Reading Journal: The Lady with the Dog

Ye Ji Park / 111053 / 12v1

Mr. Garrioch

World Literature

February 26 2013

Reading Journal: The Lady with the Dog
- “Love” and “Need” -

We sometimes have a problem distinguishing one emotion from another. We confuse love and admiration. Sometimes we do not clearly distinguish love and friendship. In some cases, we are not sure about the difference between love and hatred. In The Lady with the Dog, Chekhov suggests another pair of confusing emotions – “love” and “need”.

The Lady with the Dog, basically, is a story about one couple who just can’t stop committing adultery, despite of social blame and humiliation that would follow if divulged. In this sense, it reminds of Romeo and Juliet, the most famous love story of a couple who submits to all kinds of danger just for love. But any reader who reads The Lady with the Dog would hardly agree that this story is synonymous with Romeo and Juliet. Why?

The answer is simple: Romeo and Juliet “loved” each other, while Dmitri and Anna “needed” each other. 

Let’s go over Dmitri first. Chekhov introduces Dmitri’s wife as a “tall, erect woman … staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual”. She “read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri”. Dmitri, married to such a sophisticated, noble, and learned woman, “was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home”. This description indicates that Dmitri is, consciously or unconsciously, feeling inferior to his wife. Dmitri’s inferiority to his wife is again indicated in the later part of the story, when his wife "twitched her black eyebrows, and said: "The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dimitri."” Dmitri has been cheating on his wife for years, and he believes that he is one of the “attractive and elusive” guys who “allured women and disposed them in his favour”; yet his wife’s remark shows her disregard for something her husband is proud of, thereby inferior-izing Dmitri.

Nobody wants to acknowledge his/her inferiority. Humiliated, indignant, one wants another chance to be superior instead. This is what Dmitri seeks for in his relationship with Anna. When he first meets Anna, he is attracted to her “diffidence, the angularity”, her “first time … alone in surroundings”. Dmitri knows that Anna is an inexperienced, weak, “pathetic” fellow who he can easily be superior to.

And this is why he meets Anna – he needs Anna to confirm the fact that he himself is a valuable, superior, powerful person. If Dmitri truly loved Anna, as Mr. Garrioch argued, “he would walk away from her, reflect on the affair as a cherished memory, and go home to his family and provide them with the love of a true father and husband”. But he does not leave her alone, and return to his wife, because he needs Anna, an inferior being, not his wife, a superior.

The reason Dmitri returns to Anna clearly reinforces his motive. Although he sometimes remembered Anna and missed her, he lived quite few years in Moscow without contacting her. Then, one day, he was insulted by his officer’s “degrading and unclean … savage manners”. He “did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation”. He realizes that without Anna, he is again the inferior – not only in family but also in his work now. This is why Dmitri decides to take a journey to Petersburg; he needs Anna more than he did in usual because he was severely insulted.

All these evidences clearly indicate the emotion that Dmitri possesses toward Anna – not “love”, but “need”. Then, how about Anna? Does she love Dmitri, or need Dmitri? Although described far more vaguely than Dmitri’s case, I believe that Anna’s emotion is also closer to need rather than love – need to run away from her dissatisfied life.

Chekhov illustrates Anna’s husband as “a good, honest man”, but Anna does not love him and defames him as a “flunkey”. When asked reason why she married her husband, then, she answers “I have been tormented by curiosity; I wanted something better. ‘There must be a different sort of life,’ I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, to live!” This answer implies that Anna married in hope that marriage would bring her a new, exciting life. But her expectation was not accomplished; actually, her life became even duller. Her second life is “grey”, just like the “stretched long grey fence adorned with nails” across her house which drove her to “run away”.

This may be a good reason why Anna stays near Dmitri. Anna is a delicate, emotional young lady, and her sensitivity would have noticed that Dmitri is not truly in loved with her at least once. In fact, her continuous inquiry about “the same questions” that “he did not respect her sufficiently” implies that she does suspect of Dmitri’s sincerity. But despite these suspicions she has on Dmitri, and anxiety and fear she always feels of her adultery being divulged, Anna does not leave Dmitri because she “needs” him so badly as a source of pleasure that deviates from her ordinary mundane life.

It is the end of the story that “love” and “need” is distinguished. Dmitri, as always, was not paying attention to Anna, crying in guilt: “Let her have her cry out. I’ll sit down and wait,” thought Dmitri. Then he looked inside the mirror, and noticed that “his hair was already beginning to turn grey”. He suddenly seemed “so much older, so much plainer during the last few years”, and as he stared Anna, who had been with him for years, “still so warm and lovely”, he confessed that “he had fallen properly, really in love – for the first time in his life.” Grey hair is a clear indication of Dmitri’s inferiority to young Anna. This is the moment that Dmitri realizes that he, who actually is older (inferior) than Anna, was using Anna to fulfill his need for superiority. He feels gratitude to Anna, who has loved him for years despite his selfishness.

This realization is reflected in their following conversation about “how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception” and “how could they be free from this intolerable bondage”. Dmitri (and perhaps Anna, too) has been satisfied with temporary meetings up until now, because these were enough for him to satisfy his need of superiority. But now, he hopes to be with Anna all the time, publicly, because he loves her and love cannot be satisfied with few times of surreptitious trysts.

Personally, I’m not yet certain about whether the emotion of “love” is stronger than that of “need”. But as a teenage romanticist, I hope that “love” is an I-will-always-be-next-to-you emotion, while “need” is an I-am-satisfied-with-few-purposed-meeting. I hope love to be stronger than need, so that Dmitri and Anna, despite of “a long, long road before them” with the “most complicated and difficult part … just beginning”, would finally find their way into love.