All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  In his preamble, Balzac suggests that the germ of his book on marriage lies in the word ‘adultery’, confronted during his studies as a student of the French legal code put in place by Napoleon, who believed that marriage was an institution of culture and not of nature, and could thus be radically improved. Under the Code Napoléon, as already noted, adultery for men occurred only if they brought a mistress into the sanctity of the family home. For women, if the husband so wished, it could lead to imprisonment for up to two years and constitute grounds for divorce, though that could be obtained by mutual consent as well, if the woman’s adultery was kept private and concealed.

  Balzac confesses that the word ‘adultery’ began by conjuring up in his mind a ‘mournful train of consequences. Tears, shame, hatred, terror, secret crime, bloody wars, families without a head, and social misery rose like a sudden line of phantoms.’ But later on, when he ‘became acquainted with the most cultivated circles of society, the author perceived that the rigour of marriage laws was very generally mollified by adultery. He found that the number of unhappy homes was larger than that of happy marriages.’ Everywhere men kept mistresses and seemed incapable of fidelity; while women, except the religiously virtuous who ended up in Swiss spas, had lovers often stupider than their husbands and certainly younger. These came from amongst the scores of gallant and seductive young men who couldn’t marry during their most ardent years. ‘The laws of love are simply stronger than human law,’ Balzac notes, himself amongst the most ardent of young seducers. It may well be ‘the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love’.

  Balzac’s Physiology is a sardonic observer’s guide to worldly mores. The double sexual standard of Victorian England and America, which exonerated men and punished women far more brutally for adultery, and which prevailed in divorce laws that robbed straying women of home and children well into the second half of the twentieth century, has little place in the Physiology. Marriage, for Balzac, is merely a way of extinguishing passion and letting society reproduce itself–unless everything changes. To begin to pave the way for ‘unadulterated’ happiness in marriage, Balzac argues, would entail a social revolution in which girls were educated and free to love early, in concert with the young males’ most ardent phase. This in turn would mean that they could later be faithful to their husbands and as wives no longer prey to the advances of desiring young males. Marriage itself would need to be based on passion as well as on property. And both parties would need to be as intelligent as philosophers and as inventive as artists. If in our own liberated times we have reached these first two points, we have scarcely arrived at the other two.

  For Stendhal, that literary psychologist who is Balzac’s near-contemporary, love is also, often enough, an adulterous matter. In his great novel of Romantic realism, The Red and the Black (1830), the young and ardent Julien Sorel engages in a passionate and formative relationship with the mayor’s wife, Madame de Rênal. He is an ambitious young man, and rivalry, the displacing of a more powerful figure, inevitably plays into a passion that we might now label ‘Oedipal’. The passion will be the death of him. First, however, after an interim of Parisian intrigues, it is Madame de Rênal he attempts to shoot for exposing him to the father of the aristocratic Mathilde, the woman the plebeian Julien has meanwhile fallen in love with and hopes to wed. But awaiting execution, Julien’s first love for the maternal Madame de Rênal resurfaces and he goes to his death buoyed by her beneficent love. Three days later, she gives her children a final embrace and follows him, her heart having given way.

  In his ground-breaking mid-twentieth-century study, Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont argues that nine out of ten times the great loves in Western literature take the form of adultery, as if ecstatic suffering and misfortune were bound up in our very understanding of passionate love and were constitutive of its force. ‘It is obvious,’ he writes, ‘that Western Man is drawn to what destroys the happiness of the married couple at least as much as to anything that ensures it.’

  Starting with the myth of Tristan and Isolde, de Rougemont points out how the desire for obstruction, for breaking rules, for finding obstacles, has become for us an intrinsic part of passion, that ‘divine delirium’. By idealizing this ecstatic form of love we hide from ourselves the fact that the ultimate obstacle, death, is what this kind of ‘passion has yearned after from the beginning’. Underlying Tristan and Isolde’s transcendent desire for one another–a desire that takes them into exile, far from the rules of society, and then brings them back only to perish–is, de Rougemont claims, ultimately the desire for death–for that oblivion in which our very individuality is annihilated.

  Some of the major fictions of adulterous passion would seem to bear him out. Arguably the world’s two greatest novels are amongst them: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877). It is worth pausing over them, since they provide such astute analyses of the dynamics of love and adultery. As if wishing instantly to signal that adulterous passion lies at the heart of marriage and shadows its lacks, both novels proclaim their heroine’s married state in their very titles. The implication is that the whole project of bourgeois marriage is destined for failure. Passion and property simply won’t be wed–and, in particular, if woman is part of the property. The odds are even greater if passion is understood as a form of quasi-religious transcendence, a beatitude which pays little heed to law or contract.

  An ordinary sensuous woman

  Young Emma Rouault is susceptible to literature. Books prepare her for passion. They provide her indoctrination into the exoticism of ecstasy. They move her, as the Greek ekstasis suggests, ‘out of her place’. But so, too, does religion and the convent school this farmer’s daughter enters at the age of thirteen.

  Before her formal education begins, Emma has already read that Rousseau-inspired pastoral romance, Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, set in a mythical Mauritius of sensuous and social harmony. Historical romances are soon added to her imaginative armoury. Sir Walter Scott and his heroic tales of ill-fated women–Mary Queen of Scots and Joan of Arc–stir her fantasies. But it is the convent that completes Emma’s sensuous education, both aesthetically and emotionally. Here she succumbs to the ‘mystic languor exhaled by the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the holy-water fonts and the radiance of the tapers’, all of which play on her senses. Meanwhile, images of the pierced Sacred Heart and ‘poor Jesus falling beneath His cross’ awaken self-mortifying emotions which subtly combine with Christian metaphors of ‘betrothed, spouse, heavenly lover, marriage everlasting’ to awaken ‘an unlooked-for delight’ in the depths of her soul. Like any receptive adolescent girl, Emma has her senses and imagination awakened by the romances of her times, into which religion plays. When her religious ardour grows excessive, the nuns prohibit it.

  Flaubert may ironize all this and highlight what is happening to his young heroine with a cool eye. Yet he is never less than ambivalent about her, as his later pronouncement ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ makes clear. The education in sensibility which turns Emma into a romantic dreamer is not, in itself, a negative. It does, however, make her intensely susceptible to the heightening pleasure of secrecy itself–‘that condition of forbiddenness in the erotic life of women’ which Freud links to the delay between sexual maturity and sexual activity. In her early teens, Emma’s adolescent sexuality is fed by the secrecy so fundamental to the pleasures of the imagination, of reading and religious transport. This condition of prohibition is reawakened in her secret affairs.

  Her early transports also make her susceptible to the disappointments of a marriage in which she had placed much hope. This, despite Charles Bovary’s love, is too limited, too meagre, unadorned and dull in its daily unfolding to fulfil her wishes. She tries to allay the tedium by making her home beautiful. But the satisfactions are few and she grows increasingly nervous–thin, ill, despairing. Some have diagnosed Emma as a ‘hysteric’. The psychiatric diagnosis ‘Bovarysme�
� has been named after her: a marked tendency to escapist daydreaming. The prerogative to see the world as other than it is, belongs, of course, to all writers and all people dissatisfied with their condition. Emma yearns: she longs to travel or to go back to the convent, to die or to go to Paris.

  The move that does take place is to another small town, Yonville, near Rouen, and when it takes place, Emma is pregnant. But there is no money to feed her maternal fantasies. Charles Bovary’s medical practice doesn’t thrive. Emma vests her hopes in having a strong son, a male who is free to live out adventure and passion, who can afford her ‘a kind of anticipatory revenge for all her past helplessness’. But there is no son, only a daughter, another being to be trapped like herself between desire and convention. Emma takes little interest in her child. A dreaming sensualist, with hankerings after a finer life and with no activity or projects in which to deflect (or sublimate) her desires, she is prey to the advances of men who speak of a wider and deeper experience than her parochial husband seems able to provide. One might say that Emma wants nothing more than to be ecstatic–displaced, either by rapture or by martyrdom, from the petty world into which fate has cast her.

  Believing that love ‘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 you heart and soul into the abyss’, Emma does not at first recognize that the sensitive and poetical lawyer, Monsieur Léon, who woos her with poetry and fine sentiment, is in love with her. When she does and finds that she returns that love, she tells herself she is first and foremost a ‘virtuous woman’ and imposes a domestic martyrdom on herself which casts her into the ‘nervous’ abyss of unrequited love. Despair and frustration make her hate her poor husband all the more, so that when the worldly upper-class Rodolphe appears on the scene, she is all the riper for the plucking.

  In the famous scene of the agricultural show, with its pervasive authorial irony, Flaubert sets the small-town republican virtues of industry, trade, service and duty against Rodolphe’s more aristocratic code–one to which Emma aspires. Prizes for manure, rams and pigs, culminating in a prize for fifty-four years of domestic service, are counterpointed with Rodolphe’s wooing: ‘Duty again!… I’m sick to death of the word… To feel nobly and to love what is beautiful–that’s our duty. Not to accept all the conventions of society and the humiliations society imposes on us.’

  So Emma joins ‘that lyrical legion of adulteresses’ and becomes ‘a part of her own imaginings’. ‘Love, so long pent up within her, surged forth at last with a wild and joyous flow.’ Her life of secret letter-writing and illicit encounters begins in high adventure. But soon enough, intoxication wanes: Rodolphe grows careless in his love. The tender words and tempestuous embraces vanish and when she redoubles her love, he waxes increasingly indifferent. Emma, in turn, becomes a slave to passion. When ultimately Rodolphe reneges on their–or principally her–plan to elope together, she contemplates suicide, then succumbs to a state of nervous prostration. Meanwhile poor Charles, ever more in debt because of her extravagance in purchasing finery, contends with creditors and the depression and illness of a wife whom he continues innocently to love.

  When Emma finally rallies, it is to engage in another doomed passion with the law student Léon, her first admirer. But the increasingly sexual frenzy of what had started as an affair of heart and mind, alongside attraction, tires Léon before it tires her, and once more she is confronted by the vanity of her dreams: ‘All was lies! Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom, every joy a misery. Every pleasure brought its surfeit; and the loveliest kisses only left upon your lips a baffled longing for a more intense delight.’

  Emma is confronted by the elusiveness of her pursuit of satisfaction: rapturous love through time ever eludes the lover’s grasp. Like so many engaged in a passion which initially seems grand, she comes to rediscover in adultery ‘all the banality of marriage’. Torn apart by the spiral of debt for which she has only herself to blame, she takes poison. Charles, bereft, continues to love her despite the revelation of her infidelities. He dies of a broken heart. Orphaned, their daughter is reduced to earning her keep in a cotton-mill. The fate of the passionate dreamer and adulteress is to wreak havoc on the lives around her.

  But Flaubert judges his heroine–if he judges at all–less severely than the pettiness of the society of which she is part. In this quintessentially modern novel, the adulteress’s punishment comes neither from religious power–as it does, say, in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850)–nor indeed from the society around her. It comes from her very condition as a woman, which allows her no dreams of transcendence apart from those of love; and from the nature of adultery itself–doomed to become as dull as marriage. The very obstacles which contribute to passion, Flaubert the psychologist demonstrates, are not enough to sustain it through time. Born out of fertile illusions, it is bound for disillusionment. Ever even-handed in his ironies, however, Flaubert posits little hope for domestic love either: Charles’s idealization of Emma, his willing, indeed uxorious, recognition that this beautiful woman is cut from finer cloth, does not mean that he is capable of the imagination that might even briefly satisfy her desires. Desire may indeed be doomed, but without it, there are only the chemist Homais’s empty platitudes and comically provincial self-satisfaction. Human heavens are brief and self-created, but they’re heaven for all that.

  If Emma’s story has a tragic dimension, her male counterparts in continental fiction tend to be treated in a comic idiom. Unmarried men may woo and love older married women, with meaningful passion–like Stendhal’s and Balzac’s heroes–but married men pursue their lusts by rote and with a degree of social acceptability, whatever the moralizing of the Church or the malice, ever mingled with envy, of gossip. Mondanity rules.

  Unhappy families: Anna Karenina

  Despite the passage of time and shifting social conventions, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina remains the richest psychological elaboration of love, marriage and adultery fiction has given us. The tragic passion of Tolstoy’s iconic heroine is so vivid in cultural memory that it can make us forget that the book in fact begins with its comic counterpoint: the marital plight of Anna’s worldly brother, Stepan. An upstanding and much loved member of the Russian aristocracy of the 1870s, Stepan Oblonsky is a charming, pleasure-loving, happy-go-lucky philanderer. It is his family that is the first case to follow from the most famous opening line in fiction: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

  Stepan’s family is unhappy because his wife, Dolly, has discovered his infidelity with their former French governess. Dolly feels that she can neither forgive him nor go on living with him. Her palpable pain suffuses the household and unleashes disorder: the smooth running of family life grows impossible. Recognizing this and suffering its consequences, Stepan, homme moyen sensuel that he is, can nonetheless feel little guilt for his infidelity: ‘He could not deceive himself into believing that he repented of his behaviour. He could not now be repentant that he, a thirty-four-year-old, handsome amorous man, did not feel amorous with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children… He repented only that he had not managed to conceal things better from her.’ Although he understands the gravity of the situation and pities Dolly, Stepan is quintessentially a man of his time. Indeed, he encapsulates the double standard inherent in a particular type of masculine pragmatism, whatever the period. He has never thought through the question of his infidelities clearly, ‘but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed to him that she, a worn-out, no longer beautiful woman, nor remarkable for anything, simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent.’

  Dolly isn’t. It takes the intercession of Stepan’s sister, the charismatic Anna Karenina, to smooth matters between husband and wife. With her force of presence, as much as with
the force of her argument, Anna convinces a Dolly whose heart and pride have been wounded to forgive her husband. There are different kinds of love, she argues: Stepan’s for Dolly is a love of the soul, he has called her ‘remarkable’, she has been a ‘divinity’ for him; while his love for the governess is a mere sexual exploit–‘infatuation’.

  Soon Anna herself will be caught up in a passion that challenges any easy separation between the values of the sacred and the profane; and as an adulterous woman, forgiveness will be far harder to find.

  Stepan, the kind but fundamentally amoral pleasure-seeker, provides one pole of the novel’s exploration of morality in love; his deeper and more troubled friend, Levin, provides another. Tolstoy’s own stand-in, Levin is reflective, austere, idealistic, tied to the land and to overarching religious values, yet racked by unconscious impulses and his own inability to understand or indeed control himself, particularly where passion is concerned. Like everyone else, except momentarily Dolly, he loves Stepan: but he can’t viscerally grasp his friend’s wayward, childlike greed and undisciplined desires.

  When Stepan says to him: ‘Suppose you’re married, you love your wife, but you become infatuated with another woman…’, he responds that he doesn’t understand, just as ‘I don’t understand how I could pass by a bakery, as full as I am now, and steal a sweet roll.’ Stepan, decidedly a man with the makings of a modern consumer, counters that the sweet roll may be so fragrant you can’t help yourself, even if it is a theft and engenders lamentable consequences. Not a man driven by passing desires, Levin advises him simply not to steal sweet rolls. But, remembering his own past sins in this area–before he formed a pure and overarching love, a love that leads to higher areas of the soul, for Dolly’s sister, the delectable Kitty–he blurts out that he simply hasn’t the answer to these problems of love.