The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [118]
For two final examples of Tragedy in its full five-stage form we may consider the stories of two of the most haunting tragic heroines in literature, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
The thousand-odd pages of Anna Karenina really tell two stories, interwoven but completely contrasting: that of Levin and that of Anna herself, each shaped by a quite different plot. We shall concentrate here entirely on the story of Anna.
When we meet Anna she is one of the most beautiful women in St Petersburg, married for some years to a senior and highly-esteemed government official. But living in the shadow of her husband's dry, intellectual high-mindedness, and preoccupation with his work, the passionate Anna feels a void in her life and heart. On a visit to Moscow, she briefly meets on her arrival at the railway station a handsome young cavalry officer, Count Alexei Vronsky. At a grand ball, they run into each other again, and both begin to be swept off their feet by violent mutual attraction. When they meet a third time, back in St Petersburg, Vronsky feels that `all his powers, hitherto dissipated and scattered' have now become `directed with terrible energy towards one blissful aim. When Anna arrives home from their next encounter
`her face shone with a vivid glow, but it was not a joyous glow - it resembled the terrible glow of a conflagration on a dark night.'
Their mutual passion and sense of anticipation mount until at last they perform the irrevocable act which binds them together:
`That which for nearly a year had been Vronsky's sole, exclusive desire, supplanting all his former desires, but which for Anna had been an impossible, dreadful, but all the more bewitching dream of happiness, had come to pass.'
Firmly into the Dream Stage, they continue to meet more or less secretly, in a series of passionate encounters. But already others, including the increasingly chilly, unhappy Karenin, have some suspicion of what is going on. Tongues begin to wag, `waiting for the scandal to break'; and the premonition of some ultimate disaster is heightened by an emotionally fraught incident at the race course when Vronsky, leading in a steeplechase on his beautiful English mare Frou-Frou, makes a stupid error, forcing his horse to stumble so that she has to be destroyed:
`for the first time in his life he experienced the worst kind of misfortune - one that was irretrievable, and caused by his own fault.'
Both Anna and Vronsky have the same terrible dream, of `a peasant with a rough beard, small and dreadful, fumbling in a sack and muttering to hImself in French about `battering' and `iron': and gradually the story is drawn up to its first great climax. Anna has become pregnant and as she is delivered of a baby girl she falls desperately ill of puerperal fever. Thinking she is about to die, in her delirium she tells her husband how she has felt divided into two people:
`I am still the same... but there is another in me as well, and I am afraid of her. It was she who fell in love with that other one, and I wished to hate you, but could not forget her who was before. That other is not I. Now I am the real one, all of me.'
The dying Anna and Karenin appear to be reconciled. Vronsky stumbles off in despair and attempts to shoot himself. It might seem that the story was, however messily, approaching a conclusion. But, at a deeper level, too much is still unresolved. Anna and Vronsky separately recover. Anna's old fatal yearnings return. She succumbs and leaves her husband forever, to throw in her lot irrevocably with Vronsky.
At this turning point in the story, Tolstoy opens Book Two with the biblical quotation `Vengeance is mine; I will repay. Vronsky and the now-totally compromised Anna flee from Russia for Italy:
`During this, the first period of her freedom and rapid recovery, Anna felt unpardonably happy and full of the joy of life...'
It might all seem like a new Dream Stage, after the nightmare of her illness, But when, at the book's ending, we look back over the whole story, we can see how this central period