Madame Bovary and the Seeking Instinct, Untamed
"The nearer things were, the more her thoughts turned away from them."
I’ve been trying to write an essay about Madame Bovary for over a month. I’ve gone on too many “meditative walks,” which have prompted too many thoughts and ideas that remained stuffed in my head. I couldn’t untangle them. Then Nicholas Carr’s new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart arrived in the mail. This seemed like it’d be a refreshing change of pace from Flaubert, so I put Madame Bovary on the shelf and dove in. (Superbloom also happens to be the February pick for the Smartphone Free Childhood US book club; we’ll be discussing it on Zoom on Feb 25. Register here to join!)
But, no offense to Nicholas Carr, it wasn’t a refreshing change of pace at all. Because it turns out Superbloom deals with the same problem that Flaubert was writing about 168 years earlier in Madame Bovary: namely, the emptiness of a life spent seeking instead of living. I can’t escape this crap! Nevertheless, I am thankful because Superbloom helped me untangle what I want to say about Madame Bovary.
Homo Sapiens and the Seeking Instinct: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The seeking instinct is the evolutionary drive we humans have to explore our surroundings in pursuit of new stimuli. It is the quest for dopamine. The seeking instinct is not about the joy of discovery, but rather the pleasure of the hunt itself.
The seeking instinct wasn’t always a problem for our species. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, it was actually key to survival. If we didn’t seek the unfamiliar, we wouldn’t find food, we wouldn’t detect threats, and…I wouldn’t be here today struggling over the umpteenth draft of my Madame Bovary essay.
Something very important to know about the seeking instinct, however, is that it needs to be kept in balance or else it has a way of taking over everything. A little seeking is good; too much, and things start to get dark. Because if we spend all our time seeking, then we can never be content with what’s right in front of us (Madame Bovary is, among other things, a case study in this).
“Our seeking instinct tells us that the familiar is without interest,” Carr writes in Superbloom, “but once the instinct is subdued, we begin to discover the rewards of looking long and hard at the world we know. The possibilities of art, science, and philosophy open up. The story of civilization is, among other stories, a story of the taming of the seeking instinct.”
Or, as Flaubert put it, “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”
For most of human history, the seeking instinct was subdued naturally because there were limits to the number of unfamiliar things a person could possibly seek in their environment, as well as the amount of time one could spend seeking. Before the era of modern transportation, most people stayed very close to home for most of their lives, which helped tame the seeking instinct. In addition, households were primarily producers rather than consumers—growing and preparing their own food, making their own clothes and tools, and creating their own entertainment through songs and storytelling once the daily work necessary for the running of the household was completed. These activities took up the majority of people’s time and helped keep families rooted in the familiar rather than hooked on seeking.
Nowadays, however, most people obtain the necessities of life through consumerism rather than production. Consuming is more efficient than producing, which means it leaves us with a lot more downtime than our producer forebearers had. And there is so much to consume! Plus, with the invention of the radio, followed by TV, internet, and of course smartphones, one no longer needs to leave their own home to seek the unfamiliar—an infinite number of new and interesting stimuli are in reach every moment of every day. Unfortunately, the combination of lots of downtime plus constant access to a never-ending stream of new stimuli spells trouble for our ravenous seeking instinct. “We’re being given what we want, in quantities so generous we can’t resist gorging ourselves,” says Carr.
To recap: the seeking instinct has been a core characteristic of our species for millennia, but until recently, it was kept under control because most people spent their lives largely grounded in their familiar, physical surroundings. “The material world, with its spatiotemporal boundaries and its many frictions, tames the seeking impulse,” Carr states. Things used to be in balance. But as technology sped ahead in tandem with consumerism, that equilibrium fell apart. Even by Flaubert’s time—mid 1800s—things must have been starting to get out of whack, or else he would not have written a book like Madame Bovary.
How Madame Bovary Became a Slave to the Seeking Instinct
If you’re not familiar with Madame Bovary, here’s a quick recap (spoilers ahead!). Emma (Madame Bovary) is a country girl plagued by a nagging sense of ennui. As a young woman, she becomes smitten with the country doctor Charles Bovary, fancies herself in love, and quickly agrees to marry him. But the honeymoon doesn’t last—not because Charles is a terrible guy, but because, in Emma’s eyes, he’s so utterly commonplace. Depressed that married life doesn’t deliver the passionate romance she was anticipating, she tries to fill the void in her soul by buying lots of stuff—running up enormous debts along the way—and eventually taking some lovers. Ultimately (SPOILER), she brings ruin upon herself and her family with her extravagant spending, her lovers grow tired of her and she of them, and she commits suicide by swallowing a bunch of arsenic. Cheery stuff.
I am not a historian and don’t know much about life in 19th-century bourgeois France. But a few things are clear in this novel. Emma was rich enough that she didn’t have to immerse herself in her familiar, physical reality. She could spend her days browsing catalogs of pretty things to buy or reading romance novels. She had no “production” obligations to help root her to her own household, such as cooking, cleaning, or other domestic duties; the servants took care of all that. Even when she became a mother, she didn’t experience the friction of caring for her own infant. Forget “breast is best” vs. “fed is best.” In Flaubert’s time it was more like “guest is best”—the guest being your own baby sent to live in the home of a stranger “to nurse” for the first several years of life.
I feel obligated to note that as a woman during this time period, Emma’s options for finding fulfilling work outside of the home were also severely limited. There was nothing for her to do at home and nothing for her to do outside of the home—a tricky situation, to be sure. At the same time, despite undeniable progress in women’s rights since Flaubert’s time, it seems to me the seeking instinct is way more out of control for women, as well as men, today (more on that below). Admittedly, this makes me wonder whether our current obsession with “having it all” is really to our benefit. But that can of worms deserves a whole other essay!
Back to the 19th century. Feeling unmoored from reality, Emma becomes ruled by her seeking instinct and falls into a deep depression that rarely lets up in the novel. She begins an affair with the wealthy, womanizing landowner Rodolphe, which temporarily makes her feel alive again. But six months into it, the flames of attraction begin to cool and the relationship starts to feel rather routine. At this point, the ennui that’s plagued her through most of her adult life returns full force. She wonders: "Whence came this insufficiency in life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned?" While pondering the cause of her chronic unhappiness, Emma recalls a memory from her childhood, which I think holds some answers:
“She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when any one passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness there had been at that time, what freedom, what hope!”
This is going to sound cliché, but bear with me. As a child, Emma was able to notice beauty in the familiar. Evenings full of sunshine, galloping colts, bees that looked like balls of gold. These simple observations from her familiar surroundings were all it took to fill her with delight. But somewhere between childhood and womanhood, she lost her ability to find beauty in regular life and developed an unquenchable desire for more—more passion, more excitement, more luxurious possessions. Emma became corrupted by the message that fulfillment wasn’t possible in a provincial setting or while married to an unambitious country doctor whose conversation was as “commonplace as a street pavement”—only in a dazzling place like Paris while surrounded by sophisticated, wealthy, attractive people. The tyranny of the seeking instinct causes her to look anywhere at all for fulfillment—except right in front of her:
“The nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them…She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like Indian plants, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness could not be separated from the balconies of great castles full of indolence, from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-filled flower-stands, a bed on a raised dais, nor from the flashing of precious stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries.”
Caught in an incessant seeking loop, Emma can’t appreciate what’s right in front of her—not her devoted husband and not even her child. She can barely even see them.
How Charles Bovary Shows Us a Different Way of Being
Emma’s husband Charles is not without fault. Here’s a description of him from Emma’s point of view, soon after their marriage: “after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up to the temples.”
So, not exactly Mr. Darcy we’re dealing with here. And yet…there’s more to Charles than meets the eye. If Emma represents the emptiness of always reaching for something “better” in life rather than enjoying what you have, Charles is a perfect foil: so blissfully planted in the present moment that he doesn’t even see the slow-speed trainwreck that is coming for him via Emma’s destructive behaviors.
Take this description of Charles from the beginning of their marriage: “He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together, a walk in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now made up the endless round of his happiness…For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.”
While Emma is constantly checked out of her actual life as she seeks the unfamiliar, Charles cannot imagine anything better than what’s right in front of him. Another example of this difference between them occurs as Emma and Charles anticipate the birth of their first child. Unable to afford the “swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, and embroidered caps” that she wants for the baby, Emma emotionally detaches from her pregnancy, which foreshadows her complete disinterest in actual motherhood.
But Charles has a very different response: “When from afar he saw [Emma’s] languid walk, and her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when opposite one another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses in her armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds…The idea of having begotten a child delighted him. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human life from end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity.”
Charles, without even trying, is a master at looking closely at the familiar and finding beauty in it. Consequently, he spends most of his life feeling effortlessly content. He is grounded in his material world and better for it, versus Emma who “passes through life scarcely touching it.”
2025: the Seeking Instinct on Crack
“In the nineteenth century, Flaubert and Thoreau foresaw mud where others saw a perfectly rewarding way of life. Today we’re up to our eyes in it.”—Mark Greif, Against Everything
168 years ago, Flaubert wrote a novel about a woman who, due in large part to the culture she lived in, could not anchor herself to her physical reality. Consequently, she became enslaved to her seeking instinct, which led to her ruin. I find this extremely disturbing. Because if Flaubert was already sounding the alarm about the emptiness of the seeking loop long before electronic media was invented and before consumerism had cemented its grip on society, what hope is there for us today? If Emma Bovary, who “lived” before the invention of modern plumbing, needed more friction in her life to really live it—how screwed are we in today’s era of smart toilets? Don’t worry, I’m not about to start a Make Outhouses Great Again movement. But I am disturbed!
At least Emma had a pure childhood, spending her days immersed in the simple pleasures of her provincial life. It wasn’t until adulthood that her seeking instinct began to rule her life, leaving depression, decay, and arsenic poisoning in its wake. Unfortunately, most kids today don’t even have the advantage of a childhood rooted in the real world. Nowadays, we are, however unintentionally, programming our children to be ruled by their seeking instinct before they’re even out of diapers.
“Youth are now assaulted by a never-ending proliferation of marketing strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives,” writes cultural critic Henry A. Giroux. “Under the tutelage of Disney and other megacorporations, children have become an audience captive not only to traditional forms of media such as film, television and print, but even more so to the new digital media made readily accessible through mobile phones, PDAs, laptop computers and the Internet. The information, entertainment and cultural pedagogy disseminated by massive multimedia corporations have become central in shaping and influencing every waking moment of children’s daily lives—all toward a lifetime of constant, unthinking consumption.”
So…What’s the Solution?
This is all sounding quite bleak. But I think there is a way out, even for us dopamine-addicted Homo sapiens of the 21st century. It’s not easy given the filthy water we’re all swimming in, but it can be done. We can tame the seeking instinct and find richness and meaning in the familiar. In doing so, we can flourish.
I’m no expert in this, having spent the better part of the last decade enslaved to my own seeking instinct, but here are a few suggestions:
1. Be aware of the problem. Repeat after me: If I don’t control my seeking instinct, it will ruin my life. Make this your mantra. It may sound dramatic, but sadly, it’s accurate. As Mark Greif writes in Against Everything, “The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our lives a waste.”
2. Consciously erect speed bumps in your daily life to slow your seeking instinct’s roll. We live in a culture of consumption that is constantly telling us we need more. The seeking instinct is here for it, but we need not be. We can subdue the seeking instinct by limiting our use of technologies and media that embolden it. Everyone has their thing—whether it’s online shopping, video games, news articles, social media, or something else. Quit or reduce the time spent on your “thing.”
3. Look for opportunities to embrace friction instead of always prioritizing efficiency and convenience. Contrary to what our efficiency-obsessed culture is constantly telling us, friction is not the enemy. Friction is our friend because it helps subdue the seeking instinct. A few things to try: go shopping in person rather than ordering everything on Amazon. Meet a friend for coffee or invite them to your home for dinner rather than catching up on text. Try growing flowers from seed. Go on long walks. What are some other ideas?
4. Try aestheticism. Aestheticism is not about vibey Pinterest boards or the perfect Instagram filter. As Mark Greif explains, it is a way of living in which “you treat the things you encounter and the things that you meet as capable of offering you the pleasures which, characteristically, we think of as coming from art, movies, paintings.” This cannot be done when we’re in seeking mode, only when we’re able to slow down and look closely at the familiar for a long time. In Madame Bovary, it’s not the beautiful, sensual Emma who practices aestheticism, but rather her soup-gurgling husband Charles.
5. Shield children from technologies and other cultural influences that cause the seeking instinct to run wild. Russell Banks wrote that our society dehumanizes children by transforming them “into consumers making them want, want, want, in order to sell them and their parents not what the children need but what they have been made to want.” We have to protect our kids from this. Their brains are still developing, and they need to be shielded from the culture of “unthinking consumption” that they were born into, if they are to have any shot at taming their own seeking instinct once they’re older. To that end, they need firm boundaries when it comes to addictive digital technologies and media. Let’s give kids a chance to put down deep roots in the material world before exposing them to the rot of addictive video games, smartphones, and social media.
“A life spent only in seeking is an empty life,” Carr writes. “What we see today as the real world’s shortcomings—its withholding of easy and immediate amusements, its stretches of solitude and boredom, its frictions and inefficiencies—are the very things that open the world’s possibilities to us. They push us to seek out and master difficult, complicated, and ultimately more satisfying ways to spend our time.”
The seeking instinct is part of human nature. We’re not going to change human nature anytime soon, but we can resist a culture that brings out the worst in us. We can structure our lives in a way that enables balance between the urge to seek and the ability to “sit down to life with serenity.”