This is an idea I’ve sort of been mulling over for awhile, partly set off by my classmates’ discussions of marriage and love in Tolstoy (see their blog links on the right hand side of my blog!). For Tolstoy, it seems like a happy marriage stands in opposition to a passionate marriage. Tolstoy might even see the term “passionate marriage’ as an oxymoron. All-consuming passion for Tolstoy does not have any place in marriage –its almost something that has to be sublimated into everyday marriage. Kimberly has a good discussion of this in one of her posts about Family Happiness. Masha, once happily married to her husband, becomes thrilled by her society “shadows” until she realizes this passion is only fleeting and comes back to apologize to her husband, Sergey. Kimberly quotes Sergey talking to Masha: “'all of us and especially you young women must have personal experienced of all the nonsense of life, in order to get back to life itself; the evidence of other people is no good." (79). But Kim points out that even though Masha got society and thrill out of her system, “Yet she has returned with not more understanding about why she no longer has the same relationship with Sergey. She just decides to pour out her love on someone else and Sergey offers their baby as a person or a thing for that release.”
There’s a parallel idea to this in Anna Karenina, which comes up when Vronsky is arguing with the ambassador’s wife at Princess Betsy’s party early on in the book. The ambassador’s wife argues that arranged marriages are “those in which both have already had their wild times. It’s like scarlet fever, one has to go through it” to which Vronksy responds sarcastically, “Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox” (138). The ambassador’s wife is talking about lust, sexual passion, but Vronsky combines lust with love, either saying they are the same thing or at least somewhat dependant on one another. I think it’s just this slippage of terms, from love to “passionate love” that Tolstoy is discouraging. He wants to separate out passion and love as almost oppositional—I don’t think it hurts for couples to originally feel passion for one another, as long as they move past quickly! (In tolstoy’s opinion, not my own...) Its also interesting to think about Tolstoy’s “ideal couple,” Kitty and Levin, and how they have so little “passion” that Kitty refuses Levin’s proposal initially! There’s nothing passionate about it! Well, Tolstoy might say, there’s a “spiritual passion”...whatever in the world that is supposed to mean...
1 comment:
For someone who believed so deeply in the immediacy and authenticity of the individual experience, and who insisted that an artist cannot fake, either on the page or the canvas, and emotion he didn't once feel himself, Tolstoy is very mistrustful of the human body and its urges. Similarly, for a person who respected the natural man and his ties to nature, its flora and fauna, Tolstoy emphatically resisted the fact that we, too, are animals, with instincts and appetites that challenge, and often will not be reined in by, external cultural standards. Tolstoy's thinking was decidedly Cartesian and, to a great extent, at the heart of his numerous internal contradictions. Still, what a guy!
Post a Comment