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Anna is different and by being so she strikes a chord in Gurov. Gurov sees purity in Anna. He sees naivety and innocence. He made a reference to some of Anna’s actions to the lessons his own daughter did. Gurov throughout the text compared Anna with the previous women he has been with. He described the previous women, some being careless, some being neutral, some being cold. His feeling towards these women was hatred. At first impression, Gurov secretly thought negatively of Anna and was somewhat scared of her. But, as the story progresses we find out he feels differently about Anna. At one point when he saw her his heart contracted, something which didn’t happen in past experiences with women. Anna was different in a way to Gurov, something that broke the cycle of the same types of women. He only realizes that he loves her at the end in Moscow.

Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog takes place in the small resorted town of Yalta, where Anna and Dmitri meet. The remoteness of the town plays an important role in the story because this is temporarily their life outside of reality and their responsibilities. Anna is in Yalta for a vacation, but has a husband back home, while Dmitri is married with children. The lovers continue their relationship in Yalta, where they become inseparable. Reality hits them hard when they have to leave each other and go back into their lives outside of Yalta. Yalta acted as a foundation for them to build their relationship, where they did not have to care for their outside responsibilities. When Anna has to leave Yalta, that is where they think their relationship ends— until Dmitri goes to S—— to surprise Anna. However, the reality of their relationship finally came into light for both of them. When Anna sees Dmitri she is unpleasantly shocked and realizes all the implications of their relationship. She says “We are mad. Go away to-day; go away at once. . . . I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you. . . . There are people coming this way” (page 8). Outside of Yalta, people will actually recognize them and they realize that their relationship cannot go beyond what was built in the town.

The tension in the story functions as a way to kind of keep the women from boiling over and making the setting a violent place. The readers go to the story with descriptions of Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade describing their younger selves and their relationship to their daughters. However, the tension rises because Mrs. Slade is fed up that Mrs. Ansley is trying to hold the demeanor that she’s perfect and never did anything disgraceful; therefore, leading to her exposing the real reason Mrs. Ansley got so sick because she “simply can’t bear it any longer”(30). Mrs. Slade reaching her boiling point showed that she had enough of looking like the troubled one, when Mrs. Ansley had a thing for her [now] husband and betrayed the loyalty between them.

The short story The Dead by James Joyce redefines what it means to be alive and dead through the comparison of Gabriel and Michael. In Gabriel’s speech, he mentions that the past often consumed his head with “sadder thoughts” causing him to “not linger on the past” anymore (Joyce, 177). Gabriel refuses to acknowledge his past because he believes it doesn’t bring any value or impact on his current life. However, this approach of mindset towards life is unrealistic and inhumane–like the dead– to think the past doesn’t affect the present. Gabriel soon realizes he’s mistaken from the points he made from his speech when Gretta confessed her love for Michael even though Michael was dead. Even though Michael is physically dead, he has more of an impact on the living now than Gabriel. Gabriel is also seen “dead” because he is unable to sympathize with others throughout the play due to his high class status and he often naively insulted those around him. In short, Gabriel believed his actions had no weight to them, but we see that the past indeed does affect on the present, just like how Gretta’s love for Michael still resonated with her. Therefore, Joyce redefines being “dead” as to someone like Gabriel who believes their past actions do not hold weight to those of the present who are living. 

It was obvious that Dimitri was extremely misogynistic, but his reasons for being attracted to women were much less apparent. Some could argue that he never loved the women he met, but that is much too simplistic. It was much more evident that he loved the way he felt around women. They gave him a sense of comfort. Even though this comfort was most likely rooted in his beliefs that women were inferior, he still was comforted by them.  His narcissistic personality fed off this, and made him yearn for more. Almost as if he were addicted to a drug. This makes it hard for us to believe he has really fallen in love. It makes you feel as if he is more so emotionally invested for his own personal reasons/ greed. But, Anna is very similar to Dimitri. Both of them are married to other people, both of them are being unfaithful, and both of them are invested in the other for their own reasons instead of for the reason of caring about the other. In this sense, it is easier (not easy) to reconcile the idea of their love in relation to Dimitri’s misogyny and both of their infidelity.

What is the relationship between friendship and judgment in the story?

This short story is composed of two friends, Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley.  Their daughters are also in the story.  To begin the story, the two women are enjoying their time together, and their daughters are watching them, appearing to be judgmental.  Getting further into the story, Mrs. Slade gets a little insecure about her daughter in comparison to Mrs. Ansley’s.  The common idea I developed was that judgement can easily get in the way of friendship.  Rather than being critical or judgmental of one another, friendship is about understand each other and helping move forward and advance from past mistakes.

The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov is a story about two separate, married lovers, Dmitri and Anna, having an affair with each at a resort town called Yalta. During their first encounters together, Dmitri and Anna are passionately attached by the hip. But, their affair doesn’t last because of Anna’s insecurities and jealousy for Dmitri and Dmitri’s inability to present himself truly as a person. For example, Dmitri mistakenly presented himself to Anna as a “kind, exceptional, and lofty man” even though he only thinks of Anna as a “common woman”, misleading Anna in his intentions to be with her Chekhov, 5). Additionally, during their last encounters in Yalta, Anna cried out of jealousy that Dmitri wouldn’t love her like other women (Chekhov, 4). Both sides have different expectations and intentions for each other, therefore causes them to falter in their relationship.

The significance of the location, a resort town called Yalta, summarizes the point of love having strings attached because it symbolizes short lived, unrealistic expectations. Like any vacation, the thrill and happiness is temporary, but one must always return back to reality. Anna and Dmitri both had different intentions and expectations, which caused them to return back to their regular lives, just like how one comes back home from vacation. Therefore the author tells us that love has its stages of unconditional support, but in order to be long lasting, love must fit into both parties’ expectations of the relationship.

Dimitri is a misogynistic, adulterous man who has little or no interest in the welfare of anyone but himself. He speaks crudely of women and shows no appreciation for his own marriage. He escapes his wife and ventures out to the resort town of Yalta, which throughout the story symbolizes fantasy. Even as he meets Anna, the woman with whom he soon forms an intimate relationship, he finds himself unable to compliment her without adding some form of criticism: “He recalled her slender, delicate neck, her lovely grey eyes; There’s something pathetic about her, anyway.” Dimitri tries to discredit  Anna’s beauty and dismiss his growing fondness for her. Once she leaves Yalta to return to her sick husband, though, he misses her. His feelings for Anna are at odds with his general disdain for women, and their brief relationship leads him to recognize a part of himself he did not know existed. He is forced, ultimately, to admit that, inferior or not, he cannot live without women. After his time in Yalta, he is a changed man: “…he no longer cared for arguments; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender…” Dmitri’s affection for Anna has humbled him and softened his gruff persona. He sheds his misogynistic self and embraces the changes brought on by his unlikely love affair.

In the piece The Gilded Six-Bits by Zora Neale Hurston, two newlywed couples embark challenges in their relationship as the wife, Missie May, sleeps with another man, Slemmons, betraying her husband, Joe. Throughout the two exchanges of men whom she sleeps with, Missie May gains the same silver coin from both. However, the value of the silver coin changes based on who gives it to her. For Joe, the silver coin is worth more because it brought her happiness from real substances like going out on dates to get ice cream. For Slemmons, the coin was based on the lies of his wealthy businesses. Through Joe’s honest efforts to please May and make her happy, the author shows the power of the currency of exchange in the small, genuine interactions in one’s life. In fact for Slemmons, May realized how little value he brought into her life after she realized his wealth was all a lie when she did “not to recognize his stickpin as a gilded quarter, and his watch charm as a four-bit piece” (Hurston, 7). May’s life was simple with Joe in making breakfast for him and going out to eat. It was enough for her in the end because she was with meaningful people in her life, which brought great value, like the coin Joe gave her.