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Meditation upon a Summary of Madame Bovary –LOIS MARIE HARROD
She was a doctor's discontented wife, who longed to experience the passion, the excitement, the luxury she has read about in novels. She had affairs, racked up debt, and took arsenic. Yes, that was her life, and, yes, she was discontented, as are most women who see themselves as merely mates— who wants to be a helpmate when you can be a hussy or a harridan or a whore? And the doctor was tedious. And I can name any number of people who prefer suffering to boredom, who create agony for themselves and too many others. I try to keep them at the edges of my life. As for Emma, I have some sympathy, After all, she does long for the passion, the excitement, the luxury which she reads about in books I teach. So maybe the problem is reading. Life never stacks up to literature, heavy or light, and I have heard of lovers who preferred the fictional to the real— its steadiness, its lack of surprise after the first encounter. Yes, men who read Madam Bovary, Anna Karenina even, Moby Dick, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake again and again. To love a book is to love someone who won’t change. Not strictly true, says my husband, the literary critic, A book is different every time you read it. A man, he was a doctor, once told me portentously, A woman marries a man because she thinks she can change him. A man marries a woman