Reflection- "The Darling"

For this reflection, we were supposed to read "The Darling" by Anton Chekhov.  The story starts out by talking about a young girl named Olenka.  All the people around her say that she is "such a darling" (Glencoe Literature) because of how pretty she is.  She fell in love with a man named Snookin (not to be confused with Jersey Shore's Snooki), a man who owns a theatre and gets very upset when it rains because it is ruining his business.  I felt kind of bad for Snookin at this point because it rained on their wedding day and wedding night.  How can you enjoy the best day of your life when you hate rain so much! They seem to be living happily, until one day before Easter Olenka received a telegram that her husband had died (Glencoe Literature).  Olenka was extremely sad and mourned for three months until another man came along.  He was in the lumber or timber business, and Olenka took on the role of being in the timber business as if she had never been married before (Glencoe Literature).  When her friends would suggest that she should go to the theater because she and her husband were always working, she replied by saying "Me and Vasya have no time for theaters...we are working folk, we can't be bothered with trifles" (Glencoe Literature).  Olenka, so far in the story, seems like the type of woman who does exactly what her boyfriend or husband tells her what to do.  What happened to being your own person, girl?!  Pretty soon, her second husband is dead and she already has another one within a few months.  Again, she conformed to his life as if she had lived it her whole entire life (Glencoe Literature).  As of right now, I am not really sure how "The Darling" can relate to the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau.  It may be because she was so dependent on her husbands, and Emerson and Thoreau felt very strongly about living independently.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey D., Douglas Fisher, Beverly Ann. Chin, and Jacqueline Jones. Royster. Glencoe Literature. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.