The Lady with the Dog
Matview 3
In the following essay, which you can read on page 280 of your textbook, student writer Steven Matview explores the role of setting in Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” Read the essay responsively and critically, taking time to consider the details Steven chooses to highlight and the way he interprets them. Does he manage to build a convincing and thorough argument about the role of setting in “The Lady with the Dog”? In particular, notice how Steven concentrates on temporal setting (the seasons) while commenting only briefly on spatial setting and on the interconnections between time and space in the story. If Steven were your classmate, what three things would you suggest he most needs to do in order to improve the essay in revision? Read the marginal comments below.
Steven Matview
Professor Anne Stevens
English 298
12 March 2012
The Importance of Good Setting:
How Setting Reflects Emotions in Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”
Setting is important to Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” But wait, isn’t setting important to all stories? Not necessarily. In many stories, like Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants,” the plot could be happening anywhere, and it would not matter. But in “The Lady with the Dog” the setting plays an important role in the story, in particular to Dmitri, who is the main character and who experiences the most growth throughout. He goes from being a man at 40 who is full of youthful energy and thinks he has been loved by many women to an old man who realizes that he is just experiencing love for the first time. During the course of the narrative, the setting Chekhov maps out shows the progression of Dmitri’s affair with Anna Sergeyevna, Dmitri’s state of mind, and the changes that Dmitri undergoes. The setting in this story is just as important as any character. In fact, I would argue that the setting is the single most important component of the story. Comment by jennifer.heinert: Notice how the author immediately identifies the key issue (setting) and story that will be identified.
Dmitri’s relationship with the lady with the dog has its ups and downs, which are reflected in the seasons and the descriptions of weather. Anna, the lady with the dog, makes this apparent when she says, “The weather is better this evening” (184). Their lives are better when they are together in the summer. This is the time Dmitri and Anna meet and start their courtship. Both are married, and both have spent so much time forcing themselves to love their partners that they do not recognize real love when they feel it. Dmitri initially only wants a fling and doesn’t even learn or use Anna’s name, referring to her only as “the lady with the dog.” There isn’t any stress yet, and the two can be just happy with things the way they are. They go on dates and spend time together in Anna’s hotel room. Dmitri starts to think of her as “Anna Sergeyevna—‘the lady with the dog’ ” (par. 29), showing a shift within the relationship. He shows he’s started to think of this as more of a relationship by using her full name but doesn’t completely switch, as he adds in that epithet “lady with the dog.” He is trying to resist because he is still married. Dmitri feels young and alive and thinks back to all the women he has made happy in his life. Comment by jennifer.heinert: The author begins with a topic sentence that makes a clear point, but it could be better connected to the idea of “setting.” What role do seasons and weather play in the setting? This might be something to address in the introduction or to revise in the topic sentence. One good way to edit your essay is to read all of the topic sentences and make sure every one of them connects to the introduction in a clear way. Comment by jennifer.heinert: Quotation and analysis that supports the interpretive point. Comment by jennifer.heinert: Does this part of the paragraph relate to setting or the main point of the paragraph? Thesis?
Another aspect of the setting are the places described in the story, which relate to things the characters feel or know on a subconscious level. At the start of the story, Dmitri is staying at a seaside resort in Yalta. We know that a resort is an impersonal place, where someone can reinvent themselves or get away from the things they don’t like about home. Dmitri reinvents his idea about what love is while getting away from a wife he does not care for. Dmitri meets Anna for the first time “in the public gardens” (par. 2). A garden is a place of growth, reflecting the soon-to-be growth of their relationship, as well as the growth Dmitri will experience as a person. They then go on a date, and we become privy to a metaphor describing Dmitri’s marriage and how things will go with Anna: “Owing to the roughness of the sea, the steamer arrived late, after the sun had set, and it was a long time turning about before it reached the groyne” (par. 22). The steamer is Dmitri, the sea is his life, and the groyne, a device designed to disrupt the flow of water, is Anna. It took Dmitri longer to find true love, and he has gone through a rough time in a boring marriage, and now there is someone to break that up. This is when Dmitri starts to feel love for Anna, though he does not realize it is love because it is so different from what he has known in the past. Comment by jennifer.heinert: A return to the key term of “setting” in this topic sentence. Comment by jennifer.heinert: Another specific type of setting. Comment by jennifer.heinert: There is an attempt at “unpacking” here but it could be more developed: Why does it matter that they are “public” gardens? What associations do we have with gardens other than growth? Comment by jennifer.heinert: This is a skillful “unpacking” but it could be better connected to setting? Is the point that the author uses the setting as metaphor for their relationship?
Things change as soon as the next season approaches. The first challenges that arise in the courtship of Dmitri and Anna come when the season begins to change from summer to autumn. Dmitri mentions here that “it’s a cold evening” (par. 60), the first time cold is mentioned in the present (before it was only used to describe the unhappy places Anna and Dmitri were escaping from) and a stark contrast to Anna’s comment about the weather earlier in the story. Things are starting to get worse for the relationship. Word gets to Anna that she must travel back to her home to be with her husband, who has fallen ill. Dmitri finds that he does not want to let Anna go, that the fling he wanted has turned into something much more. Dmitri thinks that he was “warm and affectionate with [Anna]” (par. 59), terms associated with summer weather. But, with autumn approaching, Dmitri decides that they were not really in love. This is because the feeling he has does not resemble the forced love he has always experienced with his wife and mistresses, but it is brought up as the object of his “warm feelings” leaves and is replaced with the “cold night.” Comment by jennifer.heinert: This essay on setting has gone from seasons, to places, and back to seasons. The author seems to be following an organizational pattern that follows the order of the narrative. What might be a clearer and more logical way for this essay to be organized? One possibility would be to group the types of settings together: group the paragraphs about place and setting together in the paper, instead of following the chronology of the story. One good editing strategy to check for chronology is to look at the order of the quotations in your essay: do they follow the order of the story? Or are they organized around ideas that are independent from chronology?
Change of place goes hand in hand with a change of seasons and weather here. And we are told shortly before Anna leaves that “Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on mountain-tops” (par. 47). The mist covering Yalta is like the uncertainty that lies in their future as the summer is winding down. Neither can see clearly what will come from their summer tryst when the time comes to separate. White is a color that is often associated with purity, and Dmitri is experiencing a pure, true kind of love for the first time, but he also has obstacles to overcome that are represented by the mountains. Comment by jennifer.heinert: Setting as place here again. Comment by jennifer.heinert: “Unpacking” and interpretation made visible here.
Dmitri thinks he will get over Anna quickly now that she’s gone, but winter brings him even more hardships. The most difficult time the couple face comes in the season of winter. Winter is a cold season often affiliated with sadness and the absence of hope. We find out that “the frosts had begun already” (par. 62), meaning the bad times have already started, and we join Dmitri after he’s already been back in Moscow for a short time. In Moscow Dmitri has not stopped thinking of Anna Sergeyevna, who is only referred to by her full name now. Referring to her as “Anna Sergeyevna” instead of “the lady with the dog” is a subtle way of letting us know that Dmitri is thinking of her as more than a fling that has gone by, as we saw earlier that he only called her “the lady with the dog” when he didn’t have feelings for her. They are separated by cities and by circumstance, and it seems the relationship might be over. In winter all the plants die, and Dmitri and Anna, whose relationship first blossomed in a garden, seem to have a dead relationship. We find out that “more than a month has past” and that “real winter has come” (186), real winter representing the increasing feelings of separation anxiety Dmitri is suffering from.
We get more visual descriptions in Moscow and Anna’s unnamed city relating to the characters’ thoughts. After Anna leaves and Dmitri returns to his home in Moscow, we find out that he wants to escape to “restaurants, clubs, dinner-parties, [and] anniversary celebrations” (par. 63), showing us that Dmitri is feeling repressed at home compared to the freedom he had at the resort. After confiding in a local his problems, Dmitri thinks, “there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a mad house or a prison” (par. 72). A mad house and a prison are two places that no one wants to be. Both places are where you are kept from loved ones. But they are also places you are put in when you have done something wrong, a hint that Dmitri feels he’s made mistakes in the past, done his time, and now wants to be free to be with Anna.
Dmitri then decides to go to Anna’s city, which is left unnamed in the story. This reflects that it is really Dmitri’s journey. Dmitri has a hard time reaching Anna at first, as she is tucked away in the house she shares with her husband. When Dmitri finally does confront Anna she does not initially seem happy to see him. Dmitri confronts Anna at a performance of the play The Geisha. The opera and the opera house it is performed in have many qualities that suggest Dmitri’s emotional state. The opera house is described as having “a thick fog above the chandelier,” and its “gallery was noisy and restless” (par. 85). Dmitri has lots of noisy thoughts in his head as he approaches Anna with uncertainty. As Dmitri approaches Anna the musicians begin tuning their instruments. They are getting ready for the big performance, as Dmitri is getting ready to renew his relationship with Anna. Anna at first appears to be unhappy and takes Dmitri down a path of winding corridors and then up and down a “narrow, gloomy staircase” (par. 93). The outlook seems gloomy for Dmitri, but she does agree to see him again and proceeds to profess her love for him. Comment by jennifer.heinert: Is this a topic sentence or a detail from the story? It would better serve the essay and thesis for the writer to use a clear topic sentence that reflects setting more clearly. Comment by jennifer.heinert: While this looks as though the writer is sharing only plot summary, the sentence that follows is strong literary analysis.
At the end of winter, with spring fast approaching, things between Dmitri and Anna begin to show slight improvement over early winter. The weather is described as being “three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing” (par. 105). Things are getting better for Dmitri, who knows now that Anna loves him and wants to be with him, but it’s not all great yet as both are still married and forced to keep their relationship a secret. The open-air setting of the gardens that their relationship started in is replaced by a hotel room, giving the final scene a claustrophobic feel as Anna wonders how they can be together. At the end of the story the couple is still trying to find a way to make their relationship work when we are told, “it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found” (par. 124). Winter is ending, and spring, a season of growth, new beginnings, and love, is on the horizon. From this we might deduce that the couple will make it, at least into the spring.
But will they? The fact that the story ends with the couple in a “gray area” is fitting because gray, a color associated with ambiguity (shades of gray compared to a black-and-white situation; a “gray area”), in fact appears often in the story. Dmitri is in a situation that involves a lot of moral ambiguity. During the course of the narrative he ends up in love with a married woman while he himself is also married. They begin existing in this gray area where we as readers begin to wonder if what they are doing is really wrong, since they are committing adultery. Anna’s eyes are gray, reminding us that Dmitri is entering into a moral gray area whenever he is engaging in this relationship. When Dmitri goes to find Anna and resume their relationship in her home town, he stays at a hotel room whose “floor was covered with grey army cloth” (par. 75) and where there is gray dust and a gray blanket. He enters another gray area when he wants to do what his heart says is right by reuniting with Anna, but doing so is committing more adultery.
But I feel that the recurring gray colors also imply something besides ambiguity—the sadness and lack of excitement that Dmitri has always had in his life thanks to his unhappy marriage and that he might, paradoxically, have come to expect or even need. We can see this when he refers to his hotel in Anna’s city as “the best room at the hotel” (par. 75), but filled with items of gray, or when Anna is “wearing his favourite grey dress” (par. 108). The hotel room and Anna are both things that are great or that he adores, but they have that tinge of sadness, represented by the gray, that he needs.
Looking back over the story, we as readers can come to our own conclusions about whether or not Dmitri and Anna stay together. From looking at the progression of the weather we see that in the summer things are good, in fall bad situations arise, winter is the worst time, and the dawn of spring shows slight hope. Following this progression, I believe that when spring finally hits they will be able to come up with a plan to stay a couple. Dmitri and Anna would be happy. We would see Dmitri and Anna figuring out a way to make their relationship public and no longer to be confined to enclosed hiding places. The real question then would be whether the gray would fade out of Dmitri’s life after he finds a happiness with Anna that will last past the following summer or whether the cycle is just doomed to repeat itself, as summer eventually turns into winter and the brightest of colors and emotions fade into gray. Comment by jennifer.heinert: A conclusion should sum up the key interpretations that a writer wants to make but do just this: put the analysis in a larger context—what is the meaning of setting? Well, this writer has shown that it has a big impact on how we read the overall analysis of the story: is this a phase or is this something that will break the cycle?
