The "The Lady with the Dog" is Chekhov's short story about the love affair between two married people. The main character of the story is a middle age man who is married with two children already. Due to his unsatisfactory marriage, he started to have extra-marital affairs with different women. But he never finds true love until he meets the lady with a little dog. The entire story seems like a love story, but it also reveals a man who is trying to find his happiness and freedom in the society he lived in. Through the story, author Chekhov shows us that sometime the moral standards will stand in our way toward freedom and happiness we desire. It also shows us that sometimes our freedom and happiness is restricted by the society we live in. In the story Chekhov describes the main character of the story as a victim of the society.
The main character of the story is a middle age man called Gurov. His freedom was restricted earlier in his life. He was talked into marriage when he was "still a second-year student" in college. This clearly shows that he wasn't ready to get married. As a reader, you can feel that he was being forced to get married. There were not too many choices for him. Later we learned that this marriage is not a successful at all. Gurov is forced to spend his life with a woman, which he does not love. .
In the story, he describes his wife to be "narrow minded and graceless." This really shows that the marriage didn't bring any happiness to Gurov's life. Instead, the marriage is like a birdcage, which locks Gurov inside, and takes away all the freedom he had. The loss of freedom makes Gurov unable to live the life he wanted. The unhappy marriage also creates a further restriction on Gurov's life, since he already had a child with his wife. This means that even though he feels extremely unsatisfied with his marriage, he still can't just leave the family; therefore the child also becomes one of the barriers that keep Gurov from pursuing his freedom and happiness.