Chekhov's Cherry Orchard and Trauma Essay

The Cherry Orchard Play By Anton. Chekhov

Ms. Ranyevskaya’s behavior in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is replete with sentimentality, distraction, and nostalgia. However, lurking beneath her obvious mistakes and foolish dreams is a serious trauma—i.e., the drowning death of her seven year old son and the loss of her husband—leaving her a motherless widow. It is the unexpected entrance of death into her life that could be used to explain or at least indicate the presence of psychological trauma in Ms. Ranyevskaya’s character. It is Anya who tells of these misfortunes: “Father died six years ago, and a month later our little brother, Grisha, drowned. Sweet boy, he was only seven. And Mama couldn’t face it, that’s why she went away, just went away and never looked back” (Chekhov 816). Thus, Ranyevskaya’s absence from the family estate the past half decade, her ill-pursued love affair, and her spendthrift ways are all indications of a reckless sort of behavior that is more akin to a soul trying to self-medicate away its problems by chasing after dreams, shadows, flights of fancy, and—then—when none of it works to fill the hole in the heart, returns to the past to take refuge in memories of a time when everything seemed whole and at peace. This is why the cherry trees of the estate represent so much to her—and why she refuses to do a deal with Lopakhin: he wants to eliminate the cherry orchard and install chalets for tourists. Cutting down the trees would be like cutting down Ms. Ranyevskaya’s hope that in nostalgia she can find the cure for her trauma. The reality is that she must face the facts: she cannot afford to keep the estate and the orchard will not bring back the dead.

Ms. Ranyevskaya’s inability to face reality and to cope with the past is evidenced in the way she cries upon returning to the family estate at the beginning of the play. Trofimov, the former tutor of how now dead son, identifies himself to Ranyevskaya and asks if she recognizes him—not having seen him in five years. She makes no response but only embraces him and cries. In her crying, however, she sobs for her lost child: “My Grisha…my little boy…Grisha…my son” (Chekhov 821). Varya attempts to console, but Ranyevskaya only weeps the more: “My little boy drowned, lost forever….Why? What for? My dear boy, why?” (Chekhov 821). Momentarily overcome with grief she forgets herself and the happy homecoming she envisioned is for a minute overshadowed by the loss she suffered. Though she does manage to shake off her emotional display of sorrow and proceed to inquire after Trofimov, the revelation has already occurred…

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…He lies back, has a scolding word for the young, and then is left seemingly to die on stage with the house and its memories. He is the trauma finally left behind in a sense.

In conclusion, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard does present the behavior of Ms. Ranyevskaya in such a way that the reader might see them as indicators of psychological trauma. The fact that she is introduced as a motherless widower who lost both a husband and a son within a month of one another immediately prepares the audience to be on the lookout for trauma. The trauma is then displayed when immediately she returns to her home for the first time in 5 years and bursts into tears at the first mention of her son Grisha, whose name likely has not been heard in all that time. She shows the signs of a woman who has never quite come to terms with his death, and her desire to escape into the past—the pleasant past—the cherry orchard of her youth—indicates that she is trying to avoid the pains that she has suffered. That is why she has been in Paris all this time, trying to find a new love, spending her money unwisely. Now, even her last remaining support is being taken away: she ends the play having to face reality and accept…