In the opening of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel “The Marriage Plot,” an English professor complains that contemporary life has been disastrous for the novel. His argument goes like this: “In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma [Bovary] married if she could file for separation later?”
Eugenides presents this professor as something of a doddering geezer, but the belief that the “great novels” of the past derived much of their greatness from the strictures of the past is certainly not unique to him. It has become the default position of many readers and writers. Eugenides, speaking for himself, made a virtually identical argument in Slate several years ago, substituting “Anna Karenina” for “Madame Bovary”: “You can’t have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.”
Of course, the fact that Eugenides wrote “The Marriage Plot,” a novel about contemporary relationships, indicates that he doesn’t think such novels are passé, but rather that the form must be updated to reflect current realities. That’s unobjectionable, but the larger question remains: Are older novels about love more powerful because their protagonists contended with societal repression, instead of merely struggling with their lovers and with themselves—with their conflicting desires and changing moods? Have the liberation of women and liberalization of divorce law really deprived the novel of its high stakes?
I think the answer is no. The issue turns on where we think the narrative power of those older novels originates—whether it’s attributable to the social constraints on their characters (as well as the satisfying decisiveness of their fates—the suicides on the one hand or marriages that last “forever” on the other), or if, instead, these novels are, like so many contemporary novels, primarily dependent on psychological and internal drama.
I think that, if we look closely, we find that much of their strength derives from the internal and the timeless—from conflicts rooted in the perversity of human nature and the persistent difficulties of social life. In “Madame Bovary,” for example, divorce would not have solved Emma Bovary’s problems. So many of them were extralegal, more to do with her particular, hard-to-fulfill desires. In that, they were more like those of, say, Alexander Portnoy than they might first appear.
Consider Emma’s first affair, with Rodolphe. A handsome landowner and a bit of a playboy, he is also her superior in terms of class and wealth and worldliness. He’s got all the qualities that would make him attractive to a woman like Emma, whose ideas about love, Flaubert shows us, are the stuff of romance novels. Rodolphe is an alpha male, a Christian Grey without the S & M fetish. His and Emma’s affair proceeds the way many do: in the beginning, Rodolphe is full of ardor, but, Flaubert tells us:
After this relationship ends (she wanted more; he didn’t), Emma’s next lover is her old friend Léon, who is more her social equal—a peer rather than a dashing romantic hero. But, soon after it is begun, this affair, too, grows dull, for both Emma and Léon. One day, after they’ve spent the afternoon together, she is overcome by a sense of hopelessness, not because her marriage to Charles prevents her from being with Léon but because nothing appeals: “Why was life so unsatisfying? Why did everything she leaned on instantly turn to dust?” she asks herself. Then a thought revives her—maybe there is someone else out there, someone better than Léon:
Hope, I guess, springs eternal—or at least until Emma bankrupts her family and takes her own life.
“Madame Bovary” isn’t really a didactic story of a woman who is tragically stuck in a bad marriage—though there is enough of that in the novel so that generations of college freshmen can spin essays about the bad old days and the subjugation of women. The book itself paints a rather more complicated picture of Emma’s situation.
Most of the novel’s true admirers prize it for reasons less likely to make for neat five-paragraph essays: because of the lovely yet unsentimental precision of Flaubert’s prose, because of his shrewdness about his characters—the way he exposes what is trite and bourgeois, as well as what is real and often inexpressible, the way he forces us to simultaneously recoil and pity—and because of his relentless depiction of the dullness of provincial life and the hypocrisy of those who at first appear to be less dull, more cosmopolitan. Very little of this feels dated to me.
It could still be, however, that the power of “Madame Bovary” is amplified by the social and historical backdrop. That Emma was trapped in a marriage that, officially, could only be dissolved by death (although she was willing to run off to Italy with Rodolphe) perhaps raised the tension and gave Flaubert an ideal canvas on which to exercise his other talents. Perhaps. It’s impossible to know. All we can honestly say is that the stakes aren’t derived entirely from Emma’s inability to divorce Charles, or from her tragic end.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that “Madame Bovary” is, in theory, an unlikely novel. Until Flaubert proved by doing it that it could be done, it wouldn’t have been obvious that one could write a successful novel about a selfish, materialistic woman whose life is almost unbearably hopeless and who in the course of the book sleeps with three men (including her husband), and never once has a love affair whose success the reader roots for. Only in retrospect, when the novel is in our hands, does Flaubert’s achievement look inevitable. It’s easy to fall prey to a retroactive distortion, to think wistfully about the rich source material that the past seems to have offered, and that the present appears to lack. In an age as squeamish about aesthetic hierarchy as ours, in which even the idea of a distinction between literature and fiction is held to be controversial, that explanation is, for many of us, more credible than that Flaubert simply wrote a better novel, one that sees more deeply and more justly, and describes the world more eloquently than the vast majority of novels, now or then.
The other side of the marriage-plot argument concerns the happy ending, Emma Woodhouse rather than Emma Bovary. The argument here is that marriage as happily-ever-after is no longer viable, that although it makes for satisfying stories, we now know it to be naïve, certainly without bearing on life as it is lived, post-Freud, in an age of serial monogamy and no-fault divorce. The freedoms of contemporary life have supposedly drained the novel on both ends, robbing it not only of the possibility of tragedy but also its opposite. What used to fall under the umbrella of realism must now be called fantasy.
Once again, however, I think a close reading of the novels that supposedly rely on our ability to believe in happily-ever-after marriages suggests that the situation isn’t really so dire for contemporary fiction. It’s worth taking a look at Jane Austen’s novels, because they are so often the ones held up as prime examples.
Consider how many other older novels end in marriage—from Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” to the action-heavy narratives of Sir Walter Scott to the gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe. What is different about Austen is the nature of the obstacles that separate the lovers: in Austen’s books, as in many a contemporary one, they are primarily internal. Instead of being kept apart by disapproving parents or scheming rivals, the lovers generally need a whole book to get together just because one or both has not yet learned to appreciate the other. In “Emma,” for example, Emma Woodhouse is initially drawn rather reflexively to Frank Churchill because he is young and handsome and has a dash of romance about him—Emma had heard about him long before they met. It takes her quite a while to realize that she doesn’t care much for Frank, and even longer to see that the one she does love is her old friend Mr. Knightley. The same is true of Elizabeth Bennet vis à vis Wickham and Darcy, and of Edmund Bertram vis à vis Mary Crawford and Fanny Price, among others. (This is partly why I don’t think Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot” offered a significant twist on the novels of the past. Yes, its central protagonist moves on from his love interest at the end, but passing over time from one interest to another was not unknown to Austen, et al.)
In her novels, we always know why Austen believed the first choice was both appealing and unsuitable, as well as why the second choice is the better one; the why is as much part of the story as the who. In addition to their being excellent and acerbic comedies, I think this probing psychological quality is why these books, in contrast to thousands of others that end in marriage, don’t feel dated. The happy endings surely give a satisfying narrative turn, but they also feel earned (and in a context in which marriage was in fact indissoluble, it isn’t really that much of a stretch of our credulity to believe that some marriages were happier than others). But, more importantly, the idea that the books, like fairy tales, depend so heavily on those happy marriages puts too little stock in what comes before.
As long as marriage and love and relationships have high stakes for us emotionally, they have the potential to offer rich subject material for novelists, no matter how flimsy or comparatively uninteresting contemporary relationships seem on their surface. It has always been difficult to give shape and form to the presentation of fairly ordinary interpersonal relationships without resorting to melodrama or becoming overly reliant on incident. As Austen’s celebrated contemporary Sir Walter Scott wrote of her, “The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of description and sentiment, is denied me.” (I came across this quotation in the literary critic William Deresiewicz’s excellent “A Jane Austen Education.”)
I also doubt that it has ever been easy for novelists to write about love in a way that doesn’t feel either overblown and melodramatic or little and trivial. (Remember Emma B.’s fantasy about the lyre-playing Adonis? Romantic thinking is almost always infused with triviality.) And, even in the old days, ideal subjects weren’t just there for the taking—selecting material, choosing a proper canvas on which to tell a story that both fits and seems bigger than its characters, has always been part of the novelist’s task. When Edith Wharton said, of “The House of Mirth,” that “a frivolous society gains dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys,” we see that for Wharton, Lily Bart was a way in, and are reminded that dramatic significance has always been hard won.
If the novels of the twentieth and twenty-first century seem to lack certain qualities that their predecessors possessed (and they certainly do, for better as well as for worse), the explanation is not that life itself—let alone feminism—rendered the subject of love obsolete. The truth is that I get a sinking feeling each time I encounter the marriage-plot argument. It condescends to novels like Austen’s, treating them as mere romances, and, while making much of novels like “Madame Bovary” and “Anna Karenina,” it locates their power in what I think is least interesting about them. Literary depth is too often equated with a sort of journalistic idea of “seriousness,” as if depth were achieved by taking on “issues” like hypocritical attitudes toward female adulterers. But depth is a subtle, wily quality, one that often resides simply in an author’s ability to see into his or her characters—to see beyond self-delusion and pretension and personal mythmaking and reveal them to us with a richness that we don’t often experience outside of fiction.
Adelle Waldman is the author of the novel “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.”
Illustration by Amanda Lanzone.
