Madame Bovary Part 1 : Emma

It’s no secret that I’ve had a hard time penning my thoughts about this book.  I think this is the longest read to post date in the history of this blog.  Its summer and maybe I’m feeling a little bit lazy, but those aren’t the only reasons I’ve had a difficult time with this one.   Every time that I revisit it, flip through its pages, or reread passages my thoughts dart in various different directions, and I can’t quite seem to pin down what I want to say about it.

There were times when you couldn’t have pried this book out of my hands. I enjoyed reading it and  I was immersed in the experience of it.  Yet, when it came time to jot down my thoughts, I felt bewildered.  I couldn’t articulate what made it great or why I loved it.

So I picked up Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Perpetual Orgy, read it, and proceeded to pour over all the quotes that I marked in both that book and the original.  It’s starting to drive me a little crazy and I think I just need to let it go so I’ve decided to just put out what I’ve managed so far.  I’m anticipating that I will post my thoughts on his book in three parts (maybe four, we’ll see).

The first part entails my thoughts on the novel’s central character, Emma Bovary.  For what it’s worth, here we go . . .

Madame Bovary is Emma Bovary.  Naturally, as she is the book’s namesake, she’s also the central protagonist in the story.  In the beginning, she is Emma Rouault, a young woman living an isolated and lackluster life on a farm with her father.  She spends her youth immersed in religious instruction and romantic novels which give birth to dreamy illusions of a life of sensuous sophistication.

Along comes Charles Bovary, a “health officer” from town – and bingo – she’s just received her golden ticket to a more exciting life, or so she thinks.

At this point the novel becomes an exploration in expectation vs. experience, ideals vs. reality.  Flaubert points to the indulgence in romantic novels and religion as the culprits for building up unrealistic expectations in Emma’s mind.  Both give rise to fantasies that real life cannot live up to.

In hopes of feeling the limitless intoxication that she has come to expect and anticipate, Emma makes an attempt at swaying her new husband Charles into her romantic notions:

…acting upon theories that she believed to be sound, she kept trying to experience love.  By moonlight, in the garden, she would recite all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart and would sing melancholy songs to him, with a sigh; but she would find that she was as calm afterward as she had been before, and Charles seemed neither more loving nor more deeply moved.”  

When Emma cannot sufficiently satisfy her desires within the life that’s been carved out for her she becomes disillusioned.  I suppose when you’re isolated, it becomes easy to believe that “certain places must produce happiness like a plant that was peculiar to that soil and grew poorly in any other spot.”  So Emma becomes like a flower planted in clay that should have been planted in sand and imagines that she would flourish if only given the right conditions.

At this point in the novel I was sympathetic with Emma.  I could sympathize with her because she was young and naïve and had a restricted experience of life.  She made a major life decision at a time when she had a very limited world view.  It’s also not so unusual to have romantic notions in youth that don’t pan out – but one adjusts.  At that point I didn’t know whether she was going to be a transformative character or not.  I was giving her a chance.

As the story progresses it becomes more and more difficult to empathize with Emma.  She becomes like that friend who is always coming to you for help with her petty troubles but refuses to listen to your advice, accept responsibility for her actions, and can only ever see as far as her own unhappiness.  Such people tend to be slaves to their own drama, and I think Emma was a slave to her dissatisfaction.  After a while you start to cringe when you see that friend coming, because it’s all so formulaically predictable.  Emma does not grow, learn, or adjust; she just becomes more and more mired in misery.  She clings to the belief that it’s just her married life that doesn’t live up to those high ideals put forth in books and art.  Her life hadn’t ended in intoxicating bliss like she had expected.  For a while, she continues to assume that other people in cities and faraway places easily and effortlessly achieve what she so desires.  She’s the exception; she’s the one who’s missing out.  She imagines:

In the city, amid the din of the streets, the buzz of the theaters, and the lights of the ballrooms, they were leading lives in which the heart expands, the senses blossom.  But her own life was as cold as an attic with a north-facing window, and boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.”

It was Emma’s egotistical sense of entitlement that really zapped my sympathy for her.  It’s true that fate works against her; as a woman she is powerless to counteract her circumstances.  I get that.  But the way that Emma reacts to her fate is the equivalent of a child crossing their arms and pouting until they get their way.  Don’t get me wrong, usually I feel a great deal of sympathy for a character that feels locked into the norm and seeks to defy conventions. But Emma doesn’t fit that bill.  Actually, Emma plays into far more conventions than she defies.  She may not selflessly abide by the happy housewife convention but she clings to romantic conventions.  The things that she strives for are so common as to be cliché, not to mention superficial; and she goes after them with equally selfish intentions, never considering anyone else’s needs or wants, only her own.  What’s worse is that she uses her stereotypical ideas as an excuse for behaving badly.   She allows her fate to corrupt her.  She deceives a man who loves her and refuses to show affection for her own child unless it will prove advantageous in some way.  She takes lovers she doesn’t love and acquires an abundance of things that she can’t afford.  Emma has real love in her life, but she’s so blinded by her illusions that she can’t (or won’t) see it.  She chooses what’s shimmering and artificial over what she perceives as dull, but is nonetheless, real.  

Inevitably, those artificial frills that are supposed to make her life so enchanting and exciting eventually lose their luster.  Adultery becomes as boring and predictable as marriage and an accumulation of material things becomes a veil for that boredom.

However, it doesn’t seem that Flaubert put the spotlight on the blemishes of Emma’s personality merely to reveal her individual weaknesses.  Emma falls prey to fantasies that were stereotypical among the French bourgeoisie society that Flaubert was so familiar with.  Through Emma, he was commenting on all that disgusted him about the society he inhabited.  Emma’s experience reveals as much about those around her as it does about her.  The minor characters with which she rubs elbows prove themselves to be equally despicable and shallow, such as Lheureux, who feeds off of Emma’s delusions of grandeur, using her weakness to his own advantage.  He’s not the only one, other minor characters could also be sited, such as Rodolphe or Homais.

Flaubert was careful to keep his narrative from sounding heavy-handed, believing that an author’s judgments should be communicated, rather than expressly stated.  But that doesn’t mean that his judgments weren’t there or that the story is entirely objective.  In many ways, Flaubert uses Emma’s experiences to project his contempt for the bourgeoisie.

In his own words, he relates;

Against the stupidity of my era, I feel waves of hatred that suffocate me.  Shit keeps coming to my mouth, as in a strangulated hernia.  But I want to keep it, fix it, harden it; I want to make a paste of it and smear the nineteenth century with it, the way they coat Indian pagodas with cow dung, and who knows? Does it perhaps have a chance of lasting?”

-Letter Sep. 30, 1855

With that in mind I do still struggle with the question of whether Emma was part of the problem or a product of the problem – or both.  Did Flaubert intend for us to dislike her because she represented the afflictions of society or should we feel sorry for her because she’s just a by-product of that society?  I tend to think it’s a combination of both.

Any thoughts?

Stay tuned for Part 2 in which I will discuss Flaubert’s pessimism/realism and in Part 3 I’ll comment on his narrative technique.