Three Sisters Lesson Plan

Discuss Masha's intense self-awareness, and how this enriches her as a character.

Masha is a fascinatingly complex character, because she is perhaps the most self-aware person in the play. She pursues her affair with Vershinin almost self-destructively, yet she maintains an honesty in her emotions that the other characters sometimes lack. She knows the price of each of her actions, and she outlines them plainly to Chebutykin in the final act of the play when she says, "When you take your happiness in snatches, in bits and pieces, and lose it, as I'm about to, you gradually turn hard and malicious." Masha is mean and bitter in many ways, but she knows exactly why, which...