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Thursday
My favorite episode in Anna Karenina is the one where Levin tries to protect his new wife from his dying brother—he doesn’t want her to have to confront the unpleasantness of the world—only to discover that she can handle the situation better than he can. At that moment, he realizes he has married a woman with far more depth than he realized.
The episode also raises a question I’ve long thought about: why do women seem more able to handle sickness, dying, and death better than men?
Such a question comes with the caveat that all gender generalizations are suspect and none should be seen as absolute. In my own experience, however, this has proved to be the case. When my oldest son died and our family was lost in a haze, a number of women descended upon our house and took over. They saw there was a need and saw that they could help.
I also saw how my wife Julia worked with my dying mother far better than I did. I was like Tolsoy’s Levin, getting tangled in my head about what I should say or do, whereas Julia—like Kitty—kept her eye firmly fixed on what was most important.
When Levin’s brother is dying, Levin initially tries to prevent Kitty from going to see him, believing that his young bride won’t be able to handle either the brother’s unpleasantness or his lower class female companion. Kitty, however, refuses to stay away. Here’s an excerpt of from one of their first marital arguments:
“I tell you, that if you go, I shall come with you; I shall certainly come,” she said hastily and wrathfully. “Why out of the question? Why do you say it’s out of the question?”
“Because it’ll be going God knows where, by all sorts of roads and to all sorts of hotels. You would be a hindrance to me,” said Levin, trying to be cool.
“Not at all. I don’t want anything. Where you can go, I can….”
“Well, for one thing then, because this woman’s there whom you can’t meet.”
“I don’t know and don’t care to know who’s there and what. I know that my husband’s brother is dying and my husband is going to him, and I go with my husband too….”
As it turns out, Levin is fairly useless when he encounters his brother:
Levin could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see and did not distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelt the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or to relieve his suffering. But a sense of his regarding all aid as out of the question was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this made it still more painful for Levin. To be in the sick-room was agony to him, not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone.
This stands in stark contrast to how Kitty responds:
But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention. She sent for the doctor, sent to the chemist’s, set the maid who had come with her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub; she herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sick-room, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillow cases, towels, and shirts.
Levin thinks his irascible brother will be upset at Kitty’s interference, only to discover that she understands the brother better than Levin does:
Levin did not approve of all this; he did not believe it would be of any good to the patient. Above all, he feared the patient would be angry at it. But the sick man, though he seemed and was indifferent about it, was not angry, but only abashed, and on the whole as it were interested in what she was doing with him.
Tolstoy continues to hammer home the difference between the two different approaches to death as the episode continues. Here he contrasts Kitty and the brother’s female companion with Levin:
Both [women] knew, without a shade of doubt, what sort of thing life was and what was death, and though neither of them could have answered, and would even not have understood the questions that presented themselves to Levin, both had no doubt of the significance of this event, and were precisely alike in their way of looking at it, which they shared with millions of people. The proof that they knew for a certainty the nature of death lay in the fact that they knew without a second of hesitation how to deal with the dying, and were not frightened of them. Levin and other men like him, though they could have said a great deal about death, obviously did not know this since they were afraid of death, and were absolutely at a loss what to do when people were dying. If Levin had been alone now with his brother Nikolay, he would have looked at him with terror, and with still greater terror waited, and would not have known what else to do.
And further on:
More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to move. To talk of outside things seemed to him shocking, impossible, to talk of death and depressing subjects—also impossible. To be silent, also impossible. “If I look at him he will think I am studying him, I am afraid; if I don’t look at him, he’ll think I’m thinking of other things. If I walk on tiptoe, he will be vexed; to tread firmly, I’m ashamed.” Kitty evidently did not think of herself, and had no time to think about herself: she was thinking about him because she knew something, and all went well.
Ultimately, it is Kitty, not Levin, who does the brother the most good in his final moments.
As I say, I shy away from gender generalizations, and there are undoubtedly men who can handle sick beds and women who can’t. But my own experience has been Levin’s, and I deeply admire and gratefully acknowledge those women who step up in moments of crisis.
