What I see in the characterization of women in two of the nineteenth-century texts we have looked at is that women are seen as femme fatales that can destroy man on one hand and inferior, and sex toys that man can’t do without on the other. The two texts I chose was “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats and “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov Keats.

Femme fatales is a French saying that, translated, means “deadly woman”. This type of woman uses her beauty, charm, and sexual magnetism to achieve a hidden purpose. This is how I believe Keats describes the woman in his writing.  “Full beautiful, a faery’s child” (IV), “she bend and sing a faery’s song” (VI), and “She found me roots of relish sweet, and honey wild, and manna dew, and sure in language strange she said “I love thee true”” (VII). All of these images sound like how the femme fatales is able to use her irresistible desire and ability to hypnotize to lead the knight into a deadly reality. That reality was that the knight was so smitten by the lady that he let himself be lead to a cave and left there to die.

Chekhov, on the other hand, describes women as just sex toys that are to be played with and then tossed away. His conviction of this is in the images that we get of Dmitri’s character. “He had first begun deceiving her long ago and was now constantly unfaithful to her…he spoke slightingly of women, to whom he referred as the lower race” (pg. 1524). I feel that this is the foundation of how he likes to play with them, like a cat plays with a mouse. Dmitri also feels this was about Anna, “And yet there’s something pathetic about her” (pg. 1526).He would use them until he felt that it would into “an intolerably irksome situation” (pg. 1524) and would go on to the next sex toy (woman). I say sex toy because Chekhov describes Dmitri’s reaction as “the desire for life surged up in him” (pg. 1524), referring to his genitals. On the flip side of this, Chekhov states that man can’t do without women. He writes, “without this “lower race” he could not have existed a single day” (pg. 1524). I feel that he is saying that even though women can be bitchy, overly demanding, and unduly complicated man needs the intimacy of the other sex to be able to survive the quotidian things that happen every day. This is the reason Dmitri keeps playing the game and keeps getting burned. He can’t realize that you can’t have one without the other.

The characterization of women in pre-nineteenth-century literature was portrayed in a lot of different lens of writers of the time. My view of Keats and Chekhov is that women are seen as femme fatales that can destroy man, such as the knight and can also be inferior, and used as sex toys that man can’t do without, like Dmitri. This lens still exists, even today in the twenty-first century literature.