Blog IV

Lonely Souls

The theme about love between the short stories of Anton Chekov, “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” and D. H. Lawrence, “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” is treated in two different ways. The first one arises of passion; the second one of a possible suicide.

            Chekov in his short story exposes two couples that are completely different each other. Gurov is married with a woman that she describes herself such as: “intellectual” (p. 382). She lived in her world of female intellectuals. Gurov is a fond of ladies who has a big number of affairs. But his changes when he knows Anna Sergeyena, her soul mate; even thought he does not know yet. He believes she is going to be an affair more, but she has to go with her husband he realizes that he loves her. Maybe he is attracted to her because she is treated such as an ignorant by her husband. She does not feel important in his life, she does not feel part of his life because he believes himself more intelligent than her: “My husband may be a good, honest man, but he is a flunkey! I don’t know what he does there, what his work is, but I know he is a flunkey!” (p. 385).  She cheat on her husband not because of he, but because she is unsatisfied with her life: “There must be a different sort of life” (p. 385).  On the other hand, Gurov after an internal fight he recognizes that he is in love of Anna. That feeling is not only passion, but love. When both of them realize their love they understand that their fight just is beginning: “a long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning” (p. 391). They road is long because both of them are married, and both of them have a life a part in the social and labor world. They know that if they want to be together, it means to leave all what they have been built and start a life apart of that world which is really difficult because in that time was not good for people to be divorced.

            On the other hand, Lawrence develops his love story in two people that are single, but they are lonely. Mabel is a twenty-seven year old lady that lives in a male world where she is humiliated. She has three brothers that do not respect her such as person even a sister. Because of the family bankruptcy, she has to go with her sister Lucy, but she does not want to. She decides to suicide but the doctor rescue her. She believes that he save her because he loves her, but he refuses to: “He had never thought of loving her. He had never wanted to lover her. When he rescued her and restored her, he was a doctor, and she was a patient” (p. 399). He does not want to love her, but he goes to the ranch of her family she perceives his sight and she believes that he loves her, but in that moment he does not recognize that feeling. When both of them are in the doctor’s house emerge an internal conflict between the doctor and the human being. He separates this two aspects, and he says the wishing word: “Yes. The word cost him a painful effort. Not because it wasn’t true. But because it was to newly true, they saying seemed to tear open again his newly-torn heart” (p. 400). Lawrence makes born love between two lonely people that need each other because both of them feel incomplete lives in that world that eats the best of each human being in different ways. In Mabel case, it was the male oppression, and the doctors was his career.