Nastasya Filipovna in Thebes

In a conversation recently with someone who was reading Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’- I happened to mention that Nastasya Filipovna is for me, one of the best female characters in literature. My fondness for her was completely lost on my listener, though, and not without reason! She is an unlikeable, dangerous, rude, and vile character, and yet, for me she is so much beyond that.

Now, given that it has been more years than I care to mention here since I read the book, I started to wonder, why did she stay with me in my imagination, what makes her such a compelling character? Was it something about my late teenage experiences of becoming a woman in the world that made her so compelling to me, and would I still feel the same way about her if I were to come across the book for the first time now?

Despite appearing relatively briefly, she is one of the novel’s most consequential figures: an impetus for the book’s events, and a force that disrupts every moral and social script placed around her. She also reminds me of another famously rebellious woman in literature: Antigone. With these thoughts swimming in my head I sat down to try to put my thoughts to (metaphorical paper). What follows is a stumbling, imperfect, but genuine reflection on these two women, what place they occupy in literature, and (at least in my mind) why they continue to hold readers’ imagination.

Of course, the irony of the fact that both these characters are written by men is not lost on me, but let’s not dwell on that. These were not ordinary men : ).

The two women sit on almost complete opposite ends of history: one in a nineteenth-century Russian novel of psychological inquiry and aristocratic decay; the other a singular figure imposing her political reality in ancient Thebes. Yet both are caught in a kind of performance, one in the theatre of representation, the other in the theatre of politics. After much reflection, I can only conclude that what makes them compelling is their resistance, their refusal, their rebellion.

Too often, women in literature are turned into ‘an idea‘…something vaguely symbolic that exists to move the plot. The monster, the temptress, the muse. Their interiority is flattened, and symbolism becomes a cage.

Nastasya Filippovna is undoubtedly tragic, not only because of what happened to her, but because she refuses to be caged by what happened to her. The fantasy that a ‘good man‘ could save a “ruined woman” is offered to her again and again, and she refuses it head-on. She refuses to be redeemable on demand. She rejects the idea that salvation is the only acceptable ending, because it is not on her own terms.

The world has already written her off, and she is unwilling to submit to the authority of that social imagination. The only way left to exist without surrendering herself is to continue to exist as she is: unforgiven, unassimilated, abased. She would rather be condemned on her own terms than ‘rescued‘ into a life that requires her to accept the story society has imposed on her.

Yes, she is beautiful, but society hates a beautiful woman who knows she is beautiful. She holds power over men, but it is power they themselves have granted her, and she wields it using the very tools that were used to shame and ostracise her. She turns the mechanisms of possession back onto those who believe they are entitled to possess.

How impossible it is to exist as a woman in that world!

Nastasya also exposes the thin line women are forced to walk: between being desirable and being respectable, and being compelled to choose which side to fall on. She is nasty (can’t have Nastasya without ‘nasty’): hysterical, reactive, performative, dramatic, self-wounding. She deliberately embodies what is most traditionally associated with a “female psyche” at its worst. But she does this as an act of resistance against systems of humiliation and ownership. Nastasya is desired, pursued, rescued, but all the while these roles which are made available to her are painfully limited. She can become the repentant fallen woman, the grateful saved woman, the newly respectable woman who lives quietly ever after. But she refuses to be neatly redeemed. She refuses the violence done in the name of rescue, of love.

And Antigone refuses to submit to the violence done in the name of law: the state, politics, order.

Antigone defies the idea that the public sphere belongs to men. Her insistence on a law devoted to kinship and the divine is treated as unnatural, irrational, disruptive. She violates not only Creon’s decree, but the underlying assumption of practicality as political virtue. She rejects the framework altogether.

Where Antigone differs is in the source of her motivation: an uncompromising moral clarity that burns brightly, and burns her with it. She speaks in public, she argues with power. She places an older, more intimate law against the state’s law. And she does it in Thebes: the mythic birthplace of political order. Antigone is not merely disobedient, she forces a confrontation with the very foundations of authority. Her conscience becomes the highest form of law even at the price of her own death.

Defiant women in literature often pay dearly for defiance with madness or with death. Think Anna Karenina, Blanche DuBois, Jen Yu. Their refusal is reframed as pathology and their agency is reclassified as self-destruction.

Both Nastasya and Antigone refuse what is ‘practical’ and their actions are interpreted as self-annihilating. Nastasya refuses to believe her inner life is a problem to be solved. Antigone asserts herself in a space that is declared not to belong to her.

Both women die in the end, lost to the world that punishes them. In one sense they ‘lose’ but they win in a more important way: by refusing to be domesticated by interpretation, by remaining alive in the imagination of readers.

Neither woman allows herself to be fully decoded, understood, or saved within a world of rationality that insists women must be legible to be tolerated. They stand as affronts to tradition. They demand to be seen not as symbols or representations, but as autonomous moral subjects.

How impossible it is to exist as a woman in this world.

And how telling that the women who refuse the cage, who refuse to be made coherent, containable, redeemable, are the ones who endure.