Shall we talk about The Kreutzer Sonata (book 392 for me)? The truth is that I'd rather not. I've been wanting to read this one and wrap up Tolstoy, since though I love Russian novels I do not love Tolstoy generally. I still haven't forgiven him for War and Peace. I just can't.
I'm guessing most don't know what this little novella is about. Yay for you! Basically, it's about this train trip (so promising) where one traveler tells another about the time he killed his wife after discovering that she was having an affair. Tolstoy does not shy away from graphically describing this, and it was violent.
It's always interesting, I suppose, to read novels looking at the relationship between men and women/women's rights/gendered power dynamics from other time periods. And by interesting I generally mean maddening, of course.
While one could go in many directions if one needed to write a paper on this one, I was most interested in a short passage where the guy who killed his wife expounds on his views on women generally. His argument is that women have primarily been used by men for men's pleasure/enjoyment. That men have basically exerted control over women to exploit women for their own ends. He then goes on to argue that attempts to improve women's education, legal standing, political rights, etc. won't ever get anywhere because men will continue to view women mainly in terms of objects for their enjoyment, and that the only way for women to truly be emancipated is for them to not have sex (he says this generally; I assume he really meant with men).
One could, of course, go in many different directions with analyzing that argument, but what struck me most was how it completely ignores women's pleasure/desire and basically assumes that it does not exist. Since I don't want to get into a long treatise about women's sexual pleasure here, I think I'll just stop.
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