Comparison of Moliere and Tolstoy - Essay Example

Lina Wu English 2302 Fortunato March Comparison of Moliere and Tolstoy This paper seeks to compare and contrast the works of Moliere and Tolstoy particularly the way they portray the roles of women in different social contexts and classes during different periods. Both authors explore in depth the lives of key women characters in a bid to give insight about how women were perceived in various societies as well as to highlight different roles of women during different historical periods. The authors reflect about the different interfaces between the personal and the public views about the women’s lives such as their sexuality and the way they wield to sexuality to secure their personal spaces and to secure their standing in their social and family circles during the periods when their works were published. The elements of sexuality are seen vital factors that can be used to understand how women were percieved when the two works by the two authors were published. These interfaces also shed some light on the state of the society and the way society regarded and treated women in terms of their personality and how they occupied certain family and social roles. Thus, an earnest comparison between the works and ideas of Tolstoy and Moliere from this perspective is a potentially fruitful way to arrive at such understanding. The comparison too is potentially able to surface differences and similarities between the social roles and expectations tied to women in two disparate historical periods on the one hand as well as to explore the similarities and differences in the understanding of how women were portrayed in terms of their private lives, thoughts, feelings, and interactions with those people they were engaged with in intimate relationships. One can therefore undertake this comparison from the perspectives discussed above in the spirit of exploring the minds of works of the two masters and certainly to come up with new and deep insights about different views associated with how women were viewed by different sectors of the society (Tolstoy). In Tolstoy one does not have to look very far to find suitable women characters for analysis and introspection about the nature of women in their social and private spheres. Anna Karenina of course is a seminal and popular work, and one too that stars a woman whose depiction is sufficiently complex and brilliant for the purposes of this present comparison and analysis work. It can be observed in this novel Anna goes on to be unfaithful to her husband and in the end she is unable to handle the social and internal pressures of such an act and commits suicide. However, this simplistic plot also provides a framework for a deep exploration of the inner workings of the minds and personality of Anna on the one hand and the way various aspects of her being clashed with the social roles and conventions that society had reserved for Anna and her kind during Tolstoy’s time. Just looking at the plot, it is easy to conclude that Tolstoy condemns women who commit adultery, and sees such women as ultimately doomed, and ultimately having the fate of a person who drives directly into a brick wall. On the other hand, with Tolstoy one expects something more, and that things are rarely black and white. During Tolstoy’s period, it can be seen that adultery had no room and women who wer found to be cheating on their husbands were condemned and the practice was never condoned in the society. Indeed, while a surface reading shows Tolstoy depicting adulterers as ultimately doomed through a piercing and intimate portrayal of the subjective reality of Anna, he nevertheless sheds a light of compassion on Anna and all women who lived during his time. On one extreme end, there may be those who will summarily dismiss women as crazy, that adultery does not pay, and that the subjective reality of women is that they should fulfill certain social roles that are safe and tried such as mother, husband and friend. The other extreme view of women is that they are not capable of subjectivity, or at least not capable of subjectivity that is worth taking seriously, and so they are better off just living within the parameters set for them by society. This is typical stereotyping where women expected to fulfill certain social roles assigned to them by the members of the society. In other words, women have no freedom to act outside the parameters set by their respective societies in terms of their conduct and behavior. This entails that women who sleep with other men and follow their feelings and passions are doomed to stray away from the safety of social conventions, and risk death. Certainly this is what happened to Anna. On the other extreme end, Anna’s own ultimately tragic fate was worthy of the piercing eye and the compassionate treatment of Tolstoy. In Tolstoy’s depiction of Anna Karenina, the subjective reality of women is valuable and worth investigating. She is not merely crazy and therefore must remain confined to proven roles. Anna, while doomed, was a person to be taken seriously, whose emotions, thoughts, passions and fate had the weight of a universe and the best artistic effort of a master like Tolstoy (Tolstoy). In this regard, Anna deserved to be viewed from another angle that is different from the socially assigned roles of women since she also has feelings like any other living human being. It is also important to note that women are also capable of reasoning and their wrong doing may also be contributed by men but in this case, all the blame goes to the women. A woman cannot commit adultery alone since a man is also involved so the society should not treat women harshly under such circumstances since their male counterparts are also worth an equal share of the blame. In Moliere too, Tartuffe and his portrayal of Elmire shows a sympathetic master who depicts women and their ways of being as not necessarily worth putting on a pedestal on the one hand nor worthy of being condemned and straight jacketed on the other. The sexuality of Elmire is viewed with much sympathy and understanding, and is in fact used to lure a charlatan and expose a fraud in Tartuffe. Indeed, in the play Elmire overtly uses her sexuality to achieve an end but here the end is noble. Elmire employed her seductive powers with the complicity of her husband with the goal of pinning down Tartuffe and of making Orgon see the folly of his blind trust in a hypocritical and manipulative man (Molerie). One can say too that in both Tolstoy’s Anna and Moliere’s Elmire, there is a compassionate portrayal of the subjective lives of the two women. They are not merely roles, but are complex beings and that moreover their sexuality are a deep source of fascination and a deep source of mystery able to reshape fortunes, reveal truths, ruin lives, disrupt families, break men’s hearts, and cause great masters to create works of great complexity and beauty in the case of Tolstoy and Moliere. Women are viewed as central in disrupting the lives of men especially in Tolstoy but in Moliere, they can also be used to achieve certain goals. Again, this reveals that women are still portrayed as subjects meant to fulfill the goals of men. On the other hand, the differences in Moliere’s women and Tolstoy’s women, as reflected in the portrayals of Elmire and Anna, are also profound. In Tartuffe, Elmire wields her sexuality for noble ends, and within the confines of family and her role as a loyal wife and preserver of the family (Molerie). It is a sanctioned wielding of sexuality and Elmire does not really stray from social expectations. Anna, on the other hand, makes a complete and bold break with social expectations of her (Tolstoy). She dares to give in to her passions and to be unfaithful to her husband. In a way, it is Tolstoy who is the true revolutionary in portraying Anna in this way and in exploring the possibilities of an adulterer’s life with so much compassion and without fear. For Moliere, Elmire’s person and her femininity and sexuality are treated within the safer confines of convention and within the bounds of acceptability relative to the social expectations of women during that time (Moliere). In conclusion, in the compassionate and earnest way in which Tolstoy explored the life of an adulterer in Anna, and to a lesser extent of a seductress in Elmire by Moliere, one can see that the way the two works by these two masters broke new ground in taking the subjective and personal lives of women in all of their flaws and their mysterious aspects very seriously. The subjective and personal lives of women matter and the two writers have demonstrated it to be so in powerful statements. At the same time, one can see too that there are stark differences in the way Tolstoy went further and explored the life of a woman who chose to live outside of social conventions and rules, and to employ the same compassionate but true eye to the unfolding of such a life all the way to its end (Tolstoy). The main theme portrayed in the works of these two authors is that women are expected to live within the confines of social roles and expectations as determined by their respective societies. Tolstoy depicts Anna in a negative way because she goes against the expected social roles through committing adultery. However, Moliere portrays Elmire in a positive light because her actions have designed to achieve a specific goal. However, it can be seen that both women have engaged in sexuality. In reality, sex outside marriage is bad practice no matter it is done for good purposes or otherwise. Women are portrayed as having no total freedom to act independently since they should act within the parameters of social roles assigned to them by their respective societies. Works Cited Moliere] Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. Tartuffe. Longman Anthology of World Literature. 2nd Edition, Volume D. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. 199-252. Print. Read More