fizA on Friendship I manly SaW .ncarn. a Sf o her. She was hoveri Madame Bovary 1 at Bloomingdal e s the other morning, or rather, I saw the current issue. of Cosmopolitan, Whose ng Marriage. Her face already over the cosmetic counters, clutching irresistible to the opposite sex line read “New Styles of Coupling, and terribly lonely. And I thoughther to myself: Poor girl! With all the by a materialistic middle-class glutting reams plight (victimized by double standards, no’ tvvithstanding all these diagnoses, one g fact on the excess of romantic fiction), had central to her tragic fate has never been stressed enough: Emma Bovary ha a faithful and boring husband and a couple of boring lovers—not so intolerable a condition—but she did not have a friend in the world. And when I think of the great solitude which the original Emma and her contemporaries exude, one phrase jumps to my mind. It comes fonl ail essay by Francis Bacon, and it is one of the finest statements ever penned about the human need for friendship: “Those who have no friends to open them-selvesunto are cannibals of their own hearts.” In the past years the theme of friendship has been increasingly prominent in our conversations, in our books and films, even in our college courses. It is evi-dent that many of us are yearning with new fervor for this form of bonding. And our yearning may well be triggered by the same disillusionment with the reign of Eros that destroyed Emma Bovary. Emma was eating her heart out over a fantasy totally singular to the Western world, and only a century old at that: the notion that sexual union between men and women who believe that they are passionately in love, a union achieved by free choice and legalized by marriage, tends to offer a life of perpetual bliss and is the most desirable human bond available on earth. It is a notion bred in the same frenzied climate of the romantic epoch that caused countless young Europeans to act like the characters of their contemporary liter-ature, Goethe’s Werther is said to have triggered hundreds of suicides. Numerous Wives glutted on the fantasies of George Sand’s heroines demanded separations because their husbands were unpoetic. And Emma Bovary, palpitating from that romantic fiction which precurses our current sex manuals in its outlandish hopes for the satiation of desire, muses in the third week of her marriage: Where is “the S�citY, the passion, the intoxication” that had so enchanted her in the novels of Walter Scott?
