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Woman, Beyond Biology

To know what something is, we need to understand not only the lowest common denominator of all things of its type but also what it looks like at its best. We could say that a tennis player is someone who strikes tennis balls with a racquet, or a US president is a person who occupies a certain office specified by the US Constitution, or that a woman is someone with the type of body that can gestate and give birth to a human being. But until you have actually seen Roger Federer play tennis, read how George Washington governed, or gotten to know some of the women portrayed in the novels of Jane Austen or Leo Tolstoy, it may be difficult to grasp what we are really talking about.

In arguing in these pages that women are the kinds of persons who can gestate and give birth, Rachel Lu has provided a lowest common denominator of womanhood that in essential respects applies as much to any mature mammalian female as it does to a woman. Of course, Lu supplies one additional feature—namely, that a woman is a person. But by merely invoking this idea without exploring in more depth the personhood of a woman, as distinct from a man, we are left with no vision of what someone who excels as a woman, as opposed to merely qualifies as a woman, might resemble.

By choosing to define woman in terms of gestating and giving birth, Lu invites us down a certain path of inquiry—namely, into the idea of motherhood as deeply definitive of woman. She does not, for example, say that a woman is a person with the kind of body that can menstruate, which might in many respects function just as well as a definition. Biology is but a starting point. But to understand the personhood of woman we need to turn to a form of discourse that provides a far richer account of what it means to be a person in imaginative literature. And perhaps no novel better explores the personhood of woman than Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. So let us travel further down the path of understanding woman as a potential mother, focusing less on biological equipment than on how excellence in motherhood might appear, thereby gaining deeper insight into at least one essential feature of the excellence of being a woman.

For such an examination, one might look to what many consider one of the greatest novels ever written: Anna Karenina. Critics often refer to its unparalleled richness and complexity, while simultaneously perpetuating a serious misapprehension concerning the novel—namely, that it is about Anna and her doomed extramarital romance with Count Vronsky, omitting any reference to the courtship, marriage, and family life of Kitty and Levin.

When we expand our field of view to encompass a fuller cast of main characters, we realize that while Tolstoy is indeed describing common features of romance, he is also drawing stark contrasts between Anna’s and Kitty’s understanding and practice of motherhood. Both are women, and both express their potential to gestate and give birth, but they differ dramatically from one another as mothers, which influences the degree to which each can be regarded as an exemplar of excellent womanhood. Specifically, Anna’s focus on her own happiness ends up destroying her and those around her, while Kitty finds fulfillment and enriches lives by devoting herself to others.

Anna is a beautiful, intelligent, intuitive, and convivial person, but she is also a narcissist. She always thinks of her own happiness, and like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, she becomes convinced by reading romance novels that her life with her bureaucrat husband Karenin has become dull and unfulfilling. In an adulterous romance with Vronsky, a rich and dashing cavalry officer, she finds an opportunity to be loved as she wishes—to inspire utter and helpless devotion. She wants nothing more than to be adored, and it is no accident that she spends a great deal of time throughout the novel tending to her appearance, making herself more attractive. She is obsessed with how others see her.

As Tolstoy shows, the biology textbooks barely scratch the surface. Deeper understanding of woman requires getting to know a person.

These attitudes spill over into her perspective on motherhood. She loves her young son by Karenin, but she is also able to forget about him for long periods of time, imagining starting all over in a new life with Vronsky. Eventually, Vronsky comes to love her as a wife, but she prefers to remain a mistress. She names their illegitimate child Annie but immediately turns over her care to a nursemaid. To Anna, children represent a threat. First, bearing children may dim her radiance, and second, they compete for attention she would prefer to be devoted to herself. After Annie’s birth, she secretly begins using birth control, to prevent herself from bringing another child into the world.

A woman can gestate and bear a child, but when it comes to personhood, how she cares for and raises that child is far more revealing. Anna leads an idealized, imaginary existence. Important events in her life happen on trains, on which she is trying to get somewhere else, and she finds her surroundings—including the people with whom she lives—somehow always wanting. “Her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment,” Tolstoy writes. “She had imagined him better than he was in reality.” To Anna, life repeatedly falls short of expectations. She sees that her husband is good, truthful, and good-hearted, but she longs to be pursued. Even when she and Vronsky are together in the country, she is tortured by feelings of jealousy and explains his desire to have more children “by the fact that he does not treasure her beauty.”

Kitty presents a stark contrast. She initially rejects Levin, with whom she had felt comfortable since her youth, for Vronsky, with whom she pictures a life of brilliant adventure. Soon realizing her error, she falls ill, and both she and Levin long deeply for a different outcome. Eventually, their courtship is renewed, and they discover that they share a deep and intuitive mutual understanding. Levin, who is always struggling to understand and formulate rational arguments, realizes that Kitty has been right all along: what must be grasped is not the logical steps in an argument, but what the person making the argument loves. Only with this key is it possible to unlock the door to understanding.

Levin glimpses Kitty’s true self in the way she cares for his dying brother. He thinks she should not accompany him to the bedside and all its unseemliness, but she grows angry and insists. She cannot conceive of not being with her husband in his sorrow. For Levin, the encounter with his brother is all awkwardness, and he has nothing to offer, merely wandering in and out of the room to no effect. But at the sight of the sick man, Kitty feels pity. She transforms his dark and dingy room into a hospitable environment, organizes his care, and tends to him in ways that relieve his suffering. Kitty has one thing that Anna almost completely lacks— compassion, and the capacity to devote herself completely to another.

When Kitty gives birth to their first child, Levin again does not understand. During the labor, he is asked to fetch a table and sofa, only later realizing that he was getting a bed for himself. He hears shrieks and becomes convinced that all is lost, failing to grasp that his wife is suffering and complaining, but also “triumphing through these sufferings, rejoicing in them, and loving them.” When the screams stop, Levin’s taut strings break, and he is overcome with sobs of joy. There, at the foot of the bed, stands the midwife, holding “a human being who had never been before and who would now, with the same right and same sense of his own importance, live and bear others like him.”

Anna and Kitty are both women in the biological sense of the term, but they are in crucial respects just about as different as two persons could be. Anna is a dark attractor, drawing everything and everyone to herself and in the process wreaking destruction. Kitty, by contrast, seeks to give the best of herself and contribute as much as she can. While such virtue is no less desirable in men than women, in the context of womanhood it transforms the meaning of gestation, the bearing and rearing of children, and the thriving of a family. As Tolstoy shows, biology textbooks barely scratch the surface. Deeper understanding of woman requires getting to know a person.

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