Reading Journal 1

So these are for REES/WS 281. These beginning ones were more just bullet-pointed first impressions with a focus on how women are represented.


Maria Morevna

• Maria at the beginning: fierce, independent, and secretive but not maliciously so. In the repeating part of the story, she's concerned for her safety but willing to risk death (brave, and for love).
• Prince's sisters: allowed free will in marriage choice.
• Baba Yaga: civil enough (even about her evil points: "do not hold it against me!"), but secretly tricky; "sweeping her traces with a broom"

Valilisa the Beautiful

• There's a theme of truth versus image for the stepsisters ("thin from spite...sat with folded hands, like ladies")
• Vasilisa relies on maternal blessing/external help for all of what's remarkable about her; righteousness wins; curious magic/Christian theology combination going on (even the doll tells her to pray, p. 443)
• Baba Yaga is strict, cruel, and impossibly wicked (with the chores); yet also seems to have some wisdom (even to share: "don't ask too much" for it makes you grow old too soon), and sticks to her word (gives the light Vasilisa needed)

Igor's Death and Olga's Revenge

• Olga as cunning, almost monstrous in her backstabbing/trickery, but it was out of revenge for her husband (thus okay somehow?--maybe not the point)

Poor Liza

• Liza and her mother honourable: "never took extra" for both; Liza even after her innocence is lost and she's given way to her passions remembers, "I have a mother!" (to take care of)
• Anyuta continues the theme of reliance on others (the villagers)
• Liza's mother's eyes close forever: a kind of reverse metaphor of Liza's eyes being opened/innocence lost: the costs of the 'romantic'/cross-class relationship that seemingly can't actually work (return to realism)

Eugene Onegin

Tatyana's introversion and fixation on romantic heroes and heroines seems to, at least in my mind, all the more prepare her for the kind of speech she gives in her letters in a way that she actually means, which makes it all the more remarkable for her to stay true to the husband she does not love at the end when Eugene returns.

Funny how the narration switches between perspectives within the story and even to meta-story and meta-society from the author directly to the reader. Odd that the title is Eugene and not Tatyana when it seems she, not he, is the 'landfall' of the final verses, and indeed the model of womanhood to be held to in Russian society even today. It could just be that only this section exposited Tatyana's character and the rest was actually about Eugene.