The Cherry Orchard | John Kelson (essay date 1959)
John Kelson (essay date 1959)
[In the following essay, Kelson argues that the superficially formless plot of The Cherry Orchard is undergirded by extensive patterns of historical allegory, structural symmetry, and myth.]
The Cherry Orchard, which dramatizes the lives of a group of "job-lots," people whose sense of isolation and futility is perhaps most forcefully expressed in the ambivalent, Villonesque "Je ris en pleurs" feelings of Madame Ranevsky, is widely admired for the psychological realism of its characterizations and for the theatrical effects it achieves by subtle employment of mood and atmosphere. To use another line from Villon, who, like the characters in The Cherry Orchard, lived in an agonizingly transitional age, the play as a whole seems to be saying: "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"
It is my intention to show that, while this impression is certainly a part of the total effect that the play has upon the reader,...
[The entire page is 2072 words long]
Navigate
