Natasha Rostova

Natasha Rostova is the wife and mother in the idealized marriage Beauvoir examines through the epilogue of War and Peace. Once a coquettish, romantic young woman, she gives up her interest in appearance, society, and pastimes after marrying Pierre Bezukhov and devotes herself to her husband and children. The apparent harmony of their household is also the source of Beauvoir’s criticism: its happiness rests on Natasha’s self-effacement and on a model of marriage in which her fulfillment depends on a husband whose love and authority she must continually accommodate.

From romantic girl to matron

Beauvoir describes Natasha’s marriage as a striking change in her public and private identity. The girl remembered for her animation and social interests becomes, in Tolstoy’s portrait, a wife absorbed by the household. Her former pursuits recede as she directs her attention to Pierre and their children. The change is not presented simply as the discovery of an innate feminine nature. It is the outcome of a marital ideal that treats a woman’s devotion to domestic life as the proper form of her fulfillment.

Tolstoy’s description makes that transformation visible through a contrast between Natasha’s face and the person supposedly behind it. Her former vitality is no longer apparent; instead, she is seen as a strong, beautiful, fertile woman. Beauvoir quotes the passage to show what the ideal costs: Natasha’s value is made legible through her body and its capacity for maternity, while her independent inner life seems to disappear from view. The celebrated matron is therefore not just a portrait of contentment; it is also an image of a woman whose individuality has been eclipsed by her prescribed role.

The household as mutual devotion

Natasha demands from Pierre an exclusive love matching the devotion she offers him, and she is jealous of him. Pierre, in turn, gives up clubs, dinners, old friends, and long absences except when business requires them. Natasha also seeks to govern his intellectual pursuits, though she does not understand them, because she considers them important. Their sacrifices make the couple appear reciprocal: neither lives as before, and both redirect their lives toward the family.

That reciprocity, however, is not quite equality. Pierre’s restrictions are described as a form of subjection, but the household is governed by his wishes, even when Natasha has to infer them. At home she places herself in the position of his slave, trying to anticipate what he wants. The paradox is central to Beauvoir’s account: Pierre may be said to be under his wife’s influence, yet the domestic order still takes his wishes as its measure. Natasha’s labor consists not only in caring for the household but also in reading and serving a husband whose authority remains the organizing principle.

The marriage nevertheless brings Natasha real happiness as Tolstoy presents it. When Pierre has been away, she impatiently welcomes him home; the couple understand one another with few words. Surrounded by her children, home, and beloved and respected husband, she enjoys what Beauvoir describes as nearly untainted happiness. Beauvoir does not deny the emotional force of this picture. She asks instead what supports it, and whether an arrangement that feels harmonious while the husband reciprocates can remain secure if his feelings change.

The ideal under pressure

Beauvoir challenges the claim that Pierre and Natasha’s union is permanently protected by love. Tolstoy compares the couple to soul and body, but Beauvoir turns the comparison into a test: if Pierre ceased to love Natasha, what would become of their apparent unity? Natasha’s exclusive devotion and jealousy leave her exposed to the possibility that Pierre may be attracted to other women. Beauvoir lays out the consequences rather than treating fidelity as guaranteed: he might leave, devastating Natasha’s life; he might remain while lying and resenting her; or the pair might settle into compromises that make both unhappy.

Children cannot, in Beauvoir’s argument, automatically repair that insecurity. They are a source of joy within a balanced family, in which the husband remains one of its essential supports. For a neglected and jealous wife, they may instead become an ungrateful burden. Natasha’s maternity is therefore neither dismissed nor treated as an independent safeguard. Its meaning depends on the wider marriage and on whether the relation between the adults continues to sustain the household.

Beauvoir also objects to the intellectual submission built into the ideal. Tolstoy admires Natasha’s unquestioning devotion to Pierre’s ideas, but another ideal of male authority appears in D. H. Lawrence’s demand for women’s blind devotion. Since men’s claims and principles can contradict one another, a wife cannot simply echo whichever husband’s values she has been asked to worship. Natasha must be able to judge for herself. Beauvoir’s objection is not that spouses must think alike, but that a woman cannot receive her reasons for living ready-made from a man, or be required to accept principles she has not freely examined.

Beauvoir’s critique of the marriage myth

Natasha is not presented as a character whose full life beyond this marital portrait is traced in the evidence. She functions as the luminous example through which Beauvoir examines a familiar promise: that exclusive love, maternity, and a husband’s devotion can make a woman’s dependence appear complete and happy. The portrait’s appeal matters to the critique. Natasha and Pierre do understand one another; she takes pleasure in family life; and their apparent concord is not merely a disguise for immediate conflict. But its stability depends on Pierre’s continued love and on an arrangement that asks Natasha to subordinate her separate interests and judgment.

Beauvoir places this domestic ideal within her wider account of women’s social position. In her analysis, women’s history has been written by men, and the status assigned to women has repeatedly reflected men’s projects and needs rather than women’s interests. The ideal wife’s self-abandonment is thus not proof that women naturally find their entire purpose in marriage. It illustrates how social expectations can make dependence appear to be fulfillment, and how a woman’s security remains precarious when her economic and personal standing is bound to a husband.

The contrast with the Tolstoy marriage examined next sharpens the argument. Beauvoir sets the apparently harmonious Pierre-and-Natasha household against the conflict between Leo Tolstoy and Sophia Tolstoy, where devotion and family life do not produce shared happiness. The contrast does not erase Natasha’s joy; it exposes its conditions. Her marriage can seem like an idyll only so long as the husband’s love, authority, and presence continue to hold the domestic world together. For Beauvoir, that dependence is the decisive limit of the ideal.