How the French Invented Love

I came to see Emma Bovary in the light of what Girard called “mimetic desire”—that is, she desired what she had learned to desire through a third party. The romantic novels she had read were, as she remembered, “all about love, lovers, sweethearts . . . gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains.” Words like “passion” and “felicity,” “which had appeared so beautiful in books,” had given her a false notion of what love could be. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire made sense to me because I knew how books, movies, and movie magazines had affected my girlfriends and me in the formation of our romantic desires. (Of course, at Johns Hopkins, you were supposed to avoid movies, unless it was one of Ingmar Bergman’s.

Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.”