Once in the «dark kingdom» of Kabanikhi, the kind and open heroine of the play by A.N. Ostrovsky’s «Thunderstorm» does not withstand pressure and refuses to live in an atmosphere of lies and hypocrisy. Is this situation relevant for young girls today and what solutions exist?
A young girl, protected from all evil, marries early, without growing up, without seeing life. A positive young creature, who was taught everything good, kind, bright, finds himself in an extremely hostile environment.
The well-known Kabanikha, who raised her son not in order to give him to his young wife, exterminates her rival in every possible way. The mother-in-law’s envy of youth and beauty, her jealousy and dominance make Katerina’s life unbearable.
Katerina does not know how and does not allow herself to respond with rage to violence and simply endures emotional pressure and beatings, sometimes going into defensive fantasizing — “Oh, why don’t people fly like birds?” She lacks adaptive mechanisms to adapt to a new, difficult situation.
The daughter of Kabanikh Varvara has such mechanisms: from childhood she adapted to maternal hypercontrol, she splits, saying one thing, feeling another, doing a third. And Katerina offers to save herself by the same splitting — to endure life in the family, but to have love on the side.
But for a young woman, this is not an option, she cannot live split and quickly confesses her «sin», her love for another man. She allows herself a rebellion, for which, unlike Barbara, she is not ready.
Her immature soul is unable to experience internal paradoxes and contradictions. The desire for freedom on the one hand and strict religious prohibitions on the other. Desperate longing for love — and the violence in which she is forced to live. Her psyche cannot resolve these contradictions.
All this, plus the inability to show aggression, defend oneself, influence events (which is a really difficult task next to a psychopathic mother-in-law, but there is also a husband), leads to the fact that aggression turns into auto-aggression, into an accomplished suicide.
In the impasse in which Katerina finds herself, she does not have the strength, support and opportunity to open another door.
Katherine today
Many young women today live in a similar situation: emotional pressure, physical abuse. Suppressed or not allowed to manifest aggression also turns against them, leading them to despair and self-punishment.
The simpler the picture of the world with which they grew up, their idea of what is good and what is bad, the less likely they are to grow up and gain spiritual maturity, and the more dangerous for them the situation of any impasse.
An undeveloped psyche does not have enough volume to consider any phenomenon from different angles. The absence of a mature self does not allow them to rely on themselves, to know themselves, which means they do not have the resource and motive to protect themselves.
Unfortunately, if a young woman does not begin to understand herself and the world, then the risk really increases that she will die, unable to get out of difficult and unfavorable life circumstances. But unlike the times in which Katerina lived, now there are psychologists, help groups and centers to help women get out of domestic violence.