The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [119]
Indeed even when they are newly arrived in Italy, Vronsky, who has now thrown up his career for his passion:
`soon felt that the realisation of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realisation showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.'
Vronsky begins to feel bored and aimless, and after a while they return to Russia. Anna almost imperceptibly begins to feel her lover withdrawing from her and becomes increasingly obsessed with the little son Seryosha she has had to leave behind. She is refused permission to see him, but manages to snatch a brief meeting with him by penetrating Karenin's house in disguise. As we are told that, upon her son `all Anna's unsatisfied capacity for loving was satisfied', it is a heartrending glimpse of all she has lost. She then throws all her energies into a protracted battle to get Karenin to grant her a divorce, so that she can marry Vronsky: a last pitiful attempt to make her now rapidly crumbling position secure. All ends in failure. Vronsky is becoming more and more openly cold towards her. She becomes prey to all sorts of jealous imaginings about his relations with other women. They fall to endless quarrelling. Feeling increasingly lost and desperate, Anna for the first time contemplates suicide. She again has her nightmare about the little old peasant, who seems to be doing something terrible to her with iron. After a final trivial misunderstanding with Vronsky, Anna drives across Moscow, her mind whirling with inconsequential thoughts. Almost without being aware of what she is doing, she arrives at the station where she and Vronsky first met, and on a sudden impulse throws herself under the wheels of an oncoming train:
`a little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up with a brighter light than before, lit up for her all that had before been dark, flickered, began to grow dim, and went out for ever.'
Madame Bovary
In terms of the pattern we are looking at, one of the things which may strike us about Madame Bovary is how far we are into the story before the heroine finally becomes committed to the course of infidelity which ultimately destroys her. In Anna Karenina the heroine's inner restlessness which lays her open to her grand passion is deftly stated and she is already embarked on the heady early stages of the fatal affair with Vronsky within a short while of the story's opening. In Madame Bovary, however, the long-drawn out Anticipation Stage lasts for nearly half the book. This is not least because so much of Flaubert's intention is to show how Emma's fatal craving for excitement and romance builds up over a long period in her head, fuelled by her reading of romantic fiction, before she is finally drawn to act it out in real life.
To set the stage we first have to see the young Emma married to the limited and unambitious country doctor Charles Bovary: as incomplete an answer to her inward craving for passion as Karenin was for Anna. When the first pleasure of finding herself married wears off, the warning signs of distant danger begin to gather, as Flaubert puts it, like tiny rivulets gathering almost imperceptibly to make an eventually irresistible torrent:
`Emma tried hard to discover what, precisely, it was in life that was denoted by the words joy, passion, intoxication, which had always looked so fine in books.'
There is the excitement of the invitation to the local great house, when Emma is swept off her feet by the brief chance to mingle with such fashionable, titled people: the bright mysterious `other world' which is beckoning her on. As months, even years go