Alternative Realities

We are continuously looking for an escape from our reality. We wish to be better and more than what we actually are. Sometimes this drive either brings us to insanity and sometimes it causes us to give up on ourselves as in Madame Bovary. When we give up on ourselves we sit back in the world and let it pass by, rationalizing our inaction. We look for vicarious versions of ourselves feel better. We find children and movie stars to live through. When they are contributing to charities it seems almost like we ourselves have done something good. By watching a movie that a certain actor or actress who are contributing to charities then it seems that we are helping feed children in Africa. In reality we aren’t doing anything. We are losing ourselves in our lethargy. 
In pursuit of our escape we have movies and theaters. We buy the biggest screens for our televisions possible in futile attempts to become more personalized and enveloped in the alternative universe of our choice. We fill ourselves with these illusions of life that we are somehow able to make so strong that we feel personal connections. We embody the actors and actresses who are making up this alternative universe. We understand in the end that it wasn't real, but it was so much easier to be who we wanted to be in the imagination of the director. Back in Madame Bovary’s time though, they had the theater.
The theater scene in Madame Bovary allowed us to see how Emma wanted her alternative universe to look like. The opera that Emma and Charles see is one that is full of passion and there is even a women deciding between two different men. Emma can see herself as the character played out, reinventing her life. However, this life that the actress is enacting is full of passion and suave men who want nothing but to please her. She becomes a part of the illusion and pulls into her life, "She recognized all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her" (Flaubert, 207).
To make it seem even more that the play was meant for Emma, Flaubert creates the actors in it to be ones full of lives of passion and adultery that seem to call to Emma. The main actor was one who had become a celebrity because he had let a Polish princess ruin herself for him and then he deserted her for other women. This is as dramatic as it gets and falls right in with Emma's personality that seeks the drama. Emma meets Leon, the man that she had loved in Yonville during the opera adding to the scene. Here the opera parallels with her life as she sits surrounded closely by her husband and future lover. Later in the book Emma is even more like a part of the actor’s story because she lets her lover ruin her. However, Flaubert has Emma, Leon, and Charles leave the opera before it finishes. Emma doesn't want to see the end; she only wants the beginning with the lust and passion. The last thing she hears before blocking the rest of the opera out is "Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour and all my dreams" (Flaubert, 211). Emma does not want to see the end to the passion; she does not want to see the consequences that can occur from following your passions.

Societal Views On Sex

I find myself thinking that maybe if society didn't hold sex to such a high esteem we wouldn't have so many cultural problems that deal with sexuality in a negative way. Our desires are mainly stemmed from the fact that we can't be fulfilled. We want what we can't have and therefore, the things we can't have we want all the more. Sex is one of those things. I will agree that it is beneficial for the members involved and that it creates intense feelings, but sex has been so overly dramatized that I feel that humans have lost what sex really is. To me, sex is a way to communicate a desire that you have for another person, it is something to enjoy and to share when appropriate. The overly romanticized view of sex creates it as something that adds or subtracts from your self-worth. It seems that too many people believe that the act of sex will completely relieve the partners of all future desires, that it allows people to magically become complete.
Due to this romantic view several people are forced to be virgins, or undergo processes to ensure virginity, so that their passions are completely fulfilled by only one man. The romantic view is also what pushes the character, Emma in Madame Bovary, to become adulterous. Emma has this view that love is an emotion that fills you with such passion that you are completely overwhelmed by this one person for the rest of your life. She wants the passion so badly that she admits to herself that she wishes that her husband, Charles, would beat her. Beating her would give her the passion she desires because what she is looking for isn't something that would make her feel better or become a better person. What she is looking for is something to feel. If you are beaten you feel that hurt for the rest of your life. It scars you and can create this extreme hate. Extreme hate is an emotion that is felt much more strongly than a lasting love. You can feel the hate curdling around inside of you, but love is more of a comfort with another person. Love is a soft desire.
Society has tried to quench the intense desires of people so that they don't release their destructive powers. Any sort of desire, if not monitored carefully, can become destructive for all people involved. The destruction that desires can cause is outlined in Madame Bovary and Celestina. With the romanticized view of sex, society has mistaken passion and desire for purely a sexual thing and has therefor tried to reduce sex to something that should only be accomplished for reproduction purposes and be demoralized. In chapter 8 of Madame Bovary the author, Gustave Flaubert, creates a setting where Rudolph and Emma first express their desires surrounded by society to show a juxtaposition of the views. Rudolph is speaking sweetly to Emma about his passions and desires to be her servants (a.k.a to get into her pants) while the speeches of the fair are penetrating through their conversations. He says, "A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you- I remained." While the next line is from the speech, which is where the president of the Agricultural society shouts, "Manures!" (Flaubert, 140). We see the back and forth of the society versus the lovers.

Why Nothing Good Can Come From Teenagers Meeting In The Dark

Being from Maine means that if you don't have a car you don't have a social life. Even worse, if you are a child with parents who think that driving is too expensive, you are doomed to be a loner. But after reading Celestina, maybe that's not such a bad thing. After all, if you don't have a car and are stuck at home there is very little trouble you can get into. This heightened the longevity of my life by like 200%. Without a car I am able to avoid not only meeting prostitutes (I have yet to see any in Maine, such a bummer), witches, and most of all boys. Heaven forbid I fall into the equation of 1 witch+prostitutes+1 boy+ 1 senseless girl in puppy love=definite death. It's surprising any of us have lived this long.

It says that Calisto realizes Celestina's secret when he hears that his servants killed her and are being beheaded. This realization is that Melibea would have loved him even if he hadn't sent Celestina to bewitch her on his behalf. Now what fun is that? This means that Calisto was a lot easier to obtain than he had thought. Therefore, she would have loved him even if she had never met Celestina. This is when Melibea falls out of love with Calisto. If she had been an impossible catch she would have held her attractiveness and beauty in the mirror he had previously seen. Now she is just another girl, at least she is a girl who is willing to have sex with him. He is suddenly faced with the moment when the passion has died out.

It's such a pity that we can't hold onto the passion that we encounter when we first meet a person. We expect it too last forever and long for the quivering feeling in your spine to tell you how much you love this person. Yet, it fades, after a year or so you will inevitably never feel that quivering feeling again. For Calisto and Melibea this feeling fades pretty much as soon as they are done having sex the first time. Melibea's feelings for Calisto fade to wanting her only because of the sex she provides him. This revealed when Sosia visits Areusa and tells her about the meetings between Calisto and Melibea. He after explaining their secret, he says, "Even less would he go every night, for that endeavor will not tolerate daily visitation" (de Rojas, 217). He only goes when he is able to have sex and would rather stay home than to see her with her clothes on.

Another time you are able to see that Melibea is done with Calisto is in his death scene. Melibea hears a ruckus on the street and would rather go fight and leave Calisto, after he had just had sex with her, than to stay and be with his lover. This leads to his hasty climb away from her in the dark leading to his slip and fall off of the ladder. With Calisto dead we are now able to see why it is so tragic that girls get so much of their self-worth from external sources. With her major source of sexual love gone, her feelings about herself plummet into a belief that life cannot go on. Upon this reasoning that, the death of an inattentive lover + a higher tower = the only way she can feel better, she kills herself.

 These continual deaths that occur one after the other in Celestina is a lesson de Rojas wishes to give us. He is telling us to reign in our passions and greed because they will only lead to our demise. All of the characters in Celestina want something and to almost all of them this is the death of them. Celestina wanted money which leads to her death by Sempronio and Parmeno who killed her over the gold chain she refuses to share. Sempronio and Parmeno, who also wanted money, get beheaded for killing Celestina over the gold chain. Calisto and Melibea wanted passion and both got killed when they found that it was so fleeting. Melibea got killed because he was in such a rush to get away from her and Calisto killed herself because she couldn't deal with the hole it left when it was diminished.

How To Win Friends And Influence People Celestina Style

The book Celestina by Fernando de Rojas is a Spanish version of Romeo and Juliet, just with more prostitutes and love of the all mighty vagina. Celestina is this character that is able to portray both pure evilness and desire at the same time. Of course anyone who has broken up with their significant other would know how easy it is to place those two traits into one person. These traits make her come out as not only a fantastically dynamic character, but traits melt together so perfectly that she doesn't have to have a split-personality. Calisto decides to send for Celestina so that she can make Melibea fall in love with him. However, a servant of his warns that Celestina is evil which he promptly ignores and makes her out to be love instead. The love, desire, and evilness that she embodies come together to show us that you can't have any fun without hurting others. In fact, in order to get what you want, which is of course, money since you can pay prostitutes to love you. Then you need to be able to sabotage, hurt and ruin others.

Rule #1: By embodying love, even if you are evil, you can influence most men.
"Celistina was friend to many students, and stewards, and servants of clerics, and to those she sold the innocent blood of the hapless young girls who foolishly took risks on the basis of the restitution she promised them" (de Rojas, 24). This is the true character of Celistina, the one who sells people for her own gain, the one who cares for no one but herself. Calisto places the love and desire into her character, looking past all the warning signs his servant gives him, and seeking her out to deliver him love in the form of Melibea. Parmeno, Calisto's servant, understands the danger of Celestina and says. "Ah, wasted, wretched, crushed, blind man! And on earth you are worshiping the oldest and most whorish bawd whose shoulders have rubbed the slats of every brothel in town!" (De Rojas, 29). Parmeno sees that Calisto is incorrectly portraying Celestina as love. Therefore, Parmeno begs Calisto to keep his money and to spend it on his actual love, Melibea. But, for Calisto, Celestina is his love. She may not be the direct object of his desire, yet he feels that she is the only one that can bring love to him. Therefore, in his crazed mind, spending money on Celestina is spending money on Melibea.

Rule #2: If you want to make an ally offer them a prostitute.
I mean, what else are prostitutes there for other than to make the process of making friends easier? Parmeno, after much deceit, only decides to help Celestina ruin Calisto because she gives him his love (aka a prostitute that sleeps with him). Somprano, another servant to Calisto, introduces Celestina because he knows her from when he has sex with the love of his life (a prostitute). The only woman not a prostitute, thus far in the book, is Melibea. Who at first is indignant when Celestina infers that she should go sleep with him but is happy to give her girdle as a present for him. Ladies and gentlemen, no matter how attractive he is I can safely say I would never give a relative stranger my bra.

Rule #3: Those that own the prostitutes, own others.
In fact, Celestina herself, when trying to get Areusa to sleep with a man, says, "Do not hoard your loveliness, for it is by nature as good an exchange as money" (de Rojas, 107). By getting Areusa to sleep with people Celestina gets money. You can do and get all sorts of things when it comes to sex. Friends like prostitutes, allies like prostitutes, they are the gift that just keeps giving and that every man wants. You can get money by selling the prostitutes. By having these prostitutes people come looking for you to give them their loves and desires. In turn all you have to do is give them a prostitute. They are never out of season. Soon you will own the souls of those who are sick enough to give them to you. When I say sickness, I do not mean coughing in bed with a fever, I mean head over heels in love. Because love, is the greatest sickness of all. Due to this love Calisto has for Melibea he seeks out the evil powers of Celestina to make her fall in love with him. So if Celestina can convince Melibea to fall for Calisto she can own both of them and owning both of them means siphoning money out of their pockets.