Jane Austen's work being my only true frame of reference on this, I must first apologize for the outstanding amount of ignorance I'm about to engage in
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It's not ignorance so much as a lack of context ... we live in a deconstructionist age, or a "post-modern" age, so we tend to focus on "what the text brings to us" rather than the inheritance of a text - that is, what the author was thinking when he actually wrote the book.
In both Austen and Tolstoy, the general gist of the books is actually mocking those rituals you've stated; women had to indulge in leisure, the nobility had to play, society is decadent and bad, etc. If you consider the heroes (and heroines) of the novels, you'll notice they all have a tendency towards trying to be *more* active, more involved, more engaged. They were trying to break out of the prisons of decadence that social and family values had built around them.
Consider if you will the hero (anti-hero?) Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." Dostoevsky specifically sets him up as a creature of the upper middle class - he's a student, he indulges in the "European" ideals of the uberman above all morals, he has nothing *but* leisure. And in Dostoevsky's message, this is what leads to his downfall - Raskolnikov tries to convince himself that he is above the moral laws of man, and commits murder. Basically - bluntly - because he has too much time on his hands. His redemption comes at the hands of a "working girl" - not the semi-nobility of the idiot police chief or the drunkard father of Sonja.
This theme abounds in other words, especially in the works of the French Golden Age and the Russian Golden age; I wish I still had a copy of the paper I wrote that speculated that the petite-bourgeoisie authors of the Russian Age (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Lermontov) were direct antecedents to the New Soviet canon of literature, with the focus on the working man and nationalism rather than leisure and self-serving nobility.
In both Austen and Tolstoy, the general gist of the books is actually mocking those rituals you've stated; women had to indulge in leisure, the nobility had to play, society is decadent and bad, etc. If you consider the heroes (and heroines) of the novels, you'll notice they all have a tendency towards trying to be *more* active, more involved, more engaged. They were trying to break out of the prisons of decadence that social and family values had built around them.
Consider if you will the hero (anti-hero?) Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." Dostoevsky specifically sets him up as a creature of the upper middle class - he's a student, he indulges in the "European" ideals of the uberman above all morals, he has nothing *but* leisure. And in Dostoevsky's message, this is what leads to his downfall - Raskolnikov tries to convince himself that he is above the moral laws of man, and commits murder. Basically - bluntly - because he has too much time on his hands. His redemption comes at the hands of a "working girl" - not the semi-nobility of the idiot police chief or the drunkard father of Sonja.
This theme abounds in other words, especially in the works of the French Golden Age and the Russian Golden age; I wish I still had a copy of the paper I wrote that speculated that the petite-bourgeoisie authors of the Russian Age (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Lermontov) were direct antecedents to the New Soviet canon of literature, with the focus on the working man and nationalism rather than leisure and self-serving nobility.
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