The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [120]
The Dream Stage lasts as long as the secret affair with Rodolphe:
`Never had Madame Bovary looked so beautiful as now. She went clothed in that indefinable loveliness which comes of joy, enthusiasm, success, and is produced by the perfect harmony of temperament and outward circumstances.'
It reaches its height when Emma lays plans to elope with her lover and leave her despised, `repulsive' husband forever. But on the very verge of her leaving home, the Frustration Stage arrives like a thunderbolt. A note comes from Rodolphe:
`have you carefully weighed the consequences of your intended action? Have you realised the awful abyss to which I was dragging you, poor angel? No, ... you were going on, confident and heedless, imagining that all would be well, trusting in the future.'
Her lover is not going to elope with her. He had never thought of her as anything but a conveniently married mistress. Their `grand affair of the heart' had only been in her head, a figment of her fantasy. Emma is so shocked that for several months she lies seriously ill; at the end of which her husband makes a last pathetic attempt to re-establish their marriage by taking her off on a brief holiday to Rouen. It is as doomed as the fragile reconciliation between Karenin and his wife at a similar stage in their story. For it is here, at the theatre, that Emma once again meets Leon. The concluding part of the story opens, like Book Two of Anna Karenina ('vengeance is mine'), on a note of dire foreboding.
To begin with, as when Anna and Vronsky flee to Italy, there is a last hectic echo of the Dream Stage, as Emma and Leon embark on their physical affair in the most dramatic and reckless way possible, driving round and round the daylit streets of Rouen in a darkened fiacre. Emma begins to find excuses, such as an imaginary course of piano lessons, to visit Rouen more and more often. She begins to borrow money recklessly from the unscrupulous M. Lheureux. Like Anna, with her recurrent nightmare of the little bearded peasant, Emma becomes haunted on her visits to Rouen by the sight of a hideous beggar ('in the place where his eyelids should have been, two gaping cavities all filled with blood') whose wailing cries go `sheer down into the depths of her soul like a whirlwind in a chasm'. She is very nearly caught out by Charles in her `cover story about the piano lessons and adds one deceit to another (`from that moment her whole existence was a maze of lies'). She becomes more and more enmeshed in her tangle of debt to M. Lheureux. Even her relations with Leon become increasingly fraught and quarrelsome, as `every day saw her calling for madder music and stronger wine. Like so many tragic heroes and heroines, she dreams that she might escape back to happier, more innocent times, before the net began closing in. But the Nightmare Stage is inexorably nearing its climax:
`She was now always depressed, everywhere and about everything. Everything and everyone, herself included, was intolerable to her.'
Finally M. Lheureux forecloses, getting judgment for a sum of money that will involve selling everything she and Charles possess. Distractedly she runs to anyone she can think of to borrow from, ending up with Rodolphe. When he turns her away, she heads for the cupboard where the pharmacist keeps his poisons and takes a huge dose