I have not read the original work by Tolstoy, and therefore cannot appropriately compare this work to the original. However, if Irina Reyn was attempting to make a novel that was more accessible than Anna Karinina, I don’t think that she really succeeded. If I had grown up in an immigrant community and if I had been forced to confront the problems of cultural expectations that Anna K. And Kitty do, then maybe I would feel more sympathetic to them. However, as the novel is now, I have a difficult time relating to these women. Don’t take this the wrong way- I have loved this class in part because it has given me a glimpse into another culture in a very intimate way, However, I felt that rather than giving the reader a culture that they can delve into and truly understand, Reyn says to us “Bukharian Jews don’t like to marry outside of their community because it would cause a degradation of their culture.” rather than letting the reader come to this conclusion and explore it themselves. She acts as a tour guide, rather than an unobtrusive guiding voice.

What Reyn does well is to show us how these women were viewed by their husbands – as shallow objects, as possessions. She some how manages to grasp this facet of the relationships. (Lev’s “love” for Kitty, his disillusion after their marriage, he wanted the idealized version of her that he had conjured in his head for all those years. In his mind, she was already his well before their marriage, and her inability to present to him this fairy tale women that he has dreamed up causes his disillusion. Kitty, this would have fit in perfectly to your essay!) However, I think that in attempting to portray these complex relationships that Tolstoy has created, she cheapens them. Anna and Kitty’s relationship is the epitome of this to me. After Anna starts her affair with David, Reyn implies the falling out of the two women… and then it is never mentioned again until Kitty desires to repair their friendship. The depth of their affection is never fully defined and the reader is left out of this part of the story. Reyn does this with almost all of the relationships, and I found it to be very irritating. I found the characters to lack any real depth or emotion. Anna K. was the shallow, femme fatale that the outside world portrayed her as. Rather than countering this perception by other character with real depth and character in Anna K., Reyn allowed her to be swept along by these shallow dreams of a fairytale ending – as though that was the only desire a woman could hold in her heart. Anna K.’s relationship with her son also was underdeveloped. There was the potential for Reyn to develop a female character who defied the role of motherhood, but instead she is just caught in the middle and appears as a bitch because of it.

Okay, now that I am done ranting, time to talk about Film, Fairytales, and Stories! Throughout the novel, various characters have obsessions with films (Lev), are referred to in terms of fairytales (Katia), or desire to live their life like a story book (Anna K.)
I found Anna K.’s desire to be like the characters from the books she had read to be quite ironic, for she was actually already the heroine of a novel Anna Karenina. This was the motivating factor behind all of her relationships, except for her relationship with Alex K. She want’s to be written into a story, into a fairytale. “Not understanding that Anna rejected the facts before her in favor of characters and situations and myths operating more vibrantly inside her own mind. That she lived most fully not in life, but on the page.” (Pg.123) However, she is creating a tragedy for herself in her attempt to make this fairytale come to life. In a blog post from the beginning of the semester, I discussed how women will strive to achieve the relationships they are presented with in fairytales, and how this sets them up for failure. Anna has spent her entire life attempting to mold herself into a model for a heroine, as though this will complete her somehow. However, in her attempt to imitate the women she reads about, she has conformed to what society prescribes. She has made herself the exact opposite of what a writer should want to write about, rather than novel and strange and exciting, she fits the mold of what has previously been written.

In my opinion, Lev’s obsession with French Films highlights the possessive way he views his wife and the ideal that he wants her to conform to. He does not take the time to get to know her before he falls madly in love, and therefore must do that after they get married.

That being said, there were some moments in their relationship that I truly loved. I love the scene when they first make love – the tender images that Reyn invokes, the fact that Katia actually likes having sex! (what a novel idea). “The more he got to know his wife, the more he grew to respect her; perhaps she touched areas he could not reach.” (pg.145) Lev’s gradual growing understanding of his wife and the respect that she wins with him is unusual in the story because it speaks of equality between the two. Though Lev is second only to Anna in his idealization of women and the world, he manages to have the empathy here to connect with Katia and understand her.

Although I did not read the Tolstoy original, I set out to acquaint myself with it before I could approach Reyn’s novel. And I did. I noted the scenes where Kitty is forced to witness Anna diverting Vronsky’s attention at the ball, the famous train scene when Anna and Vronsky lock eyes, Vronsky’s horse race which leads to Anna’s confession to her husband, etc, etc. When I read What Happened to Anna K, I recognized all these scenes that Reyn claimed to be so inspired by, but I question the necessity of such a modern retelling in the scheme of an immigrant community setting…to claim the namesake of Tolstoy’s novel is a huge undertaking that should be seriously considered.

At its bare bones, Tolstoy’s main plot-line of a woman entering an affair is not a particularly innovative one. I’ll take Kiera’s word for it, but what made Anna Karenina, the Anna Karenina story was Tolstoy’s prose and character development. Reyn’s novel did not exactly match up to this Tolstoy literary greatness. For one, there was the cringe worthy metaphors which Katie so nicely pointed out (Re: Ozone layer?!?). Also, I felt myself disengaged with the characters. Usually, I’m invested in the characters established in the literature, but with this story, I was just indifferent and especially irritated with Anna, who seemed so preoccupied with her looks and irrationally paranoid with David’s possible infidelity towards the end of the story (to which we as readers are unsure if this is a legitimate fear on Anna’s part…after all we never really know what goes on from David’s perspective, which is interesting. Is this indicative of lack of character development on Reyn’s part? And how would the story been affected if we were allowed to see his perspective? Speaking of which, how vivid is David’s actual Tolstoy counterpart, Vronksy’s perspective in the Tolstoy original?).

Also, the (TWO!) Swarthmore references in Reyn’s novel threw me off, especially the reference to the kind of men that Anna K often fantasized about being in a relationship. Oh those artsy hipster men from the likes of Swarthmore! And especially in an Anna Karenina inspired setting…odd concept. Again, another reason why it was a jarring experience as a reader, attempting to equate Reyn’s novel with Tolstoy’s original.

But to be more fair, What Happened to Anna K should have been viewed more of an immigration story than as the rightful retelling of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In fact, the title of Reyn’s novel could have been something completely different and I think I would have reacted to the story better without the pre-conception that this novel was truly on par with Anna Karenina. Certainly, Reyn presented some interesting perspectives on the modern Russian immigrant experience. (Sort of going off of what Daniela said here…)Moreover, it seemed as if factors concerning Anna K’s alienation from both her Russian and American culture exerted a greater influence in pushing her towards her tragic end, rather than just the affair with David itself. The concept of the affair, which I assume was a predominant part of Anna Karenina’s motivations in the original book, doesn’t really reach its intended potential in Reyn’s novel. Really, Reyn had so much to work with using the Russian immigrant experience alone that the Anna Karenina influences felt jarring and superfluous to me as the reader.

**Conclusion: I concede that What Happened to Anna K was a juicy read…but for it to be taken seriously on par with Tolstoy’s original…not so much. So I will probably be reading this on the beach to pass the time as I attempt to acquire a nice tan this summer. No offense (?)

As much as I love this course, I found it hard to give up reading the classic, Anna Karenina before reading What Happened to Anna K.  I have always been one of those people who refuses to see a movie that is based on a novel before reading the novel.  I absolutely love literature and often prefer it over films.  It allows for imagination and detail, and generally, less influence by the media (or at least the opportunity for us to imagine what we want to see to a certain extent.)  That being said, it was hard to read a book that followed up Anna Karenina without having read it already.  I do believe it will make me less inclined to read it, especially due to its length, but hopefully I will get around to it.  I did find What Happened to Anna K. to be an interesting read, but I wish I had read Anna Karenina before this class.  I am interested as to what those of you who have read all or some of Anna Karenina prior to reading this story feel.

The fact that I did not read Anna Karenina may have been a slight advantage for me because the plot line seemed eventful and unique.  However, I started thinking that maybe those of you who have read Anna Karenina would find this less entertaining since it is similar to the original.  However, the spin on the original may have been interesting.  Again, I am curious to hear what others in the class thought.

I thought it was very interesting to see these Tolstoy-esque characters in our modern world with cell phones and technology that we have now.  It makes for a read that contemporary Americans can relate to.  I enjoy this compared to some of the modernist poetry because I found it so challenging and unlike my own life.  However, I understand criticisms of this work in that the work comes out to be much less of a “classic.”  It seems that older generations might particularly be critical of this novel due to how it depicts Tolstoy’s work.

Another tidbit I liked in this novel was the fact that it was based in Queens in a community of Bukharian Jews.  Being from Minnesota, there is not a large Jewish population, of any sort.  Coming to Swarthmore, broadened my cultural knowledge and reading this novel encouraged me to look more into the various type of Judaism.  This small point brings me to a big statement about this course overall: I have particularly enjoyed all of the works we have read and each class because I feel like I have learned something new about a different group of people, whether it be based on gender, era, race, culture or social status.  I feel like all of these readings and class discussions have allowed me not only to learn more about Russian literature, but also about different groups of people.

What happens to Anna Karenina when she is transported into immigrant Jewish Russian New York? I think perhaps the biggest difficulties in that teleportation arise from the different opportunities available to women like Anna K. compared to Anna Karenina. Anna K. can and does work. I don’t know about the possibilities of divorce in a community as traditionalist and tight knit as the Jewish Russian immigrant or to be fair about the options available to Anna Karenina because I haven’t actually read the novel but I suspect that they must be different.
If this is the case, Anna K. is occasionally forced into frustrating passivity as heroine. However, her self-imposed vulnerability works well with her desire to cast herself as a tragic heroin. As many modern women struggle to acknowledge and deal with the expectations society has taught them and the expectations of society it is pleasant to see a woman who has fallen in love not with the beautiful dress and happily ever after but with the yearning and suffering of a novel like Wuthering Heights. I don’t know why that story is more pleasing. Perhaps because it acknowledges that women read other stories besides fairy tales or maybe because it allows modern women to be dissatisfied while appearing slightly less silly.
For example, Anna K. is not disillusioned in marriage because it wasn’t want she expected exactly but rather because domesticity is not something she craves. Her happily ever after is cosmopolitan, equal, and sexual, not that marriage is not inherently none of those things but for Anna K. it is. While this is just as unrealistic a dream as the domestic bliss of the fairy tale happily ever after it does nonetheless allows the author and reader to key into a different set of problems in marriage and women’s rights.
The issue of Anna K.’s motherhood illustrates this. She feels transformed and taken over by her pregnancy. She is disgusted by the changes taking over her body and disinterested in allowing them to persist as demonstrated by her refusal to breast feed. In part, this is because the domestity of motherhood is largely absent from the romantic plots Anna K. imagines for herself. Anna K. is conscious of her body as a work of that she maintains in the hope that it will one day inspire another work of art. She keeps it in ever present readiness for the love affair that will not come and forcing it out of that shape distresses her and alienates her from her body.
I was particularly distressed reading this portion of the novel because I had just finished watching a YouTube video on a favorite vlog of mine, “The Feminist Frequency” about how science fiction tends to “other” pregnancy for women alienating them from their bodies by making the experience of pregnancy and birth an invasive and (if you will pardon the pun) alienating experience. The juxtaposition of that and What Happened to Anna K. pointed out that this process of co-opting women’s bodies isn’t genre specific. Great novels and “high culture” have just as effectively objectified women as science fiction.

What Happened To Anna K. was a strangely frustrating read; I had not expected to be so antsy while reading it. I think the ‘problem’ lies in how realistic the characters are; the book started off, ironically, like a Candace Bushnell romantic comedy (I didn’t think the writing was that good, either), but then became frighteningly realistic as all the characters had obvious flaws and made awful decisions. Unlike most things I read, I did not have a character I sympathized with throughout the novel – I disliked them all, because their awful decisions were, to me, so obviously awful and frankly, annoying.

However, I did enjoy, reading about Russian immigrants (their views on love, sex, marriage, America) because I can identify with a lot of the Russian immigrant experiences through my experience as an expat, and my interactions with the large Russian immigrant community in the Czech Republic very much reflect the Russian community portrayed in Reyn’s book (for example, it’s a joke among the expat community and, well, Poles everywhere that anything excessively gold and/or shiny is instantly identified as being ‘Russian.’).

The concepts in the book do read like reality to me, though the plot and writing in itself do not. I understand all too well what it is like to be caught in the middle of cultures and be seen as an outsider in both. Like Anna, I’ve been told my Polish accent comes through my English (by some, though not too many), and have been told my English accent comes through my Polish by others.

Likewise, though this was based off of Tolstoy’s actual Anna Karenina, I thought the adultery was refreshing. Even though Anna K. dies at the end, her death does not read to me like a form of punishment for being an adulterer. If anything, her suicide occurs because of the different aspects of her life being unsatisfying to her. Her adultery was an expression of her life being unsatisfying, rather than the cause.

I think Laura Kipnis’ article, “Adultery,” is very applicable to this book (or story). She argues that adultery is solely the expression of a desire for something more, for desire and instant gratification, happiness that is lacking from one’s current life. She states, “we have, after all, been born into social forms in which fighting for happiness looks like a base and selfish thing, and realization of desire is thwarted and fleeting at best, so often an affair of short duration,” (Kipnis 63) thereby arguing that adultery needs to be taken seriously.

I would have liked to see a more explicit connection between the immigrant community, and the discordance of ‘Russianness’ and ‘Americanness’ which, in a way, causes Anna’s downfall. Anna is neither satisfied by her American dating life, nor her marriage to Alexei, partially arranged by her mother. I cringed at things like the description of “Faberge, the classiest Russian restaurant in Brighton Beach. The restaurant boasted that its dancers were all former Bolshoi Ballet corps ballerinas, although Anna believed they were shipped directly from Uzbek strip clubs.” (Reyn 3) Instantly, memories of my relatives in Poland hosting parties in strange locations such as the one above, convinced of their appropriateness, arose in my mind, and left me feeling disgruntled.

I would love to hear other peoples’ thoughts on whether this book felt authentic to you, and whether you enjoyed it. Also, I wish I had read Anna Karenina and not just its plot summary prior to reading this book; can anyone tell me how the two compared?

I wonder how many references I missed to the original. There is no doubt that I liked the text, which was not harmed through translation, but I wonder how much more I would appreciate it had I known past the first hundred pages of Anna Karenina. With the same notion, how many things were taken out? I remember in reading scholastic analyses of Envy’s soccer match, a few compared it to a horseracing match in Anna Karenina; I could find no such reference.

The change of society makes it so much harder to empathize with the heroine, I feel. Education is not unheard of, and Reyn manages to inject bits of humor as we go. But, more importantly, she manages to make divorce as stigmatizing as it was back then. While its rates can be projected at about 4/10, which may seem quite frequent, in this Russian Jew small sect of New York, it isn’t made to be so. While at times I could imagine how these plotlines were more conveying in Tolstoy’s time, I also found it out of place at times.

Anyways, I wanted to write a paper relating the appetite of food to sex. Obviously, there was little to go from that topic, but I think the ideas in Reyn’s work can provide a somewhat more stable platform. Initially, I didn’t pay much attention to it, focusing more on Lev’s obsession of French films. On the first few instances of food, such as Katia and David first getting to know each other, sexuality was shrouded by the importance of her religion (67). Moreover, chapter eleven, “bite by bite,” lead me to believe I would read some glorification of food and sex…only to see the meal entrenched within Anna’s perception of her gender role similar to that of the nineteenth century.

However, oh how magnificent was the aftermath of her first time with David. “How delicious it [cupcake with vanilla frosting] was, the cake still warm, crumbly,” (100). The food of the meal before such sensual events became a reoccurring thing; or, the terribleness of the food before moments of personal passion. In personal problems, we find Anna possibly having to “force” food “down her throat” (153).
I think the parallels came strongest in the relationship of Lev and Katia. Married, yet not having sex, we see them argue about having errors in food necessities. Then, in their first time together, Katia wanted to “feed it, accessorize and decorate it” (125). Her thirst was found—watermelon, peach, mango—and the next two paragraphs were dedicated to other foods.

In the end, while I enjoyed the read, I am sure that had I fully read the original I would be extremely disappointed. However, I think with its attempt at modernization, as well as its references to Swarthmore, it serves as a fitting end.

I had mixed feelings about reading this book. In fact, I was quite reluctant. While I was excited that it was based on Tolstoy’s novel, I was also a little bit sad. I was also not really expecting What Happened to Anna K. to be a story. I thought it would be analysis of Tolstoy’s work. I started reading Anna Karenina and the end of last summer and loved what I read, but got swept away by Swarthmore and all else that comes with college and have been unable to finish it. That said, I was disappointed to find out at the beginning of this semester that Anna Karenina commits suicide at the conclusion of the novel. I’m not sure how I had managed to avoid this spoiler until now. Anyway, I’ve been slightly deterred from finishing the novel now that I know what happens and after reading Irina Reyn’s work even though I really enjoyed the couple hundred pages I have already read. So, I just thought that I should preface my response to Reyn’s work.

I found my self quite annoyed with Reyn’s rendition of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. From what I have read of his novel thus far and what I have deduced from his The Kreutzer Sonata, Anna Karenina is not recognized as an incredible work of literature because of its plot. Rather, the work is known for Tolstoy’s ingenious and eloquent way with words along with the depth of his character development. The entire time that I was reading What Happened to Anna K. I could not help but juxtapose both the styles of writing and the settings with Anna Karenina. I felt that Irina left the characters undeveloped, but I do not know whether this lack of development was purposeful or not. She may have desired her characters to appear fickle and overall negligible, but somehow I doubt that she intended for the characters read to such an extreme degree. (or maybe that was just me.) Anyway, I guess I felt that the characters in Reyn’s work did not entice the reader in the same way that Tolstoy’s do. The story itself is really not all that unusual, but the character development and beautiful prose is.

Furthermore, I was thrown off by the modern New York setting. From the second page, at mention of the “Ralph Lauren handbag” I found myself battling the modernization of Tolstoy’s work. I am not sure how I feel about some of the choices that Reyn made when creating this rendition. Perhaps she tried to reflect certain aspect of Tolstoy’s work that she shouldn’t have or maybe she missed something vital from the original. Maybe it is simply impossible for anyone to write something so closely tied to such an work without such harsh comparisons.  Again, I don’t know that my perception of this novel is actually all that representative of the general public because I began reading with a slight bit of resentment, but I would like to think that I was not entirely swayed by this resentment. In fac

I’d like to begin my post by pointing out there was not only one Swarthmore reference in this book, but TWO (if you count Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice).

One of the things that greatly disturbed me about this novel was Lev’s fixation with Anna K.  If I were Irina Reyn I would have left that out.  To some extent, I really enjoy Tolstoy’s idea of justice, punishment, etc.  This is why I disagree so much with Lev’s fixation n Anna.  The irony is so cruel that Anna stole Katia’s boyfriend at one New Year’s party and her husband at the next.  Anna’s blind devotion to David is sad, charming, yet relatable.  However, Anna’s sudden shift of interest to Lev was obnoxious and irritating.

Reyn clearly wanted us to fall in love with Anna when describing her preferences in literature, her lost loves.  Her desire to be perceived as “different from the others” was endearing.  However, as a reader I felt myself turning against Anna, especially when she goes after Lev.  I found myself favoring Katia, the victim of many wrongs- Oleg’s stories, the community’s shaming, David, Lev, Anna.  I found her story of the foot the most endearing element of the entire novel.  It was only after I put myself in Anna’s shoes did I realize that Anna was merely searching for the adoration in Lev that she thought she had lost from David.  There was no way a woman like her could have been happy in her situation.  The novels she had read spoiled her hopes of being happy with Alex, yet her family’s heritage and her need for commitment spoiled her hopes of being happy with David, even if she had never married Alex.  Her idealizing is what was her downfall, as well as Lev’s.

The difference between Lev’s ideals and Anna’s were that Lev thought that he knew what he wanted, where Anna did not seem so sure.  Lev called Katia in his mind Vasilisa the Beautiful and idealized her for years, only to be enamored by Anna upon interacting with her.  When tested in the final chapter, Lev shows his love for his wife and child, but I think his wavering is all the more disappointing because he had seemed so sure in the past.

As for “The Paradox of Choice,” that is brought up, I believe it is a worthwhile point to make when describing Anna’s (as well as many of the other character’s) unhappiness.  It permeates mundane choices, such as Lev’s reasoning behind why he didn’t buy a car- he mentions all of the research he would need to do in Consumer’s Digest.  At the end of her life Anna had many choices.  She could have tried to go back to Alex, she could have gone to Iowa with David, she could have run away from both of them and immortalized herself into the novel she kept wishing her lovers would write, she could have moved back in with her parents and started anew, she could have gotten her own apartment and fought for child custody.  However, in the face of all of these choices, Anna is overwhelmed and paralyzed with indecision.  Anna was a “maximizer,” as opposed to a “satisficer”- she wanted the best as opposed to the good enough.  Because she could not have her lover, her husband’s wealth, her son, her novel, and constant adoration she felt that she had failed.  Her act of jumping in front of a train is her way of avoiding the decisions she would eventually have to make and coming to terms with not having gotten the best of everything.

What Happened to Anna K. seems to lack exactly what makes Tolstoy’s version wonderful: compelling prose that keeps one reading despite the hundreds of pages. Anna K. instead seems to read more like a dime store novel: it’s rife with trite and almost vomit-inducing lines. Beyond this, I find it to have an anachronistic feeling which I don’t think is put there with intent by the author. Finally, I do like the themes of loneliness versus alone that are portrayed.

First of all, the writing just seems pretty terrible. There’s the passage about Anna K.’s strained relations with Alex K., in which the line “Creating an ozone layer between himself and her emotions.” (79) seems to be used in an entirely un-ironic way. Can we just appreciate what a horrendous metaphor this is? Not to mention other lines such as “how erotic was that sensation of gulped-back words. His lips would be like Spanish clementines in the winter, she decided, firm but yielding, sweet” (75). These are only a couple of examples, but the ill-fitting metaphors and dime-store novel feel made it very hard for me to even take the “serious” parts seriously.

While I’m not sure if the author intended the novel to feel this way, it didn’t quite seem to fit into the right era – everything feels distinctly sepia-toned. This work ostensibly takes place in modern day, sometime in the mid-2000′s, but it never quite feels like it. It seems to read as 100 years earlier, the turn of the other century. And then I’m jolted forward 100 years as Anna K. wants to check her blackberry or send a text or mentions wearing jeans or discuss digital cameras. This is possibly to show the juxtaposition inherent in communities of Bukharan Jews that cling to past traditions despite living in the hustle and bustle of New York, but in order for this to be an effective literary strategy at least the scenes where Anna K. is just with David in the coffee shop or other such scenes should “feel” like they are supposed to be in the modern day. I’m not sure exactly why the book comes off this way for most of it – I can’t exactly pinpoint the stylistic components – but it seems as though it is a story that fits into the past with digital cameras and texts just sprinkled on top.

Despite my criticisms, I like the way that the theme of loneliness versus being alone is dealt with. This seems to first substantially come out when Anna K. is looking at the Hopper exhibit in the Whitney. Anna K. sees being alone as a privilege, not at all in a lonely way, but simply relishes the idea of having the space to be herself away from her responsibilities and connections to others. This comes up again on Anna K.’s anniversary dinner party, when she has many guests around but still exudes an air of supreme discomfort and loneliness – she is neither welcomed around the men nor feels invested in the tribulations of the women, and so despite being surrounded by many, feels supremely lonely.

All in all, this has not been one of my favorite works. The other ones that I didn’t care for as much seemed to have the excuses of being from an earlier time where expression of characters wasn’t as well developed, but as a modern day book I found Anna K. quite disappointing. I am not sure if Tolstoy would be proud.

I found this weeks short stories and articles to be very interesting, and there are many things that I want to discuss within them. However, first I want to discuss something I did for another class. In my history class we have been discussing the visualization of data and how it can be telling about a certain data set, or distorting. For my class we had to create a wordle, which I have included below. This is a visualization of the number of times certain words appear in a text.

I have been keeping track of my notes for Love and Sex in one document, so I put the entire document into wordle to see what came up. The largest word was, unsurprisingly, love. However, what surprised me was the six of the word Sex in relation to the word Love. This course is entitled “Love and Sex in Russian Literature” not “Love in Russian Literature”. So why then was sex so much less used in my notes and blog posts?

I have been thinking about this a lot, and it has led me to several conclusions about how I have approached this literature, and how this literature has approached sex. Firstly, Censorship. Most of the readings we have done were published under the cloak of censorship, and as such they did not openly refer to sex. While we have discussed how this made the literature better in many ways, and the many different ways that literature hints at and refers to sex. But most of the time, it never comes right out and says the word. Presumably, this has caused me to also use euphemisms when discussing sex, but I think it is something more than that.

The main theme that I took away from the New Yorker article we read this week was that Russians view sex as something dirty, something unsavory and distasteful. There are definitely strong parallels between the culture of Mat and the way our society views sex today. Sex is hardly ever seen as something to be celebrated – it is not seen as copulation, the bringer of new life, joy, and pleasure, but as a dirty act. Something that must be hidden from our parents and our peers, to be ashamed of.

Sex is such a strong motivator, such a major presence in our life, and yet we look on it in shame. And I believe that in my take on this class, I have fallen victim to these prejudices and stigmas. My first instinct is not to look on sex as a positive thing, I am writing my term paper on Rape and Sexual violence and appear to have taken a very negative outlook on sex.

I haven’t been looking at it as something that can stand alone as a theme or act in a work of literature. Rather, I have seen it as an indicator – and indicator of love, of passion, of violence, of jealousy. And this has subjugated the role of sex, causing me to analyze it less or only analyze it in terms of another theme.

But I don’t think that this is entirely my fault or the fault of my own seeming prejudices. The works that we have read engender this sort of attitude. None of them look at sex in a straight-forward way except “The Women’s Decameron”, and “The Women’s Decameron” has so many themes and things going on that it is very easy to overlook this integral aspect of it. When Vosnesenskaya discusses the problems of couples finding a place to have sex, she does it without any pretensions to a higher purpose or goal in the sex than just having pleasure.

This is what all our other readings have lacked. Liza looses her virginity, and the heavens thunder. That is not a realistic look at sex, it is a literary one where sex has to have a higher purpose or it is just dirty.

I also put in the link to our blog, which then generated the text from all of our blog posts, which I will also include below. There are interesting things to take away from this as well, but I will leave those to your own devices.

The Wordle for my personal Notes