Character Analysis
Marketa finds herself in a very unhappy place in her life: she's stuck in a marriage with a woman-chasing husband, feeling very excluded and sorry for herself.
It wasn't always this way: in her younger days, the bets had been that Marketa would give her husband a run for his money. But, as Kundera tells us, she's made somewhat of a fatal mistake in the way she hooked up with her husband, Karel: "In the first weeks of their love, it was decided between Karel and Marketa that Karel would be unfaithful and Marketa would accept it, but that Marketa would have the right to be the better of the two and Karel would feel guilty toward her" (II.6.12).
Oops.
Now, Marketa has to be the long-suffering wife—and she doesn't like it: "No one knew better than Marketa how sad it is to be better. She was better, but only for lack of anything better" (II.6.12). She wants to remake herself and her relationship with Karel by being daring. She wants to challenge even Karel's adventurous sense of lovemaking.
And right on cue, Eva enters the picture. She's the one person with whom Marketa can freely express all the dimensions of her sexuality, with no jealousy around her husband's love and no guilt of her own. Eva is the cure for everything that's been missing in Marketa's love life.
It's clear that Eva and Marketa's relationship gets far ahead of their relationship with Karel. While Karel is entirely absorbed in his own sexual fantasies about Mrs. Nora, two very important things happen for Marketa.
First, she realizes that sexual pleasure with her husband is only possible if she erases his identity, and hence their troubled past: "...she tried not to see the face, so as to think of it as a stranger's body. It was a masked ball...He was a man's body without a head. Karel disappeared and a miracle occurred: Marketa was free and joyous!" (II.12.5).
Second, she realizes that she's really, really into Eva. Like, really: "She had always loved her, but today for the first time she loved her with all her senses, for herself, for her body, and for her skin, becoming intoxicated with this fleshly love as with a sudden revelation" (II.12.10).
Suddenly, Eva is no longer a present from Marketa to her husband. It's no longer about impressing him or catering to his very complicated needs. In short, Marketa has learned to be like her husband, taking pleasure for herself and only for herself.
Karel, on the other hand, doesn't notice that anything has changed. Classic Karel.