Henceforth the memory of Leon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desire that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tête-à-tête– she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
–Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
I love Madame Bovary as a portrait of discontent that is self-sustained. I remember a friend once identifying with Emma, as Flaubert himself did, but he attributed the similarity to them both being “romantics.” I was annoyed. Emma is not a romantic. She is a woman who desires more from her life — which is not fundamentally wrong — and then manufactures affairs and tries to convince herself that they are not sordid and empty but great romances. Flaubert does a great job of deconstructing his own protagonist’s delusions, such as the scene when Emma’s lover seduces her at an agricultural fair as awards for the highest quality manure are announced in the background.
The passage quoted above in particular reminds me of how one can feed one’s own misery, looking for reasons to prolong it — and, if finding none, creating reasons.
