Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova

Who She Is

Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova is the officer's widow who married Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov in tears, wringing her hands, because no relative would take her in, and who lives with her three small children in a passage room of a noisy boarding house, consumptive and haughty, and is the stepmother of Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova.

What she wants is to be recognized for what she says she was, a daughter raised in a colonel's house, and to secure for her children the place that poverty took from them: opening a boarding school for noble girls in her home town is the plan she repeats to anyone who will listen.

What she fears is insult, which she feels as mortal when it falls on her children, her husband or Sonia, and not poverty itself.

What she knows, and says without thinking when a scene grows tense, is what Sonia has done for the household; what deceives her is the audience she expects, the guests who do not come, the general who will not see her, the curious onlookers in the street who do not recognize in her children the orphans of a nobleman.

She collapses in the street, blood on her chest, and dies in Sonia's room, after being thrown out of the house where she buried her husband.

Trajectory

In chapter II of Part One she is still only her husband's account, the officer's widow with three children who married him with no other choice, and then the woman who drags him by the hair in the passage room while the children tremble in a corner and she sends the stranger away, thinking he drank with her husband.

In chapter VII of Part Two she had been pacing from one side of the room to the other, telling her daughter Polenka about the rich days of her childhood, and on seeing her husband bloodied on the sofa she runs to him, undoes his clothes and acts without losing her head. She drives out the lodgers with shouts, quarrels with the landlady Amalia Ludwigovna, who wants to send the injured man to the hospital, tells her husband to be quiet when he tries to ask her forgiveness, knowing what he means to say, and on seeing the dead man asks what she will bury him with and what she will feed the children with the next day.

In chapter III of Part Three Raskolnikov tells his mother and sister that he gave her all the money he had received, for the burial; in chapter IV of Part Three she sends Sonia to invite him to the funeral and the memorial meal. In chapter IV of Part Four it is Sonia who defends her to Raskolnikov, with ardor: she is like a child, she has lost her reason from grief, she is just, and Sonia tells of her stepmother's day, how she washed, cleaned and dragged the tub alone, and of the time when she herself, Sonia, wounded her by refusing her some collars.

In chapter I of Part Five Luzhin provokes Lebezyatnikov with the beating he gave her. In chapter II of Part Five she spends about ten of Raskolnikov's twenty-odd rubles on funeral rites that no one asked of her, and the narrator offers several possible reasons:

Of the guests she wanted to impress, no one comes, not even Luzhin, whom she had praised enormously the day before; the ones who sit down are drunkards, wretched civil servants, a Pole from the boarding house and two others whom no one knew, and she decides to receive them with haughtiness. The narrator marks what keeps her standing:

Raskolnikov arrives as they return from the cemetery and is welcomed as the only educated guest; she tells him about the boarding school, displays her husband's certificate of commendation and promises Sonia a place as an assistant. When Sonia relays Luzhin's apologies, dressed up to calm her, she keeps quiet about what she knows, because the offense done to her would weigh on Katerina more than a personal offense:

A remark from Amalia turns into an exchange of insults, then a dispute over genealogies, the colonel father against the father who was a burgomaster of Berlin, and ends with Katerina flinging herself at the landlady to tear off her cap. In chapter III of Part Five she runs to Luzhin begging protection against Amalia, and he denies ever having known her father. When she understands that he is accusing Sonia of theft, she throws in his face the ten rubles he had refused, demands that her stepdaughter be searched and turns out Sonia's pockets herself, from which the hundred-ruble note falls. Even so, she defends her stepdaughter against the evidence she has just seen:

With Luzhin exposed, Amalia blames her for the glass that a drunk threw at him and throws her out; Katerina, who on the same day buried her husband and saw her stepdaughter accused, goes out into the street in a green shawl in search of justice.

In chapter V of Part Five she has already gone mad. She tried in vain to see a general on her husband's behalf, says she threw an inkwell at him, and now takes her children, dressed up in costume, to the edge of the canal to teach them to sing and dance before onlookers, convinced that everyone will recognize in them the orphans of a nobleman; she refuses the pleas of Sonia and Raskolnikov. A decorated civil servant gives her three rubles, a policeman tells her to move along, the frightened boys run off, and she runs after them, stumbles and falls: the blood that covers the ground comes from her chest. Carried to Sonia's room, between delirium and lucidity, she refuses the priest they suggest:

Her last cry, in which she speaks of herself as of the exhausted horse, closes the scene:

In the same chapter, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov tells Raskolnikov that he will pay for the funeral and place the three children in institutions. In chapter I of Part Six he takes care of the burial and the orphans are already placed, and her presence in the book ends there.

Themes Embodied

Katerina is the demonstration, in flesh and blood, of what the narrator says in explaining the spending on the funeral rites: pride is not a privilege of those who can afford it, it visits the poorest and most downtrodden and turns in them into an irrepressible need. That is why the theme Pride is not reserved for the protagonist: Raskolnikov's rests on a theory, hers on an origin, and both seek an audience, he the square, she the edge of the canal.

Her second service is to take the measure of the money Raskolnikov gives on impulse and regrets on the stairs. That money pays for the burial, but it also pays for the reception at which she must prove the family's dignity, and the day ends in expulsion. The book does not censure his gesture; it shows that a gift without accounting does not choose the destiny the giver imagines.

The scene of her death repeats the image of the dream of the mare: the woman who spent her life fighting for her standing ends by calling herself an exhausted beast of burden. The text supports two readings, and neither is comfortable: dignity that refuses to disappear to the end, or a delirium that has already taken her judgment. What tips the balance toward the first is that, at the moment the note falls from Sonia's pocket, it is Katerina who tells the whole house the truth about the yellow ticket, she who lives by pretending to nobility.

Relationships

• Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov: the husband whom she does not let ask forgiveness, and whose burial is what she defends with pride.
• Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova: the stepdaughter who describes her to Raskolnikov as a child who lost her reason from grief, and whom she defends like someone who knows what the girl did for the household.
• Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov: the one who gives her the burial money and the one who sees her die, and whom she welcomes as the only educated guest.
• Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin: the guest she had praised the day before, to whom she runs begging protection against Amalia before understanding that he is accusing her stepdaughter.
• Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov: the one who pays for the burial and places the orphans in institutions.