Male and Female Ivan Turgenev\'s

¶ … Male and Female

Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons: A Book Review

Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons offers an insightful analysis into the relationships between women and men, such as they were conceived of in the second half of the nineteenth century, at a time when the notion of gender became one of great interest among scholars as well as common people. First of all, the title of the novel, which points to the generation gap between fathers and sons, already signals an exclusion of women from the general concern of the book. Nevertheless, the women play a very important part in the plot: Anna and Katya manage to change Arkady's and Bazarov's nihilist views of the world, Fenitchka becomes the cause of a duel, and so on. Thus, it is obvious that the novel describes a male-dominated world, but at the same time, the plot clearly hints to an incipient awareness of the gendered relationships and the way in which they structure society.

Bazarov, the doctor who is the hero of the novel, is also the character who sets the general mood of that particular epoch in Russia, because of his radical, nihilist views. Thus, Bazarov is, at the beginning of the novel, a complete nihilist, who believes in nothing but the objectivity of science. He belongs therefore to the new generation, which denies the past and advocates a new, entirely objective approach to knowledge, exclusive of such irrational things as love, art or aesthetics. Thus, the Bazarov's nihilism obviously categorizes the relationships between women and men as "romanticism" or "rubbish": "And what are these mysterious relations between a man and a woman? We physiologists know what they are. You study the anatomy of the eye; and where does it come in, that enigmatic look you talk about? That's all romanticism, rubbish, and moldy aesthetics. We had much better go and examine the beetle."(Turgenev, 24) According to Bazarov, the mystery that is usually attached to love or to a beautiful woman can be easily destroyed by science and a good knowledge of physiology. As a rule, women have always been seen as the irrational, enigmatic gender, which is usually passionate, subjective and unreliable. This view of women is many times expressed throughout the novel. Bazarov considers the female gender as weak, irrational, incapable of effective thinking and manipulative. In his view, a woman cannot even keep up a conversation for more than half an hour: "If a woman can keep up a conversation for half an hour, it's already a good sign."(Turgenev, 103) Moreover, Bazarov believes that it is not 'manly' to give too much consideration to a woman, or to show any kind of dependence on the female kind, even if this comes in the form of love: "Still, I must say that a man who has staked his whole life on the one card of a woman's love, and when that card fails, turns sour and lets himself drift till he's fit for nothing, is not really a man."(Turgenev, 24) Also, Kukshina, a young woman, is considered by the men surrounding her to be very advanced and emancipated for her gender because she is divorced and independent and has some scientific preoccupations, pointing to the fact that women were for their most part uneducated and dependent on their husbands at that time: "Kukshina, Eudoxie, Evdoksya Kukshina. She's a remarkable nature, emancipee in the true sense of the word, an advanced woman."(Turgenev, 47) When Bazarov meets Kukshina however, he is again skeptical as to whether to believe in her accomplishments, and betrays his despise for the opposite gender even more when he hears she is not at all pretty and advocates that, if a woman is not pretty, she is not worth knowing. Bazarov's view on women is thus very eloquent, as it expresses the general mood of the age: women are the weak, passive gender, who can only make themselves useful for society if they are pretty and play well their roles as wives and mothers. However, the way in which the plot develops, points to the fact that women have more power than the men in the novel are willing to grant them. Although he is Bazarov's disciple, Arkady changes his nihilist view of love when he meets Katya. The same thing happens to Bazarov when he falls in love with Anna, although he is reluctant to admit to it until the end of the novel, when the young doctor dies from a typhus infection. When he meets Anna, Bazarov is impressed by her intelligence, but expresses his opinion in his usual misogynistic way: "Yes... A female with brains. Yes, and she's seen life too." He attempts to persuade himself that women are all manipulative and tries very hard to withstand the impulse to fall in love with Anna. When she rejects him, he is even more convinced that women are all hypocritical. Gradually however, a change takes place in him, and Bazarov becomes a different person by the end of the novel, arguably because he has discovered love and feelings, and these have shook his nihilistic views of the world.