Joyce Oates’ “The Lady with the Pet Dog” has a strange and suspenseful structure. When reading the story, the reader senses confusion, much like the life of Anna. The author reveals Anna’s character through the structure of the story, and through the imagery in the story. Alfred Kazin said that Anna’s life “seems to move through a world wholly physical in it’s detail” (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 11 313).
Anna’s life throughout the story is disordered and repetitious. Linda W. Wagner says’ Oates’ “stories are certainly repetitive or trivial” (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 19 349).
In “The Lady with the Pet Dog” Anna’s thoughts and feelings about her feelings about her husband are unclear. She is cheating on him with another lover. She will be with her husband, than go to her lover while going back to her husband not knowing what she wants or if she is happy. This is almost a fear for Anna. Carolyn Walker wrote that “many of Oate’s stories explore major fear with emotion damage inflicted by another person” (contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 3 360).
I see this fear in Anna when she is with her lover. The fear is repeated every time she is with her lover. At one-point Anna notices this fear and her life repeating with her stating ‘”Everything is repeating itself. Everything is stuck”’ (Meyer 188).
Through out the story, three parts take place with each part going a little further back into Anna’s life explaining it in fuller detail. When the story begins doing this, the repeated part becomes clear and define, much like Anna’s life. Alfred Kazin said “Too much is happening; many will disappear,” much like Anna’s life (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol.3 363).
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Several things go on in Anna’s life through out the story. Anna seems confused when something new is being told to the reader, but as the passage is repeated in the next part, she becomes less confused and her feelings start to become clear. At one point Anna’s feelings were becoming clear with her lover, and so she asks him ‘”Do you.. do you love me?’” With him just answering with ‘”You’re so beautiful’” (Meyer 186).
Anna’s lover does not help out with her confusion at all, even causing her to attempt suicide. Anna believes her lover loves her, but he never actually comes out and tells her that. At the end of Part III, Anna’s life final starts to take hole and her thoughts become clear and she decides whom she wants to stay with. Oates seems to put peoples lives into her stories. Her characters are “outsiders” from other lives say’s Carolyn Walker (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 3 360).
“This pervasive use of the love relationship suggest the real vacuum in the lives (and imaginations) of her characters” says Linda W. Wagner (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 19 350).
Anna’s character is reveled through this imagery. At one point in the story the reader sees that Anna is sitting in the car with her lover, when she realizes there is no future for the two of them. Oates gives the reader a sense that Anna is feeling upset and ashamed at what she has done. Anna is hoping that her lover will leave so she can forget about him, and not feel so bad about herself. At one point Anna even states, ‘”I’m so ashamed of myself’” (Meyer 181).
Linda W. Wagner sums this part of the story the best when she states Oates’
interest is less in technical innovation than it is in trying the border between the real and the illusory, in testing the space in which those two seemingly separate entities converge. (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 19 348)
As Anna returns to her husband after leaving her lover, she sees herself there in body, but not in spirit. The narrator states Anna’s “spirit detached itself from her” (Meyer181).
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After the detaching of her spirit, the affair really starts to hurt Anna. Anna is upset and having a terrible pain inside her, causing her to cut her wrist with a razor blade in attempt to commit suicide. Anna is “seized upon by obscurely motivated, in explicable urges which frequently erupt obsessively.” Says G. F. Waller (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 19 353).
Right after Anna cuts herself, she wraps her arm with a towel and walks around her house. Anna sees the rooms in her house are empty, but the reader is never told that they are. The emptiness of the rooms reflect the emptiness that she is feeling inside herself.
The narrator refers to a drawing through out the story that her lover drew of her. When Anna first meets her lover, he asks her if he can draw her. Her lover does several drawings of her, and gives her one of them when he finishes. The story refers to this drawing several different times. The drawing represents the perspective of Anna’s lover towards her, and another self of Anna, the one that is in love with her lover. The story describes the drawing as very detailed at the top toward Anna’s head and says that it fades away as it goes down to the bottom of the drawing. The author uses the drawing to reflect Anna’s life, very clear and defined, but also dull and confusing. The author has several types of imagery he uses to describe Anna’s life; the reader just has to use his or her imagination.
Anna’s character in “The Lady with the Pet Dog” is an unusual one. G. F. Waller says that because Oates’s characters tend to exist as the foci of such obsessions, not as case histories of social or political development, they are frequently depicted in stereotypical form (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 19 353).
Anna is going through several emotional problems in the story. She is stuck between her husband, who she loves and needs to be faithful too, and her lover, who she also loves and makes her happy. Oates repeats theses different emotional situations through out the story. “Oates has searched, often repetitively and restlessly, for forms which will be appropriate vehicles of her vision” (353).
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Oates seems to but her own emotional problems into this story. Alfred Kazin says that “her mind is unbelievably crowded with psychic existences” (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 11 314).
I believe that Alfred believes that Oates has several issues that she tries to get ridden of through her stories. Marvin Mudrick sums up Joyce Oates “The lady with the Pet Dog” by stating typical and predictable equations: man = irrational brute force; woman = irrational treacherousness; love = hate; passion = the Depression (the extended time – scheme seems to have epic intentions (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 11 314).
This equation sums up the emotional situations through out “The Lady with the Pet Dog”. Anna has been through two men, and has had “irrational treacherousness”, love and hate, and passion, and after all that she has gone through she is still depressed. The reader does not just get this right off, they have to figure out or analyze the story to understand what Joyce Oates is saying. John Ditsky says Oates “real subject is what does not spring to the mind’s eye in reading, but to the brain’s heart – to the seat of despair and terror” (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 11 316).
Joyce Oates is a unique author for using imagery and the stories structure to reveal the life of her character, Anna. Without all of the techniques, Anna’s thoughts and actions would not be clear. Anna would seem cold – hearted and mean it is were not for the author’s descriptions that drive into Anna’s thoughts and feelings.
