Peter Galen Massey

Emma Bovary should have stayed on the farm.

Instead, she marries an oafish health officer and rises into the middle class of a country town, where she finds boredom, loneliness, empty promises from romance novels and religion, and fury at the cages in which 19th-century France placed women.

Flaubert’s universe is barren of virtue. There is no tenderness or compassion, no understanding or true friendship, no curiosity or wonder in Madame Bovary. No love either, despite all the talking of it.

Everyone is crass and venal, foolish, pompous, scheming and self-serving, craven, dastardly. Words fail the characters – even Flaubert’s words. The novel’s people are surrounded by his exquisite descriptions of wedding revelry, bustling towns, the beauty of nature, but Flaubert’s words make no impression and bring no consolation.

All anyone sees in Emma Bovary is her beauty, her clothes, and her body. So perhaps it makes sense that when Emma tries to solve the problem of her life – a problem she feels but can’t articulate – she turns to sex and shopping. They lead her to misery and destruction, of course.

I don’t think Emma could see other choices. Who is at fault? Emma Bovary herself? The society in which she lived? Or the world Flaubert made for her? Probably all three.

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I had a long slow argument with Henry James while reading The Wings of the Dove. Was he an immortal genius? Or a purveyor of pretentious soap operas? Here’s who won the argument:

“On that especial issue, Peter made something like a near approach, taking into account his great reasons, the particulars and nuances and complexities, they being, of course, more important than the main point, they being really fine, and grand, and ravishing, and although he hung fire on his answer, and really, who might blame him, before committing himself, as it were, to a more definite position, which if stated plainly, might fall a little flat, might seem a little thin, might reveal too baldly a poverty of thought and a desolation of feeling, conveniently concealed in a thicket of syntax, great flashes of brilliance aside, yet he did half commit himself, in the end, all of which is to say, perhaps, he wouldn’t decide James wasn’t coming out something more ahead than not.”

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Hermann Hesse, author of books such as Siddhartha and winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the perfect writer for teenagers. His novels are painfully earnest, full of sensitive characters who are struggling against the soul-destroying conventions of society and searching for transcendence.

This description certainly fits Harry Haller, the central character in Hesse’ most famous book, Steppenwolf. And it’s not hard to see why Harry would appeal to adolescent readers (despite the fact he’s nearly 50 years old). Harry is grumpy, gloomy, brilliant, artistic, misunderstood, rejected, spends a lot of time alone in his room brooding, and is – turns out – pretty horny. This exactly describes the kind of teenager who would bother picking up Steppenwolf in the first place.

The question is, for those of us who read Steppenwolf twenty or thirty years ago, Should we bother reading it again?

The answer is “sorta”.

Steppenwolf is still utterly humorless and Harry is still gloomy, misunderstood, brooding. What stands out now is how dull Harry Haller is. Hesse keeps telling us how fine a soul Harry has: how intelligent is he, how artistically refined, and how much he suffers.

But the only evidence we have of Harry’s genius is Hesse’ say-so. Nothing in Steppenwolf persuades us that Harry is as remarkable as Hesse claims, and without any tangible signs of brilliance, Harry is rather uninteresting, except for when he’s being petulant.

Steppenwolf also displays that vanity particular to the aging male animal, which is the magical belief that beautiful young women find us attractive.

In the real world, young women don’t fall for decaying misanthropes unless they have a sum of money and Harry doesn’t. But Hesse asserts that not one, but two gorgeous young girls are fascinated by Harry and that he is still capable of prodigious feats of physical love with them.

What saves Steppenwolf is how thoroughly Hesse destroys any sense of value we might have for Harry’s genius. Hesse still sees Harry as a unique soul – but a unique soul leading a useless existence.  Harry is a man who has forgotten how to laugh or find pleasure in life.  He’s a fool who should be pitied, and scolded, and taken by the hand and pulled away from his stubborn loneliness and self-importance.

When this happens, Harry does become interesting. He begins to feel human. He engages our sympathy. And he makes the long hallucinatory sequence that forms the middle-end of Steppenwolf credible rather than ridiculous because Harry feels like a convincing person in it.

Finally, the last pages of the book work for readers of a certain age. Steppenwolf closes not with Harry triumphing over his old self, but rather with him discovering that he is the same person he always was despite his best efforts.

I suspect the young don’t much like this ending. The young believe they can be anybody they want to be (and they should believe this).

Unfortunately, for those of us who have been living with our adult selves for a couple decades, the ending of Hermann Hesse’ Steppenwolf bears an unhappy resemblance to the truth.

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I may just be a middle-aged Jane Austen fanboy – but Austen keeps earning my admiration novel after novel, and she’s done it again with Emma.

Since chances are good you already know the book, I’m going to skip the review and serve up random observations. I reveal much of the plot and all of the surprises in Emma, however. So, spoiler alert. Here goes:

Emma is a Comedy

The proper response to this observation is – I realize – “Duh”. But it’s also a remarkable fact because Austen’s other books are romantic dramas (except for Northanger Abbey, which is a parody of Gothic novels).

One of the qualities I admire in Austen is that she rarely writes the same book twice, even though her novels share so many themes and situations.

For example, Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price are about as different as two characters can be, and their novels are very different in tone, pacing, and plot. But Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park are both major achievements.

In Emma, Austen gives us a third variation which I think is easily the equal of these novels – and it’s a comedy. How many writers succeed in more than one style?

Emma is a Comedy … with a Conscience

Really, this is just ridiculously difficult to pull off and Austen makes it look easy.

The problem with comedy is that it is almost always based on pain. But you can’t laugh at a character and empathize with her at the same time.

To deal with this problem, writers usually locate their stories in a “comic” world that is largely free of consequences and death OR they reduce, deny, ignore or attack the humanity of their characters.

Austen does neither. Emma Woodhouse is a comic figure, and some of her foolish mistakes are funny, but it is Emma’s good intentions and the deep shame, regret, embarrassment, and pain she feels at her mistakes that make her more than a figure of fun.

And Emma is not alone, of course. Miss Bates is even more of a comic figure. In fact, there may be no greater clown anywhere in Austen’s work, and yet Miss Bates is treated with respect. When Emma insults Miss Bates during the excursion to Box Hill, Mr. Knightley rides to Miss Bates’ defense (“It was badly done indeed!”) and Emma weeps almost all the way home.

This is not comedy that produces belly laughs. It is delicate comedy, designed to make you smile, and possessing a grace and lightness that in its total effect is indistinguishable from wisdom.

Indeed, could we say the definition of wisdom is moral seriousness combined with laughter?

Emma’s only equal in this category I know is Shakespeare’s As You Like It. That’s pretty good company.

Everyone is Mistaken about Love

What a brilliant, delightful, simple conceit around which to construct a novel. Everyone is wrong about everyone else’s feelings, basically all the time. And yet it turns out happy.

Here’s a list of mistakes about love in Emma:

• Emma thinks Mr. Elton loves Harriet Smith

• Mr. Elton thinks Emma loves him

• Emma thinks Mr. Dixon loves Jane Fairfax

• Mrs. Weston thinks Mr. Knightley loves Jane Fairfax

• Emma thinks Frank Churchill loves her

• Mr. Weston, Mrs. Weston, and Mr. Knightley think Emma loves Frank Churchill

• Emma thinks Mr. Knightley loves Harriet Smith

This list doesn’t include Emma’s serial mistakes with Harriet Smith, which are persuading Harriet to fall out of love with Robert Martin; persuading Harriet to fall in love with Mr. Elton; and persuading Harriet to fall in love with Mr. Knightley while thinking she was persuading Harriet to fall in love with Frank Churchill.

It also doesn’t include the biggest mistake of all: no one realizes that Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are in love.

Emma is the Snob on Top

As I said, I admire Austen for rarely writing the same book twice. Emma is unique in Austen’s work as a comedy. It’s also unique because its major characters sit on top of the novel’s social order.

In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, the main characters are all marginalized or dispossessed in their societies or families, and generally opposed by those who rank higher or think more highly of themselves.

In the novel, Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley are the rulers of their set. Emma is aware of her social position, guards it carefully, and is jealous when it is infringed. (For example, part of the offense Emma takes at Mr. Elton’s marriage proposal is his presumption that he was Emma’s social equal … an heiress of 30,000 pounds!)

Mr. Knightley is less particular than Emma about the niceties of his status, but he wields his power with the same sense of entitlement. Mr. Knightley has perfect confidence in his judgment of every situation, and rarely yields to the opinions of other people. He does not give offense wantonly, but he doesn’t worry about offending Mrs. Elton when she presumes to guide his choices or the Westons when he speaks poorly of Frank Churchill.

This is significant because Emma and Knightley would be the villains in other Austen novels. By all rights, Harriet Smith and Robert Martin should resent Emma’s interference in their lives, the way Elizabeth Bennet resents Lady Catherine’s in hers.

But Harriet is very sweet, and not all that bright, and she seems to feel Emma’s hugely mistaken good intentions more than she notices Emma’s mistakes. As for Robert Martin, we don’t know. In the end, he got the woman he loved, and as practical man of good sense, apparently content with his station, perhaps he decided the rest didn’t matter.

From drama to comedy, and from villain to hero, these are two reasons to admire Emma. And now I think I’m done with Jane Austen for a time. On to the next author!

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