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BOOKS
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Madame Bovary
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By Gustave Flaubert, review by Bruce Meyer
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Madame Bovary
By Gustave Flaubert, review by Bruce Meyer
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Before you read the book
A little scandal goes a long way, or at least that’s what many readers think when they encounter Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
To readers today, the machinations of Emma Bovary seem tame in comparison to the emotional strum und drang that can be witnessed daily on most soap operas. The beauty of Flaubert’s novel, however, is not its shock value, but its ability to depict human nature and foibles with acute insight. It is a novel where the reader is permitted inside the psychology of the characters, where motives seem as self-evident as the description of a room or a scene from the French countryside.
Emma is a character who is driven by her desires and her imagination. Like a bird trapped in a gilded cage, her spirit longs to be free, yet the question Flaubert raises is “what is freedom, and what are its consequences?”
Confronting limitations
In many ways the novel is a denouement to almost a century of revolution in France; a subtle, if obtuse, investigation into the restrictions and boundaries that life imposes on the human spirit, and a coming-to-terms reckoning with reality. Often called the first modern novel, Madame Bovary reaches its heights because its characters fail to achieve theirs. And as Emma’s reach seems to exceed her grasp, it is easy to understand why Flaubert exclaimed in his famous comment on the novel, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” It is a novel about reconciling aspirations with limitations.
One of the strange things about Madame Bovary is that it constantly defeats a reader’s expectations. Where hope and happiness seem possible, Flaubert interjects ennui and indifference. Where aspirations almost rise to a peak, Flaubert answers the seemingly inevitable consequences with a sense of let-down that, in its own unique way, is poetically modern. In the hands of an Eighteenth century novelist, Madame Bovary might have turned out much like Moll Flanders — a moral tale of a lucky protagonist who triumphs in spite of herself. But Emma Bovary’s life of sexual desires and driven manias ends in her catastrophe; and yet, for all of this catastrophe, the novel does not seem tragic. It simply seems uniquely inevitable. That is the paradox of the work.
Get to know the characters
Originally titled Provincial Lives, the novel describes how a small-town, widowed doctor falls in love with the daughter of a man he is treating for a broken leg. After a brief, poetic and romantic courtship that, even in translation, outstrips anything written in English on the same subject in the nineteenth century — with the exception of Thomas Hardy— Charles and Emma begin their spiraling downward dissent into a life of shop-til-you drop expenditures, boredom, and isolation.
Rather than simply present a study in ennui, Flaubert sensualizes boredom and the mundane drone of life in a small town as a springboard for examining the problems that arise when the aspirations of the imagination outstrip the capabilities of reality. At this point, Madame Bovary ceases to be a novel of manners or even character foibles and becomes a study of thwarted imagination. Unlike Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, another story of the conflict of the imagination and the world, Madame Bovary takes the reader deep into the ever-widening gap between the pursuit of happiness and the perils of attaining only part of what the protagonist sets out to achieve for herself. Failure, in Flaubert’s world, is not a matter of defeat but of small, perpetual setbacks that inevitably destroy an individual. Emma Bovary, it can be said, is eaten in crumbs by a moderately hungry reality.
While you read the book
There is a mystic connection between Flaubert the writer and Emma Bovary. He seems fascinated with her and, in particular, with the small human gestures that represent the points of psychological illumination of her character. The details of her dresses, the rooms and countryside she inhabits, the colour of her eyes (which keeps changing throughout the novel), all serve to create a novel of detail that’s so rich that at times it seems almost a work of magic realism. For all its detail, however, the novel is not poetic.
Flaubert, for the depth of his writing, was never one to waste words. Even in English, the prose is almost factually straightforward and exceedingly frank. Pay close attention, for instance, to the running motif of fabrics and the descriptions of their textures, their irridescence, their colour and movement. There is a point to these descriptions. The fabrics are symbols of Emma’s state of mind. Pay close attention to Flaubert’s sense of description. It is real, detailed, and extremely sensual, and the very sensuality of the writing draws the reader into Emma’s internal world.
Also of major note is the way in which the characters evolve (Emma) or fail to evolve (Charles). A number of critics have noted that Madame Bovary is not a novel of plot but of psychology. Flaubert constantly attempts to support his characters’ inner worlds with sympathetic descriptions of their material environments as if to tell us that the inner lives of characters and what they think are just as important, if not more important than what they do. In this sense, Flaubert is the precursor to Henry James and Virginia Woolf — two memorable modern novelists who put stock in the value of a rich psyche.
Read the book online
Check out the following websites on Flaubert and Madame Bovary.
This website features plot synopses and biographical information on Flaubert. This site also features an online text version of the novel and various topics for discussion.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/bovary/context.html
For those of you who are academically inclined, this site offers some exercises and support material, including a list of links to other Madame Bovary material on the web.
http://school.discovery.com/lessonplans/programs/bovary/#lin
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