her difficulties, and readers can feel both fearless liberal ideas and the situation and sorrow of women in traditional families.
Psychoanalytic feminists argue: "To get rid of what hinders the development of women, women must go back to the depths of themselves and spiritually remove the influence of their original father." Only then will she have the space to rethink herself and thus become the person she has the right to be. ”
Her experience makes readers deeply understand and reflect on the situation of women, and also provides a reference for the development of feminism - women should not succumb to any kind of chance and inevitability, but should be their own masters.
Anna's fallen beauty shines on the latecomers in literary history, and her existence not only provides a typical reference for later literary creation, but also provides spiritual impetus for women's struggles in real life.