For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for “offenses against morality and religion.” What shocks us today about Flaubert’s devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the … opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis Steegmuller), and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as vital as its doomed heroine. In reading Madame Bovary, one experiences a work that remains genuinely revolutionary almost a century and a half after its creation.
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Flaubert’s masterpiece. A meticulously realized depiction of a reckless adultress! This book seduces! This is a classic novel witten in elegant prose and should be on everyone’s reading list–authors and readers alike! If you haven’t delved into the heart of Madame Bovary, like Flaubert, then you need to re-read this exquisite narrative!
I have always found Emma Bovary a surprisingly unsympathetic commoner. Well, perhaps “commoner” is too harsh a term – Emma herself would most likely argue with me for my use of it, but “bourgeoisie” just doesn’t translate all that well in a single word. Regardless, Emma’s quiet desperation and her pathetic attempt to cure the boredom of her married life with a racy extramarital affair don’t exactly endear her to me – and this definitely would be true regardless of my stance on/in regard to marriage! Despite the fact that I usually can’t enjoy a book if I don’t like the main character, I must admit that I really like this book. Perhaps Flaubert, in some fabulous French way, is the exception that proves my personal rule. His writing style is easy to follow and draws you in even against your will. You may not sympathize with Emma (I never have), but you will nonetheless find yourself curiously captivated to see what kind of ridiculous decision she will make next.
Madame Bovary, as with Ana Karenina by Tolstoy, highlighted the plight of an unhappily married woman in the nineteenth century, a period when it was virtually impossible to leave a loveless marriage. And while the clandestine practice of husbands having mistresses went on with barely a rap on the knuckles, for married women it was often a different set of codes entirely, as the adulteress would generally find herself socially ostracised.
That such a book was written with sympathy for the ‘fallen’ woman, in my opinion, made Flaubert an unwitting champion for women’s rights. Though I suspect he did what many great writers do, and that is reflect upon the culturally repressive era in which he lived, by constructing an engaging and deeply moving narrative.
My heart poured out for Emma Bovary, who was in equal measure both a product of her time as well as victim. Was she alive today, in an era of self-empowerment, it is not inconceivable to imagine Emma transforming herself into a writer, painter, fashion designer, or whatever else her imagination desired.
Madame Bovary’s hapless story reminds me of how far we’ve evolved as a society. For it is a civilised society that forgives impetuous choices made due to circumstances out of one’s control. In Emma’s case it was poverty that threw her into a marital union which, despite best intentions, denied her of what she desired most, not unlike Nora Helmer in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the unreciprocated passion her spirit yearned yet deprived of by a husband who at best plodded along in life and who ignored her affections.
Like all great art, Madame Bovary remains a timeless observation of the human condition. After all, Emma Bovary sought what most seek, passionate love. While she may seem shallow for indulging in the sort of pleasure which generally comes from being young and restless, the fact she became a social outcast for committing adultery is what makes this story so sad and compelling.
Here’s a book that will mess up your head, especially in regard to the difference between modernism and post-modernism and when post-modernism really began. It also makes a great pairing with Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. Emma Bovary is a bored, unhappy woman who reads a lot of romance novels and whose husband is a not-very-bright doctor. She has affairs and borrows a lot of money she can’t repay to buy her lovers expensive gifts. At first, we take all of this at face value. But it’s hard to ignore that, when Emma and her lover are walking in the market and talking of their love, a hawker is loudly peddling manure in the background. Later, when Emma and her love are having sex in the back of a tiny moving horse-drawn cab, the action is interrupted over and over by the cabby who keeps stopping til told to go on, to run up the fare. Many readers and reviewers hated Emma and were outraged by the book’s amoral tolerance of sin. But Emma does not view herself as amoral or sinful, only miserable, which makes the book a surprisingly post-modern study of being and seeming. It asks whether sin exists or if other people only seem sinful to us because their behavior is costly to us. It also asks if we are sinners or if our behavior only seems righteous to us because it is ours.
I finished reading my first translated book of the year, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. I have to say the book was not quite what I was expecting.
Emma Bovary, a small town French girl, lives in a dream world and marries a doctor, Charles Bovary expecting to live a romanticized lifestyle of hearts and red roses . When she realises that her romantic expectations is not going to be met with him, rather than work on the relationship, she seeks pleasure outside the marriage and has adulterous affairs with other men. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and she begins to run up huge debts to fill the emptiness of provincial life. When real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, let’s just say the consequences are fatal!!
I have given Madame Bovary a Bookhub rating of 4 stars because I think Gustave Flaubert is a genius with words. The only person I had sympathy for in this book was Charles Bovary. He seemed like good husband who truly loved his wife. Emma was caught up in the romantic novels she read and expected Charles to be her prince charming on a white horse. Emma seemed to have trouble accepting her reality which led to her making poor choices.
Ray Bradbury said somewhere that the quality of fiction can be judged by the number of pixels per square inch of narration. Bradbury’s image has always stuck with me as a means for me to judge my own work, and it is precisely the kind of yardstick I use to judge Madame Bovary, which, every time I read it, I am convinced is the greatest novel ever written. In this masterpiece, Flaubert creates densely-pixillated portraits not only of the physical landscape but of his heroine’s emotional one. If you want to be a novelist, read this book and learn. Pretty much everything you need to know is here.