Emma Bovary Quotes

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.

Because lascivious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he now had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them from Emma; they should be taken with a grain of salt, he thought, because the most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest feelings - as though the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions, or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.

Emma was just like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and the same language.

Emma repeated to herself, "Good Heavens! Why did I marry?

Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.

Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pine-apples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Prima di sposarsi, Emma aveva creduto di essere innamorata, ma la felicità che avrebbe dovuto nascere da questo amore non esisteva, ed ella pensava ormai di essersi sbagliata. Cercava ora di capire cosa volessero dire realmente le parole felicità, passione, ebbrezza, che le erano sembrate così belle nei libri.

Se conocían demasiado para gozar de aquellos embelesos de la pasión que centuplican su gozo. Ella estaba tan hastiada de él como él cansado de ella. Emma volvía a encontrar en el adulterio todas las soserías del matrimonio

...Emma still had a joyless look, and, habitually, at the corners of her mouth, she had that tightness that crumples the faces of old maids and bankrupts.

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Their separation was becoming intolerable. "I would rather die!" said Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. "Adieu! adieu! When shall I see you again?

Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: 'Ah! One week ago...two weeks ago...three weeks ago, I was there!' And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.

But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might make it less. What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then pride, the joy of being able to say to herself 'I am virtuous', and to look at herself in the glass taking resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she was making.

Daisy Miller dies of Roman fever. Nana Coupeau dies of smallpox. Ophelia dies by drowning herself. Tess Durbeyfield dies by execution. Emma Bovary dies by swallowing arsenic. Anna Karenina dies by throwing herself under a train. I did not die.

...but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house.

Antes de casarse, Emma se había creído enamorada; pero como la felicidad que hubiera debido resultar de aquel amor no había llegado, pensó que necesariamente debía de haberse equivocado. Y trataba de averiguar qué significaban exactamente en la vida las palabras 'dicha', 'pasión' y 'embriaguez', que tan hermosas le habían parecido en los libros

So far as Emma was concerned she did not ask herself whether she was in love. Love, she thought, was something that must come suddenly, with a great display of thunder and lightning, descending on one's life like a tempest from above, turning it topsy-turvy, whirling away one's resolutions like leaves and bearing one onward, heart and soul, towards the abyss. She never bethought herself how on the terrace of a house the rain forms itself into little lakes when the gutters are choked, and she was going on quite unaware of her peril, when all of a sudden she discovered--a crack in the wall!

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love "Madame Bovary" and cry for Emma, why we greedily read "Lolita" as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.

How did you expect me to live without you? Once you've known happiness it's impossible to get used to not having it. I was desperate! I thought I should die! I'll tell you all about it, you'll see... And you-- you stayed away from me!' He had been carefully avoiding her for the past three years, out of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex; and Emma went on, moving her head in winsome little gestures, more affectionate than an amorous cat.

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgment is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel. If you like, you can accuse Panurge of cowardice, accuse Emma Bovary, accuse Rastignac—that's your business; the novelist has nothing to do with it.

Prima di sposarsi, Emma aveva creduto d'amare; ma la felicità che avrebbe dovuto nascere dal quell'amore non era venuta, e pensava che doveva essersi sbagliata. Ella cercava ora, di sapere che cosa volessero esattamente dire, nella vita, le parole felicità, passione ed ebbrezza, che le erano sembrate tanto belle, lette nei libri

The next day was, for Emma, a dismal one. Everything seemed enveloped in a black atmosphere that hovered indistinctly over the exterior of things, and sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses. It was the sort of reverie you sink into over something that will never return again, the lassitude that overcomes you with each thing that is finished, the pain you suffer when any habitual motion is stopped, when a prolonged vibration abruptly ceases.

In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed.

Quanto a Emma, non si chiedeva se lo amasse. Ella credeva che l'amore dovesse arrivare all'improvviso, con fragori e folgori; uragano dei cieli che cade sulla vita, la sconvolge, strappa via le volontà come foglie, e trascina all'abisso il cuore intero. Ella non sapeva che sulle terrazze delle case la pioggia forma laghetti quando le grondaie sono ingorgate, e avrebbe continuato a credersi al sicuro, quando a un tratto scoprì una crepa nel muro.

Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres.

Aquela putain, Emma Bovary, tem a vida eterna e eu morro como um cão.

Il s’était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu’elles n’avaient pour lui rien d’original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses ; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là ; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres ; comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.

When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say." "But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began.

Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a rent in the wall of it.

In spite of her giddy airs (the phrase used by the bourgeois wives of Yonville), Emma still had a joyless look, and, habitually, at the corners of her mouth, she had that tightness that crumples the faces of old maids and bankrupts.

Pentru el, universul nu era mai mare decat circumferinta matasoasa a fustei ei; isi reprosa ca n-o iubeste, i se facea dor s-o vada iar; si se intorcea repede, urca scara cu inima batand. Emma, in camera ei, isi facea toaleta; el intra cu pasi usori, o saruta pe spate, iar ea scotea un tipat. Nu se putea opri sa-i atinga tot timpul pieptenele, inelele, salul; uneori ii saruta zgomotos obrajii sau o coplesea cu un sirag de sarutari marunte de-a lungul bratului gol, din varful degetelor pana la umar; ea-l respingea, pe jumatate zambitoare si plictisita, ca pe un copil care se tine scai. Inainte sa se marite crezuse ca simtea iubire; dar fericirea care ar fi trebuit sa rezulte din aceasta iubire nefacandu-si aparitia, insemna ca s-a inselat, gandea ea. Si Emma incerca sa afle ce se intelegea de fapt in viata prin cuvinte ca desfatare, patima si betie, care i se parusera atat de frumoase in carti.

Quant à Emma, elle ne s’interrogea point pour savoir si elle l’aimait. L’amour, croyait-elle, devait arriver tout à coup, avec de grands éclats et des fulgurations, – ouragan des cieux qui tombe sur la vie, la bouleverse, arrache les volontés comme des feuilles et emporte à l’abîme le cœur entier.

Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

Evlenmeden önce gönlünde aşk uyandığını sanmıştı; fakat bu aşkın neticesi olması lazım gelen saadetten bir eser yoktu. İçinden: "Yanılmış olacağım" diyordu. Emma, bahtiyarlık, ihtiras, kendinden geçme gibi sözlerin, kitaplarda okuyup pek güzel bulduğu bu kelimelerin hayatta acaba neyin, hangi halin adı olduğunu düşünüp duruyordu.

Avant qu’elle se mariât, elle avait cru avoir de l’amour ; mais le bonheur qui aurait dû résulter de cet amour n’étant pas venu, il fallait qu’elle se fût trompée, songeait-elle. Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres.

Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was experiencing was love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

Emma se sentí satisfeta interiorment creient que havia assolit d'un sol cop aquell rar ideal propi de les existències pàl·lides al qual els cors mediocres no podran arribar mai.

Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by the words ‘bliss’, ‘passion’, ‘ecstasy’, which had looked so beautiful in books

Emma était accoudée à sa fenêtre (elle s’y mettait souvent : la fenêtre, en province, remplace les théâtres et la promenade),

Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and she looked at the sun’s disc shedding afar through the mist his pale splendour.

The spelling mistakes were interwoven one with the other, and Emma followed the kindly thought that cackled right through it like a hen half hidden in the hedge of thorns.

...He reproached himself with forgetting Emma, as if, all his thoughts belonging to this woman, it was robbing her of something not to be constantly thinking of her.

Emma notaba el corazón, que volvía a latirle, y cómo le circulaba la sangre por la carne como un río de leche

There was no fire in the fireplace, the clock was still ticking, and Emma felt vaguely amazed that all those things should be so calm when there was such turmoil inside her.

Il en voulait à Emma de cette victoire permanente. Il s'efforçait même à ne pas la chérir; puis, au craquement de ses bottines, il se sentait lâche, comme les ivrognes à la vue des liqueurs fortes.

Car, depuis trois ans, il l’avait soigneusement évitée par suite de cette lâcheté naturelle qui caractérise le sexe fort ; et Emma continuait avec des gestes mignons de tête, plus câline qu’une chatte amoureuse :

There, at the top of the table, alone amongst all these women, stooped over his ample plateful, with his napkin tied around his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, drips of gravy drbibbling gravy from him lips. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a little pigtail tied up with a black ribbon. This was the Marquis' father-in-law... he had led a... Read more tumultuous life of debauchery and duelling, of wagers made and women abducted, had squandered his fortune and terrified his whole family... Emma's eyes kept coming back to this old man with the sagging lips, as though to something wonderfully majestic. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of a queen!

Ils se connaissaient trop pour avoir ces ébahissements de la possession qui en centuplent la joie. Elle était aussi dégoûtée de lui qu’il était fatigué d’elle. Emma retrouvait dans l’adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage.

Emma leek op alle andere maîtresses; en nu de bekoring van het nieuwe langzamerhand als een kledingstuk van haar afgleed, kwam de eentonigheid van de hartstocht bloot, die altijd dezelfde vorm heeft, die dezelfde taal spreekt.

Zij haatte niemand meer; een wemelend halfduister daalde neer over haar brein, en van alle aardse klanken hoorde Emma alleen nog de gestadige klacht van dit arme hart, zacht en vaag, als de laatste klanken van een wegstervende symfonie.

I’m sure I’ve got that part of the Aristophanic sex-myth straight. With the help of Eros we go on, each of us, looking for his missing half. Ravelstein was in real earnest about this quest, driven by longing. Not everyone feels that longing, or acknowledges it if he does feel it. In literature Antony and Cleopatra had it, Romeo and Juliet had it. Closer to our own time Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary had it, Stendhal’s Madame de Rênal in her simplicity and innocence had

...Leon'un gözünde Emma artık tam bir erişilmez nokta idi. Öyle erdemli, öyle ulaşılmazdı ki... Artık bütün ümitlerini yitirmiş haldeydi. Fakat gariptir ki vazgeçişin etkisiyle Emma biraz daha yükseliyor, en yüce makamlara çıkıyordu Leon'un gönlünde. Artık genç kadın gözle görülür her güzellikten arınıyor, bir meleği andırıyordu. En temiz duygulardan biriydi bu. Yaşayışımızda yeri olmayan, sırf ender oldukları için beslenen, yitirilmelerinin verdiği üzüntü, elde etmenin verdiği zevkten daha güçlü olan duygulardı...

As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss

s’était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu’elles n’avaient pour lui rien d’original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses ; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage.

He racked his brains for a way of making his declaration. Torn all the while between fear of offending and shame at his own faint-heartedness, he wept tears of dejection and desire. Then he made forceful resolutions. He wrote letters, and tore them up; he gave himself a time limit, then extended it. Often he started out with a determination to dare all; but his decisiveness quickly deserted him in Emma's presence [...] Emma, for her part, never questioned herself to find out whether she was in love with him. Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with thunder and lightning, a hurricane from on high that swoops down into your life and turns it topsy-turvy, snatches away your will-power like a leaf, hurls your heart and soul into the abyss. She did not know how on the terrace of a house the rain collects in pools when the gutters are choked; and she would have continued to feel quite safe had she not suddenly discovered a crack in the wall.

Emma mordía sus labios pálidos, y dando vueltas entre sus dedos a una ramita del polípero que había roto, clavaba sobre Carlos la punta ardiente de sus pupilas, como dos flechas de fuego dispuestas para disparar. Todo —en él le irritaba ahora, su cara, su traje, lo que no decía, su persona entera, en fin, su existencia.

la madurez tuvo cierta propensión a las crisis nerviosas. E2 tuvo una infancia tranquila, pero al llegar a la madurez tuvo cierta propensión a las crisis nerviosas. E1 llevó una vida sexual irregular desde el punto de vista de las personas biempensantes. E2 llevó una vida sexual irregular desde el punto de vista de las personas biempensantes. E1 imaginó que tenía dificultades económicas. E2 supo que tenía dificultades económicas. E1 se suicidó ingiriendo ácido prúsico. E2 se suicidó ingiriendo arsénico. E1 fue Eleanor Marx. E2 fue Emma Bovary. La primera traducción al inglés de Madame Bovary fue obra de Eleanor Marx. Analice esta serie de datos.

No tempo da sra. Dubuc, a velha senhora se sentia ainda como a preferida; mas, agora, o amor de Charles por Emma lhe parecia uma deserção de sua ternura, uma invasão do que lhe pertencia; e ela observava a felicidade do filho com um silêncio triste, como alguém arruinado olha, através da vidraça , pessoas à mesa em sua antiga casa.

Elle était amoureuse de Léon, et elle recherchait la solitude, afin de pouvoir plus à l’aise se délecter en son image. La vue de sa personne troublait la volupté de cette méditation. Emma palpitait au bruit de ses pas ; puis, en sa présence, l’émotion tombait, et il ne lui restait ensuite qu’un immense étonnement qui se finissait en tristesse.

Avant qu'elle se marîat, elle avait cru avoir de l'amour; mais le bonheur qui aurait dû résulter, de cet amour n'étant pas venu, il fallait qu'elle se fut trompée, songeait-elle. Et Emma, cherchait à savoit se que l'on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de felicité, de passion, et d'ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres.

Edebiyat; yazgılarına boyun eğen, yaşadıkları hayattan memnun olan insanlara hiçbir şey söylemez. Edebiyat asi ruhları besler, uzlaşmazlık yayar; hayatta çok fazla şeyi ya da çok az şeyi olanların sığınağıdır. İnsan mutsuz olmamak ve bütünlenmek için edebiyata sığınır. La Mancha kırlarında kemik torbası Rosinante ve şaşkın Şövalye’yle birlikte at sürmek, Kaptan Ahab’la birlikte bir balinanın sırtında denizlere açılmak, Emma Bovary ile birlikte arsenik içmek, Gregor Samsa’yla birlikte böceğe dönüşmek: Bütün bunlar; kendimizi bu hak tanımaz hayatın, benliğimizi saran birçok özlemi dindirebilmek için birçok farklı insan olmak istememize karşın bizi hep aynı insan olmaya zorlayan hayatın yanlışlarından ve dayatmalarından arınmak amacıyla icat ettiğimiz yollardır.

I was reading a New Yorker online piece the other week by Roxanna Robinson, who always gives her first-year writing students at Hunter College Madame Bovary. And each year their reactions are predictably depressing. It’s a “cold” book, Flaubert doesn’t “like” his characters enough, Emma Bovary is “selfish”, she’s a “materialist” and, best of all, she’s a “bad mother”. One boy thinks that Rodolphe’s cowardly letter dismissing Emma is really cool (ie, applicable to his own life) until he is beaten up by the female students and backs down. In other words, these characters and their creator aren’t nice enough, they wouldn’t be my friends, they’re not enough like me and mine… It’s a world in which reading has been corrupted by the cliches of film and television – cliches of character as well as plot.

Şimdi ise bütün hayatını beraber geçireceği, taparcasına sevdiği güzel bir karısı vardı. Charles'ın nazarında evren, Emma'nın ipek etekliğinin etrafından ibaretti; onu kâfi derecede sevmiyor diye üzülüyor, onu göreceği geliyordu; hemen eve döner, yüreği çarpa çarpa merdivenleri çıkardı. Emma'yı odasında, kendine çekidüzen vermekle meşgul bulurdu; yavaşça yürüyerek girer, onu ensesinden öperdi. Kadın bir çığlık koparırdı.

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, “She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.” The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument “whose strings buzzed,” and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

Though one of the greatest love stories in world literature, Anna Karenin is of course not just a novel of adventure. Being deeply concerned with moral matters, Tolstoy was eternally preoccupied with issues of importance to all mankind at all times. Now, there is a moral issue in Anna Karenin, though not the one that a casual reader might read into it. This moral is certainly not that having committed adultery, Anna had to pay for it (which in a certain vague sense can be said to be the moral at the bottom of the barrel in Madame Bovary). Certainly not this, and for obvious reasons: had Anna remained with Karenin and skillfully concealed from the world her affair, she would not have paid for it first with her happiness and then with her life. Anna was not punished for her sin (she might have got away with that) nor for violating the conventions of a society, very temporal as all conventions are and having nothing to do with the eternal demands of morality. What was then the moral "message" Tolstoy has conveyed in his novel? We can understand it better if we look at the rest of the book and draw a comparison between the Lyovin-Kitty story and the Vronski-Anna story. Lyovin's marriage is based on a metaphysical, not only physical, concept of love, on willingness for self-sacrifice, on mutual respect. The Anna-Vronski alliance was founded only in carnal love and therein lay its doom. It might seem, at first blush, that Anna was punished by society for falling in love with a man who was not her husband. Now such a "moral" would be of course completely "immoral," and completely inartistic, incidentally, since other ladies of fashion, in that same society, were having as many love-affairs as they liked but having them in secrecy, under a dark veil. (Remember Emma's blue veil on her ride with Rodolphe and her dark veil in her rendezvous at Rouen with Léon.) But frank unfortunate Anna does not wear this veil of deceit. The decrees of society are temporary ones ; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality. And now comes the real moral point that he makes: Love cannot be exclusively carnal because then it is egotistic, and being egotistic it destroys instead of creating. It is thus sinful. And in order to make his point as artistically clear as possible, Tolstoy in a flow of extraordinary imagery depicts and places side by side, in vivid contrast, two loves: the carnal love of the Vronski-Anna couple (struggling amid their richly sensual but fateful and spiritually sterile emotions) and on the other hand the authentic, Christian love, as Tolstoy termed it, of the Lyovin-Kitty couple with the riches of sensual nature still there but balanced and harmonious in the pure atmosphere of responsibility, tenderness, truth, and family joys.

Enquanto o olhava, saboreando assim, em sua irritação, uma espécie de volúpia depravada, Léon avançou um passo. O frio a empalidecê-lo parecia derramar em sua face um langor mais suave; entre a sua gravata e o seu pescoço, a gola da camisa, um tanto frouxa, deixava ver a pele; uma ponta de orelha ultrapassava uma mecha de cabelo, e seu grande olhar azul, alçando-se às nuvens, pareceu a Emma mais límpido e mais belo do que os largos das montanhas onde o céu se espelha.

Rodolphe ouvira tantas vezes dizer tais coisas que elas nada mais tinham de original para ele. Emma assemelhava-se a todas as suas amantes; e o encanto da novidade, caindo pouco a pouco como uma veste, deixava ver a nu a eterna monotonia da paixão que tem sempre as mesmas formas e a mesma linguagem. Aquele homem tão experiente não distinguia mais a diferença dos sentimentos sob a igualdade das expressões. Porque lábios libertinos ou venais lhe haviam murmurado frases semelhantes, ele mal acreditava em sua candura; era preciso, pensava, descontar suas palavras exageradas, escondendo as afeições medíocres: como se a plenitude da alma não transbordasse algumas vezes nas metáforas mais vazias, já que ninguém pode algum dia exprimir exatamente suas necessidades ou seus conceitos, nem suas dores e já que a palavra humana é como um caldeirão rachado, no qual batemos melodias próprias para fazer danças os ursos quando desejaríamos enternecer as estrelas. Porém, com a superioridade crítica de quem, em qualquer compromisso, se mantém na retaguarda, Rodolphe percebeu naquele amor a possibilidade de explorar outros gozos. Julgou todo pudor como algo incômodo. Tratou-a sem cerimonia. Fez dela algo de maleável e de corrompido. Era uma espécie de afeto idiota cheio de admiração para ele, de volúpia para ela, uma beatitude que a entorpecia; e sua alma afundava naquela embriaguez e nela se afogava, encarquilhada (...)

akşam rüzgâr pencereye vurur, lamba yanarken ateşin başına oturup bir kitap açmaktan daha tatlı ne var ki? Emma, iri iri kara gözlerini ona dikerek: — Değil mi?.. dedi. Léon devam ediyordu: — İnsan bir şey düşünmez, saatler akıp geçer. Hiç kımıldamaksızın, görür gibi olduğunuz ülkelerde dolaşırsınız; düşünceniz hayalle sarmaş dolaş olarak ayrıntılar içinde oynar, yahut serüvenlerin çevresini izler, şahıslara karışır; onların elbiseleri altında kendi kalbiniz çarpıyor sanırsınız.

She was reading Madame Bovary aloud to Six-Thirty. She’d just finished telling Six-Thirty that fiction was problematic. People were always insisting they knew what it meant, even if the writer hadn’t meant that at all, and even if what they thought it meant had no actual meaning. “Bovary’s a great example,” she said. “Here, where Emma licks her fingers? Some believe it signifies carnal lust; others think she just really liked the chicken. As for what Flaubert actually meant? No one cares.

Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the marble.

The next day, for Emma, was funereal. Everything appeared to her shrouded in a black mist that hovered uncertainly over the surface of things, and grief plunged deep into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in an abandonded chateau. She sank into that kind of brooding which comes when you lose something forever, that lassitude you feel after every irreversible event, that pain you suffer when a habitual movement is interrupted, when a long-sustained vibration is suddenly broken off.

nezaketine, fakirler de insaniyetine hayran oluyordu. Fakat onun içini hırs, öfke ve kin kemiriyordu. O düz kırmalı fistanın altında huzurunu kaybetmiş bir kalp gizliydi; o pek afif dudakları, gönlün ıstırabını anlatmıyordu. Emma Léon'a âşıktı; yalnızlığı araması da onu düşünüp haz duymak içindi. Onun kendisini görmek, hayalin verdiği zevki bozuyordu. Léon'un ayak seslerini duyunca yüreği çarpar, sonra karşısına çıkınca heyecanı geçip en sonunda hüzne dönen bir büyük hayretten başka bir şey duymazdı.

Quanto a Emma, evitava di domandarsi se lo amasse. Era convinta che l'amore dovesse arrivare di colpo, accompagnato da luci e fragori, simile a un uragano celeste che piomba sulla vita, la sconvolge, travolgendo la volontà come foglie secche, e trascina ogni sentimento nell'abisso. Non sapeva che la pioggia a goccia a goccia crea laghetti sulle terrazze delle case, quando le grondaie sono otturate, e avrebbe continuato a credersi al sicuro se d'improvviso non avesse scoperto una falla nelle sue difese.

Calvin was in her dream. He was reading a book on nuclear magnetic resonance. She was reading Madame Bovary aloud to Six-Thirty. She’d just finished telling Six-Thirty that fiction was problematic. People were always insisting they knew what it meant, even if the writer hadn’t meant that at all, and even if what they thought it meant had no actual meaning. “Bovary’s a great example,” she said. “Here, where Emma licks her fingers? Some believe it signifies carnal lust; others think she just really liked the chicken. As for what Flaubert actually meant? No one cares.

Mais plus Emma s’apercevait de son amour, plus elle le refoulait, afin qu’il ne parût pas, et pour le diminuer. Elle aurait voulu que Léon s’en doutât ; et elle imaginait des hasards, des catastrophes qui l’eussent facilité. Ce qui la retenait, sans doute, c’était la paresse ou l’épouvante, et la pudeur aussi. Elle songeait qu’elle l’avait repoussé trop loin, qu’il n’était plus temps, que tout était perdu. Puis l’orgueil, la joie de se dire : « je suis vertueuse », et de se regarder dans la glace en prenant des poses résignées, la consolait un peu du sacrifice qu’elle croyait faire.

Emma become secretly thrilled that she had reached at a first try the uncommon best of light lives, in no way attained by means of mediocre hearts. She permit herself float at the side of Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of death swans, to the falling of the leaves, the natural virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it, would now not confess it, persevered from dependancy, and at closing was amazed to sense herself soothed, and with out a more dissapointment at coronary heart than wrinkles on her brow.

Pero cuanto más conciencia tomaba Emma de su amor, más lo reprimía para que no se notara y para que disminuyese. Le hubiera gustado que Léon lo adivinara; e imaginaba casualidades, catástrofes que hubieran propiciado tal circunstancia. Lo que sin duda la retenía era la pereza o el miedo, y también el pudor. Pensaba que había ido demasiado lejos en su rechazo, que ya no era tiempo, que todo estaba perdido. Pero luego, el orgullo, la satisfacción de decirse a sí misma: «Soy virtuosa» y de contemplarse en el espejo con talante resignado, la consolaba en cierto modo del sacrificio que creía estar haciendo.

Anna is not just a woman, not just a splendid specimen of womanhood, she is a woman with a full, compact, important moral nature: everything about her character is significant and striking, and this applied as well to her love. She cannot limit herself as another character in the book, Princess Betsy, does, to an undercover affair. Her truthful and passionate nature makes disguise and secrecy impossible. She is not Emma Bovary, a provincial dreamer, a wistful wench creeping along crumbling walls to the beds of interchangeable paramours. Anna gives Vronski her whole life, consents to a separation from her adored little son—despite the agony it costs her not to see the child and she goes to live with Vronski first abroad in Italy, and then on his country place in central Russia, though this "open" affair brands her an immoral woman in the eyes of her immoral circle. (In a way she may be said to have put into action Emma's dream of escaping with Rodolphe, but Emma would have experienced no wrench from parting with her child, and neither were there any moral complications in that little lady's case.) Finally Anna and Vronski return to city life. She scandalizes hypocritical society not so much with her love affair as with her open defiance of society's conventions.

Every time Leon had to tell her everything that he had done since their last meeting. She asked him for some verses - some verses for herself, a "love poem" in honour of her. But he never succeeded in getting a rhyme for the second verse; and at last ended by copying for her a sonnet in a "Keepsake". This was less from vanity than from the one desire of pleasing her. He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he was rather becoming her mistress than she his. She had tender words and kisses that thrilled his soul. Where could she have learned this corruption almost incorporeal in the strength of its profundity and dissimulation?

Había un no sé qué de vertiginoso que Emma sentía llegar hasta sí, como una emanación de aquellas vidas amontonadas, y su corazón se henchía profundamente al percibirlo. Era como si las ciento veinte mil almas que allí palpitaban le estuvieran enviando al unísono el vaho de aquellas pasiones que ella les atribuía. Su amor ensanchaba a la vista de aquel espacio y se llenaba con el rumoreo de confusos murmullos que subían hasta ella. Proyectaba su amor hacia fuera, hacia las plazas, los paseos y las calles, y la antigua villa normanda le antojaba una capital desmesurada, una especie de Babilonia por cuyas puertas estaba entrando. Se apoyaba con las dos manos en el borde de la ventanilla y se inclinaba hacia afuera para aspirar la brisa, mientras los tres caballos seguían su galope.

He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fulness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

Suggested Reading Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December and More Die of Heartbreak Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Henry Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Henry James, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony and The Trial Katherine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown Herman Melville, The Confidence Man Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon Diane Ravitch, The Language Police Julie Salamon, The Net of Dreams Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Scheherazade, A Thousand and One Nights F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Joseph Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Reading

Madame Bovary, c'est moi. Emma Bovary. She was the first. The first to thrash around in the space between a packaged wonder and reality, trying to reconcile the two in her enormous, inarticulate heart. Madame Bovary, c'est toi, perhaps, dear reader. Madame Bovary, c'est tout le monde.

His thoughts go to Emma Bovary strutting before the mirror after her first big afternoon. I have a lover! I have a lover! sings Emma to herself. Well, let poor Bev Shaw go home and do some singing too. And let him stop calling her poor Bev Shaw. If she is poor, he is bankrupt.

There’s a little Emma Bovary in all of us.

So don't be too fast to attribute yourself with miraculous sexual powers, The Christ of Love. Emma and I created you out of nothing, or very little, and in all fairness, You owe us everything. While you flounder in your daily life we have built you up as a truly powerful icon of erotic integrity.

Si Emma Bovary n'avait pas lu tous ces romans, il est possible que son sort aurait été différent.

Mary McCarthy, though, had it wrong when she wrote that “Madame Bovary is Don Quixote in skirts.” Emma’s suffering is Platonic: she searches, in all the wrong places and with all the wrong people, for an ideal that is only imagined. Until the end she believes that she will get the love and recognition she deserves. Quixote’s suffering is Christian. He has convinced himself that once upon a time the world really was what it was meant to be, that the ideal had been made flesh, then vanished. Having had a foretaste of paradise, his suffering is more acute than that of Emma, who longs for the improbable but not the impossible. Quixote awaits the Second Coming. His quest is doomed from the start because he is rebelling against the nature of time, which is irreversible and unconquerable

les obstacles, mordre aux bonheurs les plus lointains. Mais une femme est empêchée continuellement. Inerte et flexible à la fois, elle a contre elle les mollesses de la chair avec les dépendances de la loi. Sa volonté, comme le voile de son chapeau retenu par un cordon, palpite à tous les vents; il y a toujours quelque désir qui entraîne, quelque convenance qui retient». Ser mujer —sobre todo si se tiene fantasía e inquietudes— resulta una verdadera maldición en la realidad ficticia: no es extraño que al saber que ha dado a luz una niña, Emma, frustrada, pierda el sentido.

Feminista trágica —porque su lucha es individual, más intuitiva que lógica, contradictoria porque busca lo que rechaza, y condenada al fracaso—, en Emma late íntimamente el deseo de ser hombre.

El heroísmo, la audacia, la prodigalidad, la libertad son, aparentemente, prerrogativas masculinas; sin embargo, Emma descubre que los varones que la rodean —Charles, Léon, Rodolphe— se vuelven blandos, cobardes, mediocres y esclavos apenas ella asume una actitud «masculina» (la única que le permite romper la esclavitud a que están condenadas las de su sexo en la realidad ficticia).

También en sus relaciones conyugales los roles hembra-varón se invierten muy pronto; Emma pasa a ser la personalidad dominante y Charles la dominada. Ella impone el tono, se hace siempre su voluntad, al principio sólo en cuestiones domésticas y luego en los otros dominios: Emma se encarga