Love in Chekhov and Steinbeck Essay

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“The Chrysanthemums” and “The Lady with the Pet Dog”

Both Steinbeck and Chekhov offer realistic depictions of love and unhappiness in their respective stories. Chekhov paints a vivid picture of two unhappy people, each married to someone neither loves. They meet at a resort away from home and casually fall in love with one another. However, the reason they are able to fall in love so easily on this resort is that it is a vacation—it is not real life. It is not the day to day or the simple fact of the matter. They are on holiday: they feel free to be charming, to be witty, to laugh, to be themselves, and to not care about anything at all. Chekhov would say, perhaps, that they are not quite living in reality and that when they do attempt to carry on their love affair into reality, they quickly realize the difficulty: “it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning,” writes Chekhov. To the individual who says he loves his wife but feels as if there is nothing he can do to stop the heartache, Chekhov might replay: “That heartache does not every go away. It is a sign that you are alive. Do not seek to live a life without it—you will not find it. You are a sensitive soul; your heart aches because it feels. You can sense perhaps what others cannot—some unhappiness within yourself, some unhappiness out there, or some unhappiness in others. Remember, however, you must not dwell on that unhappiness for too long—for there is also happiness there in you, in others, and out there. There is beauty and wonder and mystery and all manner of goodness and truth. To remain in melancholy, absorbed in one’s own melancholy is to risk falling. Error is melancholy’s child, as Shakespeare says—consider that point and consider another, that Malick makes in his film To the Wonder: ‘You must love, whether you like it or not.’”

Steinbeck would most likely agree, as his story is full of illusion as well and describes a woman who is tricked by a man who feigns interest in what she is doing so that she might find him more agreeable and give him some work to do. He is like someone who has read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. She is naïve and clearly wanting someone to pay attention to her and someone to see beauty in what she sees beauty in—namely her flowers. When she sees the flowers she gave the man tossed on the side of the world, she feels crushed and old: “She turned up her coat collar so he could not see that she was crying weakly—like an old woman,” writes Steinbeck. What she is turning her collar up on is her feeling and the awareness that she nearly was tempted to touch the man who deceived her, to embrace him, and to give love to him. Now, realizing that the love was all an illusion, all in her mind, she recoils back within herself and is afraid to let the world or her husband see what has affected her. Steinbeck would probably say that this is the problem with people: they are afraid to expose themselves, to be themselves, to be open and honest.

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People hurt—life is not easy. It is made all the more difficult when people do not learn to let go—to…

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…in the beginning of the story. They are married to others and must love the spouses they already have. Their trouble is that they have fallen in love with a romantic version of love and want to make it their reality instead of turning their reality into a life of loving with the spouses they already have. Chekhov showed that such a life is possible in another short story entitled “The Darling”—here he simply leaves his characters stuck in their fantasy as they struggle to find a way to make the fantasy “work.”

For the man who is unhappy in his marriage though he loves his wife, the authors would say to find love in his life and to love the wife no matter how he feels. They would advise him thus: “Do not worry so much about how you feel. The feelings come and go. The heart can be deceived just like the mind. The feelings are not indicators that true love has been found. Nor are they indicators that you can never be happy. The heart is merely a gauge: it tells you where you are so that you can get back to where you need to be. You are married, so love your wife. Love her even if you do not know how. Women need love, perhaps even more than men. Men—they need respect. But if you show your wife love, you will get the respect you deserve, and you will begin to know what it means to be happy.” In this way, the two authors would help the man to solve his problems. Love, they would show, can often come like an illusion when in reality it is an effort of the will, though its source comes from a higher place above us all.….....

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