FEMALE IMAGES IN THE COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE OF RUSSIAN AND FOREIGN LITERATURE

Abstract

This article examines female images in Russian and foreign literature through a comparative reading of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Although these texts belong to different national traditions, they reveal a common nineteenth-century problem: woman is represented at the point where desire, morality, social regulation, and narrative power intersect. The study uses comparative-typological analysis, feminist literary criticism, and close reading in order to identify both convergences and national differences in the construction of the heroine. The analysis demonstrates that the female image in all three novels is shaped by tension between inner subjectivity and externally imposed roles. At the same time, the three protagonists embody different models of response to patriarchal order: moral self-determination in Jane Eyre, destructive rebellion in Emma Bovary, and tragic collision between passion and social law in Anna Karenina. The article argues that Russian literature, represented here by Tolstoy, gives the heroine exceptional psychological depth and social embeddedness, whereas the Western European novels of Brontë and Flaubert foreground, in different ways, the struggle for autonomy and the limits placed upon female agency. The comparative perspective makes it possible to see the female image not as a static “type,” but as a dynamic artistic form through which literature thinks about freedom, guilt, desire, and social belonging.