Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary - an uncontrolled appetite that led to tragic ends

Two women, who could not control their appetites, even at the cost of being a responsible mother, meet tragic ends

* A modified version of this post has appeared in The Usawa Literary Review, 2024 *

'appetite' (ap-pe-tite) n.

i. as any of the instinctive desires to maintain organic life, especially eating

ii. an inherent craving. 

The word 'appetite' is most commonly associated with hunger and often portrays ravenous cravings, as seen in the Bakasura story in the Mahabharata. His insatiable hunger symbolizes his inherent evil nature, and his devouring the village people further accentuates this. But appetite is related to much more than just food. Through mythology, there hardly exists any character with uncontrolled hunger or appetite who meets a happy ending. Yet there are many other ways in which appetite can be destructive beyond the immediate link to food. Indeed literature gives us many examples of destructive appetites.

An appetite for living, for sucking the marrow out of life can also cause one to choke on the bone at times. Life can be a bit much. It is much better to find all we want of it in literature, safe between the pages, as we sit down wrapped in a blanket, holding a cup of tea. We can cry as we bemoan the fates of those who let their appetites run wild, who did not stop to think and consider what would be wise to do. The hallowed halls of classic literature are peppered with instances of those who followed their hearts' desires, did not listen to reason and plunged headfirst into ruin. Going through the canonical works, one notices more women than men are brought to their knees, which might reflect that more men were writing and getting published. Their personal biases influenced the themes correspondingly. 

Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, two of literature’s most famous adulteresses, on the surface, share some similarities. If one were to sketch a thumbnail description of their fates, one would say, 'Unhappily married woman gets involved in an affair that leads to trouble, kills herself.' But that would be too simplistic. Looking closer at their lives in these books, you can see that the underlying differences are as distinctive and unique as fingerprints. It is in these details that we uncover the richness of the characters.

Emma Bovary, the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel 'Madame Bovary: Provincial Customs' embarks on a different path to death than Anna Karenina. Emma is at convent school, considering a life of devotion to God. However, romance novels smuggled into the school find their way to Emma's hands, and her appetite is sparked as she reads tales of passion, glamour, midnight trysts, and stolen women. That Emma is immature and very naive. This is where the ‘Provincial’ of Flaubert’s title makes a mark on the character; indeed, through the book, Emma does not acquire any great realizations about life despite repeatedly being thwarted in her attempts for adventure. She marries Charles Bovary to escape her parents' farm, but marriage fails to excite her. Even motherhood fails to move her, apart from a brief period. She feels lost.

“Where did it come from, this feeling of deprivation, this instantaneous decay of the things in which she put her trust?”

Taking up with the caddish Rodolphe and planning to run away seems to provide her with the much-sought-after thrills finally, but sadly, only briefly - she is betrayed by him – a betrayal that affects her so deeply that she is taken to bed for forty-three days with a brain fever. She almost dies. Forty-three days is no small number. Through this Flaubert gives us a measure of her passion, how deeply it affects her and how deeply she allows it to affect her. Eventually, she recovers and turns back to religion. But this is only a brief detour.

At the opera, she runs into her first crush, Leon, the only period of her life when Emma is happy, albeit briefly. She starts an intense affair, and the affair and the anticipation of her weekly trysts fill up her minutes, her hours, and her days. The commencement of this affair is brilliantly conveyed by Flaubert, in their tryst in a carriage.

“Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom.”

However, the fool in Emma cannot be kept down too long, and she overextends her credit at home to live a life of luxury. When her debts come knocking at her door, she cannot get loans from anyone, including Leon, her lover. Distraught, she swallows arsenic and dies one of the most painful deaths in all of literature, described in excruciating detail. Love, from conquering all, does not even pay her bills in the end.

Emma is young. Emma is immature. In her various affairs, she is reckless, to the point where those around her know of her dalliances. All but her husband. Charles somehow plods through the book, never realizing the extent of his cuckoldry. Emma's insatiable appetite to be cherished and loved never helps her. Everyone she loves lets her down; everyone she should have loved (her daughter and husband) gets scant attention from her. Being a provincial woman, she lacks self-awareness;  not knowing exactly why she wants the things she wants. She looks for more, believing there is more to life, but never realizing how little there is to her. 

Anna Karenina, the eponymous heroine of Leo Tolstoy's 1878 novel, is a bona fide member of Russian upper-class society and starkly contrasts Emma Bovary, a provincial woman from the start to the end. Emma's excitement at being invited to her first ball is palpable, while Anna, accustomed to such events, is almost bored by them until Vronsky's arrival. Emma's head is often in the clouds as she chases her next fantastic experience, while Anna's is bowed, dulled by her routine marriage to the timid and duty-bound Karenin. Indeed, Anna's road to infidelity and eventual ruin directly contrasts with Emma's. Emma thinks she is keeping her affairs secret, but it is one of the novel's ironies that everyone seems to know. Anna, on the other hand, does not seem overly bothered about people finding out about her love for Vronsky. When Anna meets Vronsky, asking him to accept Kitty, he replies that he is in love with Anna herself. This thrills her, and she soon commences their doomed affair. When he nearly gets killed at the horse race, Anna's passion is so evident in her expressions and body language amid high society that Karenin feels compelled to talk to her about it. She almost immediately confesses. So, here we have the case of a wise woman making nearly the same decision as Emma, but from an almost rational point of view. Anna is terrified that life is passing her by without true passion, and nothing else matters as much. She remarks on their love,

“They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.”

Emma and Anna are willing to sacrifice motherhood on the altar of their love, for they have no choice. Karenin refuses Anna's request for a divorce, more interested in the appearance of things than the things themselves. Vronsky does not want to give up his trappings or ambitions, all the while seeing Anna leave her husband and travel around Europe with him, even if she cannot spend time with her son. Upon returning to Russia, Anna makes an ill-fated decision to attend the opera but is scorned and talked about unflatteringly. She grows increasingly insecure, unable to go out and meet people, while Vronsky faces no such stigma and tribulations. Finally, she throws herself onto the tracks at the station where she first met Vronsky. Her passions gave her pleasure for a while, but the cost was too high. Like Emma Bovary, she has tried to follow her desires and ignore life, but as Auden would say, Time coughs when you kiss and eventually, the societal repercussions of her actions catch up with her.

The crucial difference between Emma and Anna is that Emma is naïve, unaware that people are whispering and rushes where angels fear to tread. Her husband alone remains clueless. Anna is the opposite in that she knows the stakes; she knows she may never see her son Seryozha, who bears the brunt of his father's coldness after Anna leaves home. Anna is only able to meet him once, secretly, on his birthday, in the most heartfelt and beautiful scene in the entire novel, where Tolstoy can show us that Anna does indeed love her son immensely but that she loves Vronsky more.

As Anna lives more and more indoors, distraught and increasingly insecure, she envies Vronsky’s freedom, bemoaning her loss of status and family, particularly her son. Finally, in a most tragic resolution, she finds herself at the train station, the very place where she first set eyes on Vronsky, on a day when a woman threw herself on the tracks. The connection is made in her mind – as it starts, so it shall end. She gains her eternal peace by falling on the tracks, ending her suffering almost mercifully.

For the large part, Tolstoy shapes the other characters in Anna Karenina as being in control of their appetites. Anna’s brother, Stiva, is serially unfaithful, but he and his wife do love one another, and they can live happily by not living too intensely. Similarly, Kitty is temporarily saddened by Vronsky's refusal, but eventually, she finds more mature and lasting love and happiness with Levin. The message of Anna Karenina seems to be that if we choose to live fully, we also risk losing everything if one were to be so tacky as to assign a message to a classic.