A Lucky Guy On The Bus

Oh, Madame Bovary! Oh, you, you . . . you French woman, you!

I don't know exactly what I expected when I started reading Madame Bovary and A Streetcar Names Desire at the same time. I thought, though, for some reason, that Emma Bovary was a nice lady. How wrong i was! I don't know if she's evil, or just crazy. At the moment -- about 30 pages left to read -- she seems certainly to be descending into madness. She has had a hard time facing reality, accepting it; and her impression of the green grass on the other side of the fence is quite delusional. So I guess she's always been a little nuts.

I have this ongoing problem, though, with stories in which children are abused or neglected or hurt: that becomes the theme for me, the defining plot element. This is one of the best books I've ever read, and maybe Emma has just tricked herself into madness -- but, because of her treatment (or more accurately, non-treatment) of her daughter, she will always be, to me, a rotten person.

In the context of the book, that is, by far, not her biggest sin. I'm just saying.

She seems to want to live a life as intense as Stanley Kowalski. She wants a life that fills any room it walks into, as Stanley personality forces itself to the center. The Kowalskis are lower middle class, I guess, which Madame Bovary would never accept. But Stanley's intensity matches the intensity of the life she thinks she deserves, in which there is a thrill a minute (so to speak).

Whether evil or nuts, she is definitely not a victim. She, and she alone, has taken herself to where she had arrived. It's like she assumes rich people do nothing but party and so, having convinced herself she should be rich, she parties, expecting no consequences because that's what people like her (the illusory her) do. I'm at the point where the consequences are starting to intrude.

At the point I've reached in Streetcar, by the way, Stella and Stanley are back together and still in love, much to Blanche's horror.

Meanwhile, the bus has been taking detours due to some invisible construction around the hospital: really, cars are going down the road, but the buses are skipping a mile out of the way for no apparent reason. Some guy got off on the detour Thursday, and the bus driver even asked if he was sure, and he said yes. I had to admire his fortune at getting on a bus that he couldn't possibly have known was going to deposit him exactly where he wanted to go, saving him a long walk from the normal bus stop.