Dolly and her acceptance

[captormoonlu]

Does Dolly ever admit to the fact that Stiva is constantly having affairs even after their reconcilation in the first act?

[Gladys]

Adulterous Anna and Vronsky's lives are ruined: Anna dead, Vronsky hoping to die in battle. Ongoing adultery is turning Stiva and Dolly's relationship to stone. Old Karenin is a victim of marital coldness. Nikolai is a victim of elicit relationships outside of marriage; Varenka and Koznishev, of marriage opportunity lost.

At the end, only the lives of the Russian peasants, faithful Levin, and perhaps Kitty, are really worth living.

Dolly’s end, saddled with Stiva, is sad.

[Dark Muse]

I was a bit irritated that they just kind of let that go, and you never really found out if Dolly knew he kept doing it, and she just stayed with him the whole time. I kept hoping and waiting for her to discover the seceret and have a blow out with him

[Gladys]

Perhaps Dolly leaving Stiva is too culturally courageous for Dolly, or most married women, to undertake in those moralistic times. It's asking too much of her. I sure many wives stuck by far more objectionable husbands than gentle Stiva.

[Dark Muse]

But in the beginning she she was considering leaving him, at least she was making him misserable by refusing him, but than she let Anna talk her into a complete reconciliation with him.

It did not seem Dolly was really worrying that much about society in her struggle as to what to do, but unlike Anna, she showed more concern over the posistion of her childern in her discision of what should be done.

[Gladys]

A distraught Dolly did consider leaving Stiva but, with children and all, life would be hard. Later, Karenin spells out graphically the difficulties of divorce in Russia.

If Dolly wasn't worrying much about society in her struggle as to what to do, what then was the nature of her concern over the position of her children?

[Dark Muse]

I think a part of her did not want to take the childern from thier father, for thier own sakes, but I do not think she was worried about how other people would view her for what she was doing.

She was conerned with the overall happiness and well being of the children

[Gladys]

Isn't Dolly something of a muddle-head: a pedestrian housewife focused on the mundane? She lacks the depth, passion, integrity, humour and sensibility of her angelic sister-in-law Anna, who resolves for a time the marital unrest.

Yet how great is Anna's fall! Rather too great for my sensibility.

[Bellamira]

If we think of the theme – reasoning versus living – that permeates the last chapters of the book, Anna's life and Levin's enlightenment, I think a great deal of light is shed on each of the book's main characters, including Dolly’s situation.
Levin is the primary canvas on which this idea is painted. He tries throughout the novel to use reason and intellect to bound and guide his life. Yet he is constantly losing rational arguments and getting turned around in intellectual conversations with his brother, friends, and acquaintances. His constant “thinking” and reasoning lead him to become suicidal in thought and attitude. But at the end of the novel, thanks to his conversation with a peasant, he realizes that reason cannot guide one’s life, because the way in which we live – being good – is irrational. He accepts a peasant’s view of life, that is, to simply live.
Anna, at the end of her life, riding in a carriage towards the train station, becomes enamored with a sudden idea or reason as the guiding force of life. A random woman on the train in Anna’s final chapter says, "That's what reason is given man for, to escape from what worries him." And Anna, who has this whole time been riding around, turning a “shining light” on those whom she sees, judging them, guessing at and being disgusted by their lives, thinks, “Why not put out the light when there's nothing more to look at, when it's sickening to look at it all?” Reason is given her to escape. Her reasoning points unwaveringly towards death. And so, she dies.
For the question of Dolly, Dolly is like one of the peasants on Levin’s land. She is merely living. She doesn’t have the time to think or to be engaged in reason and intellect. She is simply a mother and a housewife. This isn’t to say that she doesn’t dream of more, that she doesn’t desire love, intellectual company, fidelity, and beauty (which she does and has desired throughout the novel). She performs her duty to her children, sacrificing her desires for them.
Should she leave Stiva? In this way, we see Dolly and Anna contrasted. Anna leaves Karenin because she has found true passion and love in Vrosnky and this above all is what she desires. The love of and for her son she sacrifices to be with a man for passion. Symbolically she will have no more children. She has sacrificed motherhood for marital love. Dolly, on the other hand, does not seek out passionate love because she has maternal love. Frustrating, humiliating, and crippling though it is, that is the love that she chooses. Consequentially, she has many children, but a loveless, broken marriage. Each woman is forced to sacrifice one type or love for the other. How can we say that either of them is wrong?

[Gladys]

If we think of the theme – reasoning versus living – that permeates the last chapters of the book, Anna's life and Levin's enlightenment, I think a great deal of light is shed on each of the book's main characters, including Dolly’s situation.

Reasoning versus living is a most interesting perspective.

[kelby_lake]

I'd possibly pick out the theme of endurance. Anna is not willing to endure and so she becomes the victim of her own passion: she cannot endure her affair with Vronsky either. Levin and Kitty have to endure things in their marriage but they are rewarded by their endurance. Dolly endures her marriage and whilst she may not be happy, she's not devestatingly unhappy. Dolly and Oblonsky's marriage shows the flaws of endurance- Dolly simply has to put up with Oblonsky's behaviour. His love for her may endure but Oblonsky will never change his ways.