Joyce Carol Oates--"The Lady with the Pet Dog"

I've never been all that drawn to Joyce Carol Oates, but the vagaries and vicissitudes of life--and the shortcomings of a textbook--have forced me into reading some of her work that I would have happily left untouched. Still, even in the least pleasant reading there is typically something to learn. If you want delve into Oates' short fiction, you could do worse than with High Lonesome.
"The Lady with the Pet Dog," although a tale of adultery justified, holds some interest for the Christian reader. Far from the many tales of adultery punished, including films like Unfaithful or Fatal Attraction, Oates relates the story of a wife who, for apparently no real reason, opts to engage in an illicit tryst and then, after breaking it off once, to resume it. In the story's end, Anna, the only named character among the key three, feels, "joyfully . . . a miraculous calm." She "discovers" or rationalizes to herself that this man, despite her marriage to another man and her lover's marriage to another woman, "was her husband truly--they were truly married, here in this room--they had been married haphazardly and accidentally for a long time."
Anna, like the protagonist of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, has no significant complaint about her marriage. She cannot point to abuse or lack of support or infidelity on the part of her husband. Granted, the husband is not painted by Oates in a particularly flattering manner, but the reader is left to wonder whether his greatest fault is his lack sensitivity or his declining physical appearance. The husband's insensitivity is evidenced while they're making love: "her husband was impatient. He was apart from her, working on her, operating on her; and then, stricken, he whispered, 'Did I hurt you?'" While nobody wants this guy as their Valentine, this sort of callousness is hardly a hanging offense. Couple that fact with Anna's reaction during the same act. "He made love to her and she was back in the auditorium again" seeing her lover. Might the fault for her husband's detachment lie in both of their hearts and minds?
The glorious faux "marriage" that Anna celebrates as the story closes is, of course, no marriage at all. It is a series of liaisons, experienced furtively in a different hotel room each week. This relationship, experienced in darkness, evokes the teachings in 1 John 1:5-10. This is not marriage. The shame that Anna mentions several times during the story should be a real shame, but she manages, at the story's conclusion, to smooth it over, to decide that her shame should not be shame at all, but this is something that she can do only by playing semantic games, deciding that her husband is no real husband at all and that her affair is somehow a real marriage, playing the sort of games that Paul decries in Romans 1:25.
Of course, Oates would not have seen things in this light. She seems to admire the development Anna achieves by the story's close. However, her re-identification of evil as good is no more convincing or authoritative than is Anna's.