"Being sure she loved him, he did not trouble to please her, and imperceptibly his manner changed. He no longer used the tender words which made her weep, nor did he lavish on her those vehement caresses which almost deprived her of her senses...(he) contrived to hide is indifference."
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1856
It has been written and expressed countless times before, century after century, and still the conclusion is the same. It transcends time, geography, and culture...the circle of perpetual seduction:
"...the humiliation of feeling how weak she was, turned her to rage, which was appeased by voluptuous pleasures. It was not attachment, it was perpetual seduction."
This is coming from an ageing lonesome batchelor in a damp and breezy loft conversion on a night when the Drizzle Cabaret are in town. If you're married and happy, are you thinking "he just hasn't found the right one yet...he will...and all his untethered misery will evaporate like the drizzle that numbs him."?
Picture sensuality plotted on a graph, as a Sine wave. It peaks and troughs exponentially into the future. Depending on how you react to the above statements, will position you on the sine wave somewhere.
No relief...no more depth...this is all there is in romance. I'm serious, this is all there is to it.
1 comment:
Madame Bovary or the illusion of love
I think this could be completed. You can generalize the idea of romance that’s true, but this shortcut is not faithful to the deeper vision of passion you can find in Madame Bovary.
From the very beginning of the book, Flaubert gives clues about the main roads he is about to follow all along his book. You can feel the uneasiness of living of the main character Emma Bovary. She has too much ambition comparing to what her own life can stand, especially in terms of love, and has a certain paradoxical detachment from reality at the same time.
If you remember the scene just before the quotes you have made, Flaubert makes an ironic description of romantic clichés and illusion of love.
Rodolphe is not seduced, he just is physically attracted to her, ‘blasé’ of the relationships he experienced. And he manipulates her to get what every man expects from a woman. I am not blaming him, Emma is so naive, she dreams her life more than she lives it. She is exalted and works with excess feelings. She is deeply shattered when she meets Rodolphe and lets him acting, because she thinks she is going to be rewarded for her daydreamings about romance.
Flaubert is making fun of Rodolphe, who has a pragmatic, simple and reduced vision of romance, without intuition :
“ He was not seeing, this man full of common sens, the dissimilarity of feelings underneath parity of expressions”.
And Rodolphe is making fun of Emma, as soon as he meets her, he is thinking about how to leave her later on, he calculates everything from the very beginning.
In my opinion, your quotes don’t reflect the spontanity and intuition you can experience in passion. I think romance is a little bit complicated than that and that there is many many ways to describe and feel it. It is not a science, it can be a Sine curve and goes like that for eternity, but why not a gaussian curve, just like life : to be born and to die.
However, I am not juging, just opening the debate. And sorry for the approximative translation I have made from the french book.
EB
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