overdose on chloral hydrate. Society breaks poor Tess, too, in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Tess is a teenage milkmaid who experiences the worst of both the adolescent and adult heroine conventions. She is raped and impregnated by her cousin; she falls in love with a man who abandons her after he finds out she isn’t a virgin. After she kills her rapist and runs away with her former lover, she is cornered by the police, lying on the rocks of Stonehenge like a sacrifice, her body and life an offering to the world of men.
In Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Emma, a pretty and suggestible farmer’s daughter with a taste for romance novels, gets married to a doctor named Charles Bovary and finds herself confused. Marriage is much more dull than she’d expected. “Emma tried to figure out,” Flaubert writes, “what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.” She “longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.” She cannot stagnate comfortably, as is expected of her. (“It is very strange,” she thinks, about her baby, “how ugly this child is!”) “She was waiting for something to happen,” writes Flaubert. “Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.”
This longing drives Emma to her love affairs—first with Rodolphe, who ditches her the night before their planned elopement, and then with Leon. Their attention is not enough. (She wonders, “Whence came this insufficiency in life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?”) Emma has been perfectly socialized into the idea that female happiness exists in the form of romance and consumer purchases. When romance fails, she goes deep into debt, attempting to excite herself. She begs her lovers for money; she finds out that affairs almost inevitably get as tedious as marriages; finally she takes arsenic, dying a drawn-out, painful death. As with so many other nineteenth-century novels, the main narrative engine is the inability of a woman to access economic stability without the protection of a man.
Leo Tolstoy’s protagonist in Anna Karenina (1878) is an entirely different sort of woman than Emma—she is intelligent, capable, perceptive—but nonetheless follows the same trajectory. The novel begins with an affair and a possible suicide: two chimes on a clock, telling the reader what time the story’s set to. Anna has come to visit her brother, Stiva, who has been cheating on his wife, Dolly. At the train station, the two of them run into Vronsky, an army officer, and Anna is instantly electrified. Then a man either falls or throws himself on the train tracks. “It’s an omen of evil,” Anna says. During her visit, she urges Dolly to forgive Stiva, and the love between her and Vronsky starts to burn. When she returns to St. Petersburg, the sight of her husband and child disappoints her. She’s only in her late twenties, but she’s trapped: unlike Stiva, she will be cast out of society if she has an affair. She has a recurring dream about what seems like a threesome, her husband and lover “lavishing caresses on her” simultaneously. “And she was marveling that it had once seemed impossible to her,” Tolstoy writes, “was explaining to them, laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both of them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.”
Anna gets pregnant with Vronsky’s child and confesses to her husband. She can’t bring herself to end the affair, and she can’t get a divorce without ruining her social standing. She starts to unravel. “She was weeping that her dream of her position being made clear and definite had been annihilated forever…everything would go on in the old way, and far worse, indeed, than in the old way…she would never know freedom in love,” Tolstoy writes. Formerly poised and vivacious, Anna dissolves rapidly—struggling to interact with people, taking morphine to sleep. She turns on Vronsky, becoming erratic and manipulative, the way women do when the only path to power involves appealing to men. She is aware that “at the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her,” and suddenly realizes that “it was that idea that alone solved