Excerpts from Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, highlighting the points where she is slowly going cray cray because at that point, Love is just no longer enough:
Before Vronsky' s departure for the election, Anna, coming to the conclusion that the scenes which had always taken place every time he left her for a journey might serve to cool his love rather than attach him more firmly to her, resolved to control herself to the best of her ability, so as to endure calmly the separation from him. But the cold, stern look which he had given her when he came to tell her about his journey had wounded her, and he was hardly out of her sight before her resolution was shaken.
Before Vronsky' s departure for the election, Anna, coming to the conclusion that the scenes which had always taken place every time he left her for a journey might serve to cool his love rather than attach him more firmly to her, resolved to control herself to the best of her ability, so as to endure calmly the separation from him. But the cold, stern look which he had given her when he came to tell her about his journey had wounded her, and he was hardly out of her sight before her resolution was shaken.
In her solitude, as she began to think over his cold look, which seemed to hint at a desire for liberty, she came back, as she always did, to one thing — to the consciousness of her humiliation.
" He has the right to go when and where he pleases. Not only to go, but to abandon me. He has all the rights, and I have none ! But as he knows this, he ought not to have done this. And yet what has he done ? .... He looked at me with a hard, stern look. Of course, that is vague, intangible. Still, he did not formerly look at me so, and it signifies much," she thought;
"that look proves that he is growing cold toward me."
" It is all the same to me," thought Anna, "if only he is here ; and when he is here he cannot help loving me ; he does not dare not to love me."
***
" That is not the cause," said she ; " and I do not understand how my irritability, as you call it, can be caused by the fact that I have come absolutely into your power. How is my position indefinite .'' It seems to me the contrary."
" I am sorry that you are not willing to understand," he replied, obstinately determined to express his thought. " Its uncertainty comes from this, — that you think that I am free."
Watching the film on the plane back from London sparked off a niggling thought in me. What if going over to London makes me entirely dependent on Mr.HEA and that slowly drives him insane before driving me off the cliff too?
I didn't use to like Anna when I read the story as a younger woman, but perhaps it was because I feared that insanity that is so inane in females. The one that scares the alpha males away, the one that does not bode well with the Grace and elegance I am aspiring to (wishful thinking).
But now, faced with the tough decisions, its difficult to keep her leashed.
