MENTIONED: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Dirt’s “The Desire Question”; Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick; TikTok’s Pookie and Jett; Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “Seduction and Betrayal”;
“Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick”; Richard Linklater’s Before SunriseI finished Madame Bovary on the train yesterday from DC to New York. In my notebook, I wrote of the novel’s end: There is more truth to tragedy than a happy ending, so why do I feel… so bereft, so forlorn at its finale? My first instinct was to describe Madame Bovary as a story about the dangers of fantasy, but I think Flaubert (a French Romantic) understood fantasy as intrinsic — necessary, even — to a fulfilled life. Rather, Emma Bovary’s demise was a warning against the relentless pursuit of fantasy, culminating in its inevitable collapse when Emma’s reality becomes crushed by the weight of her fancies. And Emma, forever a fantast, chooses death (“It is but a little thing!”) over an impoverished life devoid of beauty and pleasure.
I am a person who’s historically struggled with rom-coms or, for that matter, any genre of movie where the form feels fixed, when the happy ending is written from the first glance and first meet. This makes me sound like a fundamentally unhappy person (I am not), but I am of the belief that life is, at best, a tragicomedy we have to learn to laugh at. To quote Deborah Levy quoting Orson Welles, “If we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story.” But no matter where we pause in Madame Bovary, Emma’s fate seems fixed. From the masked ball at Vaubyessard, where she dances with the Viscount and gets a tease of upper-class extravagance, Emma is doomed by dreams of wealth and frivolity. Her first and truest love is for the figure of the Viscount; he is a symbol of the social standing she aspires towards unto death.
Her later suitors, Rodolphe and Léon, are mere substitutes for that great fantasy. With Rodolphe, she recalls the Viscount’s scent, how his beard “exhaled … an odor of vanilla and citron” similar to Rodolphe’s pomade. And with Léon, a younger lover who was loyally submissive to her fancies, she indulged in luxuries beyond both their means. These men were keen on eventually ridding themselves of Emma (as a married woman, she can be no more than a mistress), but their betrayals were not what inevitably did her in. What kills Emma is her desire for more, a slow-burning poison that manifests in a frustrated melancholy towards the limits of her middle-class life.
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