Natasha, Pierre, Comet 1812 REACT Part Eight

I have to hard disagree with you on your interpretation of "Nobody feels sorry for Natasha because she brought this on herself" and I don't know that it's productive to view this story with a hard binary between "moral" and "immoral." Natasha's character and her choices exist within a very different social and political context than we (broadly) do, which I think informs a lot of the way this can be read. I'm not exactly a historian of early-19th-century Russian elite, but from my understanding, compared to what's "normal" today, women got engaged comparatively young and engaged couples didn't know each other very long (or necessarily very well) before becoming engaged/married. Natasha and Andrey apparently knew each other for a year "I don't understand / how you've loved one man a whole year." Andrey and Natasha have to like each other, of course, and Natasha believes she loves Andrey, but theirs is a successful match "one of the finest matches in all of Russia" because she's of an appropriate social status for him, and her family badly needs money, which his family can provide - "I am glad and relieved, he'll be the family's saving grace." When the story begins, her fiance is gone for who knows how long, and she's thrust into a new environment that she's not sure how to navigate as a societal adult. He has also (which is admittedly very easy to miss) said she was free to refuse him; i.e., she can break off the engagement if she wants to. (From "Letters" - "Andrey said I was free to refuse him / but you haven't refused him, or have you?") She goes to meet her fiance's family (people who would be her family, if she and Andrey married) and they are awkward/unpleasant and cruel to her. Then, she goes to the opera and meets a man who pursues her and flirts with her. He asks her to the ball at his house, and she does NOT agree to go - she demurs. She clearly feels some attraction to him, and has a bit of a crisis about it - "that man who aroused such terrible feelings I don't understand," has she "broken faith with Andrey" just by having these feelings? (She is in an entirely different context; unlike the audience for this show, she doesn't live in a culture where people normally have multiple relationships and learn how relationships work before getting engaged and then married.) Andrey, meanwhile, is being open about how much he sucks /to everyone but Natasha herself/, and is explicitly the 19th-century equivalent of a playboy/fuckboy (a rake, maybe), who is already married because some father of an unmarried woman he was with forced him to marry her. He knows what he's doing - "how I adore little girls / they lose their heads at once;" he understands that Natasha's inexperience and naivety make her easy prey. We as the audience easily recognize this type of guy; Natasha cannot. He enlists Helene, who comes to her to tell her she's OK, she doesn't need to feel guilty for what is, so far, just having feelings. "your fiance would want you to have fun" and cajoles her into coming to the ball. She could still refuse, she does want to go, but she's being heavily pressured. Helene, again, is doing this out of some kind of callousness/malice ("how the thought of throwing them together amuses me") She attends the party and dances with Anatole (per my understanding, again, but dancing is a normal social activity for 1812 and not the equivalent of cheating on Andrey) who very forcefully pursues her against her objections, to the point of kissing her - and she is attracted to him, and in the moment, kisses back. Not great from Natasha, definitely a mistake (which she rationalizes as being because she is actually deeply in love with Andrey - "how else could all of this have happened?"), but also not something she pursued and actually something she actively tried to avoid multiple times. She knows it was wrong (not to actively break free of his kiss, and then to tell him she loves him), but doesn't know what to do - she believes she loves them both - "What am I to do if I love him and the other one too? Must I break it off?" (Meanwhile, Anatole is enlisting someone else to write love letters to her.), and when Sonya confronts her, she does what she knows she must and writes to Mary/Andrey to confirm the engagement is broken. From this point on, the consequences that she's going to get are mainly because she is going along with Anatole at all, not that she's doing it while engaged to Andrey. Sonya and Marya's objections are that he is, presumably, going to sleep with her without marrying her, which is more or less the worst thing a woman can do, even if it's really that a man does it to her. They're upset not that they would be in a relationship at all, but rather that Anatole didn't go about it the right way - both point out that he could have come to the house and openly asked for her hand. Finally, in terms of consequences, being a woman in this time period meant that marriage/children were generally your main reason for existing, and so the consequences for sexual immorality were extreme - "Is it true Natasha is ruined?" (love to live in a society where a PERSON can be ruined.) In conclusion - the worst thing Natasha did was: 1. kiss back / not break a kiss and tell anatole she loved him while engaged to Andrey. Is this good? no. But was she naive, unsure, and being manipulated and pressured? yes. Is this enough that her life in this society should be over? Is this enough to say that she's simply immoral and deserves anything bad that comes her way? I feel immensely sorry for her.

Lydia Brunk