In Defence of Tolstoy’s Treatment of Woman

So not only have I fallen behind in my reading, I haven't been posting on the blog! Oh-no! Let me make it up to the world with a lengthy post on Tolstoy's treatment of women, in which I finally get too put all those hours watching 'Mad Men' to use.

I don’t think Tolstoy treats his female characters as badly as my co-readers do. Sure the women in W&P are for the most part flighty and shallow, but it’s not as if the men come off any better. Pierre’s easily manipulated, Andrei has a stick up in his ass, Rostov is the biggest idiot this side of the Napoleonic war. Even my favourite character, my man Dolokhov, is a bastard who will gorge money out of his best friend in a game of cards (and not even because he needs the money, or because he hates the friend. He just does it out of spite because the guy’s sister turned him down.). Sure the women in the book aren’t portrayed all that great, but the men are shown to be, on the whole, pretty stupid. I wouldn’t say Tolstoy is misogynistic as much as misanthropic (though I think even that would be too strong a word).

I do take issue with the fact that the male characters get to do more. Despite having a large cast populated by both men and women, most of the book is told from the point of view of the male characters. While this was obviously a choice on Tolstoy’s part, I also think the time and setting of W&P needs to be taken into account. When you’re writing in a world with very set gender roles that restrict what kind of things men and women can do, it’s far too easy to give into temptation and write from the point of view of the gender that gets to go off and fight wars and become diplomats and fight duels vs. the gender that gets to throw parties and have babies (Tolstoy does give us some of the later, but nowhere near as much as the former).

But just because the society your story is set in has strict gender roles, it doesn’t mean you have to follow them to the letter. Or, you could reinforce those roles and, by showing how hard a time of it your characters have trying to navigate them, show how silly they are. For example, the show 'Mad Men' is set in the world of New York advertising agencies in the early 1960s. A major theme of the show is how women try survive in a system that marginalizes them: some go along with it only to feel depressed and neglected, others use their femininity to get ahead, while others go against the grain completely. While there are a lot more Betty Drapers in W&P then there are Peggy Olsons, I still think that Tolstoy does at certain points use the novel to critique a system that gives woman very little power. When Andrei’s wife complains about being abandoned and left with strangers while her husband goes off to war, she’s not just complaining about that one particular incident but of how little control she has over her own destiny. This is driven home brutally hard with her death and her reaction to it (“What the fuck did I ever do to deserve this?”).

That said, I don’t think that Tolstoy is a feminist or that W&P is a feminist text. It has its moments though, like when Helen reveals to Pierre that she’s just as unhappy in their loveless marriage as he is. Or when Marie decides for herself that she never wants to get married and would rather look after her father. That scene in particular is a favourite of mine, as it’s one of the few moments in the book when a female character takes her life into her own hands and makes a decision for herself. That alone is enough to make Marie one of my favourite characters (but only second favourite though: I just love that crazy bastard Dolokhov far too much).