182
MARY McCARTHY
has willed it?" His view of Emma is the same as the judge's view of a
merino ram. She is flesh,
with
all
its
frailties, and he is an expert in
flesh. Yet Rodolphe is trite beyond his intention. He is wedded to a
stock idea of himself as a sensual brute that prevents him from noticing
that he actually cares for Emma. His recipes for seduction, like the
pomade he uses on his hair, might have been made for him by a phar–
macist's formula, and the fact that they work provides him with a
ready-made disillusionment. Since he knows that "eternal love" is a
cliche, he is prepared to break with Emma as a matter of course and
he drops a manufactured tear on his letter of adieu, annoyed by a
vague sensation that he does not recognize as grief. As for Leon, he is
too cowardly to let himself see that his fine sentiments are platitudes; he
deceives himself in the opposite way from Rodolphe: Rodolphe feels
something and convinces himself that it is nothing, while Leon feels
nothing and dares not know it. Even his sensuality is timid and short–
lived; his clerkly nature passively takes Emma's dictation.
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 surround–
ings. 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 prophet have fore–
cast Anna's fate. "He will get tired of her and leave her," they would
have said, of Vronsky. He did not. But Rodolphe could have been
counted on to drop Emma, and Leon to grow frightened of her and
bored.
Where destiny is no more than average probability, it appears
in–
escapable in a peculiarly depressing way. This is because any element in
it can be replaced by a substitute without changing the outcome; e.g.,
