The Cherry Orchard: Historical Allegory and Structural Symmetry
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, beneath this surface of seemingly aimless existence there is a patterning so rigorous as to give every impulsive speech and despairing gesture an almost predetermined significance. Thinking of the play as a person, one can say that beneath the quivering, oh so sensitive flesh there is a very firm bone structure and a strongly beating heart.
The structure of the play allows for at least three levels of meaning: literal, historical, and mythical. On the literal level of psychological realism, the play gives a picture of humanity in which loneliness, futility, and frustration are the dominant emotions. It is on the literal level, of course, that the play makes its most immediate appeal to the reader. In addition to this emotional content, however, there is historical allegory which, like the allegory in Orwell's Animal Farm, depends for its appeal on the knowledge of Russian history that the reader can correlate with the naturalistic events and characters of the literary work. Some of the characters, as a matter of fact, are motivated in ways difficult to explain satisfactorily except on the level of historical allegory; I am thinking particularly of Charlotte and Barbara, the governess and adopted daughter, respectively, of Madame Ranevsky.
Following is a brief schematization of the allegorical correspondences of the various characters, with occasionally a suggestion as to the way particular characters are motivated in response to other characters in terms of the historical allegory. Madame Ranevsky, Gayef, Anya and Pishtchik correspond, in that order, to the pleasure-seeking, dilettantish, idealistic and opportunistic elements of Russian aristocracy at the turn of the century. Barbara, the adopted daughter, the one in charge of the estate during the mistress' absences, the one who feeds the servants on peas while dreaming of the day she can cast off her responsibilities for the life of a pilgrim, represents the Russian Orthodox Church. Her ambivalent relationship with Lopakhin, who stands for the Bourgeois class, is understandable in terms of Russian history, just as is her fear of the Tramp, a symbol of atheistic Marxism. The Bolsheviks had declared themselves as a separate identity in 1903, just a year before The Cherry Orchard was produced. Trophimof, as the Intellectual class, and Firs, Yasha, and Dunyasha as representing aspects of the Servant class, can be easily identified. Of the two remaining characters, Ephikhodof fits readily into his role as the type of the Bureaucrat, as he is left in charge of the estate during the absence of Lopakhin. His delusions, seeing a spider straddled over him upon awakening, and his misfortunes, clumsily breaking things as he moves about, remind one of other fictional clerks in recent European literature, among whom are the hero of Gogol's The Overcoat, the Underground Man and the Double of Dostoevsky, and, most famous of all, the man-turned-insect of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Finally, there is Charlotte. She embodies the spirit of the modern Russian...
(This entire section contains 1987 words.)
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artist, as composer painter and writer. Her cries of loneliness, of not being understood, reflect the attitude of the modern artist, whether Russian or otherwise. At the beginning of Act II, when she reminisces about her earlier days, mentioning thesalto Mortale and the old German lady, what we have on the allegorical level is a brief resume of the development of Russian musical culture in particular, and in general a statement of the progress of the Fine Arts through imitation of foreign models to the establishment of a native, national art. She has become, that is, a governess. Her theatrical background, her ventriloquism and her conjuring tricks make her a suitable representative of the Artist, the dealer in entertaining illusions.
To turn to a reading of the play as the representation of myth is to penetrate deeper than surface emotion (the raw nerves of psychological realism) or intellectual amusement (the jigsaw of allegory). It is on this level, I believe, that the play gives us a meaning which will account for the most enduring appeal that the play has.
To begin with, although the cherry orchard is certainly the central image of the play, it is the seasonal cycle of Nature that provides the basic structure for the action of the drama. The four acts correspond to the four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. The first act, for example, is so constructed that everything in it tends to reinforce the atmosphere associated with springtime, with birth and planting. The act opens with the reveries of Lopakhin, representative of the forces in Russian society that are going to displace the aristocracy, and it closes with the reveries of Anya, who represents the youthful, idealistic element of the established aristocracy, that element which, by joining hands with the intellectuals, can contribute to the growth of the new order. The time of year is May, the setting is the nursery, and the atmosphere is one of hopefulness; enthusiastic plans for the future are in the air. Lopakhin has a plan to save the orchard for his beloved benefactress; Dunyasha has fallen in love again; and Gayef is full of schemes that reassure Anya, causing her to doze off contentedly as the curtain falls, just as Lopakhin had been dozing contentedly when it rose. The ecstatic remark of Trophimof as he gazes on Anya provides an appropriate curtain line: "My sunshine! My spring!"
In Act II the time is late June, the setting is the open fields. Being summer, there are evidences of growth and development, of active cultivation of planted things. Telegraph poles are in sight, the outline of a big town may be discerned off in the distance. Here, as in Act I, there is parallelism between the first and last scenes. Charlotte, at first, and Trophimof, at the end, express feelings of "mysterious anticipation." Just as Trophimof represents the Russian intellectual, cultivating dissatisfaction with things as they have been, so Charlotte represents the Russian artist, conscious of a profound unrest after having been educated by Italians and Germans and having become now a governess, one who is trying to train and discipline the native Russian capabilities in art. All the characters talk about the way they have spent their lives, the things they have done in their youthful enthusiasms. For just as the theme of Act I is Infancy, so the second Act centers upon Youth. As in Act I, Anya and Trophimof are center stage as the curtain falls, now having definitely committed themselves to the stirrings of the new society. The Tramp, in his mysterious passage across the stage, has proffered an invitation—"Brother, my suffering brother … Come forth to the Volga. Who moans?" …—and Anya and Trophimof seem to have accepted it, for Anya says, "Let us go down to the river. It's lovely there."
As the curtain rises on Act III, the time is autumn, the orchard, now ripe for harvest, is being sold, and a celebration is in progress. Now is the time at which the plantings made in the spring will be gathered in, if they have thrived, or cast aside, like the chaff from the wheat, if they have not prospered. The parallelism between first and last scenes continues. This time Pishtchik, with his talk of the horse of Caligula that became senator, and a representative of the aristocracy which can no longer harvest anything but tares, is paralleled with Lopakhin, the founder of a new dynasty, another breed of work horse that has been transformed into a senator. Everything has now come to maturity. That which must die can look forward only to death, while the "young wood, green wood" that has been growing through the spring and summer will continue on into the next cycle of life.
The wintry mood of late October dominates the last act; the hopefulness of Lopakhin, Anya and Trophimof, among the representatives of the new life, is subdued by their sympathy for those who have only a short span left. The parallelism of opening and closing scenes in this act involves, on the one hand, the delegation of servants who have come to pay their last respects to the dispossessed landlord, and, on the other, old Firs, who sinks down to die in silence and loneliness in the abandoned nursery. Just as the delegation at the beginning is characterized by the distant murmur of their voices, dying away into silence, so does Firs mumble inaudibly as he resigns himself to his fate.
The most important element in this framework of the seasons, however, has not yet been mentioned. The beginnings and endings of the four acts enclose centrally placed scenes in which Madame Ranevsky is the dominating figure. Her musings in each act are appropriate to the season: in the first she recollects her childhood, in the second she speaks of more recent years, in the third she disputes with Trophimof about her present lover whose appeals for her sympathy and protection she will not reject, and in the fourth act all of her concern is with finding secure places for all those who have been in her service, particularly Barbara and Firs. Since, on the mythic level, the play is mimesis of the cycle of Nature, it is appropriate that one character should represent the continuing, sustaining and life-giving power of Nature. Thus Madame Ranevsky is in the first act the Sorrowing Mother for, in grieving over her lost son Grisha, she is another Demeter mourning the Persephone snatched from her. Her Grisha is taken from her, but what Lopakhin says of her at the beginning of the play, mentioning the way she wiped the blood from his face and took him in her arms, suggests that on the mythic level Lopakhin is the son returned to her, and in his return there is the renewal of life, the beginning of a new cycle. She is, in the second act, a Goddess of Fertility, eternally procreant, carelessly spilling gold coins from her lap as she sits in the midst of a burgeoning field. In the third act she is represented as a Love Goddess, a Venus lamenting over her Adonis ill and alone in Paris. (Note that Trophimof says he does not want to be an Adonis, after saying which he succeeds in making a complete fool of himself.) As she was a Demeter in the first act, she becomes a Persephone in the last. She reigns as Queen of the Dead, tenderly concerned for Barbara and Firs; but also, like Persephone, she will return to the world of the living, and when she does she will bring life back to the earth again. As she says to Anya, "I'll come back, my angel."
Thus the play has at its center a character who, seen only in her human and finite appearance, is the very picture of helplessness and ineffectuality, but who, in her mythic character, is actually that which sustains and renews the life around her. It is she, not Lopakhin, who triumphs, for Lopakhin, like all the others in the play, is only another one of the unhappy children on earth whom she gathers into her arms to comfort and console.
John Kelson, "Allegory and Myth in 'The Cherry Orchard', "in Western Humanities Review, Vol. XIII, No. 3, Summer, 1959, pp. 321-24.
