Great essay! If you love literature, I highly recommend.
I'll add a third literary protagonist: Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg from Custom Of The Country. She uses her beauty without shame to get what she wants. For better or worse, Undine has a clarity of inner thought about her reality that Emma and Anna do not have. As your essay outlines, Emma is wrapped up in fantasies and Anna is torn between competing desires.
"I fell in love with everyone, in Anna Karenina; I pitied them; most of all I experienced them as both recognizably real, and decidedly outside myself."
Have not yet read Anna Karenina, but this sounds very much like War and Peace and Hadji Murad. It is Tolstoy's great strength.
Wonderful analysis! I wonder if you would agree that the distinction you raise is something like that between sympathy and empathy, and that, perhaps, sympathy is the more worthwhile and genuine aesthetic experience of the two. I explored that idea in an essay I wrote about the role of beauty in suffering: https://believinginbeauty.substack.com/p/beauty-and-suffering?r=lbkcq
Great essay! If you love literature, I highly recommend.
I'll add a third literary protagonist: Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg from Custom Of The Country. She uses her beauty without shame to get what she wants. For better or worse, Undine has a clarity of inner thought about her reality that Emma and Anna do not have. As your essay outlines, Emma is wrapped up in fantasies and Anna is torn between competing desires.
"I fell in love with everyone, in Anna Karenina; I pitied them; most of all I experienced them as both recognizably real, and decidedly outside myself."
Have not yet read Anna Karenina, but this sounds very much like War and Peace and Hadji Murad. It is Tolstoy's great strength.
Wonderful analysis! I wonder if you would agree that the distinction you raise is something like that between sympathy and empathy, and that, perhaps, sympathy is the more worthwhile and genuine aesthetic experience of the two. I explored that idea in an essay I wrote about the role of beauty in suffering: https://believinginbeauty.substack.com/p/beauty-and-suffering?r=lbkcq
A wonderful essay .. thank you. You got me searching for both books amongst my others. Saluti dall'Italia.
Very well stated also for us the non-literary types. Very revealing yet with a lot of guessing left.