A SYSTEM THAT WILL NOT ALLOW SELF-DESTRUCTION

 Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) ("Didn't Flaubert execute Emma for her crime? . . . He was a moralist in a larger sense. He was, if anything, writing about a French bourgeois so stifling, so enamored of respectable mediocrity . . . [] It is, Barrett knows, a romance, and a perverse one at that, the whole notion of a house brought down by pettiness and greed. It's nineteenth-century. Citizens of the twenty-first century can max out their credit cards, they can extend their limits, but actual destruction, death by extravagance, is no longer possible. You work something out with the credit card company. You can always, if it comes to that, declare bankruptcy, and start over. No one is going to swallow a fistful of cyanide over a pair of ill-purchased motorcycle boot. It's comforting, of course it is, but it's also, somehow, discouraging to live within a system of that won't permit you to self-destruct." Id. at 89-91.).