i was thinking, why do we love madame bovary so, and not bouvard and pecuchet? she's sexy. b&c are not. they are rubes of fruitless invention. though we don't love the tale, the sex helps. it's a tale we can't shed, of culture versus nature, and we watch knowing culture wins and nature dies and we die in nature. culture and 
nature.
madame b. abhors nature and lusts for culture but she really lusts for freedom and she doesn't get that her nature and nature are not as far apart as her nature and culture. she buys too much her love abandons her and she eats the poison and dies in the nature path so beautiful in her fall dress dying in the falling leaves. 
we return to this dilemma because we're still in it, we return to it in imagination because we can't imagine how to resolve it. the fight with nature and culture is our mortality, and it gets heavier with time, the loss. our struggle now we know is not to buy off unhappiness but to find our lost nature, to shed the nihilism of our culture, to return to nature.