Curious

Perspective changes with age and situation. I have often read a work of fiction and felt at a loss for not having done so in another set of circumstances. Yesterday I finished Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, a novella first published in 1859.

Most class discussions focus on Tolstoy’s portrayal of Masha in Family Happiness. And my knee-jerk reaction included the appropriate feminist scoffing. It was impossible to read some of Tolstoy’s passages, bursting with Victorian sentimentalism and earnestness, without giggling. Nevertheless, as P. and I grinned at Tolstoy’s hyperbole, we did so self-consciously because we have been tempted with similar self-absorption and recognize the pinch of conviction.

It is true that my [new] husband sometimes went to his study to work, or drove to town on business, or walked about attending to the management of the estate; but I saw what it cost him to tear himself away from me. He confessed later that every occupation, in my absence, seemed to him mere nonsense in which it was impossible to take any interest. It was just the same with me. If I read, or played the piano, or passed my time with his mother, or taught in the school, I did so only because each of these occupations was connected with him and won his approval; but whenever the thought of him was not associated with any duty…it seemed to me absurd to think that anything existed apart from him.

Yet, after our laughter dampened, a broader perspective shaped by age and situation gripped me. P. and I married in the end of May but I still remember the fears that arose when marital commitment appeared on the horizon. Most critics agree that Tolstoy wrote Family Happiness with an autobiographical pen. Tolstoy was courting the young Valerya Arseneva either just before or during his work on the novella. Distinctions of age and temperament between himself and Valerya had convinced Tolstoy that the marriage would be imprudent. According to popular theory Family Happiness nervously prophesied of what might await Tolstoy if he should go through with the marriage

Right before marrying, you find yourself forecasting your prospects of happiness in marriage much as Tolstoy did in Family Happiness. I confess that it is shocking that a Victorian sentimentalist and I shared so many pessimistic estimations of married life . (Rest assured. I hardly qualify as an expert witness for married life after three months of experience, yet I already find myself categorically disagreeing with some of my previous assumptions.) Granted, Tolstoy’s simplistic portrayals of women and the harsh dichotomy between romantic and family love deserve criticism. Yet my critical perspective has broadened a bit after a few hours of reflection. Family Happiness also deserves some consideration as a nightmarish, premarital prognosis, one which just might prove transcendent in its portrayal of fear and doubt.