EmerSonya the Romantic and Self-Reliance

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

I make a point not to become dependent on things. Not to rely on other people, nor on money or material goods, or the seasons. The only person I can rely on is myself. And Nannechka.

For six years life had been dependable, constant, predictable, and comfortable. Uncle and I worked and saved; Nannechka knitted, Babushka read her pamphlets. The doctor came to visit. We had tea at eight every morning. In spite of myself I began to depend on our comfortable routine, with all its occasional discomforts of hunger and want and hard work.

Then Papa came to live with us. Papa and his new wife.

They pulled up our lain tracks, they grew over our beaten paths, descended like hot clouds in an Indian summer sky to hold in their heavy, hot winds of change. And though it was nice at first to have Papa around, our relationship has always been formal and didactic. And this new woman. She could have been a sister to me. A beautiful, strange, queen of a sister. I was terrified and scornful all at once. I remember seeing her at the wedding, and how she stuck out in that crowd—a silver ruble among a handful of dull copper kopecks. Their winds rocked the foundations of our lives, but my self-reliance has held. And now I can find strength and validation in my own work. I can hurry and busy myself with a calm inside. I will gather the crumbling walls of the estate close about me, hold them in place, and pull back the creeping ivy sown by Papa and Yelena which slowly take hold.

***

 The wind that blows our doctor in, Yelena’s perfume, the smell of candles burning into the restless night—these form a miasma that we’ve all breathed for too long now. The estate is slipping through my fingers as is my tolerance and my energy.   I know I must do my best to maintain order but my patience is thinning. I actually confronted Papa tonight–I haven’t done that since before the wedding. And Uncle. I don’t know what to do with him, I feel as if he’s fading, fraying, pulling away from me like paint peeling from the walls. Astrov has him marinating in vodka and regret when the best thing for him is to fight, like me, to be strong. Astrov gets us all drunk. I certainly have no control over myself when he walks in a room, I watch my defenses and ambitions, my strengths and strongholds fold like garments around my ankles. He spoke to me tonight, really spoke, and I saw him completely and I think, I think, he may have seen me too. Even if just for a minute, a moment, a fleeting glimpse, but he saw. Maybe he saw. And then he was gone. And left me humming with a residue of words, all beauty, beauty, beauty. How did I stay standing? How did I not weep? How did I let go of his hand? Seems there may be strength left yet. And beauty, beauty swept in, but she wasn’t strong at all but needed me just as I needed her, and that night I surrendered to friendship, tears and laughter. My first surrender.

***

My next surrenders were my chores, my duties–those which had held me up all these years, the little tasks which formed the vertebra of my backbone were gently forgotten. My hurry is slowed to a shuffle, an ooze, while my inside is thrumming and churning. In six years he has never come this often. And his words and his face are beating at the insides of my skin, shouting beauty, beauty, and I wonder how I’ve never heard them before and the drumming gets quicker and nearly unbearable as my body grows listless. He’s here every day. He can’t hear my drumming. He can’t see past the creeping kudzu of beauty to the stone walls beneath, the crumbling stone walls no longer strong. And I’m crumbling. My self-reliance has laughed in my face, and dependence has flown away to roost in the words, the hands of the doctor. The heavy air is heaviest yet, pregnant with storm, ready to ruin me. And yet I don’t seek shelter, I surrender my happiness, as all of us have, to beauty. She asks him. I know what he says. The clouds burst open with my heart and empty, everything I’d grown to rely on flies away. Papa wants to sell the estate, my estate, to wrest the crumbling walls from my grip. I look into Uncle Vanya’s face and barely recognize him—my ally, my comrade. The dependable, inaccessible doctor never to return, never to return my love. My internal drum is suddenly silenced. Gunshots ring out in the still noise. I cling to my only refuge, still the only thing I can rely on—my Nannechka.

***

When I was little and couldn’t be consoled, I would hold my doll tight and tell her it was going to be alright. The only thing to stop my tears was to soothe my dolly’s imagined heartaches, to let her need me, to know I was needed. Uncle Vanya has given back the morphine. It’s still quiet. Goodbyes are muted and harness bells hushed. Yelena won’t let go of her pencil as we hug goodbye, as the beauty that I’ve loved and hated lets me alone at last. And reaching through the dark I find my work, and allow myself to be needed, my greatest comfort. My hurry will return but for now it’s a quiet emptiness, like the feeling after you’ve been crying for hours, and suddenly grow still, and weary. Yelena said I must learn to trust. But only myself, and the promise of rest.

—Faye G.

One thought on “EmerSonya the Romantic and Self-Reliance

  1. Jules Odendahl-James

    This is such poetic and evocative writing, Faye. So tied to sensual imagery, which is not something I’d immediately think to connect to Sonya but in your/her voice it makes complete sense. The idea that she would be perfectly placed to soak up everything about this environment (sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes) and take it in. Unlike Vanya who seems like an open wound to such sensual experience, Sonya maintains her balance until, and I love the way you put this, “Astrov gets us all drunk.” And then, the second push into overload comes with a forged connection with Yelena that drags her right down. As you say, ” I’m crumbling. My self-reliance has laughed in my face, and dependence has flown away to roost in the words, the hands of the doctor.”

    I also love the way you come back to Yelena’s appeal to you to “trust” and how that has come to naught by the play’s end. At least the trust in people. You can trust in work. And in the ultimate release from work that will come in death. I keep thinking about the current plan to scatter those autumn leaves across the stage between Acts 3 & 4. After reading your post, I get an even greater sense that the house and its inhabitants have been blown apart by the last act. As if the doors have been thrown open by outside forces and the external world has invaded. Astrov mentions “abandoned Turgenev mansions” — that’s kind of what this place has become. And Sonya and Vanya soldier on in the midst of a now ruined inside. “A quiet emptiness” as you put it.

    And here’s where I return to the connection between Chekhov and Beckett. Such an image, and an imperative to find joy or hope in death is absurd in that way that provokes both laughter/anger and tears/recognition. In some ways I want to jump on stage and shake Sonya “awake” in a way. She’s 24 for heaven’s sake! But at the same time, what an idealized, impossible ending would it be were she to fling herself at Astrov and he to suddenly “realize” he would be wise to marry and love her. (That’s the Wood Demon’s plot and, it was an utter flop.) As Judge Brack says at the end of Hedda Gabbler, “People don’t DO such things” We might not idealize death as rest at the age of 24 BUT the alternative is also a fairy tale ending, even if it’s a “happy” one. And so we’re left in the muddled middle, between feeling these characters are utterly absurd and yet completely and recognizably human.

    Jules

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