Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language by Kristeva Julia

Author:Kristeva, Julia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-11T14:35:19+00:00

THE SECOND SEX

OU TSIDE OF SEX

Nastasya Filippovna: “I am going to die soon”

Her mother “had deigned to burn” to death with the entire Baraskoff estate. Nastasya Filippovna deigns to burn with her “monstrous passion,” throughout The Idiot (1869): proud, haughty, pensive, explosive, consumed.

But she is not of this world: “I have renounced the world, already it hardly exists anymore . ” For better or for worse, she has entered the emptiness, without ties and without ego, intrinsically altered:

“God knows what lives in me in place of me . ”

Nevertheless, with a superior education, in French, of course, but also in various fields of knowledge, even law, this fatal beauty

“understands a countless number of things,” especially the value of money (as do Dostoyevskian women in general). A reader, a student, in a word (sadly reminiscent of Apollinaria Suslova), in an atmosphere marked with taste and elegance, but not without her guardian “inflicting” upon her what he calls “the original act.” Enclosed within the shame of her “disfigured fate,”

Nastasya Filippovna rises up first as an unconscious, budding feminist against Totsky, her lecherous benefactor, “that man toward whom she nurtured an inhuman repulsion.” Especially

34 Y The Second Sex Outside of Sex when he announces to her that he is considering arranging a marriage for her with a respectable bureaucrat whom she already knows, and in this way providing her with capital, a comfort-able dowry so that the benefactor can, in his turn, be wed, without Nastasya being able “to harm him in any way.”

The “woman object” does not let herself be pushed around and “outs her pig,” a pathetic prefiguration of the “me too”

movement. The offended party throws herself headlong into the comedy with malicious laughter and venomous sarcasm and then in turn turns gambler, apparently out of disgust, out of vexation, basically for nothing: shouting, straight out, that “she no longer cared about anything, least of all herself,” that “all her life hung by a thread.” She keeps upping the ante; the players increase their bets. This rebel persists in refusing the marriage and also resists marrying the idiot Prince, leading the narrator to believe that her simmering pride is much superior to the rank of princess. In fact, Nastasya Filippovna is a “seeker” but “without goodness,” a kind of lover outside of sex who bonds with Myshkin, and not only through the intermediary of Aglaya (two women who are jealous of each other because they love each other in loving the same “angelic innocence”).

As counterpoint to the dead Christ exposing the males to the anguish of death, this proud beauty describes her favorite painting, thus revealing the secret of the disturbing strangeness that makes her gaze so seductive: Christ alone listening to a child, a hand resting on the child’s head, with “a faraway look”: “A thought, great as the universe, is in his eyes.” “And it is a pensive look— as children can be pensive— pensive and attentive, as the child gazes up at him.”

As feminine alter ego of the

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