Tolstoy and Women’s Sexuality: an Analysis of the Female Characters in Family Happiness, Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2317-4765.rus.2024.222539Keywords:
Leo Tolstoy, Gender and Literature, Family Happiness, Anna Karenina, Kreutzer SonataAbstract
The theme of adultery and female sexuality permeates much of Leo Tolstoy's work, whose view of the position of women in society can also be associated with his conception of art. No wonder, in his controversial essay What is Art? (1898), he uses an analogy with women to elucidate his view. Thus, thinking about the female figure seems to be central to the constitution of his work. With this in mind, we propose an analysis of the main female characters in three of his works in which this problem of female sexuality is present; Family Happiness (1859), Anna Karenina (1878), and Kreutzer Sonata (1889). With this, we seek to recover the way in which Tolstoy represented women in his narratives, as well as to highlight the implications of the different literary resources adopted in each work with regard to the constructed representations.
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Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
Grant numbers 2023/04236-0
