Text/Yellow Peach
Married at the age of twenty, met love at the age of twenty-eight, and committed suicide in despair at the age of thirty, it is really thought-provoking that Anna Karenina's life ended in the form of a tragic tragedy. What was it that brought this beautiful, intelligent, noble, high-society woman into a desperate situation?
First, the contradiction between the individual's will to life and the bad environment of society
Anna is a vibrant young woman. This is very well reflected in the novel. Tao Li praised her as "radiant and full of spirits"; Ji Di felt that she did not look like a twenty-eight-year-old married woman, but like a twenty-year-old girl; Vronsky only looked at her twice, and found that she was suppressed but constantly angry.
Originally a vibrant maiden, she married Karenin, a stereotypical, cold, hypocritical bureaucratic husband in her twenties; fell in love with Vronsky but could only live together in an illegal way; loved her son and wanted to have him without access to her cold husband;and was humiliated in trying to challenge the Petersburg social circle with her own strength. The lack of understanding and tolerance of the social environment pushed Anna to a wall everywhere. However, after experiencing the double tribulations of illness and spirit, Anna can still recover quickly in the nourishment of love, which shows her strong will to life.
The high society of Petersburg was full of boredom, vulgarity, luxury and erosion. Under the fig leaf of marriage, many couples maintain a superficial dignity and harmony. Anna's daring to tear off the fig leaf of hypocrisy and expose her love to the sun is undoubtedly a fearless act of contempt for the world, the embodiment of her unique will to life, but it is incompatible with the customs and ideas of Russian high society. Anna was eventually abandoned by high society and fell into a situation of loneliness and helplessness.
(Anna)
Second, the contradiction between the new awakening of love and the old ethical and moral concepts
Anna's marriage to Karenin was arranged by the elders. She has marriage but no love. Karenin suffocated Anna's life, suffocated everything that was alive in her, and he never imagined that she was a woman with her own thoughts and a life of love.
After marriage, Anna positioned herself as a mother, putting love into her children and taking good care of her son. Encountering Vronsky, Anna's suppressed longing was awakened, as if a volcano that had been dormant for years was spewing hot lava.
"I can't fool myself anymore, I'm a living person, I have no sin, God made me such a person, I need to be in love, I need to live. ...... I'm going to break through his net of lies that want to tie my hands and feet. ”
This passage can be said to be Anna's declaration of love. As a married woman, I understand the misfortune of marriage, see the true face of my husband, dare to pursue love, and think that this is a matter of course and is the need of "me"! This is a new view of love from the self, an awakening of women's self-awareness.
However, Anna is deeply influenced by the old ethical and moral concepts, and carries a heavy sense of self-blame and shame in the pursuit of love. In the early days of her love with her lover, she was ashamed and embarrassed, and felt terrible and hateful. She often dreamed that she was loved to death by two men at the same time. After giving birth to her daughter, she suffered from puerperal fever and spoke nonsense in high fever delirium.
"Another woman was attached to me and I was afraid of her because she was in love with the man,...... That woman is not me, and now I am the real me, and it is only me that I am completely. ”
For Anna's so-called "two women", we may wish to look at the shadow of her two concepts, that is, one shadow is Anna who bravely pursues love after awakening, and the other is Anna who adheres to the old moral concepts. Unable to resolve this conflict between old and new ideas, she would take her husband and lover's hand in the confusion of the heat and ask them to shake hands and make peace; she would ask Karenin for forgiveness before she died (she thought she was going to die).
(Anna asks Karenin for forgiveness while she is ill)
Third, the contradiction between the love of the ideal and the reality of the situation
Anna said to Vronsky: "Love, I don't like this word because it means so much to me, far beyond what you can understand." ”
In Anna's world of love, there must first be Vronsky and his love, a single-minded and lasting love. Without Vronsky's love, her life would have lost its support and meaning. She demanded that Vronsky's love be sincere, pure, and long-lasting. Vronsky gave up the opportunity for her promotion and even committed suicide, which deeply touched her and made her think that she had found and had the ideal love.
The second is to have a son, Xie Liaocha. Without a son, she felt that her love was incomplete, that she was a selfish mother, and that she would always be condemned by conscience and morality.
However, Vronsky's love, not sincere enough, did not last long. After more than three months of living abroad, Vronsky referred to Anna as "Madame Karenin" and explained his whereabouts with "We were traveling together and I was going to see her." When his wish to live with Anna was satisfied, he became bored and had to spend time studying politics, reading new books, and painting. After returning to China, he insisted on living separately from Anna, both to show outsiders that the relationship between the two was not as close as rumored, and to create conditions for his free activities. The person Anna fell in love with was actually a selfish and vain person.
in Vronsky
Karenin refused Anna's request to see her son. Anna saw only her son once and lost the right to see him forever. As a mother, she felt pain. Thinking that this situation had something to do with Vronsky, she would be angry with him. However, Vronsky could not understand her pain, believing that their love had nothing to do with her son.
After having Anna's love, Vronsky felt constrained and lost the freedom of men, so he used active participation in social activities to escape Anna.
Vronsky did not love his mother, and the mother-son relationship was very cold. Vronsky's mother objected to her son's relationship with Anna and introduced her son to the other women in an attempt to break them up. Anna was unhappy about this, but Vronsky would not allow Anna to comment on it.
Anna helps Vronsky's trainer and helps the family, but is questioned by Vronsky, believing that she cares too much about others and is cold to her daughter.
Among the various trifles, there are hidden thoughts of each other, and even discord. Hot love is thrown into concrete life, and it turns out that it is also a place of chicken feathers. The ideal of love and reality thus haunted Anna and entangled her.
(Anna and Vronsky)
Fourth, the contradiction between the pursuit of self and the loss of self
Anna's life with Karenin was a life of losing herself. She does not love Karenin in her heart, but she tries to find advantages from her husband; she realizes the hypocrisy of the relationship between husband and wife, but still meets her husband; she does not like the social circle, but she wins the love of the people in the circle.
She hid her true self until Vronsky's appearance awakened her long-sleeping love, and her self was fully revealed. She feels relieved after confessing her feelings to her husband, which is the embodiment of the release of her thoughts and emotions after years of repression. She put aside old moral concepts and openly cohabited with Vronsky without fear of gossip, which is her courageous act of self-pursuit.
(Anna lost in love)
However, in the process of fighting for her rights, she was confined to a sense of guilt and shame, adopted an attitude of being at the mercy of Karenin, and abandoned the demand for divorce, so that she was always in a passive waiting situation. This is a manifestation of a lack of self-awareness.
What's even more emotional is that she puts love above everything. For Vronsky's love, she was somewhat low into the dust. During her life abroad, she looked at her lover with loving eyes, gave him a perfect aura, and held a grateful love for him. And when she returned home, Vronsky was keen on political affairs and often went out, she felt lonely and lonely, afraid of losing him, afraid of being abandoned by him. While living in the countryside, she supported all his actions, except for his vain position, trying to firmly stabilize his love by doing what he liked.
But life is more than love! It seems that what Anna did for love, but in fact she has been trapped by love and has become a slave to love. Anna eventually loses herself on the path of love, goes to extremes, and goes to total destruction.