Emma does not see the difference. She is disappointed in both her lovers and in “love” itself. Her principal emotions are jealousy and possessiveness, which represent the strong, almost angry movement of her will. In other words, she is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is only remarkable for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling. Emma is trite; what happens to her is trite. Her story does not hold a single surprise for the reader, who can say at every stage, “I felt it coming.” Her end is inevitable, but not as a classic doom, which is perceived as inexorable only when it is complete. It is inevitable because it is ordinary. Anyone could have prophesied what would become of Emma—her mother-in-law, for instance. It did not need a Tiresias. If you compare her story with that of Anna Karenina, you are aware of the pathos of Emma’s. Anna is never pathetic; she is tragic, and what happens to her, up to the very end, is always surprising, for real passions and moral strivings are at work, which have the power of “making it new.” In this her story is distinct from an ordinary society scandal of the period. Nor could any ordinary society Cassandra have forecast Anna’s fate. “He will get tired of her and leave her. You wait,” they would have said, of Vronsky. He did not. But Rodolphe could have been counted on to drop Emma, and Léon to grow frightened of her and bored.

Where destiny is no more than average probability, it appears inescapable in a peculiarly depressing way. This is because any element in it can be replaced by a substitute without changing the outcome; e.g., if Rodolphe had not materialized, Emma would have found someone else. But if Anna had not met Vronsky on the train, she might still be married to Karenin. Vronsky is necessary, while Rodolphe and Léon are interchangeable parts in a machine that is engaged in mass production of human fates. Madame Bovary is often called the first modern novel, and this is true, not because of any technical innovations Flaubert made (his counterpoint, his style indirect libre) but because it is the first novel to deal with what is now called mass culture. Emma did not have television, and Félicité did not read comic books in the kitchen, but the phenomenon of seepage from the “media” was already present in every Yonville l’Abbaye, and Flaubert was the first to note it.