World Literature, 1650-Present

Women in 19^th century..

In the 19^th century, the head of family was the husband or the father. Everyone in that household followed and respected him as a leader in that family. Women were “lower race” like Gurov described his wife in the text. They were restricted and limited their work within their household. Women in that period were portrayed as only child-bearer or sexual instrument in many literature works although it had been changed since then.

The lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov tells a story about the love affair between unsuccessful married guy “Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov” and a young lady “Anna Sergeyevna” who was taking a vacation in Yalta. They both were unhappy with their marriage and wanted to getaway. First, Gurov described his wife in a very negative tone “his wife now looked nearly twice as old as he did” , “he secretly considered her shallow, narrow-minded and dowdy, he stood in awe of her, disliked being at home”  They met and married while they were in college and have children in teenage. However, Gurov is unfaithful to his wife and cheating with lady that he thinks “the lower race.” Sadly, his wife had never found out her husband’s unfaithfulness what so ever. I think because she is so limited within the house. She always stays at home and takes care of children. She doesn’t have a chance or a time to doubt her husband’s unfaithful behave. Next, Anna Sergeyevna who has fallen in love with Gurov lives in a grand scale, luxuriously, kept carriage-horses house but long gray fence with inverted nails hammered into the tops of the palings as described in the text. Her life seems luxurious without any problems, but she feels bored and she has a negative attitude about her husband as she described. A gray fence with the nails in indirectly alludes Anna’s life would be nothing different than Gurov’s wife. Because women’s life at that time period was restricted and limited and considered as lower than men’s status.

Women were described as a lower race or even as a sexual instrument in “A carcass by Charles Baudelaire.”  “her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore” , “her stinking and festering womb”  In this poem, Baudelaire describes a rotten carcass which is obviously woman’s. As his description, women were negative and only thoughts he had of women were sexual instrument just like toy. This gets much clearer when we find out how his life was, how things gone in his life. This poem’s main theme is death, but he used a woman’s body to describe decay and a rottenness of his situation.

In the 19^th century, women were characterized as a lower status than men’s. They were so powerless, restricted and limited within the society. Many of art works in that time describe this thoroughly like Chekhov and Baudelaire did in their works.

     Before the nineteenth century the role of women was almost the same in the society :  a woman , who had to maintain  a household and to reproduce.  A Woman was dependent on a man in everything. We can see this inequality between a man and a woman throughout the whole history. However, in the middle  of   the nineteenth century the characterization of women started  to change, and the  world first women’s right convention was held  in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848.Women were fighting for  getting equal rights in the society as men did have. So, the role of women was not stable in the nineteenth century, it was in a period of slow changes. This situation in the society was portrayed in the world literature as well. I would like to consider the characterization of women and attitude toward women in the poem of John Keats “ La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and  in the work of Anton Chekhov “ The Lady with the Dog”. Both  main characters( a narrator of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and Gurov from “ The Lady with the Dog”) of these works fell in love  with a woman, but  they had  different understanding of  love and perception of  women.

      “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” was about a knight ,who got seduced and fell in love with a mysterious woman, who left him in the end. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” was translated as “The Beautiful Lady without Pity”. The Lady was so beautiful and bright , she made him charmed by her appearance.(“Full beautiful ,a faery child, Her hair was long, her foot was light and her eyes were wild”). This quote described her as something faery and pure, because he compared her with a child, and I feel this lady was so clean and light, but on the other hand the author’s words “her eyes were wild”  gave me a strange feeling and  a completely different perception of the woman, it’s like she was not so innocent ,so pure anymore. I see that the narrator was in deep love with her and he was so romantic(“ I made a garland for her head, and bracelets too, and fragrant zone…”).He was caring and loving, he set the lady on his horse and as he said  “And nothing else saw all day long, For sidelong would she bend and sing a faery sing”, and it seemed the knight could do anything for her and for his love.These all expressions of his emotions  made  me think that a man  had lost control of himself and everything, when he met a beautiful woman, who could seduced him so easy by singing and her appearance. And in the end the lady took him to cavern and made him asleep, left him alone and cold on the “hill’s side”.(“ And there she lulled me asleep , And there I dreamed, ah woe betide! The latest dream I ever dreamt On the cold hill’s side.”) This poem had  an unpredictable end, since not a man left  a woman and felt fine ,but here was a woman ,who charmed the knight and left him broken in his feelings. I see a new wave of changes  in images of women in the literature of the nineteenth century.

     “The Lady with the Dog” was a story about a man( Gurov) ,who was ”womanizer”, didn’t care about women , “to whom he referred  as the lower race”. His view of Anna Sergeevna was  the same as he considered any other woman , but within time it had changed and Gurov fell in love with her, and he never experienced before in his life.” … he secretly considered her shallow, narrow-minded , and dowdy, he stood in awe of her, and disliked being at home. He had first begun deceiving her long time ago and he was now constantly unfaithful to her..” This is how Gurov thought about his wife, whom he got married in his second year of college. As I see he didn’t love her at all and probably never loved before. It was a typical family of that time,  where was no love, where a husband was cheating on his wife and didn’t feel sorry about it. Gurov couldn’t live a single day without women, he knew what was right to say them, how to seduce and charm  them, and women got attracted to him. The first thought of Gurov , when he saw  the lady with the dog, was “ If she’s here without her husband, and without any friends, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make her acquaintance”. So he was looking for some love adventures. After the first conversation with her, he thought about her a lot, that she was twice younger than him, and Anna Sergeevna seemed  so shy and constrained. Gurov felt it was the first time ,when she started a conversation with a  stranger. He couldn’t forget her appearance  and he liked her, but his thought  “ And yet there’s something pathetic about her” got me back to real Gurov’s personality and his perception of women. After they made love at the hotel, Anna Sergeevna was feeling so bad, because she never deceived her husband and now she was like “ an ordinary woman”(“ It’s not right.You will never respect me anymore”, “ I’m wicked ,fallen woman”, p.1527). She seemed so naïve and pure. Her soul was clean, that’s why Anna Sergeevna felt miserable  and guilty at that moment. Probably it was because of her family education and stereotypes of that society. Gurov tried to calm her down ,but it didn’t work and he got annoyed by this conversation(“Gurov listened to her, bored to death). He didn’t understand how she felt and what was happening in her soul, like any man of that time, who didn’t care about woman’s feelings. I can say he just “satisfied his needs” ,what he wanted to do from the beginning. Later on  when Anna Sergeevna left for Saint- Petersburg, Gurov thought that it was one more adventure in his life and it remained  only a memory. When he came back to Moscow, he couldn’t forget her, it was not only a memory anymore, “ She accompanied him everywhere, like his shadow, following him everywhere he went”. He started to realize that was love, that was his happiness…Everything (house, kids, work ,wife) irritated him. The story took  a beginning from  a spoiled man by women’s attention and love, who transformed  during the story into a person, who realized what love was and that none of those women , had ever been happy with him. He didn’t appreciate any women in his life before he fell in love with Anna Sergeevna. He was not thankful to his wife , for three kids, that they had, he could left home and went for his vacation somewhere. And  a woman  still stayed inferior in the nineteenth century. But there were some changes as well, for example that Anna was in Yalta alone and she was married, it seemed for me unusual. Maybe in the eighteenth century this would affect  reputation of women , who were travelling alone.

     In conclusion , images of women in the world literature were portrayed differently in the nineteenth century. Most stereotypes of the characterization of women  still existed at that moment. Keats’ poem showed not a typical woman, since she left him and he was suffering. In Keat’s work I feel that this woman took a superior role. Chekhov showed us reality of  an ignorant man and an innocent woman.  Indeed the role of women had changed throughout time. The nineteenth century was a beginning  of this adjustment. Today  a woman is completely different that she used to be. Women have equal rights as men, but sometimes I feel a woman lost something that made her a woman, a weak gender and what gave a woman something unique and pure.

Literature in the 19th century depicted women to be subpar to their male counterparts. Various texts portray women to either be concerned with nothing but physical needs, or too involved with their emotions. Whether is a happy or tragic ending to the text, it is evident that the author felt that women have flaws or behaviors that are in need of correcting. Charles Baudelaire’s, “A Carcass”, depicts women as a vile, rotting corpse. He showed that her body too, will be subjected to such treatment. In Anton Chekhov’s, “The Lady with the Dog,” women are seen as too emotional. In this text, women did not know how to give their affection and emotions to those who can return it.
In Baudelaire’s text, he compares the woman’s future to a rotting corpse they spotted. As stated; “And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this: Horrible, filthy, undone […]” (1387, 37), the line bluntly states that she will be subjected to the same doom. She is characterized as a dead corpse, laying in the most vulnerable and revealing way. It lies there unwanted, wasted, and a thing of the past. The body will be something no longer wanted. It is as he wants her to realize that the soul and “love” will be everlasting. Such attention on the physical will render useless. Such point makes sense when thought of the long run. The magnitude of this uselessness may have been blown up beyond necessary. The language used reinforces the idea that women are seen as lower than men due to their ideas and beliefs.
Chekhov’s text takes on another aspect, women’s emotions. The text makes the points that women are almost fragile in relations due to emotions. It seems that he feels women do not have the ability to separate the two. The woman in the text needed constant reassurance and fell for him, despite knowing it was not the best idea. By her stating; “‘How can I justify myself? I’m a wicked, fallen woman […]” (1527), she acknowledges that she couldn’t contain herself. That is the author’s attempt to tell his readers that women cannot control themselves. This leads back to the idea that men are superior in yet another way. Men have the ability to control or recognize their feelings. They may not help who they love, but they know when they must recognize it and act upon it. The author’s thoughts make sense from a man’s point of view, for they do have a different thought process that involves a slightly smaller amount of emotion. However, the idea that a woman is fragile and needy is pushing the emotional differences to both extremes.
Both the texts present an idea that women focus on certain aspects more than a man would. The author’s themselves view that women have these flaws that will not have the best results. The actions of the woman, or the visual of the exposed and revealing carcass, shows that women were not seen as the highest in morals and values.

The late nineteenth century Europe experienced the eruption of Romanticism with other elements such as realism and symbolism. The Idea of Romanticism is it focuses on how individual’s feeling and emotion toward others. John Keats and Anton Chekhov are poet and writer during the period of Romanticism. La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Lady with the Dog are two literature pieces characterized women in the nineteenth century to be sensual, attraction, temptation and the idea of some ambiguities, having readers draw the big picture which can shape the importance of sensuality.

     La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats emphasizes the ideas of sensual, beauty and emotion of the woman in the story. John Keats creates the knight as depress individual who escapes from the reality and trapped in his own fantasy world. At the beginning of the poem, setting of the poem is gloomy, the author uses words such as alone, palely. Also in third stanza, Lily which symbolize death where at the end of the poem, Kight returns back to reality and he is even more depressed. He indicates the woman he met as a “fairy woman, and words she tells, the song she sings are interpret by himself.  “I met a lady in the meads, full beautiful, a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light And her eyes were wild.” (Keats 828) At first, through Keats’s description, Knight has portrait this woman to be a beautiful and attractive individual. The idea of sensuality and temptation start to kick in. “She took me to her elfin grot And there she wept and sighted full sore…With kisses four.” (Keats 829) the quote shows his imagination, where he believes he had a close emotional relationship with the woman with some ambiguity elements involved.

The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov also shares the idea of sensuality, attraction, temptation. Chekhov describes Anna as sensual individual who falls in love with Dmitri after a date. “He looked steadily at her and suddenly took her in his arms and kissed her lips…And they walked off together, very quickly.” (Chekhov 1526) this quote is an example of sensuality of Anna, she doesn’t really know Dmitri well and had affair with him because of the loneliness that her husband is not with her. “I’ve been so unhappy…why did you come?” (Chekhov 1533) this quote shows the emotional side of Anna, when Dmitri visits her hometown and wants to be with her. She’s willing to go back to Yalta to see Dmitri and betray her husband.

Both “fairy woman” and Anna from La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Lady with the Dog are been portrait mainly as sensual and emotion individual during the era of romanticism of the nineteenth century. And yet, most of the literary pieces during the nineteenth century have the idea of ambiguity that can confuse the readers and misdirect the true meaning of the story.

Helena Wojtczak mentioned in her brief overview of Women’s Status in the 19^th century as such: “In 1890, Florence Fenwick Miller (1854-1935), a midwife turned journalist, described woman’s position succinctly: Under exclusively man-made laws women have been reduced to the most abject condition of legal slavery in which it is possible for human beings to be held…under the arbitrary domination of another’s will, and dependent for decent treatment exclusively on the goodness of heart of the individual master. (From a speech to the National Liberal Club” She went on to say that “most lived in a state little better than slavery.”

These were the extreme ways in which women were treated back in the 19^th century. It is very hard to imagine how life was back then for these women but the works and literatures of those times clearly showcases these traits. Men used to consider themselves superior to women and they were forced into whatever the man wanted off them, be it childbirth or any other labor according to their preference. I believe that women were treated worse in the East than in the West although the West was considerably worse too by all standards. In Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘A Carcass’ and “Punishment” by Rabindranath Tagore, we find that women were shockingly treated and more so in the “Punishment” by Rabindranath Tagore.

‘A Carcass’ starts off with a beautiful and pleasant spring morning where the author mentions the man is walking with his lover. This poem was one of Baudelaire’s ‘corpse poems’ where he describes topics of death and decay vividly. The poem quickly turns into a horror story when they come across a carcass which is rotting away. The poem is extremely symbolic but these symbols and words were directly were used on the back of the women who were used as a tool to prove his point about humanity’s disregard for death. The poem necessarily was not written to degrade women but to consider them worthless was the norm and when anything negative was mentioned, the men did not hesitate to attribute it to the women. The rotten carcass was the body of a woman and the author termed it as a ‘lecherous whore’ and that it was ‘sweating out poisonous fumes’. This showed a gross disregard for the women and that the author could mention poisonous and attribute it to that carcass of the woman shows the prevailing mindset of the people regarding women in the 19^th century. Although the main theme of the poem was about death and how with life comes death and that humanity is supposedly heedless about this inevitable phenomenon, women were mistreated in the poem to prove this point. This is demonstrated when the author says, “From back in the rocks, a pitiful bitch, eyed us with angry distaste, awaiting the moment to snatch from the bones, the morsel she had dropped in her haste.” This disturbing verse of the poem shows how women were viewed and that men would use any metaphors or descriptions to address the women during the 19^th century.

Punishment, by Rabindranath Tagore, is an Indian short story depicting in extreme clarity how women were treated in the East, in this case in India. I was shocked to learn about the excessive amount of submission and oppression women faced and willingly accepted in the society back in the 19^th century. Indeed this makes me reflect on the initial quote on the first paragraph. Women in most cases were nothing but legalized slaves or a bit better. They are maybe at best slaves with some sort of minimal rights to be taken care of in terms of their food, clothes and shelter. In the story, there are two brothers Dukhiram and Chidam. Dukhiram murders his wife Radha out of anger because she says something sarcastic to him. Dukhiram lost his cool after a long and hard day of work and stabs Radha with a knife in her head and she dies. Now Dukhiram’s brother Chidam finds his brother moaning the death of his wife. Chidam and Ramlochan devise a plan to rescue Dukhiram from persecution. The simple solution was to ask Chidam’s wife Chandara to take the blame. This act itself shows the mentality of the people in the society. The culture clearly discriminates against men and women and Chidam’s and Ramlochan’s act were sufficient to prove that. Ramlochan was trusted with the legal matters of his village and even he discriminated and justice came second to discrimination. There were a few strong indications in the story that displayed women’s status and role in the 19^th century. Firstly, they stayed home and cooked and cleaned for their husbands. They were given the domestic roles to raise the children and take care of the household only. Also, men generally felt superior to their wives. Dukhiram came home and was demanding food from his wife. He gave a straight order and did not even have the decency to ask kindly for food. He felt he was the ruler of the house. Also, Chandara is seen to accept the blame when her husband asks her to do it. She showed no signs of revolt or concern but willingly accepted her husband’s orders. It could be either she was scared to go against her husband (because she feared the consequence) or the norm was that no one cared about a woman’s feelings. Also, society viewed women as inferior to men or even subhuman in some circumstances. Chidam says to Ramlochan,” If I lose my wife I can get another, but if my brother is hanged, how can I replace him?” This clearly was one of the most blatant and shocking thing for me to read. The men had absolutely NO concern for the lives of women in the East. It was as though her life was not worth that of a man. She was not even considered a full human because only when one considers someone subhuman that one is able to prefer one life over the other. This was the ultimate violation of justice and goodwill because what Chidam and the men in the village were advocating was the life of an innocent woman in exchange of that of a criminal.

In conclusion, 19^th century was a shocking and terrifying time for the womenfolk and both the texts clearly manifests our original claim that women were treated extremely poorly, with no equality, in some cases as sub-humans and utterly degrading forms. Men clearly felt they were superior to women and this ignorance was evident in society as large. This is what seemed to be the norm back then and quite frankly it is very disturbing and I am glad that we are living in the 21^st century. It is hard to imagine life and how it was to back then. I feel sorry for the women who had to go through all that but it gives us all the more reasons to fight for justice and be grateful for what we have today and keep working hard to maintain our basic human rights and rights of equality.

Self-Destruction

Though we have not encountered any female authors thus far in our readings, the depiction of women in certain nineteenth century texts plays a very important role in their contents’.  Many different authors provide several outlooks on women, their role in literature and their role in society.  Some of these roles are expressed positively, some negatively and others may not even offer their stance.  Irregardless of this, it is possible to trace a pattern across these vastly different viewpoints and locate a central idea or theme associated with multiple texts.  Charles Baudelaire’s poem, “A Carcass”, along with Anton Chekhov’s novella, “The Lady with the Dog”, both contain women as a main focus in their works, however the approaches taken by the authors to characterize them have stark differences.  Despite this, a common ground can be mined from both of these pieces of literature, which expresses the idea that women in this time period have an inevitable, self-destructive nature.

Baudelaire’s “A Carcass” is a very in-your-face poem.  The completely gruesome details of a female corpse laying in plain view begin at the outset of the reading and exist mostly throughout.  The author uses horrifying and grotesque imagery as a device to really deliver a grasp in the reader’s mind of the harshness and reality of the cadaver’s presence.  It is an eye-opening experience and the reader is meant to feel this right away.  The clear use of negative connotations toward the body, one of which being a “lecherous whore”, convey a hidden distaste toward women that Baudelaire holds inside.  This continues in the very same stanza as he describes the “stinking and festering womb” being exposed, indicating that any life she creates will be just as offputting as her.  All of this description of the corpse, and all of its gruesome includings are all part of a bigger theme or idea in this poem, that of the inevitablity of death.  The narrator tells his female companion, “And you, in turn, will be rotten as this: Horrible, filthy, undone, Oh sun of my nature and star of my eyes, My passion, my angel in one!” (36-40).  This dialogue to his partner elicits the truth that although she is his love, his passion and the center of his life, that she, one day, will inevitably lay just as the carcass, rotten, filthy and gruesome, and all of the characteristics given to the carcass will be bestowed on his loved one.  Baudelaire’s hidden distaste toward women as mentioned earlier ultimately exposes the inevitable fate of them, even in the case of his true love.

In Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”, a far different approach is taken in the characterization of women.  Anna Sergeyevna, whom we first encounter as merely a lady with a dog, is spoken about in quite high regard, at least compared to Baudelaire’s work.  Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov, ever since their first encounter, was always thinking about her. He would picture her finest details such as her “slender, delicate neck and her fine gray eyes”.  Throughtout the novella he becomes very much infatuated with her and views her with great admiration.  Clearly Chekhov’s approach on her characterization is far different from Baudelaire’s.  From Anna’s standpoint, she is a wife who is quite bored with her life and comes to Yalta in search of something, something.  Her boredom and yearning for whatever she may be yearning for ultimately leads her to have an affair with Dmitri, which afterwards, at least temporarily, leaves her despising herself and feeling pitiful.  Her journey to Yalta, bred by boredom leads her to make an inevitable decision in which she betrays her husband.  She sums up her self-destructive actions as she says, “How can I justify myself? I’m a wicked, fallen woman, I despise myself and ahve not the least thought of self-justification…I told myself that there must be a different kind of life I wanted to live, to live….I was burning with curiosity…You’ll never understand that, but I swear to God I could no longer control myself, nothing could hold me back, I told my husband I was ill, and I came here.”  In this statement, she is describing her feelings on her life, her boredom, how she is constantly yearning for more, for something else.  Her dissatisfaction with her normal life and her husband lead her to a new place.  Her independence is her demise.  The second she decides to leave S. and come to Yalta is where she self-destructs.  She walks around with her pomeranian every day in the same spot for what reason? To find something, to find what she is looking for, and that is excitement.  She immediately falls for a man whom she has affairs with and her whole life changes. It was an inevitable journey.  Chekhov uses Anna Sergeyevna to characterize this aspect of self-destructive women in the nineteenth century.

Literature poses many questions and many puzzles that readers every day strive to find the answers to.  The depiction of women in literature, for our purposes, those in the nineteenth century are just another of these great mysteries that authors love to write about.  Whether approached in a negative way such as in Baudelaire’s work, or positively as in Chekhov’s, each author tries to convey his or he own idea about the nature of these female characters.  In both the accounts, “A Carcass” and “The Lady with the Dog” we see examples of self-destructiveness and inevitability, which may very well be related to societal realities of women in this period.

It is a well-known fact based on the observation of history that while time progressed, ideas in the society has transgressed as well. Such ideas like enlightment, democracy and abolishment of slavery can be good examples. Similar to these progresses, the figure of women was changing as well. In the work of Anton Chekov’s “The lady with the dog” and John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, these works show how women were portrayed at the 19^th century. These women were expressed as a beautiful, naïve, fragile and weak figure that were thought to be below men. But unlike the ordinary stereotypical figure, one significant way women were presented was women are seductive and wicked.

In John Keats’ “La belle dame sans merci”, the narrator talks about this mysterious character. He describes this unrevealed figure as “Full beautiful, a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light And her eyes were wild”. Throughout the work, it can be guessed as a woman. Like most of the literary works, Keats paints the picture of a woman to be this beautiful and weak looking creature. However, as stanza VII shows, “she found me roots of relish sweet, and honey wild, and manna dew”, this person is not only beautiful but also trying to charm the knight and make him fall for her. With all those sweets and whispering “I love thee true” seems as a flytrap trying to seduce a fly to fall into the trap. “She took me to her elfin grot and there she wept and sighed full sore”. This act can also be thought as a seduction by the woman so that the knight will be eager to protect her and calm her down. As Keats portrays women by this figure of seduction, Chekov approaches this idea in a similar way.

Anton Chekov’s “The lady with the dog” starts with the impression of women as “Shallow, narrow-minded and dowdy”. He also refers women as “the lower race” which is similar as the most stereotypical view back in that time. But as Keats viewed women in a unique way, Chekov had a similar view as well. While on pg. 1527, Anna is blaming herself about the affair that she is having with Dmitry. But unlike her intent, “But for the tears in her eyes, she might have been jesting or play-acting”, Dmitry finds her actions odd and in some way deceiving. That is why he asks the question in the following sentence “What is it you want?”. If it was for Anna feeling guilty and wrong for her action, she should have burst out of the room.  Instead of avoiding the affair, “she hid her face against his breast and pressed closer to him”. This can be thought as she is saying one word and acting in another way. This is a similar case as in the Keats’ work, where the woman shows her vulnerability seeking for care and protection by the male. This is an act of seduction. By these wicked acts, Dmitry gets lovesick and can’t stop thinking about her. Because of this, later in the story, Dmitry eventually goes after Anna to pursue his love affair.

The story of Chekov’s “The lady with the dog” and Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” portrays the idea of women to be seductive and wicked. This is a significant contrary to the ordinary figure, which women was thought to be weak, naïve, beautiful and fragile. But as most ideas change throughout time, this is another example how the transition was made in forming the modern day characterstic of women.

Women in 19^th Century Literature

            What makes the 19^th century so important is that from the 14^th through 18^th centuries there was the Renaissance period and then the Age of Enlightenment where there was a marked turn from superstition and dogmatic religious beliefs.  This was the age of reason where humanism began to supplant religion and the scientific method began to erode superstition.  This is evidenced in the philosophy, art and literature.  And one would think that there would be a transition from a male-centric worldview to a human-centric view.  However, in the 19^th century literature, the imagery of women was still very negative and beneath that of a man.  This is evident in Baudelaire’s “A Carcass” and Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.”  Both authors use the female form to personify the misery of life and love.

A great many poets portray the idea of love in the feminine form and it is usually soft, leisurely, and heart-warming.   However, Baudelaire’s symbolic image of love and the use of the female form in “A Carcass” is grotesque, nauseating, vile and therefore memorable.  The first image that Baudelaire smacks the reader with is that of a female carcass with her legs spread out like a “lecherous whore,” who even in death is still opened to debauchery in “slick invitational style.”  This is not just the image of a woman, but one that is debased and desecrated.  (The image of the “whore” is loathsome in any culture throughout recorded history.)  Next, the womb, a uniquely female component, which is supposed to give life and joy is categorized as “stink and festering.”  The life and joy that it brings forth is disgusting in his eyes.  He goes on to describe how the maggots and lice are so entrenched in the carcass that it is almost alive again, “pulsating like a wave.”  There is life, but not the life of the carcass.  It is from the vermin that feed off of the dead.

Baudelaire’s denouement is complete when even the dog that had been feeding on the carcass and was been hiding in the rocks is described in the feminine as a “pitiful bitch.” The dog is a scavenger and is fearful; those are even the lowest traits in the world of nature.  I believe that Baudelaire chose to represent the female form in such a negative way because if the reader is disposed to think of a woman as a “inferior being” then it is easy to visualize the lecherous whore as rotting and decaying and for the image to be all the more nauseating and disgusting.  Baudelaire’s intent was to disgust the reader.

Contrastingly, Chekhov’s depiction of women in “The Lady with the Dog” is not as graphic or contemptible as Baudelaire, but is subtle, condescending and subjugating.   Chekhov’s first female portrayal is of Dmitri’s wife, who he had been talked into marrying while at college. Physically, the reader can visualize a very tall woman, who has an austere disposition, but looks twice as old as she really is.  And although she claims to be a “thinker,” Dmitri thinks that she is “shallow, narrow-minded and dowdy.”  And this is the woman that he stood in awe of, although he despises her.

Dmitri, in turn, lived a life of infidelity and did not think very highly of women.  In fact, he thought and spoke of them as “the lower race.”  This is interesting because he felt more at ease with women than men.  We later see that this comfort is based on the lie of his double life.  Dmitri’s success with women stems from his knowing how to manipulate them; he plays on their sympathies and knows “what to say and how to behave.”  This characterizes women as simple and predictable.  And like a skilled craftsman, Dmitri executes with ease.

Anna is not illustrated any differently than the other women that Dmitri has been with.  She is young and inexperienced and although she is married she doesn’t even know what profession her husband is in – which makes her appear to be dimwitted.  She is on vacation, looking for a way to escape her unhappy and mundane life, but does not really understand how to go about doing this.  It is evident that she esteems her virtue, but in her naiveté she doesn’t realize that hanging around and being with a man every day in the absence of her husband would lead to an adulterous affair.  Her virtue is based on her marriage so when they have had their first act of intimacy she considers herself to be an “ordinary, worthless woman,” and rants that she has “been snared by the Devil.”  Dmitri kisses her forehead and says some soothing word and she is alright, just like a child.

Although Dmitri does fall in love with Anna, it is a realistic interpretation of the text that he fell in love with an image of her as when he thought about her when he returned to Moscow.  “When he closed his eyes, she seemed to stand before him in the flesh, still lovelier, younger, and tenderer than she had been in Yalta.”  His image of her as a person does not change, but his image of her image does.  This is the driving force behind his desire to see and be with her.

Dmitri’s view of women does not change and Chekhov’s view of women is evident during the climax of the story.  Very subtly, Dmitri blames the women for his way of behaving and in living the life that he has. Dmitri looks into the mirror and realizes that his life had been a lie.  “Women had always believed him different from what he really was, had loved in him not himself but the man their imagination pictured him, a man they had sought eagerly all their lives.  And afterwards when they discovered their mistake, they went on loving him just the same.  And not one of them had ever been happy with him.”  Chekhov’s critique of women is deafening.  They are described in this passage as shallow and superficial; people who love images over substance.  They spend their lives looking for something that might be unattainable.  But what is more damning is that even when they realize that they have been deceived and mistaken, they don’t become angry or intent on attaining happiness, they just continue to love him.  Without joy or happiness they continue to love him – the lie.  There is a saying that there is no greater deception than self-deception and that is exactly what all of these women experience.  And that is a direct indictment on their character and place in history at that time.

Although there was a shift in thinking from the 14^th century through the 19^th with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, women were still portrayed differently in literature as evidenced by Baudelaire and Chekhov.  Both writers depict women and the female form negatively.  Although Baudelaire’s usage is shocking and graphic, Chekhov is just as offensive with his depiction of the superficial and brainless women