"she could not believe her ears, could not think of herself as a convict. But when she saw the calm businesslike faces of judges and jury, who took the sentence as a matter of course, she rebelled and cried aloud that she was innocent. But seeing that her scream, too, was taken as something natural, something to be expected that could not affect the case, she burst into tears, feeling that submission to the cruel and amazing injustice was all that remained to her."
This identity of not being a criminal, but being seen as a criminal, is going to be further developed and remain important throughout part one and I think how Maslova sees herself versus how others, particularly Nekhlyudov, both as a youth when he uses her as an object and later on in the novel, when he tries to make amends for what he has done, view her. And, since Tolstoy has developed how the jury believes they are doing something important and this is part of a natural and necessary process, her behavior in it is explained as expected and her next expected action is to accept the judgment. This is how Tolstoy develops the alienation that the court system creates between those that are judged and those doing the judging. It is also helps showcase the absurdity of the idea of necessity of the system and how it is seen as part of everyday life, as if humanity cannot live without it (much of Tolstoy's political writing works this way, taking institutions that many people see as essential or existing almost eternally and not only ridiculing them, but alienating the audience from them in order to allow the system to be subject to deeper criticism and questioning).
When the other woman that was tried with her calls her a "slut" and that she deserves to go to Siberia, she says "I don't bother you, so you leave me alone. I don't bother you, do I?" Maslova's sexuality as a negative for the other characters and as a subject of judgment continues to prevail throughout, which is a modern thought and one of those places in this novel that really resonates with our current politics and moral conceptions, but seems to somewhat contradict Tolstoy's own beliefs and behavior, as he is extremely judgmental of sexuality in general and his portrayal of Helene in War and Peace is a pure indictment of sexuality being almost contagious, infecting Natasha with her proximity. We also see here the half-developed morality of Maslova which is built upon leaving people alone and doing no harm, similar to how Andrei feels post-Austerlitz until Pierre wakes him from his moral slumber and he begins to try to reform his peasantry and falls in love with Natasha. With that in mind, it appears that Tolstoy is cluing us into the idea that Maslova has the potential for moral development (she is not an entirely selfish character like the president, for example), but she has not reached a greater moral conception. She wants cigarettes more than anything, again, displaying the growth, for Tolstoy, that Maslova needs to make.
Chapter 30: We get a long description of her cell, followed by the description of the twelve women and three children. Tolstoy makes sure to detail why they were arrested, including "an imbecile arrested for having no identity papers"; one for killing her husband with an ax "because he had been badgering her daughter"; one that tried to poison her husband when she was married at sixteen but had then made it up with her husband and her family, leading to a happy marriage that was then ripped apart by the trial that no one wanted; a woman that was arrested when peasants revolted against conscriptions; a pregnant woman "accused of receiving stolen property"; and a woman who drowned her baby in a well. I like this variety of mental illnesses, political prisoners, mistaken arrests, and what we might call "evil people" because it feels more authentic and much less judgmental than most depictions of prisons in fiction, even in literature where the protagonist is mistakenly imprisoned. Similar to the collection of people around Pierre when he is arrested, Tolstoy doesn't seem too interested in actually developing these characters into some kind of ensemble, but uses them as almost a backdrop or scenery to help color the scene and make the political points he wants to make. Tolstoy's writing is not one of economy and just as the collection of jury members doesn't really further the story and the countless collection of people (take the collection of nobility before the invasion, the last soldier scenes in the novel, or really many of the collections of soldiers in the novel) in scenes in War and Peace often don't serve to further the plot, these won't either, but they help with immersion and help paint the picture (or infect the reader, as Tolstoy would say) that Tolstoy wants to paint here.
Chapter 31: Maslova is with a female version of Platon Karataev, speaking in proverbs and sewing. This character is obviously much less important and comes in a point in the novel where they can't give Maslova the realization she needs to hit the climax of her character arc, but she serves as the kind of character Tolstoy really likes to write as a supporting character (the rare positive portrayal of a character, as in Tolstoy's usual comic cynicism, most characters Tolstoy writes are written negatively, both here and in War and Peace) and helps temporarily lift Maslova (perhaps a more accurate analogue of her character in regards to War and Peace would be Osip with his role of a mentor to Pierre and the one who redirects his life in his low point in the latter part of the first act of the novel). In the cell, there are actual "obscenities" and Tolstoy references that other obscenities are being said. This shows, despite the massive amount of censorship that the novel did receive, that there was a development of what he could and couldn't write over the time of War and Peace to Resurrection (a lot of this, without being able to dive into it too deeply, may just be the laxing of standards throughout the west more than this reactionary period of Russia). It also recalls the last soldier scenes of War and Peace, which is almost entirely focused on the lower class soldiers, seem entirely pointless from a narrative perspective, and feature this low-class vulgar language (the characters also speak in heavily accented and broken language.) that is avoided in most of the novel. While War and Peace doesn't quite have a duality of nobility versus peasant structure because the peasants are so sparse in characterization until the last couple of parts of the novel proper (they don't appear in the epilogue, which takes us back to focusing on the noble characters and the ones that are most important to the plot), Resurrection is able to use this by contrasting the Maslova and Nekhlyudov scenes. Now, having smoked and eaten a little, Maslova craves vodka. This development doesn't seem to be accidental and I think for Tolstoy would be the way that her situation is spiraling downward and affecting her moral self.
Chapter 32: Maslova is among "the aristocracy of the cell because they had money and shared what they had." The parallel between her situation and Pierre while arrested in War and Peace is apparent, but her situation seems to be better as she isn't isolated and is in fact respected, rather than being a literal aristocrat that is the butt of the jokes of the peasants and serves as his alienation from the rest of them. The women discuss how the guards will come in and (without explicitly saying it) assault or rape them. There is then a fight between two of the women, but more important is Maslova's reflections on that she is now a convict and how she never imagined it happening, and that is she is used to a comfortable life. The character arc of Maslova at this point seems to follow a dramatic valley and peak framework, with her being born into nothing and barely surviving, getting a reasonable upbringing and falling in love, getting raped and disgraced with the child dying and her finding living conditions impossible, to her having success as a prostitute and gaining a comfortable life, to having it all ripped away again unjustly and being sent to prison. Korablyova, the Platon of the novel, says "You can't go against Providence". The inevitability of this peak and valley version of life, especially for a woman who has no class and has to get by using her body, is something that really emphasizes the way that societal circumstances, not to mention chance and randomness, affect the way we are treated by the world. Tolstoy is much more comfortable being explicit about the way God directs history in this novel, rather than being more abstract like he is in War and Peace, but the inevitability of history and the rejection of the great man, the "important" individual, again appear as the theme, as the thing we are supposed to take out of how reality works and how we have to make sense of our existence. Maslova has honestly not had a lot of agency in this story, and this is the point in both the sense of how society oppresses women, but also how the way our own lives are not directed by our conscious acts and motives, but by something we cannot comprehend (i.e., at least in Resurrection, God.)
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