Sarah Palin, the Madam Bovary of Alaska

Bovary, Emma--a memorable, iconic character; a prime example of the way causality and determinism trigger responses in a front-rant character; a person who became disenchanted with her life, then attempted to effect change.

Emma is everything you could want in a character. She has a vision, which she seeks at accelerated levels to achieve; she has a mounting sense of frustration because her stratagems do not produce their intended goals; she has a growing sense of dislike for her husband, Charles, because of the fact that he, of all those with whom she has contact, wants nothing more than to please her. The fabric of life is Emma's romantic vision. Emma's behavior and attitudes comprise Charles Bovary's romantic vision. They are coevals in an existential train wreck.

Compare and contrast Emma Bovary with Mr. Stephens of Kazuo Ishiguro's remarkable The Remains of the Day: Each means no harm to others. Although each causes some collateral damage along the way, Emma is an absolute disaster in the totality of her effect, bringing her feckless husband to the state of utter inability to cope with life, while Mr. Stephens, although unintentionally breaking Miss Kenton's heart, has mostly damaged himself. He is, in fact, Charles Bovary writ larger than Bovary himself. Emma has romantic visions of enhanced social position and the exciting life she imagines will result from that position. Stephens has the romantic notion of achieving the enhanced plateau of being one of the best butlers ever. In fact, Stephens has served Lord Darlington, a conspicuous supporter of Hitler in the pre-World War II years, and who now, at the beginning of the novel, is reduced to serving a status-conscious American. Both Emma Bovary and Stephens are extreme examples of naive narrator, each intelligent enough to see beyond the surfaces apparent to them but each is resolutely unwilling to do so.

As Mark Twain notably did with his parodic treatment of Walter Scott-type romanticism and chivalry in such works as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Huckleberry Finn, Emma Bovary's creator, Gustav Flaubert, took Emma's reading habits as a vehicle he rode into the literary sunset. Emma's early readings only seemed to whet her appetite for the things she considered to be missing from her life. In a real sense, the more she read, the more her sense of reality was shunted off to the side, allowing the vast interior of her fantasy life to expand to the point where it overrode any possibility that reality would survive. In a fitting irony, Emma Bovary identified herself with Anna Karenina, pursuing suicide as the appropriate way out of the nightmare of circumstance she had created for herself. But here, too, Emma was betrayed by illusion. Anna Karenina's death was over in a brief moment. The drama of Emma's death was painful and protracted.

For more reasons than exquisiteness of character delineation, Madam Bovary is consistently cited as one of the five or ten major novels in any language at any time, but the complexity, inner struggles, and outer agenda inherent in Emma Bovary make her a tempting height to aspire when bringing a character onto a page in a story. Flaubert is famously remembered as saying that Emma Bovary is he. He might as well have said Emma Bovary is story.

Gut Feelings: Intuition or Heartburn?

romanticism--male and female writers, male and female characters acting out their enthusiasm; a dramatic, personal attitude reflecting a passionate interest in and curiosity about travel, science, history, animals, behavior in general, art, food, drink, literature, all terrains of the imagination; an overwhelming belief in the potential inherent in humanity; an instinctive and vigorous distrust of philosophies or systems that diminish or remove altogether the sense of individual choice based on individual responsibility.

Although romanticism and romance have a brief arc of overlap, the two concepts, particularly in the literary sense, go their separate ways. The romantic is the Quixote-like character but equally the Tom Jones or Becky Sharp or Asher Lev character, off in the world to seek some form of fortune. The romantic is often forced to squint at the accouterments of reality because of the dazzle of reflected light from the goal or ideal. 

 A scholarly debate of some vigor argues the likelihood of Geoffrey Chaucer having worked at translation of a medieval French poem, The Romance of the Rose, which involved such romantic tropes as dream visions and the true identity of the protagonist Rose, as in, was she a real person or a metaphor for all women? The scholarly debate adds yet another note of romanticism to the persona of Chaucer, who also may or may not have been a spy, may or may not have been involved in a court case where he was charged with rape. Ah, the possibilities.

Romance is more an extended and complex display of a wedding cake, complete with bride and groom effigies at the top tier. Will a particular couple stop fighting long enough to get married? Will Beatrice and Benedick find true happiness? Will the Wife of Bath finally settle into a good relationship with a man, and is her current husband, Jenkyn, Mr. Right? As readers, we already know we feel pretty sure about Jane, so much so that we cannot help wonder if Rochester is going to make her happy. And as we nervously reread the final paragraphs of the ur-romance, Rebecca, can we be absolutely sure that the nameless narrator is going to be okay with Mr. Right?

Both romanticism and romance are considerable forces for a writer to deal with. After rereading The Crystal Cave by Mary Renault, we are tempted to observe that romanticism (as well as the English language) is alive and well, thank you. Even though Candice Bushnell exudes a tangy modernity and edge, any of her novels assures us romance--at least in her hands--has not gone vegan on us.

Romanticism recognizes the nine-to-five job but argues in favor of the intuitive, aggressively emotional state over the more formal, rational, mechanical. Thus does romanticism become alchemy as it helps transmute the perfervid scientist into Dr. Frankenstein, who may have slightly overreached. Thus does romanticism bring drama into the equation by matching Dr. Jekyll against the neo-Russeauian Mr. Hyde. 

 Indeed, isn't Natty Bumpo the Russeauian noble savage, gone around the bend. Not to forget John Yossarian nor, for that matter, Tom Joad. Romanticism gives the writer a sterling opportunity to take on established order, one of the most splendid examples of all inherent in lead character and writer in Huckleberry Finn, the former taking on social caste and civilization, warts and all; the latter taking on the excesses of Sir Walter Scott (whom he came to loathe), slavery, and race relations in the U.S.