Anna and I

This semester I’m taking a class entirely devoted to examining Leo Tolstoy’s work. I’m one of four women in the class, and the remaining twenty are college-aged men who read Russian literature in their free time and gleefully recount the gory scenes in War and Peace. Tolstoy would love this class.  

After discussing the perils of being a bored aristocrat immortalized in literature for three months, we finally read Anna Karenina. One of the few novels with a female protagonist, it famously details the tumultuous love story of Anna (a married woman) and Vronsky (a hot guy who is definitely not her husband). If you’re a Keira Knightley fan or frequented Tumblr in 2012, odds are you saw the film adaptation. I watched the film before reading the novel, and truthfully understood little to nothing during the movie, but loved watching Keira Knightley twirl in pretty dresses and obsessed over Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s mustache. 

I was elated when we started reading it. Finally! A story with a protagonist I actually cared about, or even just one not based on Tolstoy himself. A girl can only read about a wealthy, womanizing aristocrat’s journey to self-actualization so many times. 

Up until this point, I hadn’t participated much in class discussion, mostly because while everyone was hailing Tolstoy as a literary genius I was just trying to understand why he had to ration out his brothel visits to twice a month. I was much more invested in Anna’s character and journey after reading the book, and came to class prepared to dissect one of the most famous heroines in literature. 

In a surprise to no one, the general consensus of this briefcase-toting cohort was absolute in its damnation of the titular character: Anna was a bad, ruined woman. 

As they soldiered on in their promiscuous-women-must-be-punished crusade, I uttered my first comments of the semester. In righteous indignation usually only seen in multi-level marketing schemes' “girl boss” Instagram posts, I pleaded Anna’s case. 

Anna is brave because she chooses to feel. It is too easy to live life content, complacent. She chose to feel all of the glory and all of the pain with Vronsky than continue a half-life any further. 

I felt like one of those Megan Trainor songs was playing behind me. You know, like the ones the spin class instructors play while verbally berating you. Those songs. 

I got no response from my peers, just an awkward, suffocating silence. While I wanted one, I didn’t need it. They will never understand Anna, and no amount of asking them to will change that fact. 

Anna refused to live her life in half-measure. She is married to a man who actively avoids feeling on all levels, and all the while she craves the humanity of emotion. Her choice, while a mistake based on societal expectations of morality, is possibly the first choice in her life she made for herself, and that is powerful. 

They will never understand her because no one ever asked them to. Anna surpasses the constraints she was written in because her emotional capacity becomes far greater than any protagonist preceding her. She basically had a one-woman revolution, leaving the rest of us people-pleasing type A doormats panting after her. 

I have spent my entire life living for everyone else. Even when I convince myself my actions are autonomous- “I wear makeup because I like it”- I’m playing into thousands of other people’s ideals and wishes consolidated into a societal standard. Anna makes me look at myself in the mirror and think—have I ever done anything for myself? 

I am not as brave as Anna, but I hope to be one day. I have heard a thousand times over to show less, to feel less, to be less. I lock myself in the bathroom and run the water so no one hears me cry. I laugh when someone makes me uncomfortable so I don’t make a scene. I bite my tongue so hard that it bleeds holding my truth in to spare conflict in my life. 

If I’ve learned one thing from Anna—it’s that your reckoning comes whether you believe you deserve it or not. She had two terrible options—live the rest of her days comfortably but feel nothing, or be societally shunned and face dire consequences for a moment of something. 

Her story, of course, ends in tragedy.  Anna ends up ostracized from society, so alone and miserable that she cannot go on living any longer. When has a woman ever been able to get what she wants without consequence?  

I’m not even sure Tolstoy intended for her to be one of the most complex female characters in all of literature. For someone for whom choice was always an option, the gravity of the situation and its consequences probably did not resonate.

For the rest of us, the ones who often lack choice, Anna is our hero. I look at her fictional life span, and I resolve myself to try to make the same decision she did. I would rather live a full, messy life that is completely my own than attempt to live anyone else’s.