on two adulterous women

what to make of Emma Bovary & Anna Karenina (Symposium on the Novel: Part IV)

When I was sixteen I read Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina back to back. I doubt I understood either, but I knew I liked Anna Karenina less. My reasons were spurious. I had just read Natasha’s Dance, and through it learned that Russians of the time thought it fashionable to imitate the French. I decided, based on instinct, intellectual self-flattery, and no less a sense that the French were always superior in all things, that Madame Bovary was a great novel, and that Anna Karenina was a poor attempt to emulate Madame Bovary.

At least I got the dates right. (Not, of course, that I bothered to check.) Anna Karenina was written in serial form between 1875 and 1877; Madame Bovary twenty years earlier. It’s unclear if Tolstoy read Madame Bovary prior to writing Anna Karenina, although we do know he was in Paris during its scandalous reception, and that his library ultimately contained a copy. But, of course, the plots run parallel: both novels are about unhappy women, married to men with thoroughly bourgeois notions of morality and propriety, who have impassioned affairs with feckless dandies and kill themselves. 

Parallel, too, are the novels’ treatment of novels themselves. Both Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary are novel-readers; in each case, the reading of a novel (or novels) presages their downfall. Anna reads, and is partially lost in, a novel on a train moments before encountering Vronsky, to whom she is already attracted, in the station, setting their affair into motion. We learn that Anna is both drawn in and frustrated by novels, which remind her of her own un-lived life: “Anna Arkadyevna read and understood,” Tolstoy tells us, “but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech.” The first thing we really learn about Emma, likewise, is that she is driven by her lifelong attempt to “find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

But, when I re-read both novels this summer, in an effort to re-assess them both, I was struck not just by the novels’ thematic and structural similarities but by the intensity of their difference – a difference that got me thinking about the novel itself. 

Edgar Chahine (1935), image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I loved Madame Bovary, perhaps even more than I once did. But it also chilled me. Reading Emma’s thoughts was like reading a catalog of my own worst sins: thoughts, intrusive or unbidden or unexamined, that I once had, and sometimes still do. I despised Emma – I despised, too, those parts of myself that resembled her.

I loved Anna Karenina, too – far more than I once did. I loved, and pitied, Anna. And, insofar as I have ever felt Anna’s inchoate, increasingly desperate, hunger to live, I suppose you could say I related to her: think, this time around, I preferred Anna Karenina as a book. But reading Anna Karenina felt, primarily, like an exercise in encountering other people, rather than my own self. I fell in love with everyone, in Anna Karenina; I pitied them; most of all I experienced them as both recognizably real, and decidedly outside myself.

Maybe this is just because my natural faults are in fact Emma’s faults – a love of beauty too often unveiled as mere aesthetic self-aggrandizing, a desire to be the heroine of a suitably-appointed scene. (“Through Walter Scott,” Emma learns that she “would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields.”) Or maybe it is because – I fear this – Tolstoy is somehow soft on his heroine: his affection for her, or else his specific mystic Christian vision of love, somehow occludes him to the self-love at the heart of all our desires. 

Is Anna’s desire to live authentically, to love deeply – a love that reading novels kindles in her – at its core just Emma’s desire to “lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills?” Or, to put it another way, are all our desires, fundamentally, desires of acquisition and speculation: to create ourselves as characters in our own imagination, to amass for ourselves lovers and cottages and sunsets that prop up our erroneous self-understanding?

Flaubert suggests they are. (And it’s telling that Emma’s story, unlike Anna’s, culminates in financial ruin, as she goes into debt to keep up not just her affairs but their elegant accoutrements). Emma’s relationship to the novel, in the end, is a fundamentally bourgeois relationship – it functions, for her, as something between pornography and advertisement. Emma does not open herself up to the novel; rather, she subsumes it into her idea of herself. It is Flaubert’s greatest strength as a novelist, I think, that we can despise Emma even as we find that, as indeed Flaubert himself famously said, that we are Emma. Flaubert lances sin’s illusions. 

Madame Bovary, insofar as it is a moral work, is moral not in its depiction of Emma herself but in its clever reversal of Emma’s novelistic experience, and, in so doing, its capacious vision of what a novel can be. Emma reads to find herself aggrandized; we read to find ourselves cast down. Yet Madame Bovary, though it might call us to moral self-reflection, does not necessarily invite us into moral imagination – in the sense of imagination as an expansion of our own capacity for comprehension, an encounter with what is outside our selves, the very lack of which condemns Emma (and, implicitly, the reader) to our solipsistic fate.

Tolstoy’s relationship to Anna, I think, is instead one of love. He is fully aware of Anna’s self-deceit, her “half-shut” eyes to the damage her relationship with Vronsky has wrought, her stubborn refusal to countenance consequence, including the loss of her relationship with her child. But the Anna we encounter contains a multitude. If she cannot decide between, say, her lover and her son, it is in part because her desires are so multifarious and complex and contradictory that she cannot understand herself outside of her adherence to the call of any of them. (In this regard, Anna Karenina might be said to be the best novel ever written about “authenticity”.) Anna wants good things: love, and honesty about her love (she, unlike Emma, admits her affair to her husband, runs off with Vronsky, and bears the consequences); she sees a life spent denying that love as no less immoral than the affair itself. 

In reading Anna, I find myself making sense not just of myself, but of other people; Anna invites us, in a way Emma does not, to sympathy, not necessarily to adulteresses in particular, but to anyone who behaves seemingly selfishly, and weakly, and cannot fathom the consequences. Anna’s own reading-scene – in which she has trouble focusing because she hungers to live like the protagonists in the novels she reads – at first glance appears a mirror image of Emma’s. But while Emma wants to have the objects and settings and lovers in the novels she reads, Anna longs to be those heroes – to transcend herself in the service of a life she hungers for. Anna’s sympathy goes too far – into an empathy so strong we learn she has to stop reading! – but it comes from a longing, not to bolster herself, but to transform.

It is true that Anna Karenina, like much of Tolstoy’s fiction, risks didacticism, in a way that Flaubert does not. Flaubert’s unsparing vision of Emma, unlike Tolstoy’s, does not risk pulling punches. But in the end, the wager we take, if we dare to compare the two novels, is which vision of human beings is closer to the truth? Are we, in fact, depraved and irremediable – motivated only by self-deception and self-aggrandizement? Or are we weak, conflicted, creatures, who hunger simultaneously for good and terrible things, or else for good things that we cannot help but make terrible? Which novel you prefer, I suspect, depends on your answer to that question. 

I still don’t know, this time around, which I prefer.