Living a Lie in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Lady With The Dog

It is very difficult for someone to live a lie, pretending to be happy with the way things are when in all actuality they are not. Sometimes people feel helpless to change the things that are happening around them in their private lives so they seek a way out . These people often live secret lives, this is an escape route from the every day reality that they have grown to hate. In this paper I will attempt to illustrate how this hopeless reality has come to be a part of these character's lives, and what defense mechanisms the characters came up with in order to combat it.

In Chekov's "The Lady with the Dog", the main character whose name is Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov is extremely unhappy with the way his life has turned out so far . He was forced to marry a woman whom he did not love. Over time he began to be unfaithful to his wife, whom he described as being a tall woman with dark eyebrows, erect, dignified, and he mentioned that she looked almost twice as old as him. He lived in a time when proper gentleman of his social status were expected never to divorce their wives, and an even more unacceptable thing was to move out of your house leaving your wife and children behind. So it seemed as if he was left with no choice, and being unfaithful to his wife became a normal thing for Dmitry. He would leave town, meet women, have affairs, and would never be preoccupied with feelings of guilt or remorse.

He could have never told anyone about his affairs, because that would bring shame to him as a proper upper class gentleman. He had no choice but to carry out his actions in secret. He explained: "everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself, everything tha...

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...s definitely his major oppressor in the story, she stresses him out so much with little things, if he forgot to get something from the store she would make a big deal out of it. she said :

"where's the what's-its-name? She would ask . Don't tell me you forgot the what's-its-name."

In conclusion I would like to point out that reality was most definitely on the side of these characters, so in order to cope with it, both of these men were victims of fate. It might appear that although Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov and Walter Mitty lived in totally different places at different times in history with different rules of behavior, they were both unhappy men ; they attempted to somehow overcome the reality that they have come to hate . Even though they did it in different ways, both of these men would have been totally miserable if it wasn't for their secret lives.