Saleem BS: Question no 1 ...

CHARACTERS MAURICE BENDRIX

Maurice Bendrix is the story's narrator. He is an unreliable narrator and a selfish, immature,
insensitive, and cynical man. He is a moderately successful writer who met Sarah Miles while
doing background research on her husband for a novel he wanted to write. As a writer, he has
a following, is somewhat well known, and makes a living at his craft, but he is unable to
become truly great in the eyes of critics because his work is too polished. His control over his
fiction mirrors the control he strives to have in his life. What he fails to understand, however,
is that people in his life are not characters he can create and manipulate at will. He finds this
lack of control frustrating and unfair.

Bendrix claims not to be impressed when he first meets Sarah. His physical imperfection—
one leg is shorter than the other—prompts him to reject people before they can reject him. He
almost always seeks to assert superiority over people because of his self-consciousness about
his leg. Sarah's beauty overwhelms him when they meet, stirring his insecurities, so he
conjures his superiority by trying to forget her. Eventually, they begin to see each other
romantically, and his shaky self-esteem takes the form of jealousy. Emotionally, Bendrix is
an extremist. He lacks the emotional maturity to feel anything moderately; he is either madly
in love with Sarah or he hates her passionately. The only topic about life to which he is
indifferent is religion.

Bendrix's arrogance is apparent throughout the novel. It is evident in his dealings with
people, and it is also apparent in his assumption that because God is his rival for Sarah's
affections, he can easily win her back. He believes that the tangible love he can offer will be
more appealing than abstract promises of salvation or redemption.

Henry Miles

Henry is Sarah's hapless husband. Bendrix originally wanted to research Henry's life as a civil
servant for a book he was writing, but the book was never finished. Henry is oblivious to his
wife's affair until Bendrix has her investigated by a private detective. When Henry figures out
that his wife and Bendrix were once involved with each other, his response is calm
disappointment. Upon Sarah's death, Henry calls Bendrix and the two become unlikely
friends. Henry is a pleasant, but introverted man who lacks the passions that color Bendrix.

Sarah Miles

Sarah is Henry's wife and Bendrix's lover. Her love relationship with Bendrix is complicated.
She is hesitant to talk of their love when he asks, yet she sometimes surprises him by saying
that she loves him deeply. While she seems to find in Bendrix what is missing in her marriage
with Henry, she is not open about it.

Sarah is a person of pleasure and selfishness until she has a traumatic experience during
which she vows to God that she will be virtuous if He will save Bendrix. While before this
experience she thought little of how her affair might hurt her husband, her bargain with God
forces her to look deep inside her morality. She emerges from her spiritual struggles a
stronger, more loving and virtuous woman. Not only does she refuse Bendrix's advances after
her vow, she also prays that he will be given the same spiritual peace she has found.

After attaining spiritual resolution, Sarah seeks to deepen her faith. She debates with a
rationalist man about the existence and nature of God, and she tells a priest that she wants to
become Catholic. Her personal growth is cut short, however, when she dies from pneumonia
after fleeing into bad weather to escape Bendrix. After her death, a series of miracles are
attributed to her, and she ascends to the level of saint in the eyes of those who knew her.
Critics have commented that Sarah's life story reads like that of a saint's life; she abandons a
life of mortal pleasures to devote herself to God, dies unjustly, and performs loving miracles
on Earth.

QNO 2 ...THEMES LOVE AND HATE

The opposing themes of love and hate run throughout The End of the Affair as Greene sets
them up to shed light on each other. Ultimately, he demonstrates that hate can be the
surprising precursor to love. At the same time, he depicts the cruel realities often associated
with love and hate. After all, Sarah chooses love (divine) and dies, but Bendrix chooses hate
(earthly) and is still alive at the end of the novel. The choices these characters make represent
the two kinds of love in the novel: divine love, which is selfless; and romantic love, which is
selfish and can easily turn to hate.

Bendrix knows only romantic love, and he knows it only for Sarah. After she ends their
relationship, he does not seek a new woman for his life. Instead, he alternates between love
and hate for her. When they are involved, he loves her, but when she stops seeing him, he
hates her. Then when he thinks he has a chance to win her back, he loves her again. When she
dies, he claims to love her, but his actions tell a different story. His love is so confused by
romantic selfishness that he ignores what he can infer about her burial wishes and insists that
she be cremated, which according to Catholic faith, would be unpleasing to the God who took
her from him.

Sarah, on the other hand, sacrifices romantic love for divine love. Although she began the
affair in pursuit of romantic love, even at the cost of her morality, she is surprised to find
herself giving it up to fulfill a desperate promise made to God.

Sacrificing the affair leads Sarah to the other kind of love presented in the novel, divine love.
After an intense spiritual struggle to truly give up her romance with Bendrix, she finds herself
at peace because she has accepted the love of God. She finds that this love renews her,
whereas her love for Bendrix was sinful and unhealthy. In fact, she concludes that her love
for Bendrix was merely a stop on the way to the divine love that awaited her. In her diary, she
writes:

Did I ever love Maurice as much before I loved you? Or was it You I really loved all the
time?… For he hated in me the things You hate. He was on Your side all the time without
knowing it. You willed our separation, but he willed it too. He worked for it with his anger
and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave so much love and I gave him
so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You.

CHERRY ORCHARD CHARACTER LIST BUY STUDY GUIDE MADAME

RANEVSKY

Madame Ranevsky is one of the leading characters in the play. She is the owner of the cherry
orchard estate, and she is a woman with a complicated history. She comes from an
aristocratic family, but she married beneath her, and her husband was an alcoholic. She had
three children with him before his death: Barbara, Anya, and Grisha. Grisha drowned shortly
after his father's death, causing Madame Ranevsky to flee in despair. Grisha died
approximately five years before Act I. Madame Ranevsky took a lover in Paris, and abusive
man who robbed her and took another mistress. She is returning to Russia after leaving him.

Madame Ranevsky has accumulated many debts upon her arrival in Russia, and cannot pay
the mortgage on her estate. Throughout the play, her debts are a symbol of her personality;
she is an excessive woman who does whatever her emotions incline her to do, regardless of
consequences, financial or otherwise. One moment she cries in panic and despair about how
to pay her mortgage, yet the next moment she gives her neighbor a healthy loan to pay his
own. Her behavior is irrational, and that characteristic is both her most charismatic quality
and her most serious weakness.

Of all of the characters in this play, Madame Ranevsky is among those with no capacity to
adapt to a changing society. She continues to be generous with her friends, and even with
strangers, living the life of a kind and wealthy aristocrat, even though the power of the
aristocracy no longer ensures her any wealth, and the few assets that she has are dwindling
quickly. She tells herself that she can control her purse and abandon her horrible lover, yet
she cannot keep even these most fundamental of resolutions. Even after losing the cherry
orchard, Madame Ranevsky remains sadly unable to change: she continues to surround
herself with expensive and suspicious help, such as Yasha, and she rejoins her lover in Paris,
despite his abusive history.

Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin

Lopakhin is the other lead character in The Cherry Orchard. He is a neighbor of Madame
Ranevsky, perhaps in his thirties, unmarried. His father and grandfather were serfs on the
cherry orchard estate all of their lives. Although he was born into a family of serfs, Lopakhin
has managed to use the Liberation of the serfs to his full advantage and is now a wealthy
landowner and a shrewd businessman.

The change in class Lopakhin has experienced during his lifetime is amazing; at the end of
the pay, he is not only a wealthy man, but he is the owner of the estate where he was born a
serf. Lopakhin is a symbolic character in that he epitomizes the success possible for the
newly freed serfs. However, while his bank account makes him more powerful than the
aristocratic former owners of the estate, he is an interesting specimen because he still has
qualities that betray his modest beginnings. He is well dressed and respected, yet he is not
literary or cultured; both his preposterous misquotings of Hamlet and his poor penmanship
embarrass him.

Lopakhin's talent for business distinguishes him from the other characters; this attribute is
both his best and worst quality. His preoccupation with money and success are his trademark.
On the one hand, his savvy allows him great personal success with finances; he has
completely overcome the poverty he was born into. On the other hand, as Barbara points out,
he is almost too preoccupied with business to enjoy important aspects of humanity, such as
love and friendship. In some sense, his appetite for business opportunities leads him to betray
Madame Ranevsky, his first benefactor, by buying and cutting down her cherry orchard.
Lopakhin is a complicated character, and he can be portrayed as a villain, a hero, or
something in between the two. The ambiguity in his character is precisely what makes him,
and all the other characters in the play, so mesmerizing to the audience.

SHOW QUOTED TEXT

[09/07, 06:44] Saleem BS: Q no 1 Symbolism in The Cherry Orchard

The play is rich with various symbols, images to intensify the meanings the play is
conveying. The Cherry Orchard is a microcosm which represents entire Russian society. The
orchard is very beautiful because each tree represents the soul of a serf.

Cherry orchard is a symbol of something that belongs to the past. It means it is the symbol of
mobility, feudal society, aesthetic sensibility, sublime beauty, but is tragically ends with the
change in the society. The cherry orchard is something that is interpreted by the various
characters and reacted to in a ways that indicate how these characters feel about what the
orchard represents: which is some aspect of memory. Ranevskaya thinks she sees her dead
mother walking through the orchard. For her, the orchard is a personal symbol of her peaceful
childhood. Trofimov, on the other hand, sees in the orchard the faces of the serfs who lived
and died in slavery on Ranevskaya's estate; for him, the orchard stands for the memory of
their suffering. For Lopakhin, the orchard is intimately tied to his personal memories of a
brutal childhood, as well as presenting an obstacle to the prosperity of both himself and
Ranevskaya.

Symbolically, the selling of cherry orchard shows that the old order must give the way to the
new. Students like Trofimov logically supports to the slave. Here, Trofimov symbolizes the
utopian world where as Ranevskaya and Lopakhin represent, respectively aristocrats (past)
and bourgeois (present).

There are other minor symbols that support the theme of the play. The setting sun, tombstone,
long abandoned little chapel and sad sound of the guitar symbolize the decadence of
aristocracy, change of Russian class system. The furnished room/ house of 1st act changes
into an empty room, having no curtain in the window and no painting on the wall in the last
act (IV), cutting down cherry orchard in the final act are also symbols of decline of
aristocracy.

The play has symbolic ending. The family has left for Paris. Firs, 84 years old man is lying
on the sofa. His motionless symbolizes the death of the aristocracy. The stage is empty. The
sound of a door while being locked is heard. The sound of cutting of trees is overheard.
Similarly, we see the crying of snap strings mournfully dying. All these sad notes
symbolically stand for the phasing out of aristocracy.

2 ....SNAPPED STRING

The snapped string symbolizes loss. This mournful sound first appears in Act 2 as Gayev
comments on the permanence of nature. Firs comments that the sound was present when the
serfs gained their freedom. After Firs speaks the final words of the play, the snapped string is
heard again as the sound of axes chopping echoes in the cherry orchard. This sad sound
represents change and underscores the replacement of the feudal past with the commercial
present.

This symbol is unique in that it appears as a sound rather than as an object or as part of
dialogue. lts sensory nature contrasts with the cherry orchard, which is referenced but never
visualized on stage. The auditory strength of the sound easily overtakes the fading, off-stage
presence of the cherry orchard.

QNO 2 ... THEMES IN THE CHERRY ORCHARD ?

ROMANCE AND LOVE IN THE CHERRY ORCHARD

The play also does have the theme of love. We know that different characters fall in love with
one another. Being a widow, Lady Ranevskaya was living in Paris with man whom she seems
to be in love.

ANTON CHEKHOV(1860-1904)

But her relation with him does not turn out to be fruitful. We also know that Lopakhin falls in
love with Varya, adopted daughter of Lady Ranevskaya, but due to the business mentality,
the love between them does not end in marriage. He is half -hearted man. Perhaps he does not
want to marry anyone who is aristocracy only in name.

Similarly, Yasha and Dunyasha are not brought together by the end of the play. Anya and
Trofimov also face same destiny of not having love/marriage: None of the relationship ends
with marriage. So the play carries the theme of unsuccessful love affairs. All the people who
are in love affairs belong to Ranevskaya's family in some sense. As the family suffers from
economic crisis and downfall, the relations among the lovers also suffer. Perhaps, the
playwright wants to show that economic status is to be strengthened in order to success in
social and human relationship .
2 .... THE STRUGGLE OVER MEMORY

In The Cherry Orchard, memory is seen both as source of personal identity and as a burden
preventing the attainment of happiness. Each character is involved in a struggle to remember,
but more importantly in a

struggle to forget, certain aspects of their past. Ranevsky wants to seek refuge in the past
from the despair of her present life; she wants to remember the past and forget the present.
But the estate itself contains awful memories of the death of her son, memories she is
reminded of as soon as she arrives and sees Trofimov, her son's tutor. For Lopakhin,
memories are oppressive, for they are memories of a brutal, uncultured peasant upbringing.
They conflict with his identity as a well-heeled businessman that he tries to cultivate with his
fancy clothes and his allusions to Shakespeare, so they are a source of self-doubt and
confusion; it is these memories that he wishes to forget. Trofimov is concerned more with
Russia's historical memory of its past, a past which he views as oppressive and needing an
explicit renunciation if Russia is to move forward. He elucidates this view in a series of
speeches at the end of Act Two. What Trofimov wishes Russia to forget are the beautiful and
redeeming aspects of that past. Firs, finally, lives solely in memory-most of his speeches in
the play relate to what life was like before the serfs were freed, telling of the recipe for
making cherryjam, which now even he can't remember. At the end of the play, he is literally
forgotten by the other characters, symbolizing the "forgotten" era with which he is so strongly
associated.

3...LNEVITABILITY OF CHANGE

The major theme is the inevitability of change. Because Of her financial situation as a widow,
Lyobov cannot save the cherry orchard, her childhood home. Ironically, when the estate is
auctioned, it is purchased by Lopahin. He used to be a slave at the orchard, but after he won
his freedom, he became a successful merchant, who could afford to purchase the estate.
Symbolically, the sale of the cherry orchard shows that the old order must give way to the
new.