The Fall: Discussing Fate, Myth, and Womanhood in Anna Karenina

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Ava Giles

The Birch Journal, Spring 2024, pp. 65-71.

Leo Tolstoy’s portraits of women in Anna Karenina appear to be indivisible from his own predilections and moral alignment as the narrator of the story. Women in Tolstoy’s novels often seem to exist in tropes of his own making, disconnected from the world outside his works. Consequently, Tolstoy’s rendering of the ideal woman–– often dubbed the “Tolstoyan woman” by contemporary audiences––is frequently dismissed as a formulaic, two-dimensional, stereotypical characterization of the female experience in nineteenth century Imperial Russia, a mere extension of Tolstoy’s value system. The Tolstoyan woman thus becomes an amalgam of slippery and smooth person- ality traits, a woman thoroughly polished of her rough edges and callous behavior, rather than a varied individual independent from this archetype. The Tolstoyan woman adheres to the ideals of home life as dictated by the men around her, passing through girlhood and falling into the duties of marriage and motherhood with such a sudden transition that there is no tangible period of adolescence. She poses no objection to the social parameters foisted upon her, andresigns any desire for independence without protest, accepting her new role as accessory to her husband.

The exception to the rule which disproves Tolstoy’s reliance on the trope of the Tolstoyan woman is Anna Karenina’s character. Anna’s character journey utterly shirks ideal womanhood. At first glance, Tolstoy appears to condemn Anna’s adulterous depravity by writing her path through the novel as a warning to those who follow in her footsteps, vindicating those who align their moral compass with his own. From this angle, Anna’s character journey represents the shadowy inverse of the uncorrupted feminine, standing in opposition to the morally upright society woman. Read superficially, Tolstoy penned the story of an immoral woman, punishing her for her wickedness through his authority as author and as the creator of the novel’s omnipotent narrator. Reading Anna Karenina this way, the work of a man tormenting a woman for her debauchery, does both a disservice to Tolstoy’s ability as a writer and reduces Anna to a puppet entirely devoid of agency. Pitting Anna against his framework of pure womanhood as little more than a means of illustrating a binary opposition in which Anna counterbalances the ideal feminine compresses Anna’s story into a digestible Tolstoyan parable–a warning, even–about what might happen if the womanly code of conduct goes disregarded. This uncharitable view of Anna, Tolstoy, and the novel itself proves questionable when Anna’s narrative journey is examined in closer detail.