Tag: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Uneasy Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is a frustrating book. I have a suspicion that it was probably supposed to be. Following the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family in Nottinghamshire in the 19th century, it is primarily the story of their struggles to assert themselves and their identities. While the older generations have only limited success, Ursula, the granddaughter of our original Brangwen hero Tom, is able to achieve something closer to what she wants for her (emotional) life.

That she does so is a little ironic. The Brangwens may be progressing financially and socially in the story, but it is clear that for Lawrence the world around them in late 19th and early 20th century England is not. Rather, it’s becoming increasingly more awful as continues to industrialize and modernise. What complicates this situation is that it is precisely the progress Lawrence dislikes – economic, educational, and social – which allows Ursula the chance to be herself in the way she thinks she ought. Otherwise, I think this might have been quite a one-dimensional book.

The Rainbow was my first full-length Lawrence, after a few of his poems and his well-known short story, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”. The best compliment I can give him, not that I think he’d necessarily care for my feedback even if he weren’t dead almost a hundred years, is that he certainly has his own distinctive approach. The characters of The Rainbow only ever experience strong feelings. The best way to describe them for one who hasn’t read him is that they are like jugs of emotions just sloshing about more than real people. Regularly, the feelings pour over the brim and make a mess on the carpet.

Central to these emotions are love and hate, and the frustration that leads to their regular alternations. Anna Brangwen, the adopted daughter of Tom Brangwen, imagines her premarital life as like a torture cell where she could “neither stand nor lie stretched out, never.” She escapes her home by marrying Will Brangwen, son of one of Tom’s brothers. At first, things are good: “Gradually a low, deep-sounding will in him vibrated to her, tried to set her in accord, tried to bring her gradually to him, to a meeting, till they should be together, till they should meet as the sheaves that swished together.”

Then, just as quickly, things are bad. First, she’s crying, and then he is. They are unable to talk to each other, and Will takes up drinking – the men in The Rainbow are always going up to the village to get drunk alone, and Will quickly joins their number. When they visit a cathedral – Will likes them as a kind of hobby – Anna decides to ruin his faith through mockery and doubt and largely succeeds, leaving him miserable. They then make up just as suddenly, and it almost seems as if Lawrence approves of this destruction because he suggests it leads to better sex. At another point, Will tries to seduce a stranger and when he returns home the result is the same – better sex. Both he and Anna no longer feel obliged to be good or obey or social norms, and their passion for one another reaches a new height. (I lost track of how many babies she has throughout the novel, or how many fallings-out.)

The only child who matters within this book, however, is Ursula, the eldest daughter. On the first page of The Rainbow we learn that the Brangwens are all born with a look of “expectancy” on their faces, and it is with Ursula that we get closest to fulfilment. In the background of the book’s several hundred pages, modernity has crept into the story. By the time of Ursula’s section, we have the occasional motor car and the Boer War to help us date things, while the suffragettes are trying to get women the right to vote. The Brangwen family has also grown. At first, they were reasonably well-off farmers, but the growth of towns nearby thanks to coal mining makes them more money and allows them to climb a little socially.

Most directly for Ursula, this helps her to become a teacher and try to live an independent life. She also then goes to college to actually train to be a teacher, which perhaps she should have done before doing the teaching. In between all this she has her experience of first love with the son of a friend of her mother’s, an extremely homoerotic experience with a female friend, and through her other acquaintances she also comes across such ideas as the cause of the suffragettes.

In general, however, and as I mentioned at the beginning, Lawrence seems very hostile towards the modern world. The corporal punishment Ursula has to mete out to her children at the freshly-built new school seems as demeaning to her as it is to them, while the teaching itself is unstructured and primarily rote-learning. The suffragettes are criticised for thinking about ideas rather than actual human fulfilment, and as for the growth of towns and urban spaces Lawrence memorably describes them as “a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a skin-disease”. People everywhere seem to be turning into machines, and Lawrence is no fan.

His own ideas are much more timeless, or at least timeless-seeming. There’s an emphasis on personal freedom and self-assertion, but mainly through passionate sex rather than upending society. In fact, there’s no real sense of society at all – Lawrence’s characters are all monstrous egotists only brushing against each other when their blood is pumping. The greatest moments are moments of nakedness – Anna dancing in her bedroom nude, or Ursula running on the beach naked. That’s the fulfilment everyone wants here and not the vote. But we might also notice, unsurprisingly, that even if a partner is present, these are moments of self-fulfilment rather than of joint, let alone of collective fulfilment. The men observing feel left out, alienated. (I am not sure Lawrence liked men who were not himself.)

Lawrence uses religious language and symbols to give his work a kind of mythic edge and his ideas the stamp of Truth. Early moments of love are described as “the light of the transfiguration”; at one point Ursula is compared to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; and cathedrals play a reasonably prominent role. The clear delineation between and essentialising of men and women, a sense of cyclicity (Brangwens on their first illicit strolls with lovers always seem to find the same paths to tread), and biblical images like a flood and the rainbow of the novel’s title, all make Lawrence’s narrator seem like someone presenting some timeless discovery, as if he has gone back to the root of things to find their real essence.

It is not so, of course. Lawrence may attempt to cloak himself in the Bible, but his main influences seem to be the classic German thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When we read that “she felt his will fastening on her and pulling her down, even whilst he was silent and obscure,” we think of Schopenhauer’s idea of a fallen humanity controlled by clashing wills. When we consider Lawrence’s rejection of modernity (“I hate democracy”, Ursula cries embarrassingly) and his love of the body, there’s more than a touch of Nietzsche and his successors in the Lebensphilosophie movement, while Freud is also here in much of the more detailed psychological assessments of the effects of modern society on the individual soul.

One is allowed to be influenced by others, of course, and Lawrence not being a real prophet does not devalue his ideas necessarily and certainly not his book as a whole. In fact, The Rainbow was banned in the UK for some years after its initial publication, which is generally a sign that it did reflect a certain truth. A truth about sex in particular – this is, undoubtedly, the sexiest book I’ve read which does not mention the male member once. Like de Sade, there’s a sense that even if Lawrence has a limited view of female empowerment, it’s one that still undermines the view that women exist only to be caregivers and dolls.

Overall, the ideas are actually reasonable enough; the problem is that, wishing to convince us of their Truth, Lawrence takes the easy option of disallowing debate or counterargument to exist. Characters are either sellouts to modernity who become like machines and are dropped by Ursula, or they are having great sex. I suspect there may be more to the matter than that. Anna has fifty babies, while Ursula gets engaged, goes on a mad one, and then breaks the whole thing off. The life of the body is good and fun, but I dislike the way Lawrence completely devalues the mind. I suppose once we accept he is right about everything we are supposed to stop thinking, if we were supposed to think at all.

One figure I thought of regularly while reading The Rainbow was Dostoevsky. Both he and Lawrence can only write characters whose emotional states are strained so taut you can hear the thrumming as soon as they leap onto the page; both he and Dostoevsky could have done with a better editor; both he and Lawrence have their own visions of how things are. But of the two, only Dostoevsky actually places his ideas against those of his enemies in such a way that even today, many readers can be quite convinced that he wasn’t really a toady old reactionary Christian nationalist. With Lawrence, you’d need to be an idiot to miss what he’s on about. Which altogether just makes him seem naïve and a bit silly, even before we start thinking about the ideas themselves.

Yet this is not a bad book by any stretch. One reason why this is so is the tension I noted at the start on the subject of modernity. Ursula goes to a better school than her parents, she is able to get a job where her mother gets none, and I might even suggest that her willingness to have sex while ultimately backing out of marriage indicates that she was not entirely deaf to some of the more radical ideas her suffragette friends may have been mentioning. In other words, her choices do not come out of nowhere – the world may be getting worse, but it is also opening up new opportunities for achieving the kind of self-realisation that Lawrence definitely loves.

There’s an irony in all that which he may have noticed himself. Such an irony, and the question of how much self-fulfilment Ursula will actually get within that world, makes her part of the novel by far the most interesting. Indeed, it even sustains itself into a sequel, Women in Love, which I will probably read at some point. This, and the occasional richness of the sloshing-about of these characters’ sensual emotions, makes The Rainbow quite the sensual experience. Just one that I will not rush to return to until I have gone outside and first touched the grass. 

How Not to Write Philosophical Fiction – Soren Kierkegaard’s Repetition

Kierkegaard’s title is actually a typically witty joke – it refers to the number of times you need to read this stupid book to understand it. Repetition is one of the Danish philosopher’s earliest works, and as it is quite a bit shorter than Either/Or, I decided to start with it. I am very good at buying Kierkegaard’s books – I own Either/Or, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, Papers and Journals, and A Literary Review – but I am less good at reading them, even though I’ve always felt we would get on. After all, he’s often referred to as a foundational thinker of existentialism; at the same time, he was also a devout Christian, and I am interested in both of those things.

I suppose I was finally motivated to read Repetition because of Clare Carlisle’s fun and imaginative biography of Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart, which I read last month. The biography actually turned me off Kierkegaard somewhat – I really had the impression that he was quite sickly, and it’s hard to put from one’s mind Nietzsche’s argument that good, healthy philosophy is always produced by good, healthy minds. But Carlisle’s book got me thinking about the Dane anyway, and so I decided to give him a go – Repetition’s short size didn’t hurt either.

But in all honesty, I am no philosopher. In this post I hope to explain more what is interesting about Repetition than to put forward any kind of interpretation. I cannot say I enjoyed Kierkegaard’s work, but there is a lot to take away from it.

An Overview of Repetition

Repetition is, like many of Kierkegaard’s works, written under a pseudonym – this time, Constantine Constantius. It’s wrong to think that the pseudonym simply masks Kierkegaard or provides a funny pun – the pseudonyms are themselves narrators, exploring views that Kierkegaard himself does not necessarily call his own. My copy of the book even refers to Constantine in the notes, rather than Kierkegaard. I found this a little jarring, for it is as if the fictional Constantine has burst through into reality, but it makes sense.

The work’s subtitle is “An Essay in Experimental Psychology” which means absolutely nothing because in the 19th century people called whatever they wanted to “psychology”. In some sense it is not unlike a German novella. Repetition is a story, rather than a tract, with characters and a sense of being anchored in a world very familiar to our own. There are two central sections, framed by some philosophising by Constantine on the nature of repetition. One story concerns a trip by Constantine to Berlin, while the second, more weighty section, is about a young man who falls in love with a girl and then has to deal with some tortured consequences because he decides he needs to break the engagement off.

Both sections are influenced by Kierkegaard’s own life. The main biographical point everyone knows about him is that he fell in love with, and got engaged to, a girl called Regine Olsen. He then broke off the engagement because he decided he preferred to be unhappy and write philosophy – as you do. The reasons are, of course, slightly more complicated than that – Carlisle is good on them – but it is perhaps helpful to know that Kierkegaard had experienced similar things to his characters, even if the thoughts here are specially produced.

The “philosophy” section

You will be expecting me to tell you what “repetition” actually means. I certainly expected Kierkegaard to. The book’s theme is after all put by Constantine thus: “whether repetition was possible and what it meant, whether a thing wins or loses by being repeated.” Repetition appears to be a way of viewing the world. The Greeks saw all knowledge as recollection – what we learn we really remember. Recollection therefore orientates the one remembering towards the past. Repetition does the opposite. It is “recollected forwards”. But what does that mean?

Constantine tells us that “repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love”. It is happy because unlike hope it does not distract us from the present, and unlike recollection it is not filled with the sorrow of comparing the present to the past. Repetition is a living in the moment, but one with a kind of structure and a sense of limitations. Repetition knows not to demand too much. “Only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy”.

Repetition accepts life’s limitations – it is not greedy. But it does require a kind of courage to desire repetition. “Repetition is actuality and the earnestness of existence”. God himself, we are told, wills repetition. To rephrase Far Cry 3’s Vaas, repetition is not the definition of insanity– it is the only way of living, aside from thinking about the past the whole time, which allows us to live without life dissolving “into an empty, meaningless noise”. Without repetition or recollection, we will struggle to live meaningful lives. And only the former lets us live happy ones.

Berlin

Constantine decides to test if repetition is possible, so he goes to Berlin. He has been there before, and he hopes to find it the same. Unfortunately, but somewhat predictably, the city has changed. His old landlord has gotten married, the theatre isn’t quite what it was the first time. He had left his home in Copenhagen because he was living “the wrong kind of repetition. My thoughts were barren, my anxious imagination constantly conjured up tantalizing memories of how the thoughts had presented themselves the last time, and the weeds of these recollections strangled every other thought.” In Berlin too, Constantine cannot enjoy things because he is recollecting them, rather than actually “repeating” them. He fails to live his own definition.

A Romance

Before and after the Berlin trip Constantine tells the story of “a young person” who considers Constantine his confidant. This person likes a girl, but unfortunately not in the right way. Constantine uses his idea of repetition vs recollection to determine what a good relationship should be like. Almost immediately, this young man is already “in a position to recollect his love.” Rather than concentrate on the girl as a human being in the present, she is already a memory-image in his mind. In a brilliant phrase, Constantine writes that the young man “had leapt right over life”. Perhaps the young man does not love her at all, only the image she created in him. Anyway, Constantine suggests ways of breaking off the engagement that will not hurt the girl too much, mostly involving been seen with other women.

After his trip to Berlin, the young man reappears in Constantine’s life, sending him letters. He has departed Copenhagen, but not followed Constantine’s advice about how to end the relationship. Constantine philosophises about him – “The girl has enormous significance for him. He will never be able to forget her. But that through which she has significance is not herself, but her relation to him. She is like the limit of his being. But such a relationship is not erotic. Religiously speaking, one could say that it is as if God had used this girl to capture him”. In any case, the young man leaves no address, simply writing his thoughts to Constantine for the latter to muse over.

And what are these thoughts? A mishmash of things, mostly centring on God and Job. “Does one no longer dare to complain to God?” the young man asks. In our age we no longer have sufficient faith to argue with Him, or perhaps we are simply afraid. The young man reads Job. “At night I can allow all the candles to be lit in my room, illuminating the entire house. Then I stand and read aloud, almost yelling, one or another passage from Job.” Me too. The young man also offers an interpretation of the bible story in the context of repetition. Namely, that Job, undergoing God’s testing, did not hope for anything, but simply lived, and then eventually things got better – they repeated. Only God can make possible repetition through his “thunderstorm”, which overcomes the tension of life.

Repetition as Philosophical Novella

I do not pretend either to have understood Repetition or to have successfully conveyed what little I did, perhaps, understand. But I would like to critique it as a philosophical novella, because I at least know how to do that. Kierkegaard’s two characters, and his story, encourage us to think. By having action in the real world, Repetition makes its philosophy something directly related to life as we live it. Meanwhile, the two characters prevent us from simply assuming that one or other is the author, and the other is someone to be disagreed with thoughtlessly. Constantine insults the young man – “it was easy to see that he laboured under a complete misunderstanding” – but that does not mean we should. As I noted, Constantine’s trip to Berlin shows he himself does not quite understand repetition as he defined it. Both characters are flawed, but both have important things to say.

But does that make Repetition a successful philosophical novella? What even is philosophical literature to begin with? Is it just a narrative that makes us think about philosophical themes? Most stories are philosophical by that definition, but we’ll go with it. Repetition has the young man’s story, with its letters and Constantine’s occasional snarky commentary. It has the Berlin trip, and it has the philosophy at the beginning and the end. Very well.

But it is not entirely successful as a work of literature. The Berlin section contains far too long a discourse on the nature of the theatre and of farce. There is a bit of humour, a lot of irony, but not enough humanity. The young man’s story suffers similar problems. Constantine notes that the girl is only an image to the young man, but she remains so for him and us too. The young man’s letters are perhaps the best example of the work’s flaws. He asks questions, “Am I lost?”, “Am I perhaps crazy?”, “Why does no one answer?” – which cannot have answers, because he does not leave a return address or even desire Constantine’s response! But that means that there is no dialogue in this text, there are only two monologues, with Constantine’s critiquing the young man’s.

Dostoevsky is often compared to Kierkegaard, but his philosophical novels are a hundred times better than Repetition precisely because they are filled with dialogue between characters. Characters engage with each other’s ideas, and nothing is settled in their world. The great Soviet critic Bakhtin notes that “Dostoevsky’s hero always seeks to destroy that framework of other people’s words about him that might finalize and deaden him”. Here, the young man cannot be in dialogue with Constantine because the correspondence only goes one way. Constantine “finalises and deadens” the young man, without the battle that would take place if they were actually in the same room. Though both characters are supposedly alive, because they have no real relation to each other it’s hard to feel they actually live.

Conclusion

I am unable to judge Repetition’s philosophy. A wiser person than I may one day note in the comments how terribly I have misrepresented it. As I understood it – this orientation towards the present, coupled with a sense of not demanding too much of life – it seems sensible enough. I appreciate Kierkegaard’s careful structuring of his text, but I think it is fundamentally misaligned with how good philosophical fiction must be.

Philosophical fiction shouldn’t just be people talking past each other – even Heidegger has essays with characters chatting, for crying out loud! Philosophical fiction has to elucidate the ideas in a way that philosophy on its own cannot, and that demands action and dialogue. Dialogue through life, rather than simply words passed between others; otherwise we could stick Repetition and some of its early reviews together and call that “dialogue”.

Latency does not make for dialogue. We need characters in the same room – we need to feel, as we feel with Dostoevsky, that at any moment the discussion could fall apart and they could start fighting each other with hands and fists. If this philosophy stuff is actually vitally important – and I’m sure Kierkegaard thinks it is – then its representation in literature demands this. Philosophical literature must make philosophy real, and it must make us feel. Alas, Repetition only just manages the former, and fails completely at the latter.

I will read some more Kierkegaard soon. For more on Job, check out my review of Joseph Roth’s novel of the same name. For more Dostoevsky, look at my thoughts on rereading the first two parts of Crime and Punishment.

A Question of Guilt – Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature”

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella “A Gentle Creature”, also translated as “The Meek One”, makes for unpleasant reading. We are immediately thrust into the aftermath of a suicide, where the surviving partner of a marriage attempts to come to terms with why his young wife chose to end her life. In times of grief, we can often blame ourselves for things that under the lens of cold reason are not our responsibility. But in “A Gentle Creature” the situation is far less innocent. Our unnamed narrator is as repulsive as any a man Dostoevsky created, and as he explores his memories it is impossible to avoid the fact that he is responsible for his wife’s death. Theirs was an extremely abusive relationship, one which remains as fresh and horrible today as it was then.

In “A Gentle Creature” Dostoevsky uses this setup, of a man trying to evade his own guilt, to create a brilliant character study. The relationship and its decline are thematically rich, making us think about the nature of moral responsibility and fate, about money and power, and finally about the written word itself. Beneath the story, which I found painful to read at times, there is much of value to discuss.

Quotations are from the translation by Ronald Meyer, but as I prefer the title “A Gentle Creature”, I will refer to the story using that name.

“A Fantastic Story” – the Narration of “A Gentle Creature”

“A Gentle Creature” has the subtitle “a fantastic story”, and before the story begins Dostoevsky explains his strange word choice. Though it is “realistic in the highest degree”, it has an element of fantasy in how Dostoevsky takes us along the memories and turmoil of the narrator’s heart as he tries to make sense of what has happened. We meet our narrator shortly after his wife’s death. “…Now as long as she’s here – everything is still all right”. Such an opening thrusts us in media res, as if we’ve suddenly been plugged in to our narrator’s thoughts. Our own disorientation reflects his own. Though the narrator tells us that “the horror of it for me… [is] that I understand everything”, half a page later he admits he keeps getting muddled.

The narrator is our only guide to the story, but he is not reliable at all. As he goes through his memories, he also interprets them. When he comes across badly, he gets defensive – “you see, I wasn’t badly brought up and have manners”. Though he claims to portray “pro and contra” impartially, he also blames his wife for her suicide. It’s not hard to see the games he’s playing. Just as he describes his relationship with his wife as a game, so too is his description of the past a kind of game. We are drawn into his world, a world with almost no dialogue, so that we are almost suffocated by his solipsism. But he still needs his readers. He addresses them from time to time, appealing for moral support. He wants them to justify his actions. His addressees are male – perhaps he hopes they’d be biased.

The Plot

Our narrator is a pawnbroker, Dostoevsky’s favourite profession. One day he notices a repeat client, a young girl of about fifteen or sixteen. She keeps bringing him things, and seems to be growing increasingly desperate. The narrator becomes interested, and decides to learn about her. It turns out that her parents are dead, and she lives with her aunts. These women are preparing “to sell her”, and a merchant has been chosen to be her husband. She doesn’t want this, but this is the 19th century and she’s a poor woman and can’t easily defend herself. She uses the money she gets from pawning things to put adverts in the papers, hoping someone will hire her, as a governess for example.

The narrator decides to marry her instead. Compared to the shopkeeper, who has already beaten to death two wives, he must seem to the poor girl “a liberator”. She agrees to marriage. And here begins the horror of the story. The narrator, who first only had monetary power over her, now gains marital power. And as the story progresses, his power and his desire for control only grow.

“She should have appreciated my deed”.

From the very first, he expects her subservience and her respect. But this is a one-way street. He does not expect to have to offer anything to her in return. To her love – “she would throw herself at me with her love” – he presents silence. He enjoys the thought that he is “a riddle”. He creates “a complete system” for controlling her, and eventually the two of them stop talking altogether. Why does the narrator act this way? It’s both easy and difficult to say. At one point he claims to be aiming at a higher happiness for both of them, one that can only be reached through suffering. At another moment, he seems to think he’s Mephistopheles, using evil to work good.

In all of his decisions, there is no respect for what the girl thinks. In “A Gentle Creature” we hardly ever hear her speak. When she does speak, the narrator dismisses her through misogyny – “these outbursts were unhealthy and hysterical”. The narrator does not even let her go outside on her own. In all his planning, the narrator not only displays a desire for control connected with his profession as an accumulator of money, but he also shows an unwillingness to respect or acknowledge the variety of human experience, and the essential dignity of his young wife.

The girl is kind – at first she does her best to love him. But through his coldness, the narrator attempts to reform her into a different person entirely. The fifth part of the first chapter in the story is called “The Meek One Rebels”, and there’s a degree of irony in it. The narrator has tormented her so much that she can no longer be herself. But then we might also think about suicide in connection with this. For many people, the decision to kill themselves comes as the consequence of losing their sense of identity. The narrator demands she break with hers. Her rebellion consists with an attempted liaison with one of the narrator’s old comrades (they were both in the army together), but the liaison does not work out. She is too morally pure, even then.

But the narrator still punishes her. He forces her to sleep on a different bed, behind a partition. The marriage is over. He makes her feel guilty for what he has driven her to. Later on, she declares that she is “a criminal”, even though she’s done precious little wrong.

Guilt and the Limits of Knowledge

Throughout “A Gentle Creature” we are asking why the poor girl killed herself. In some sense, it’s trivially simple. The narrator hurts her, abuses her, forces her into silence, and crushes her sense of self. But at the same time, it is still worth thinking about questions of responsibility as we read the story. The narrator may be an idiot when he suggests “I was forced to act as I did then”, as if he can simply excuse himself by invoking fate, but there might be value in questioning how far he is to blame, or at least, how he ended up in that position. I think the main problem is a failure of imagination on his part, coupled with the way that he refused to acknowledge her individual dignity.

 Why imagination? He makes plans, but finds she doesn’t fit into them because he is unable to plan enough. That’s at least one level to the problem. But it goes further than that. Under the surface of “A Gentle Creature” there is a lot of pent-up feeling. The narrator is a bad person in action, but not at heart. He really is aiming at a kind of happiness, and I think he did love his wife. But he was unable to express that love. Whenever he wanted to, it came into conflict with his desire for control and the lack of respect for his wife caused by his misogyny.

As a result, instead of being kind, he was silent. Instead of talking about his feelings, he tells us that it is impossible, “what would she have understood?” The narrator blames her for dying when she did. If only she’d waited a little while longer, then things would have worked out. But he is at fault for driving her to suicide, and whether she did it earlier or later the important thing is that he drove her to it in the first place.

In the end, though, as much as we condemn the narrator, we can’t avoid thinking about how we determine responsibility to begin with. After all, in “A Gentle Creature” we only hear his side of the story – we never learn hers, and never will. And though he hardly portrays himself well, he’s also suffering from shock and grief, and isn’t thinking clearly either.

Why is the Narrator as he is?

Comparing the narrator of “A Gentle Creature” to that of “Notes from the Underground” is a sensible decision, as both, though talkative, never seem to get anywhere with their thoughts or with their lives. They seem trapped in small places, like characters from something by Samuel Beckett. But more than that, both of them are in a sense poisoned by their era. The girl in “A Gentle Creature” is from a different generation to her husband, and where he is cold and cruel, she is idealistic and hopeful (until he’s had his way with her). The narrator is someone who also clearly once had his own ideals, but failed to live up to them. When he was younger, he was a soldier, but he was forced from his regiment after failing to participate in a duel. He tries to call his actions courageous, but it’s hardly convincing.  

He takes out his shame on her. He makes her feel ashamed of her own actions, above all for her love. But there is more to him than damaged pride. The end of “A Gentle Creature” is particularly difficult to read because the narrator finally seems to come to terms with his guilt. His worldview is spoiled, and he feels completely isolated. “I am alone with the pledges”. What had earlier given him power, even a sense of self – his money – now weighs down on him. He becomes aware of the emptiness of his life, and we have a feeling as he cries out with fear at the prospect of his wife’s body being removed from the house that perhaps his own suicide is not far off either. “People are alone on this earth” he thinks. That is his conclusion after so much suffering – both his and his wife’s. Fun.

Conclusion

“A Gentle Creature” ends bleakly, with a sense of terrible isolation. To be fair, it is bleak throughout. We watch a kind, hopeful, loving girl be destroyed in an abusive relationship, unable to express herself and controlled wherever she goes. There is, as with all suicides, a pervasive and nauseating feeling that if only we had a little more time, perhaps things would have been different. But for all the gloom, the story is still worth reading. The narrator is, in the Dostoevskian mould, perhaps a little too evil in thought, but his actions are believable and well-described. And however uncomfortable following his thoughts is, the twists and turns as he tries to justify himself remain fascinating.

Compared with The Double, “A Gentle Creature” is far more psychologically interesting, and (surprisingly for Dostoevsky!), a good exercise in concision. It is not as enjoyable as Crime and Punishment, in part because it has little positivity, and no Sonya waiting at the end. But that’s no reason not to give “A Gentle Creature” a chance the next time you have an hour free. It certainly won’t disappoint you.