Short Review: This book is perfect. It is now one of my favorites.
Longer Review: It always bugs me that when people list forms of art, they never put literature near the top of the list, or often won’t include it at all. From now on, whenever anyone fails to recognize the artistic merit of literature, I will use this as my first and last proof.
Madame Bovary is an exquisite masterpiece. After I’d read the first few chapters, I realized that for the rest of the book, I wouldn’t be looking forward to the further unfolding of the plot (which was deft and well executed, but fairly pedestrian–unhappy housewife seeks satisfaction in adultery–so never really captured me), but rather to seeing more of Flaubert’s composition: his prose is some of the finest poetry I’ve ever seen, a bracing achievement of language crafted into its highest possible power.
I was never disappointed. Whenever I found myself daydreaming and not remembering what I’d just read, I went back and read it again, alert, not because I feared that I had missed some important turning point in the story, but because I knew I had missed some elegant phrasing.
On practically every page, I was rewarded with words so perfectly chosen and arranged that I’m almost tempted to learn French so I can read it in the original, in the perhaps Quixotic hope that it might be even better in the original. I suppose I’m being greedy.
For instance, I now open to a page at random, in hopes of finding a suitably charming example of Flaubert’s skillful quill for you. From part II, chapter 12, pay dirt:
Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her side she awakened to other dreams.
To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a new land, whence they would return no more. They went on and on, their arms entwined, without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose pointed steeples were storks’ nests. They went at a walking-pace because of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters. And then, one night they came to a fishing village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and in front of the huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and bathed in sunshine.
Rapturous, no?
Even in its seemingly mundane tangents, this novel’s writing shines, as when Emma Bovary and Leon discuss the excitement of being a bookworm in part II, chapter 2, or when two supporting characters debate the relative morality of literature versus the theatre in chapter 14 of part II.
The structure of Madame Bovary also impressed me. Not only was this gloriously sublime work also the apparent result of fastidiously tight editing, with not a word being wasted or unnecessary, but the balance of all the individual episodes as well as the overall framework of the novel–with the book beginning and ending with close, sympathetic looks at Charles–helped me appreciate Madame Bovary at its multiple levels of genius.
I’m surprised, though, that the book caused such a scandal when it was published, with many critics fearing that it insufficiently punished–or perhaps even promoted–adultery. Poppycock! Madame Bovary is practically a cautionary tale against it. Certainly she finds no real happiness in it; indeed, Flaubert labors to show us how shallow each lover’s motives are, and how fleeting are the temporary pleasures in which they indulge. It is most certainly a tragedy.
However, most commentaries on it that I’ve ever seen focus on Emma Bovary as a sensitive dreamer who falls into affairs to escape the crushing boredom of her boring life. I find that to be misleading. Generally, I dislike reading modern ideas into older texts, especially when that criticism takes the form of analyzing works through some trendy socio-political lens, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Emma isn’t just bored, she’s clinically depressed.
Her wild fluctuations of temperament throughout the work (including a short but intense flirtation with serious piety, much like Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait) would be enough alone as evidence of that, but consider also such things as her callously emotionless reaction to her husband’s grief when Emma’s father-in-law died, in part III, chapter 2.
Actually, this brings up another angle from which to appreciate Madame Bovary besides the lyrical grace and masterful arrangement of it: the characterization is superb in the extreme. The pharmacist, for instance, is regularly one of the most interesting characters in the book; his duplicity coupled with a profoundly myopic obsession with his own earnestness resulted in a man who always seemed too fully realized for the page.
But, ultimately, though the book is Emma’s, the real hero for me is Charles. What did he ever do to deserve to be cheated on? Is he neglectful, dull, abusive, or a loser? No, though Emma routinely dismisses his feelings as he beats his heart against the wall trying to connect with her and help her to be happy, the reader sees that there’s no way for him to win. Emma will not be happy. Charles is an average, decent guy who just had the bad luck of marrying a woman who was permanently discontent with everything in her life, and most of all with him.
This sour focus on the dysfunctional protagonist nearly to the dehumanizing exclusion of the more likable everyman reminds me of how Nabokov wrote Humbert in Lolita. Despite Flaubert’s famous assertion that he himself was Emma, I think most of us will find our best selves buried in the obscure corners of this tragedy with Charles.
Perhaps that’s truly why, besides all of Emma’s sound and fury, the novel begins and ends with him.
Gently Hew Stone 