From
the opening sentence, Tolstoi's Anna Karenina concerns itself with the family
and, more explicitly, with the problem of family happiness. At first, Anna
Karenina seems to be an extraordinary woman because of her beauty, charm and
knowledge. However, inside she was
miserable. This was because of her
unhappy marriage. From the start
she did not love her husband, and as the book progresses, she comes to despise
him. Other women in the book show a similar dissatisfaction with their place in
life. Dolly, for example, is
tormented by her troubled marriage and feels at times that her life has been
wasted. While we can not assume
that all women were unhappy as Anna and Dolly, Tolstoi’s depiction raises
important issues and problems that were obviously present in the society.
It
is my belief that the difficulties women were having in finding satisfaction and
fulfillment in life were connected with their upbringing.
The way girls were raised, what amount of education did they receive, and
what were the beginning relationships to opposite sex, could be all the factors
that had a strong impact of women's future life. Girls were not prepared to make
the right choices for themselves, and parents often intervened to make the wrong
choices for them. Tolstoi’s writings about the whole issue with Kitty, whose
parents argue whom should she marry, lead me to the thought that perhaps parents
were playing an important and powerful part in upbringing the child, and maybe
they were greatly influencing girls choices in terms of whom to marry.
Girls
were raised under strict control since they were little. Sofia Kovalevskaya's
book “A Russian Childhood”, gives a good idea about how girls were raised
during nineteenth century Russia. But not just parents were raising the children
and influencing girls. Besides mother, older women, such as grandmother, nurse,
governess-played a great part in girls early childhood, and they provided
feminine companionship and alternative role models. In early childhood, many
girls were brought up their nanny, and later the education was taken over by
their governess and tutors.
Fathers
play relatively insignificant role when girls are small, but as they move in
adolescence a young adulthood, they become more important. During the early
childhood, father's concepts of child-rearing were very elementary, and the
whole field of pedagogy seemed to them as female and not male concern. However,
father role in daughter's life changed over the time.
As daughter grew older, father got closer to daughter.
For example, Kitty had a very close, warm and loving relationship with
her father. Fathers were often influencing girls decisions in terms of whom to
marry. In worst cases, fathers were
deciding whom the daughter should marry.
Father could stop the daughter to marry the man she loved because the
fiancée was poor, without rank and a social nobody.
It was explained by the fact that father had the daughter’s happiness
foremost in his mind.
Although
many of the mothers were not deeply involved in raising children when they were
still babies, mothers still had the strongest impact in upbringing daughters. In
fact, the most important task a woman faced after a child-birth was to see that
her daughters were properly married. Mothers had a great power over daughters
and also a complete responsibility for them until their marriage. Mothers
controlled daughter’s lives greatly.
Mother's were often deciding whom the daughter had to marry.
The beginning relationships with opposite sex were
very limited. Girls were
raised
separately from boys, and therefore they did not know a lot about masculine
world.