Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel

by Amy Mandelker

Amy Mandelker's feminist reinterpretation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina challenges prevailing critical notions of Tolstoy as a misogynist and Anna Karenina as a classic realist novel. Instead, Mandelker reads Tolstoy as a radical feminist at the vanguard of Russia's "woman question" debates and Anna Karenina as a modernist novel that breaks tradition.
Mandelker's revisionist analysis begins with the contention that Anna Karenina rejects the textual conventions of realism and the stereo-typical representation of women, especially in Victorian English fiction. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy uses the theme of art and visual representation to articulate an aesthetics freed from gender bias and class discrimination. As Mandelker shows, Tolstoy compares the theme of the representation of women in society with the representation of women in art to critique Western bourgeois traditions that trivialize the beautiful as a feminine category in aesthetics and a purchasable commodity in society. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy both creates and theorizes an aesthetics that transcends boundaries and liberates the individual.
An important and compelling work, Framing Anna Karenina is essential reading for scholars and students of Russian and Victorian literature, particularly those interested in feminist approaches to nineteenth-century novels.

241 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Tiena · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The labyrinth of Anna Karenina is an enclosure that by its very artifice reminds us we are enclosed and thus points our vision to what is not or cannot be contained, and to the means of entrance and exit traversing the frame.”

This was a really interesting take on AK, and I’ll definitely use it in my essay. Some of the claims seemed a bit far fetched in terms of reading into Tolstoy’s intentions, and I also got a bit lost at some points.

[Jasmine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Anna Karenina as a 21st century feminist was a contradictory experience. There were parts that felt radical even for today -- women discussing pregnancy and being a wife as a form of slavery, women discussing the futility of motherhood, women admitting to not bonding with their children. But other parts of the story felt very moralizing, very limited in seeing how women could achieve self-actualization outside of marriage and motherhood. The woman with the happiest ending embraces being a wife and a mother and remains forever unshaken in her faith in God, while the woman who decries pregnancy as toil and slavery and transgresses against the sanctity of marriage takes her own life.

I picked up Mandelker's book to try to grapple with these opposites: is Tolstoy passing moral judgement on Anna or is he pointing out, in a rather radical and feminist way, how 19th century aristocratic social customs oppressed women?

The first two chapters of Mandelker provided some useful context for understanding feminist discussions of Tolstoy, and other works by Tolstoy that spoke to the Woman Question. The remainder of the book I found less useful. The close readings of portraiture in Karenina and other contemporary novels read more like an exercise in literature critique than writing intended provide insight into the novel. Some of the other close readings of individual scenes (mushroom picking, Anna reading a novel on a train) made me somehow like scenes I enjoyed less. The comparison of Anna's suicide to similar plots in other novels was interesting, and an aspect I hadn't considered.

I found it surprising (disappointing even) that Mandelker mainly foiled Anna and Dolly, or Anna and Levin, but didn't extensively compare Anna and Kitty. To me, this latter pair is the real test for the question both I and Mandelker sought to address (is Tolstoy a moralizing supporter of patriarchy or a feminist critic of his society?).

Still, I think it's a good starting point for examining women in Anna Karenina, if you're looking for a secondary/academic source.

[Eva Hilzenrath]

manic read for paper