- The Good: A character story about wanting a life you don’t have; also fiscal responsibility
- The Bad: Unfair to women
- The Literary: A seminal work in realism
Growing up on a rural farm and convent, Emma Rouault loves books, especially the popular kinds with travel, luxury, and romance. Her father’s doctor, Charles Bovary, asks for Emma’s hand in marriage after his first wife passes. Emma is thrilled, hopeful that her provincial life will become the grand adventure in her books.
Unfortunately, happiness is fleeting for Emma and this story serves as her chronicle of finding and losing one new obsession after another. Emma’s animated beauty dulls as she discovers the banality of married life and her role as a wife. Charles moves them to the larger market town of Yonville, which helps for a short while. Emma becomes pregnant, and her romantic ideas of motherhood are soon dashed. Emma falls in love with a young law student who shares her passion for literature and music, but she keeps her affections secret, and he soon leaves for schooling in Paris. Through one event after another, Emma experiences intense periods of excitement and joy followed by depression so severe she can barely get out of bed. What follows is deception and infidelity, debt and financial ruin. (Please be aware, spoilers follow in this review.)
I honestly can’t tell if I love this book or am offended by it, so I wanted to read about the book’s place in history and the authors’ intention. Published in 1856, the novel was put on trial for obscenity, which gives me reason to love it. The lead prosecutor argued that not only was the novel immoral, but that realism in literature was an offence against art and decency. After Flaubert’s acquittal, the sensational trial made it a bestseller.
Madame Bovary is considered a seminal work of realism, a movement spawned from the French Revolution of 1848, in which the monarchy was overthrown in favor of a republic. In short, it was an uprising against the bourgeois.
Emma’s husband Charles, though a doctor, is a simple and common man. He is referred to as an officier de santé, or “health officer”. He’s not extravagant, imaginative, or ambitious. He likes to smoke by the fire in the evenings. Charles is the perfect example of a happy, oblivious, down-to-earth man who loves his life and his wife, although he doesn’t really know her. He’s portrayed as the real hero and victim of this book, the moral compass against which Emma fails dramatically.
Paired against Charles, Emma represents the bourgeois and their downfall. Emma is obsessed with romantic ideas like beauty and passion, but those ideas are also hand-in-hand with wealth and high society. She’s a shopaholic, compelled to consume more and more when the high of a new dress fades. She desires something that can never be real so she’s never satisfied. I’m sure Emma suffers from depression, probably something more severe, and there is even a Madame Bovary Syndrome named in her honor, characterized as chronic affective dissatisfaction.
The realism movement strove to portray life as it really is in literature, without fantastical elements or fancy prose. It’s true that much of the story is written about commonplace life, but the novel is structured and curated, and the pace follows Emma’s own internal surges and dips. The tragic ending is especially dramatic, unsubtle, and stretches the boundaries of realism.
Even though Emma is a terrible wife and mother, I empathize with her. I also want meaning out of life, deep connections, and conversations about literature and art. She wants a little spice, some excitement, anything to make day-to-day living tolerable. “Emma, for her part, would have liked a marriage at midnight by the light of torches, but her father thought such an idea nonsensical.” Early-ish in the story, Emma’s mother-in-law recommends that Charles remove all the books from the house, as fiction is the real source of the problem. To my eyes, she’s the real villain here.
Flaubert is very critical of Emma, particularly her romantic ideals, but he takes it a step further. Emma is described as a “dark” woman, with black hair and black eyes, which get deeper and darker every time she gets excited by something romantic. By letting down her dark hair she ensnares the affections of young men. When she dies, a black bile arises from her lips and runs down her face.
Even when she becomes religious for a short time, it’s clear the priest is uncomfortable with her new religious fervor, indicating that it’s not about what she interested in, but the passion she brings. I’m left wondering if Flaubert was personally wronged by a passionate woman in his own past.
However, I do think Flaubert recognizes Emma’s helplessness. The men around her have agency in their own lives and she does not. Flaubert said once “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” (“Madame Bovary is me”), which would account for why she’s so relatable. So why then did Flaubert choose to write himself as a woman? For me, this work toes the line between female hysteria and early feminism. Flaubert allows Emma to feel rage and despondency, but ultimately kills her for it.
I think I both really like this book and am offended by it. But it’s the sort of book that your brain returns to in quiet moments. Recommended for fans of classic literature and personality disorders!
“But, when she looked in the mirror, she was startled by her own face. Never had she had eyes so large, so black, so mysterious. Something subtle, transfiguring, was surging through her. She kept saying to herself: ‘I have a lover! A lover!’, savouring this idea just as if a second puberty had come upon her. At last, she was to know the pleasures of love, that fever of happiness which she had despaired of. She was entering something marvelous where everything would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.”