Konstruksi “Keluarga Bahagia”: Pernikahan Patriarkal dan Penyangkalan Subjektivitas Perempuan dalam Karya Leo Tolstoy

Abstract

Through a feminist existentialist reading of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Semeinoe schast’e (Family Happiness, 1859), this article examines how the institution of marriage is represented as a mechanism that consolidates gender ideology in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s concepts of immanence–transcendence and otherness, the study analyzes the female protagonist’s lived experience within marital relations that are constructed as a domestic and moral space, as well as a normative horizon of happiness. The analysis shows that Tolstoy reproduces patriarchal ideology through four main narrative patterns: unequal spousal relations, the monsterization of the female character, a cycle of transgression–punishment–repentance, and the triumph of male values and perspectives at the end of the story. In this novel, family happiness becomes possible only through women’s subordination and the denial of their subjectivity and transcendental potential. This article argues that Family Happiness does not merely represent nineteenth-century Russian social norms but operates as a narrative device that tends to normalize and sustain patriarchal marriage; this claim is demonstrated through a mapping of the narrative patterns presented in the analysis section.