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by Calla Campbell
There is no denying the significance of the women who occupy the world of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It is a work distinguished by its complex, colourful, and memorable female characters. Written in the mid-19th century against a backdrop of rapid and radical social change, contrasting views on women’s liberation are presented by characters within the novel. The presence of such different viewpoints within the narrative reflects a greater discourse taking place throughout Russia during the period. In reality, the conversation surrounding women’s liberation was very much of two minds as some advocated for change while others strongly resisted feminist movements. The implications of gender ideology also stretch beyond dialogue: Tension caused by subversion of traditional gender expectations informs much of the conflict. Female characters often occupy the role of saviours, exhibiting generosity, forgiveness, and support towards male characters. This allows them to be empowered and independent as they hold economic, social, or moral power over men. Raskolnikov’s arc of rebirth shapes the story, and the regenerative role of women influences this arc as well as the paths of other male characters. This essay will examine the narrative role of women as saviours in relation to the gender dynamics and tension present due to social change in 19th-century Russia. This will be done by discussing the intersections between the reality of Russian women, the tension caused by the subversion of gender dynamics, and the symbolic purposes of female characters in the novel.
Debate over the “woman question” proliferated throughout the restless 19th century and multiple viewpoints on women’s rights are recorded in both fiction and non-fiction writing. This is apparent in conversations between characters in Crime and Punishment, and analysis of historical records can contextualize the gender tension that defines the setting of the novel. Conservative notions of gender decree that gender roles are essential to the sexes, a natural phenomenon akin to magnetism. Stereotypical ideas of men as providers and leaders, holding power over women who occupy themselves with ornamental and domestic duties, are far from outdated in the mid to late 19th century. The historian Francis Parkman, for example, in his late 19th-century essay entitled “The Woman Question”, dictates that “the supreme law of sex has decreed that the boys shall be boys and that the girls shall be girls”, attributing gender roles and performances to natural law and “universal nature” (Parkman, 1879). As a more localized example, the influential Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that, for a woman, “it is a thousandfold more praiseworthy to inspire Jerusalem Liberated than to write it herself” (1835), resigning women to the passive role of the muse, while men remain in the active role of the author. While prominent, this ideology was challenged in Crime and Punishment’s time. “The woman question was one of the burning issues of the day” (Lindenmeyr, 1985), and women began to seek greater economical independence and educational opportunities, even outside of radical and revolutionary spheres (Lindenmeyr, 1985). Interest in women’s work increased, and women began to receive recognition, respect, and praise for independent achievement (Forrester, 2012). These progressive ideas were of course met in return with criticism. Comments can be found in judicial archives critiquing women who chose to seek independence and liberation (Forrester, 2012). The political reality of the era was shaped by rapid change as well as by resistance to this change. It is also important to culturally contextualize gender: Russian gender politics function on a distinct timeline as Orthodox religious values and the isolated and agrarian nature of the Russian state during the 19th century impact its social movements when compared to the dominant ideas of Western European progressivism. It has been suggested that Russian women faced a higher degree of subordination than Western European women during this period due to this cultural divide (Engel, 1983). Russian feminism is distinct due to its unique context and often functioned in close tandem with other social movements, particularly those that addressed economic disparity.
Crime and Punishment is set right in the midst of the rapid ideological shifts of the 19th century, and its female characters are active. Their actions repeatedly align with religious ideals of forgiveness and redemption. Sonya, the only woman in the novel whose personal sins are emphasized heavily, is portrayed as wholly justified in her sinning because she is sacrificing herself for the sake of her family. Of Sonya, Marmeladov says that “He shall come on that day and He shall ask: “Where is the daughter who did take pity on her mortal father […] Come! I forgave thee once […] Now, too, thy many sins are forgiven, for thou loved much” (p. 29). Her sinning is also self-sacrificial, as she does so to make up for the economic shortcomings of her father. Male characters are also touched by the redemptive influence of women. The first example of this can be found in Raskolnikov’s discussion with the drunken retired civil servant, Marmeladov. After abandoning his post and his family and drinking through the last of their funds, he exclaims that he “should be crucified” (p. 29). He “cannot live without” Katerina Ivanovna’s beatings. Although violent and disheartening, Katerina Ivanovna personifies punishment and redemption through suffering in her relationship with her husband, beating him and then letting him back into the house. Raskolnikov’s relationships with his mother and sister also demonstrate their role in his arc of depravity leading to rebirth. Raskolnikov feels resentful and even hateful towards his female family members on several occasions. Despite this, they continue to demonstrate care for him. The last time Raskolnikov sees his mother, she says that she knows “that a great woe lies in store” for him (p. 617) and begs her son to let her “bless [him] with the sign of the cross” (p. 618). Pulkheria Alexandrovna can sense that something has changed and that suffering is on the horizon for her son. Despite this, she blesses him and tries to assure him that she, Dunya, and Sonya will follow him and support him through any suffering because suffering is necessary for his rebirth. During Dunya’s last meeting with her brother before he confesses, she thanks God that he “still believes in life” (p. 620). She believes that confession is the only option that will pull him out of his frenzied state. By going off to suffer, Dunya proclaims that he is “washing away half [his] crime” (p. 621). Sonya especially stands out as a pivotal character in steering Raskolnikov towards a confession. She is who Raskolnikov first confesses to, and she reacts by exclaiming that “nobody in the whole world is unhappier” than he is at the moment (p. 494-495), feeling “passionate, excruciating sympathy” (p. 495). Sonya’s speech of repentance is perhaps one of the most powerful in the novel: “Stand at the crossroads and bow down, kiss the earth you’ve polluted, then bow down to the whole world, to all four corners, and tell everyone out loud: ‘I have killed!’ Then God will send you life once more.” (p. 504) It is exactly this that Raskolnikov does on his way to confess, under the distant watch of Sonya, who faithfully follows him.
The influence of female characters as saviours is retained even when rebirth is not achieved. Svidrigailov, for example, is a clear foil to Raskolnikov. They are both criminals and both exhibit aggression towards women that hold power over them. He is not redeemed, however, because of his distanced and insincere relationships with female characters in the novel. For example, Marfa Petrovna pays Svidrigailov’s debts and rescues him from imprisonment on the condition that he marry her. However, he never respects their marriage and is suggested to be responsible for her death. Dunya is also a powerful symbol of salvation for Svidrigailov. He is enamoured with her, but he doesn’t value her. He sarcastically says that “when a girl’s heart is moved to pity, […] she’ll want to ‘save’ [him] and knock some sense into him, and resurrect him and exhort him towards more noble goals, and restore him to new life” (p. 570), writing off such intentions as a girlish fantasy. This indicates that he doesn’t believe in any kind of actual resurrection or forgiveness. Svidrigailov refuses to own up to his crimes and pursues Dunya out of pure lust. As he isolates himself from female characters in the novel, he grows closer to committing the ultimate, unforgivable sin of suicide. The opposite happens to Raskolnikov, who is surrounded and loved by women. He begins by admitting that he “physically hates” (p. 330) his mother and sister at the peak of his turmoil. However, right before confessing, he tells his mother that she “ought to know that [her] son loves [her] now more than he loves himself” (p. 617), demonstrating the parallels between genuine relationships with women and redemption. Sonya and Dunya contrast as well in terms of their relationships with Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov respectively. They are both positioned as saviours, yet their outcomes vary due to the way they are treated. Sonya holds strong faith in Raskolnikov and his rebirth, perhaps because Raskolnikov has not ever tried to harm her. Svidrigailov consistently damages Dunya, harming her reputation and threatening her physically, and she resents him for it. “Sonya is hope, the most realizable,” wrote Dostoevsky at the end of the Notebooks, but “Svidrigailov is despair, the most cynical.” (Dostoevsky, 1967). As Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov mirror each other, their respective outcomes signal that the influence of women in the novel is synonymous with rebirth.
The power dynamics between female and male characters within the novel are especially interesting when considering the context of ideas about gender roles and feminine power and independence. Crime and Punishment is rife with different pairings exemplifying very similar gendered dynamics (Kiremidjian, 1976):
1. Raskolnikov, his mother and sister; 2. Raskolnikov, the pawnbrokeress, and her younger, meek, and pregnant sister; 3. Raskolnikov, his landlady and her daughter (now deceased, who had been betrothed to Raskolnikov while ill a year before); 4. Marmeladov, his shrewish wife, and meek Sonya; 5. Svidrigailov, his wife, and Dunya.
Within all of these pairings, women hold some sort of power over men, whether moral or economic. The power held by women is “self-sacrificial” and “burdensome”, as women forgo their own desires to provide for male characters (Kiremidjian, 1976). The role of women as religious saviours parallels their economic or moral power held over male counterparts. These relationships represent a constant subversion of the traditional gender expectation of men as providers. All men in these pairings struggle against their saviours, and both Svidrigailov and Marmaledov pass away before they can be subjected to any kind of spiritual purification. As the central male character, Raskolnikov exhibits a “subtly complex pattern of aggressiveness towards women, where the aggressiveness combines with the thematic financial or moral indebtedness” (Kiremidjian, 1976). His struggle against the self-sacrificial power of the women who surround him is reflective of a greater struggle to negotiate a new role for women throughout the 19th century, and his arch of spiritual purification mirrors a rapid shift in ideas about women’s independence. Struggles against gendered power dynamics drive Raskolnikov throughout his frenzied episodes. His discomfort with women acting as self-sacrificial saviours in his favour is apparent when examining his romantic preference for women who present as weak and submissive, such as his landlady’s diseased daughter and Sonya. He also shows kindness or at least respect towards Nastasya, his landlady’s maid who, while not necessarily submissive, occupies a traditionally feminine role of domestic labour in his service. He feels constrained, on the other hand, by women who express responsibility and power over him, such as his mother and sister. He “feels guilty at not having managed as yet to become successful enough to rescue mother and sister from penury” (Kiremidjian, 1976). His mother sends him money, and his sister is lovelessly engaged to a wealthy man in an act of “generosity” toward her family. Dostoevsky himself, in The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment, emphasizes “how burdensome both mother and sister have become”: how their “caresses are a burden”, and how “their love is like hate” (Dostoevsky, 1967). In fact, the rage sparked by Raskolnikov’s mother’s letter announcing Dunya’s engagement is a catalyst in the novel’s essential event: the murder of the pawnbrokeress. Raskolnikov’s resistance against the regenerative and self-sacrificial influence of female power is part of what drives him to murder as he feels inferior and incompetent as the man of the family. The victim of the murder is also a woman, and she holds much economic power over Raskolnikov. He wishes to commit the murder to empower himself: economically by robbing the pawnbrokeress and physically by overpowering her and taking away her life.
Although the moneylender Alyona Ivanovna may seem like an exception to the divine influence of Crime and Punishment’s female characters, as she is the victim of Raskolnikov’s crime, she is actually the first character to set Raskolnikov on a course towards rebirth. “For some time” before the murder, Raskolnikov had been “in an irritable, tense state of mind not unlike hypochondria” (p. 5). If he had not gone through with the murder, he would have remained in his hateful, isolated state. The motivations for this murder are representative of the gendered tension and powerlessness present as Raskolnikov’s mental state erodes. The murder is the turning point for “the man who, obsessed with his own deification, engaged in a daring experiment—which he deemed emblematic of freedom and power, but above all power—finds himself unable to make good his claim and pass his test” (Rudicina, 1972). Following the archetypal scheme of a transgression, The murder is a step “over the fixed boundary line” followed by a plunge into “utterly self-willed demonic isolation” (Kiremidjian, 1976). This is then “followed by suffering, or expiation, which informs the central myth of Christianity, the Fall of Man and his Redemption” (Rudicina, 1972). It catalyzed the spiral of mental and physical illness that would lead to him repairing his relationship with his mother and sister and forming an unbreakable bond with Sonya. It was she who firmly advised him to confess and seek redemption in Siberia. It was the sight of her that “raised [him] to life”, and turned him into a “whole renewed being” (p. 657). The tension caused by women subverting the traditional gender dynamic by acting as saviours both contributes to the cause of Raskolnikov’s crime and his subsequent rebirth. Alyona Ivanovna and Sonya are also both in possession of the same three spiritual items. After the murder, Raskolnikov notices that Alyona Ivanovna carries “two crosses on [a] string, one of cypress and one of copper” alongside “a little enamel icon” (p. 96), which he drops on the chest of the corpse. After Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya, she offers him a cross made of cypress. “I’ve got another, a copper one, Lizaveta’s. Lizaveta and I swapped crosses: she gave me hers, I gave her my little icon” (p. 507). Furthermore, Sonya hangs the cypress cross around Raskolnikov’s neck days later, right before he goes to confess (p. 626). Sonya is an obvious manifestation of rebirth and renewal. The mirroring of Alyona Ivanova and Sonya can allude to the two women being figures that respectively represent the start and end of Raskolnikov’s journey towards rebirth.
Looking at the relationship of Sonya and Raskolnikov through the lens of gender expectations reinforces ideas about the roles of gender in the narrative tension. Sonya undergoes a shift in her nature after Luzhin attempts to attack her reputation. For much of the novel, Sonya is the embodiment of a passive feminine archetype. She sacrifices her own body for her family, but the nature of her work and the pretext for her decision to do so are not empowering. Sonya is a symbol of regeneration without holding power over male characters due to the permanent and shameful nature of her work. The moment of confrontation with Luzhin is a moment of pure disillusionment on Sonya’s part (Blake, 2006):
Sonya, meek by nature, already knew that it was easier to insult her than anyone else, and that everyone could insult her almost with impunity. Nevertheless, until this very minute, it had seemed to her that it was possible somehow to avoid misfortune by caution, meekness, and submissiveness before each and everyone. Her confrontation with Luzhin thus teaches Sonya that she will not bring about the triumph of higher justice on earth by meekly submitting to everyone and waiting for a miraculous intervention in her life. Instead, as her subsequent conversation with Raskolnikov demonstrates, she finds that she must more vigorously apply her faith to real-life situations
Sonya becomes renewed in her own way following this confrontation, emerging as an active, independent, and powerful figure. The shift is apparent when comparing Sonya’s discussions with Raskolnikov before and after the event. When they meet a second time, “Raskolnikov encounters a very different Sonya than the childlike woman he dominated in the same room on the previous day.” He, “sensing a change in their relative positions of power, resents her for knowing about his crime” (Blake, 2006). The change in Sonya’s nature, alongside her unwavering faith, empowers her to be the female character who finally convinces Raskolnikov to confess. He resists other active female figures but has grown close to her in her submissive feminine form. At the very moment she morphs into an active figure, he has already confessed his murder to her, “the required catalyst for his self-confrontation” (Kiremidjian, 1976).
Because the redeeming influence of women in the novel is only ever to the benefit of men, the symbolism of women as holy influences intersects with the role of a woman in 19th-century Russian society. The role of women was evolving, as evidenced by Razumikhin’s proclamation that it has been “solemnly proven” that a woman is a human being (p. 136). Lebezyatnikov also speaks about women’s liberation and equality, defending Sonya and proclaiming that he views her actions as “a vigorous and embodied protest against the social order” (p. 443). However, women are often disrespected in private conversations between men in the novel. Svidrigailov says that “women find it very, very pleasurable to be insulted” (p. 339). Ilya Petrovich refers to women seeking an education in medicine as “short-haired wenches”, disparaging their “immoderate thirst for enlightenment” (p. 634). All of the female characters exist functionally to serve the betterment of men, and those who hold positions of power over men or seek independence are constantly insulted. This can be seen in the way men talk about Alyona Ivanovna, calling her a “louse” by Raskolnikov and a “stupid, pointless, worthless, nasty, sick old hag” (p. 80) by a student in a tavern. Even her own murder serves to better her male murderer by setting him on a path toward spiritual rebirth. Men in the novel make sacrifices only for themselves. Women make sacrifices for men. Their role as saviours and their influence towards rebirth is at the expense of their own labour. Finally, women do not get to experience their own redemption or rebirth: many female characters reach bitter ends. The deaths of Katerina Ivanovna and Pulkheria Alexandrovna are characterized by delusion and distress. Marfa Petrovna dies in relation to a fight with her husband. Raskolnikov receives a lenient sentence for the murder of Alyona Ivanovna and Lizaveta. In this way, the role of women in the novel as divine influences on men is both appealing and confining. It is refreshing to read about women as complex, respectable, active characters and yet frustrating to see the ways in which their lives continue to revolve around their usefulness to men.
The role of women as independent and empowered to the benefit and service of men has a real-life localized precedent that influenced Dostoevsky’s view on women. The Decembrist movement was by no means a feminist one and called for an upholding of traditional feminine gender roles and rights (Stites, 1976). The notion of a “Decembrist’s wife”, however, has become a cultural archetype as the real wives of Decembrist revolutionaries followed them into Siberian exile after an unsuccessful uprising. These women abandoned their children and their traditional feminine and motherly duties in this decision. They are a Russian symbol of a wife’s unwavering devotion to her husband. Beyond this, though, there are also progressive aspects to the symbolism of Decembrist’s wives. They were praised as they “chose [their] own fate and fearlessly gazed into the future” (Mazour, 1975). The decision to abandon their lives to follow their husbands into exile was seen as empowered, even though the revolt preceded the “first heroic age of Russian female radicals” (Stites, 1976) and general Russian feminist action by three decades. Dostoevsky was a fan, writing in Diary of a Writer that “these real-life Russian martyresses embody the superior qualities of Russian womanhood” (Blake, 2006). Dostoevsky’s female characters are inspired by real-life examples of women who exhibit such virtues, establishing “a model for action to be emulated, not an idealized woman meant only to inspire faith” (Blake 2006). Sonya is an obvious example of this, following Raskolnikov, as the Decembrist wives followed their husbands, to Siberia. A “middle ground” gender role is negotiated through the treatment of women in the novel: That of a woman who is liberated to a point of independence but only respectable when she practices her autonomy in her faith towards men. While not a complete protest against the social order of gender dynamics, this archetype does not conform to traditional conservative ideals either. In an intense push and pull between conservative and progressive ideas about women’s liberation, this is the compromise.
Crime and Punishment the novel is itself of two minds. Rife with mirrors and opposites, it is fitting that the religious significance and influence of female characters would mirror the role of women in 19th century Russia. Two ideologies dominate conversations about feminism within the narrative, and the presence of this same duality within the historical record proves just how current this issue was to the writing of the novel. The plot is driven by women who symbolize forgiveness, redemption, and rebirth. This symbolic device is heavily tied to gender dynamics as their role as saviours allow them to hold power over male characters. The tension caused by this subversion of traditional gender dynamics comes at a point in history where conservative ideals are fighting hard to remain relevant, visible in the novel as male characters struggle and rebel against the burdensome care of self-sacrificing women. Through this struggle, a uniquely Russian ideal of femininity appears: the empowered but devoted Decembrist’s wife. The gender tension in the novel evokes a Russia that can be seen as a country that is itself in two minds. Struggling between national identity and western European influence, shaken by changing ideas about religion and science, and growing tension between the rich and the poor. Focusing on just one of these struggles, that of female emancipation, shows how each moment in history is a battle between holding on to the past and moving forwards into the future.
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