In Act three, of Uncle Vanya, the characters begin to express their feelings and some of them loose control. The romances within the house flourish and as the situation develops, the tension increases between all of them. At the end of the act, there is a huge crisis in the house and most of the characters have a meltdown.
At the beginning of the act, Sonya confesses to Elena that she is deeply in love with the doctor. Elena promises that she will ask the doctor if he feels the same way. When they plan all of this, Elena tells her that it is better to find out the truth than to be uncertain, and Sonya answers in the following way, “No, uncertainty is better... at least there is hope...” (199) In this quote, it is obvious how desperate this young women is to have be loved back and to be married. She lacks a lot of self confidence and she feels that she couldn’t be uglier. She knows she is ugly, but when people such as Elena tell her that she has nice hair, she responds in the following way, “When a women is not beautiful they always say: ‘You have beautiful hair, you have beautiful eyes..’.” This shows how she has no appreciation for herself, and therefore she is so desperate in finding someone that will be “merciful” enough to be with her. In a way, Sonya is very similar to Uncle Vanya as she feels worthless and depressed. She hates her life because she finds no love, and for her, that is the worst thing that can happen to anyone. Her state of depending on other to be happy is the same as the one of Uncle Vanya, who depends on the rest of his family, and especially the doctor and the decision he takes on the future of the country house. As I continued to read, I realized that each one of the characters in this play depend on another person. Elena depends completely on the professor, the Doctor on Elena and off course the professor, the nurse on the professor and on the family, Maria on Vanya, and so on. At the end of the day, it seems that they all depend on Vanya because he is the one that decides what to do with the house, not only because he is Sonya’s uncle and therefore the elder that has to decide, but because he is so crazy at the end of the scene, that everyone is scared of what he might do, and therefore they will follow his instructions.
After reading further into the play, I realized that throughout the text there are various comments that refer to the boredom and lack of interest that the members of the family feel towards the life in the countryside. The professor is one of them, and he says the following on the third act, “One can reconcile oneself to ill health, but what I can not endure is this regimen of country life. I feel as if I had fallen off the earth and landed on another planet.”(205) The direct and indirect comments that most of the characters of the play make against their rural life’s seems to be constant. They hate it, but at the same time they can’t escape it. What is the author trying to teach us about the countryside? Is Chekhov trying to show us that people from rural areas depend on their land but at the same time are attached to it? The doctor said he wanted to live in the city because he was tired of his present life, but that he couldn’t do it because the expenses would not be covered by the production of their land. When he proposed to sell it, Vanya refused to accept as he was attached to it due to all of the years of hard work he had invested in those crops and that house. One of the messages that this play attempts to convey is that the rural life is very hard and it slaves the people that were born inside it. Almost all of the members of Uncle Vanya’s household are desperate living in the country and they want to go away to the city. This migration of these people is a perfect example of the discontent with that type of life, and it is evident that the urbanizations in many nations have been constructed and organized due to this kind of movements.
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