I am looking at Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a novel which has recently inspired many visual adaptations: several films and even a comic book. However, Anna Karenina has had few contemporary retellings in novels- at least, few that are obvious about their connection. I am thinking about the way Anna Karenina has helped shape a modern “Chick Lit” genre, to help me understand how contemporary female authors respond to and rework the trope of the adulterous woman that Anna Karenina popularized. This trope in “Chick Lit” is reclaimed by (typically) white female authors in order to create a feminist narrative, but not one that is necessarily intersectional.

Using feminist critical theory, it can be conceived that Tolstoy’s “othering” of Anna Karenina, an adulterous woman, is only justified by her suicide. She is punished for her deviation from societal norms with a tragic demise. The modern reworking of this trope often includes a happy ending for the “Anna Karenina”-esque heroine, typically a sexually liberated white heterosexual woman. However, her status as an “other” feels ingenuine, given the nature of modern feminism; thus, her happy ending does not come as a surprise, nor is it particularly empowering for a diverse audience.

I will be looking at feminist criticisms of Anna Karenina, for example, “Women, Character, and Society in Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ by Gayle Greene. I will also be focusing on modern works which borrow extensively from the tropes Anna Karenina inspired, analyzing the way contemporary feminist writers subvert the narrative of the “othered” adulteress, and how they miss the mark. The “Chick Lit” books that I will be looking at alongside Anna Karenina include Bridget Jones’ Diary, Sex in the City, among others.

Critical article: Greene, Gayle. “Women, Character, and Society in Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina.’” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1977, pp. 106–125. 

Located on Jstor.