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A review by kleonora
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
4.0
Verdict: Well deserving of its place in the Pantheon, this perfectly crafted novel still reads fresh through the years, transcending the ‘life sucks and then you die’ genre.
I read ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ about a year ago so I reckoned it was time to read some actual Flaubert. It was a task undertaken with a sense of duty rather than delight. Barnes’ dissertation of a book hadn’t been the most compelling and I have a natural distrust of the French. Granted, their authors have been gradually winning me over (looking at you duMaurier) but beyond Barnes the only association I had to Flaubert was as the pet anteater of Miss Piggy in Muppet Treasure Island. So I repeated my optimistic refrain, ‘It must be a classic for a reason,’ and tucked into ‘Madame Bovary’.
Pleasant surprises all round. The first thing that struck me was the writing. I was expecting something ornately weighty but instead it was beautiful and easy. I can only assume it improves if read in the original French but I can’t imagine how. It is a perfect story-telling style, which somehow includes all the little minutiae of daily life without wasting a single word. Little things like
‘Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the thistledowns, while Charles, empty handed, waited till she had finished.’
are at once mundane and picturesque as little things acquire poetry under a sharp focus rather than a misty lens.
I won’t spend too much time on the story of ‘Madame Bovary’ because it is an old one; echoing down through time with spiritual kindred to be found everywhere from ‘The House of Mirth’ to ‘The Bell Jar’. Emma Bovary is young and beautiful at a time when that was all that was required of a woman in order to gain a fairy-tale life. It hasn’t quite gone right for Emma, though, and after the wedding she finds herself not kept in the manner to which she had anticipated becoming accustomed. But its drama Emma is really missing, only desiring riches for their effect as a lubricant sliding her into a glowing world of waltzes and Viscomtes.
Instead limited means (and ambition on her husband’s part) leave her to make a modest glamour at home ordering Parisian fashion mags and fancy flowers for the home. And there it might have ended. Probably did for many women. The smoldering resentment at the world and husband for not delivering the promised dream eventually burns out with time and habit and the bright young lady grows old and shuffles placidly towards the grave. Luckily this is fiction and not post-modern fiction so something a bit juicier has to happen to Emma.
I blame her husband. Perhaps not for the whole lot (although it would do no harm to his quality of life if he were suddenly to grow a backbone) but at least for the first fatal step and a few subsequent slips. The man never met a handsome young fellow he wasn’t keen to shove his young wife into isolation with. Results are predictable. Emma’s other architect of destruction is Monsieur Lheureux who plays the ‘evil’ to Monsieur Bovary’s ‘stupid’, talking Emma into buying things from him on credit thereby digging herself deeper into debt. In the end the only way out is arsenic, which Flaubert and I would not recommend. Chuck Bovary is distraught but it’s only the chemist’s servant boy that weeps for her. This, in turn, made me cry – generally an effect I don’t care for in my books but I’ll forgive this time on grounds of quality of literature.
Well, you’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds like a drag, but that’s my fault, not Flaubert’s. You see, scattered amongst the moments of brain-fever (we meet again, old friend) and angst, lie sprightly little interludes of provincial satire. The Bovary’s neighbors are the un-sung heroes of this book. Their airs and bumblings never let the narrative get too full of itself, acting as counterweight to Emma’s dramas by showing life in the process of ‘going on’ even as she is wrecked in internal havoc.
Emma, the titular Madame Bovary without whom the show could not go on, is a triumph of a literary creation. I feel quite kindly towards her, even if she does sleep around and spend money she doesn’t have and is something of a religious hypocrite and has not readily apparent maternal instinct towards her child. These sins, however, I merely see as byproducts of a thwarted spirit. I rather imagine Emma Bovary as a failed Belle (from Beauty and the Beast). Not ‘failed’ as in Emma has failed, failed as in the world has failed her by not providing an enchanted castle/prince combo on the outskirts of her poor provincial town. (To be fair, the world has failed all us women in a similar fashion, but I digress) You can’t tell me Belle would have fared any better deprived of her Disney magic.
I like Emma because I empathize. All her moods and fevers and selfish behaviors are symptoms of a soul in revolt. Female protagonists, as a general rule, have things done to them. It’s only the men that get to act as architects of their own plotlines. ‘Madame Bovary’ proves the truth of this generalization. Emma feels her wasted potential. I remember a passage in the book where she is thinking on her married life a just sees an endless, featureless corridor stretching down the length of her existence. The adultery, the spending, the religious conversion, the brain-fevers and eventually the suicide are not so much faulty moral choices as they are the only fire-exits available to her in the hospital hallway of her life.
If literature is anything to go by she’s far from the only woman to experience this existential paralysis throughout history. So far, though, she’s the best where I am concerned. (The wingeing lady from ‘The Awakening’ was welcome to her long walk off a short pier) The slings and arrows of the fair sex’s existence is not a story to which I am naturally inclined unless done properly. ‘Madame Bovary’ was pitch perfect but still too depressing for that ultimate 5 star rating. 4 enthusiastic stars though is head and shoulders above what I was expecting. I’m grateful to Flaubert for surprising me. That’s what this 1000 books exercise is about, after all, discovering gems in books I’d have dismissed by their cover (or back blurb). Though I sense I’m unlikely to find an offering in keeping with my own rosy view of life I’m happy to give Flaubert another spin but first I’m back to my comfort zone to find out if androids dream of electric sheep.
I read ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ about a year ago so I reckoned it was time to read some actual Flaubert. It was a task undertaken with a sense of duty rather than delight. Barnes’ dissertation of a book hadn’t been the most compelling and I have a natural distrust of the French. Granted, their authors have been gradually winning me over (looking at you duMaurier) but beyond Barnes the only association I had to Flaubert was as the pet anteater of Miss Piggy in Muppet Treasure Island. So I repeated my optimistic refrain, ‘It must be a classic for a reason,’ and tucked into ‘Madame Bovary’.
Pleasant surprises all round. The first thing that struck me was the writing. I was expecting something ornately weighty but instead it was beautiful and easy. I can only assume it improves if read in the original French but I can’t imagine how. It is a perfect story-telling style, which somehow includes all the little minutiae of daily life without wasting a single word. Little things like
‘Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the thistledowns, while Charles, empty handed, waited till she had finished.’
are at once mundane and picturesque as little things acquire poetry under a sharp focus rather than a misty lens.
I won’t spend too much time on the story of ‘Madame Bovary’ because it is an old one; echoing down through time with spiritual kindred to be found everywhere from ‘The House of Mirth’ to ‘The Bell Jar’. Emma Bovary is young and beautiful at a time when that was all that was required of a woman in order to gain a fairy-tale life. It hasn’t quite gone right for Emma, though, and after the wedding she finds herself not kept in the manner to which she had anticipated becoming accustomed. But its drama Emma is really missing, only desiring riches for their effect as a lubricant sliding her into a glowing world of waltzes and Viscomtes.
Instead limited means (and ambition on her husband’s part) leave her to make a modest glamour at home ordering Parisian fashion mags and fancy flowers for the home. And there it might have ended. Probably did for many women. The smoldering resentment at the world and husband for not delivering the promised dream eventually burns out with time and habit and the bright young lady grows old and shuffles placidly towards the grave. Luckily this is fiction and not post-modern fiction so something a bit juicier has to happen to Emma.
I blame her husband. Perhaps not for the whole lot (although it would do no harm to his quality of life if he were suddenly to grow a backbone) but at least for the first fatal step and a few subsequent slips. The man never met a handsome young fellow he wasn’t keen to shove his young wife into isolation with. Results are predictable. Emma’s other architect of destruction is Monsieur Lheureux who plays the ‘evil’ to Monsieur Bovary’s ‘stupid’, talking Emma into buying things from him on credit thereby digging herself deeper into debt. In the end the only way out is arsenic, which Flaubert and I would not recommend. Chuck Bovary is distraught but it’s only the chemist’s servant boy that weeps for her. This, in turn, made me cry – generally an effect I don’t care for in my books but I’ll forgive this time on grounds of quality of literature.
Well, you’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds like a drag, but that’s my fault, not Flaubert’s. You see, scattered amongst the moments of brain-fever (we meet again, old friend) and angst, lie sprightly little interludes of provincial satire. The Bovary’s neighbors are the un-sung heroes of this book. Their airs and bumblings never let the narrative get too full of itself, acting as counterweight to Emma’s dramas by showing life in the process of ‘going on’ even as she is wrecked in internal havoc.
Emma, the titular Madame Bovary without whom the show could not go on, is a triumph of a literary creation. I feel quite kindly towards her, even if she does sleep around and spend money she doesn’t have and is something of a religious hypocrite and has not readily apparent maternal instinct towards her child. These sins, however, I merely see as byproducts of a thwarted spirit. I rather imagine Emma Bovary as a failed Belle (from Beauty and the Beast). Not ‘failed’ as in Emma has failed, failed as in the world has failed her by not providing an enchanted castle/prince combo on the outskirts of her poor provincial town. (To be fair, the world has failed all us women in a similar fashion, but I digress) You can’t tell me Belle would have fared any better deprived of her Disney magic.
I like Emma because I empathize. All her moods and fevers and selfish behaviors are symptoms of a soul in revolt. Female protagonists, as a general rule, have things done to them. It’s only the men that get to act as architects of their own plotlines. ‘Madame Bovary’ proves the truth of this generalization. Emma feels her wasted potential. I remember a passage in the book where she is thinking on her married life a just sees an endless, featureless corridor stretching down the length of her existence. The adultery, the spending, the religious conversion, the brain-fevers and eventually the suicide are not so much faulty moral choices as they are the only fire-exits available to her in the hospital hallway of her life.
If literature is anything to go by she’s far from the only woman to experience this existential paralysis throughout history. So far, though, she’s the best where I am concerned. (The wingeing lady from ‘The Awakening’ was welcome to her long walk off a short pier) The slings and arrows of the fair sex’s existence is not a story to which I am naturally inclined unless done properly. ‘Madame Bovary’ was pitch perfect but still too depressing for that ultimate 5 star rating. 4 enthusiastic stars though is head and shoulders above what I was expecting. I’m grateful to Flaubert for surprising me. That’s what this 1000 books exercise is about, after all, discovering gems in books I’d have dismissed by their cover (or back blurb). Though I sense I’m unlikely to find an offering in keeping with my own rosy view of life I’m happy to give Flaubert another spin but first I’m back to my comfort zone to find out if androids dream of electric sheep.