George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' and Lev Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina': A comparative reading

Middlemarch and Anna Karenina each embody a particular version of the tragic view of life. In each novel, two major protagonists possess many of the character traits we typically associate with the heroes and heroines of tragedy and appear in circumstances that ultimately lead, or nearly lead, to their destruction--that is, to the tragic waste of a rare and valuable human life. As in many tragedies, their fates are complicated by other characters, by the particular set of circumstances within which they strive to realize their individual conceptions of a good life, and by their own errors of judgment and perception.;Eliot and Tolstoy both understood contingency, indifference, and destructiveness as built-in features of the common human condition that continually impinge upon our efforts to live good lives. Comparative readings of Middlemarch and Anna Karenina show how this version of the tragic view of life is embodied both in the structure and the substance of each novel. These readings also show how each novelist's handling of plot, character, irony, and metaphor richly fulfills many of the basic criteria established by Aristotle and by A. C. Bradley in their seminal discussions of tragedy.;While both Middlemarch and Anna Karenina describe a world in which contingency, indifference, and destructiveness play a much larger role in shaping human fate than we usually like to admit, each novel promotes a different response to the tragic view of life. Both Eliot and Tolstoy encourage us to see ourselves, our relation to others, and our place in the world, in the light of something much larger than ourselves. Eliot, however, invites us to do so against the backdrop of the collective life of humanity, while Tolstoy invites us to do so against the backdrop of our relation to God. The study concludes by contrasting Eliot's humanist response, as embodied in Middlemarch, with Tolstoy's religious response, as embodied in Anna Karenina, to the recognition that tragedy is an eternally-recurring form of human experience.