{"id":612,"date":"2020-02-05T02:31:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T02:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/?p=612"},"modified":"2020-02-05T02:32:01","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T02:32:01","slug":"women-in-the-tsars-bride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/edowd\/women-in-the-tsars-bride\/","title":{"rendered":"Women in the Tsar&#8217;s Bride"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most striking things I noted about <em>The Tsar\u2019s Bride<\/em> was the treatment of the two women Liubasha and Martha, specifically the control men in power exert over them. \u00a0We learn in the beginning of the film that Liubasha, the boyar Grigory\u2019s mistress, was kidnapped from her family. \u00a0One of the other boyars brags that Liubasha addresses him as \u201cGodfather\u201d when he personally beat members of her family. \u00a0Striking, too, about this scenario is the fact that Liubasha appears to genuinely love Grigory despite her treatment at his hand. \u00a0The one instance that she has agency in the film is when she exchanges Grigory\u2019s love potion meant for Martha with a death potion instead. \u00a0However, as soon as this fact is discovered, Grigory instantly kills Liubasha, exerting the final act of control over her body. \u00a0The fact that her one independent act is evil and is immediately punished seems to indicate that women cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves; in contrast to the evil actions of many of them men in the film, her act is not that extreme, yet is treated as such. \u00a0Like Liubasha, Martha also has her own decisions superseded by those of men in power. \u00a0In her first substantive scene, she expresses her genuine love for the boyar Ivan whom she knew as a child. \u00a0However, the Tsar spots Martha from afar; soon thereafter, his oprichniki, identifiable by their \u201cblack clothes and hats\u201d and \u201cbrushes or brooms tied on the end of sticks,\u201d arrive to take her away to him (<em>A Foreigner Describes the Oprichnina of Tsar Ivan the Terrible<\/em>, 151-152). \u00a0Martha\u2019s agency is taken away a second time when Grigory puts his potion into her wine. \u00a0It does not make a difference that she does not consume the potion that he initially intended; either one would have resulted in a change of her mental state without her consent. \u00a0Unlike Liubasha, Martha never is able to assert herself against these men. \u00a0In her final decaying mental state, Martha is praised by Grigory as a \u201cmartyr\u201d. \u00a0This expression emphasizes the film\u2019s message that female passivity is morally superior to female independence. \u00a0The final shots of the movie pan from the bodies of the two women on the floor to the icons that look down on them from the ceiling. \u00a0Perhaps this image is meant to convey what God\u2019s punishments are for sin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most striking things I noted about The Tsar\u2019s Bride was the treatment of the two women Liubasha and Martha, specifically the control men in power exert over them. \u00a0We learn in the beginning of the film that Liubasha, the boyar Grigory\u2019s mistress, was kidnapped from her family. \u00a0One of the other boyars [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1020,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-3-autocracy-takes-hold"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1020"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}