“A book lives longer than a girl,” Vladimir Nabokov once remarked during a lecture to his Cornell students about Gustave Flaubert’s crowning masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857). The same could be said of Gaetano Donizetti’s most famous opera, the blood-soaked and melodramatic opera Lucia di Lammermoor(1835). It is widely agreed that of all of opera’s crazy ladies—of which there are many—the title character’s rambling, hallucinatory 20-minute descent into madness set the gold standard for going bonkers. But it wasn’t only the music world that was taken in by Lucia’s formidable charms. The opera found a second life as part of the plot of some of the greatest works of western literature, including such classics as Leo Tostoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), E.M. Forster’s, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and most notably in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

With the character of Emma Bovary, Flaubert set out to create a woman whose raison d’être is making her life as elaborate a novel as possible, and who is ultimately undone by her inability to bridge the gap between illusion and reality. Finding herself bored and restless in her marriage to a kindly but milquetoast husband, Emma tries to live out her fantasy life by engaging in numerous affairs while racking up considerable debt as a result of her profligate spending habits. After one such love affair ends in disaster, a heartbroken and highly impressionable Emma sees a performance of Lucia di Lammermor, and finds inspiration in the opera’s tragic heroine. The famous Act IV “mad scene” of the opera finds a distraught Lucia forced into a loveless marriage by her brother to a man she loathes, and scorned by her beloved for her “betrayal.” Overwhelmed with despair, Lucia stabs her betrothed to death offstage. She dramatically stumbles back onstage for her famous 20-minute mad scene, wielding the bloody knife that she had just unleashed on her unlucky husband. She wanders the stage, singing back-to-back arias in which she hallucinates that she is marrying her true love and that she is already dead and looking down on her beloved from Heaven. The ordeal proves so traumatizing that she dies from a broken heart the next day.

After being exposed to Lucia Di Lammermor, Emma, “[p]ermits herself to be lulled by the melodies and felt her entire being stirred as if the bows of the violins were passing over her nerve-ends…[L]ucia begged for love, longed for wings. Emma, too, would have liked to flee away from life, locked in a passionate embrace.” Emma adopts the fictional character as her role model and so strongly identifies with the tragic heroine of Lucia that she becomes convinced that the only correct way to respond to heartbreak is to go mad and take her own life. After another failed love affair and panicked over her spiraling debt, Emma swallows arsenic and dies an excruciating death. Even the romance of suicide failed the tragically empty Emma Bovary in the end.

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