Provincial town versus capital city. A dialogue with Chekhov (Joyce Carol Oates’ “The lady with the pet dog”)

Abstract

Joyce Carol Oates’ short story “The lady with the pet dog” (1972) is a modern version of Chekhov’s masterpiece told from a woman’s point of view. The paper compares literary and geographic analogues of the two stories (the capital cities where the heroes live, – Moscow and New York, – the provincial towns where the heroines live, – the town of S. and an unnamed town in Ohio, – and the resort locations where their meeting takes place, Yalta and Nantucket Island), which leads to some findings about the role of the topoi in Russian-American intertextual dialogue. In particular, it is noted that in the contrast between the faceless province and the place of the protagonists’ fateful meeting, both in Chekhov’s story and in Oates’ story the distance from the sea versus the proximity to it is quite important. Another similarity of the stories is the long distance covered by the heroines on their way to the sea, which symbolizes the path of their internal transformation. The article also analyzes the feminization of Oates’ “Chekhov” story: the American woman author wrote hers in the third person, but from the heroine’s point of view, and to convey female psychology, constructed her narrative not chronologically, but cyclically and retrospectively. Thus Oates’s version emphasizes the spiritual rebirth of the heroine, not the hero.