Abstract:
"Happy families are all alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." These
famous opening sentences of Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece novel Anna Karenina serve as an axis
around which the rest of the novel's plot, characters, and motifs all revolve. The book delves into
themes of adultery, society, art, philosophy, and even agriculture, but all these subordinate
conversations circle back to the questions posited by the novel's first lines: what are happy
families and unhappy families, and how do these families relate to each other? My thesis, part
creative project and part analytical project, seeks to speak back against Tolstoy’s idea of the
monolithic happy family by offering a queer, postmodern retelling of Anna Karenina where
environmental degradation affects families’ fertility and where Anna and Vronsky are two
women who must navigate their way through the complex and often painful societal expectations
of rural Indiana.
