As Charles McGrath pointed out in a recent New York Times essay, “human beings…do foolish things, especially when love and money are involved.” Ever quick to capitalize on the more interesting byproducts of human error, writers have taken this circumstance and run with it to astounding effect.
1. Elizabeth Willard from Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Anderson spared his native milieu no pity in this collection of short stories fictionalizing the author’s young adulthood. In the story “Death,” Anderson paints a rending portrait of his mother, who employs the comfort of her one friend, Dr. Reefy, to relieve the disappointment of her marriage to a bland hotelkeeper. It is to Reefy that Anderson gifts one of the best epigrams about love yet committed to print: “‘Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,’ [Reefy] had said. ‘You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.’”
2. Laura Brown from The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Cunningham’s The Hours tracks the fates of three women, none of whom benefit from their relationships with men. Laura Brown, whose storyline transpires in post-World War II Los Angeles, bears the particularly unenviably fate of having entered a lukewarm marriage. She loves her husband and son, though life as a housewife leaves her with a persistent, existential itch. She mothers when she would rather be reading; she funnels her artistic instinct into the baking of cakes. The novel reveals to her something of her blinkered horizons, but for the most part, she remains unable to articulate her own frustration.
3. Tertius Lydgate/Rosamond Vincy from Middlemarch by George Eliot
The characters in Middlemarch could easily populate this list by themselves, but in the interest of offering you lists the finest quality, we’ll restrict ourselves to discussing only one of the novel’s misbegotten love pairings. After moving to the novel’s titular town, intent on ministering to its citizens and conducting medical research, Doctor Tertius Lydgate marries the gorgeous Rosamond Vincy. Shortly after the marriage, Lydgate realizes that he has not secured for himself a passive domestic partner and Rosamond realizes that she has not secured for herself a husband intent upon upward social mobility. In the ensuing power struggle, Rosamond ultimately proves the more determined, though she winds up exacting irreparable damage on them both in the course of her victory.
4. Charles Bovary from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
As mentioned by Vladimir Nabokov in his essay on Flaubert’s masterpiece, one of Madame Bovary’s multitudinous ironies lies in the fact that fickle, frustrated Emma Bovary has at her disposal the attentions of a man who adores her: her husband Charles Bovary. Meek, untalented and unambitious, Charles proves unable to satisfy his wife’s thirsts for status and adventure. He finishes the novel bankrupt, his wife lost to suicide and his energies unable to pay the costs of his ardor.
5. Isabel Archer from Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The wife oppressed by a boorish husband has grown through repetition into a cliché, but James managed to subject his protagonist to a variation on this theme several times subtler than the norm (and, in the end, of a far greater cruelty). Beautiful, intelligent and, after the novel’s midpoint, rich, Isabel Archer has her choice of mates on two continents, but selects the effete, prickly Gilbert Osmond instead. An aesthete, egoist and mild monster, Osmond makes clear that he values Isabel in the same manner in which he values an oil painting or fresco, and he expects from her a similar level of pliability. Through emotional extortion, Osmond ensures that his bride cleaves to him or else risks the desiccation of her pride.