The Prostitute In Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment, Notes from Undergr

The Prostitute In Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, and The Meek OneThe prostitute is a curious stronghold of Victorian era literature. In the works of William Thackeray and Samuel Richardson it was almost clich for the heroine to end up in a house of prostitution and then to transcend that circumstance in a show of proper Victorian morals. Having seen many a(prenominal) younker women forced by extreme poverty to take up the mickle of a loose woman, Fyodor Dostoevsky, a petit-bourgeois fall(a)en on hard clock himself, took a rather different approach to the whole issue he recognized that these women were not utterly without merit as so many people of the time thought. Georg Brandes spoke accurately when he said, Dostoevsky preaches the moral philosophy of the pariah, the morality of the slave. Dostoevsky explored these themes done prostitute characters in many of his works. The most famous of these characters argon found in Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, and The Meek One. Each of these presents a peculiar approach to the condition of prostitutes and the problem of their redemption. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky uses the character of Sonia Marmeladov, whose get-go name means wisdom, not solely to illustrate Gods mercy toward a fallen woman but to have her redeem both herself and Raskolnikov through Gods mercy. As in the parable given by Father Zosima on his death bed in The Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikovs initial connection to Sonia in arrest I functions as his stalk of grain which keeps him from being completely sever from Gods grace. Just as the old woman in the parable was without merit except for the fact she gave the beggar a stalk of grain, Raskolnikov lacks merit subsequently his murderous deed exce... ...uments of grace. But most importantly, he tells us that without our birth attempt to transcend our sinful nature we will fail equal the Underground Man or leap to our spiritual and physical crack of doom as the heroine of The Meek One did. We are all Raskolnikov, we are all Sonia. The key is to strive, strive harder and strive forever to reach the unreachable ne plus ultra lost to us and unreachable without God. Works Cited and ConsultedDostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Constance Garnett. naked York Bantam, 1981. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York Signet Classics, 1999. Dost. Research Station. Ed. Christiaan Stange. Vers. ? 17 July 1999 - kiosek.com/dostoevsky/quotations.html Martinsen, Deborah A., ed. Notes From Underground, The Double, and Other Stories. New York Barnes and Noble Classics NY, 2003.