Women riding horseback

At first Dolly is taken aback at the sight of Anna on horseback. We are told that “to Darya Alexandrovna's mind, the notion of ladies on horseback was connected with the notion of light, youthful coquetry, which in her opinion did not suit a woman in Anna's position" (6:17, 610).36 Dolly, however, arrives at Vozdvizhenskoe ready to accept the choices Anna has made.This is because Dolly has been thinking about the endless travails of motherhood, from cracked nipples to anxiety about her children's moral development. “Is it all worth it?" Dolly even asks (6:16, 607). In this mood, Dolly reconciles herself to the sight of Anna on horseback (against her better judgment, as will be seen below).

According to the linkages of Tolstoy's labyrinth, Anna's horseback- riding intimates that she engages in sex, but rejects maternity. This idea is encoded on many levels. It was a commonly held belief that riding horseback was especially dangerous to unborn fetuses, a fact that readers of George Eliot's Middlemarch are likely to remember. The headstrong Rosamond Lydgate ignores her physician husband's warnings, rides horseback, and miscarries their baby. Women who devote their bodies to motherhood are expected to avoid riding horses. (That Vronsky had kicked the fallen Frou-Frou in the belly on the very day Anna had an- nounced that she was pregnant also figures into the nest of associations between horseback riding and pregnancy.) The contrast between the image of Anna on horseback at Vozdvizhenskoe and what is going on meanwhile at Pokrovskoe is telling: at Pokrovskoe, where motherhood and pregnancy are sacred, everyone, especially Levin, does everything possible to ensure the safety of the baby in Kitty's womb. In fact, Anna later that evening informs Dolly that she is practicing a form of birth control that was introduced to her by a doctor after the birth of Annie. This news shocks Dolly, who is somewhat repulsed by Anna from this point on. In her own defense, Anna boldly asks, “Why have I been given reason, if I don't use it so as not to bring unfortunate children into the world?" (6:23, 638). But, in using reason to justify her rejection of motherhood, Anna only damns herself further because the spiritual truths celebrated in Anna Karenina run counter to reason. (At the end of the novel, Levin will conclude that “reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law which demands that everyone who hinders the satisfaction of my desires should be throttled. That is the conclusion of reason. Reason could not discover love for the other, because [this love] is contrary to reason" [8:12, 7971.) What Anna indicates to Dolly in words—that she will have sex but no more babies-had already been communicated subliminally, thanks to a series of intratextual and inter- textual linkings, when Anna is first seen riding sidesaddle on her sturdy English cob. That life at Vozdvizhenskoe is arranged in a rational fashion to maximize comfort and pleasure reinforces the message.

Not Content to Have Ceased Breastfeeding Their Children, Women Cease Wanting to Make Them

For all her musings about escape from the pains of motherhood while she rode in the carriage on the way from Pokrovskoe, Dolly ultimately recoils from the life she finds at Vozdvizhenskoe, a realm where mother- hood is denied. What has been subliminally suggested to the reader by the sight of Anna on horseback is confirmed by a series of revelations to Dolly. On her tour of the swank hospital that Vronsky is building for the local peasant population, Dolly is surprised to learn that it will have no maternity ward. Dolly also learns that Anna is a rare guest in her own daughter's nursery, leaving the maternal duties to an unsavory assembly of nannies and nurses.

Anna Karenina's abnegation of her maternal responsibilities recalls the behavior of that other fictional adulteress and horse rider, Emma Bovary, who neglects and even abuses her daughter. Through Flaubert's own system of linkages, Mère Rollet, Berthe Bovary's sinister and mer- cenary wet nurse, becomes an accessory to Emma's adultery. Tolstoy and Flaubert both respond to Rousseau's campaign to promote maternal breastfeeding and to his pronouncement that once women turn their backs on their maternal duties, especially breastfeeding, adultery and the general decay of family and society necessarily follow.37 Egotism results: “There are no longer fathers, mothers, children, brothers, sisters. ... Each person thinks only of himself or herself.” In Émile, Rousseau asserts that a refusal to breastfeed is the first step in a mother's fall: "Not content to have ceased breastfeeding their children, women cease wanting to make them."38 Tolstoy follows this same logic in presenting Anna as a mother who relegates the feeding and care of her daughter to others and reveals to Dolly that she will bear no more children, citing among her reasons her fear that physical changes brought about by pregnancy would interfere with Vronsky's attraction to her (6:23, 637-39). Anna thus separates the erotic from the reproductive. In Anna Karenina, as in the later “Kreutzer Sonata,” Tolstoy's plots follow scenarios envisioned by Rousseau when he argued that a woman's body, once “liberated" from its reproductive functions, becomes a dangerous force, more threat- ening to society than any political, social, or economic forces. (Before moving for a call for total chastity in, for example, the “Postface to 'The Kreutzer Sonata,'' Tolstoy argued in “What Then Are We To Do?" that for society to be saved, women must embrace their "work" as mothers, not saying "no" after two or twenty pregnancies.)39

Whereas the inhabitants of Vozdvizhenskoe deny motherhood - Vronsky by failing to include a maternity ward in his hospital and Anna by neglecting her daughter and refusing to have more children- at Pokrovskoe the impending birth of the heir (whom Kitty then nurses herself, as is chronicled at key points in Parts 7 and 8 [6:16,718; 7:28, 758; 8:6, 782-3; 8:18, 814]) is the focus of everyone's attention. Thus, "with a meaningful look," Levin tells Kitty that “it is not good for you to stand" (6:1, 552); as they walk together, he tells her to "lean more on me," avoids “places where she might take a false step," and "interrupt[s] the conversation to rebuke her for making too quick a movement while stepping over a branch," confessing: “In my heart I wish for nothing except that you shouldn't stumble" (6:3, 558-60). Furthermore, when Levin lends Dolly horses for her trip to Vozdvizhenskoe, he thinks ahead to having the best horses kept back at Pokrovskoe in reserve in case the midwife needs to be sent for (6:16, 605). All this points to the inhabi- tants of Tolstoy's Pokrovskoe embracing the punishment,and modal salvation—that God in Genesis assigns to womankind: bearing children in pain and sorrow. As a result, Pokrovskoe appears to become not merely a safe haven for horses and mothers, where reason is not prac- ticed, but in fact the best possible estate man can create this side of Eden.

Tratto da Anna Karenina and Others Di Liza Knapp