Not So Foreign Affairs

In my dramaturgy class I have just finished reading the Russian play “The Three Sisters” by Anton Chekhov, which follows the lives of three sisters after their father’s death. Throughout the play, the audience gets to know the sisters and other people that interact with them, including love interests. The sisters long for love, happiness, and wish to leave their small town and flee to Moscow, which is where they loftily believe all their dreams will come true. The middle sister, Masha, is dark, quick witted, and artistic. She ends up having an affair with the deeply romantic Vershinin, after becoming bored and uninterested  with her current husband, Kulygin.

As I read Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, I find many similarities between the pathetic Kulygin and the unremarkable Charles Bovary. In both men’s eyes, their wives can do no wrong regardless of the fact that their wives are having affairs. Throughout the play, Kulygin repeats, “I am content, I am content”, as he is in complete denial, or perhaps even oblivious, that his wonderful Masha would ever have wandering eyes let alone be having a promiscuous affair. In addition, as we discussed in class, because of his allowing the women in his life to control him, we get the idea that Charles is complacent, oblivious, and emotionless. 

I also find it interesting that there are similarities between Masha and Madame Bovary. Masha is very artistic and romantic; this is where she gets most of her lofty visions of both a better life and lover. Even though she does not run of to Moscow with Vershinin as she hopes, while the two are together they have a deep, intellectual connection as well as a romantic one. Emma Bovary also finds emptiness in her own life, and fills that void with adulterous affairs. Along with love, she also craves wealth. 

I find it intriguing that both these women find their lives to be miserable and lacking, and their only evidence for this is the disparity they find between romantic ideals present in art and literature, and the simple life they lead in the country. 

Although there is about a fifty year difference between the publication of these two works in addition to one being French and the other Russian, I can’t help but wonder of the idea of romantic, exciting affairs became more common in these times, as a way to escape the boring, monotonous burden of married life. It is an idea that we in today’s society come across in television shows, movies, and literature, which perhaps is why Flaubert’s novel is so capturing; because even readers today, in a different country, can relate. These ideas which inspired Russian plays and French novels, are in fact no so foreign to us Americans after all.