Madame Bovary

Summary (from the publisher): When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is a dull country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair.

Flaubert's novel scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857, and it remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society.
 

Review: This novel follows the tragic tale of Emma Bovary, who dreams of a love story like those she reads about in her novels but instead finds herself married to Charles Bovary, a rather ordinary country doctor. Emma begins to spin a web of lies and betrayal when she initiates one love affair and then another until her world comes crashing down upon her and the unsuspecting Charles.

 

 

It's so very difficult to review classics because I feel as if I have very little new to add to the many existing thoughts. Based on the title, I was surprised to find that the novel opens with a young Charles Bovary, who is an awkward schoolboy. In the first chapters, Charles rapidly grows up and marries an older widow, who dies soon afterwards, leaving Charles free to pursue the lady who would become his second wife, Emma. Therefore, the reader very quickly learns that there isn't one Madame Bovary, but three - Charles's mother, his first wife, and Emma. Thus it seems as if the title refers to the social title and public persona of wife that has hemmed Emma in. She must live within the confines of being Madame Bovary, confines that she quickly finds impossible to stand, ultimately leading to her downfall. Choosing to open and close the novel with Charles rather than Emma further underscores her subordinated place in society - there is no Madame Bovary without Charles Bovary and his story is the frame to her own.

 

 

On the other hand, it's quite fitting that Charles' story should frame Emma's since hers is a tragedy of her own making, but his involvement was despite his diligent effort to make his wife happy and satisfy her need. He angers his beloved mother, picks up and moves to a new country, and spares no expense to try to keep Emma, but of course he fails, because he is not the lover she has imagined in her novels. Over time, her lovers fall from grace as well, becoming the object of Emma's scorn and derision just like her husband.

 

 

Flaubert does an excellent job of constantly describing the physical presence of Emma while rarely crossing the line into flagrant displays. Emma is first seen "in a blue merino-wool dress with three flounces" (10). Charles admires "the whiteness of her nails. They were lustrous, tapering, more highly polished than Dieppe ivories, and cut into an almond shape" (11). He watches as she pricks her fingers sewing and "put them to her lips to suck them" (11). The physicality of Emma is very evident and overt from the first.

 

 

Emma Bovary is a cautionary tale of how greed and betrayal can lead to ruin. In many ways she is the grandmother of many other tragic heroines such as Anna Karenina and Lady Chatterley's Lover.  Her death by her own hand is tragic, but the reader watches her go to the brink with little hope of a solution to her ruin. As the books progresses, she is increasingly difficult to like and the reader feels sympathy for her kindhearted husband and innocent child. Even at the end, when her debts have caught up with her and she no one else to turn to, the reader sees Emma coveting what others have; "Here is the kind of dining-room, thought Emma, that I should have" (246). Until the very end, Emma cannot be satisfied by what she has and constantly believes herself to deserve more than she has. This vain inflation of her own self leads to the ruination of not only herself, but her husband, and her poor daughter, left an orphan without even a hope of the life that her mother judged so inadequate.
 

Stars: 4