Interwoven Contradictions Between Tender Feelings And Existence Predicaments

After reading Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, Gorky can not help but shed tears, so moved that Zweig give the unknown woman extraordinary tender feelings. Indeed, tenderness is the place where the novel is different from other novels, and still has moved me up to now. The novel is centered on the establishment and failures of the tender feelings. The unknown woman wanted to defeat existence predicaments via setting up tender feelings time and time again, but all failed by formidable predicaments. However, after that, the tender feeling grew up to pity, a kind of religious feeling. Loneliness, strangeness and death, these are all people cannot escape, while the unknown woman choose the tender attitude to deal with these difficulties in her whole life. Those are the places where have shocked me deeply when I first read this novel, and they constitute its inner vitality entered into so many readers’ hearts who have different ages and different backgrounds for more than ninety years from the time it was wrote. According to the above, I will try to discuss further in three parts.In part one, I will present intuitive feelings of tenderness by tender and gentle words and tendency of narration. Furthermore, I will explore two needs of the unknown woman behind tenderness:recall is her self-construction; love is her dance for lonely self.In part two, I will talk about in detail how the woman uses tenderness to deal with these three kinds of trouble, and why she failed.In part three, I will point it out that tender feeling exists in pity after failure again and again. Pity is a high level form of tender feeling, so I will explore the foundation both pity and tender feeling. Tender feeling finally opened the novelist R’s heart door, and white rose is the unknown woman’s life load bearing, will instead of her alive. In addition, compared with Job in the Bible, I try to figure out what is the meaning of the suffering and the meaning of the unknown woman being alive when the family, love, ideal, hope had been deprived of, and through Job’s structure, Letter from an Unknown Woman form a bigger circle of narration.