Oh, Emma. Emma, Emma, Emma. Darling, why must you make it so easy ? No, dear, (for once) I don’t mean for the men. I mean for everyone else in the world who goes into this book just looking for an excuse to make fun of you. I would say that most people don’t know that much about France, but they do know a few things: that they like their baguettes, their socialism, Sartre, dirrrty dirrty sexy lurrrve and they despise this thing called the bourgeoisie. This book doesn’t really do a thing to disprove any of this (though I can’t say baguettes had a prominent place in the plot), and I expect that it had a great deal to do with starting the last two stereotypes. Emma, my dear, Desperate Housewives isn’t your fault, but you can see why some people might blame you, don’t you? Your constant, throbbing whining about how your (plentiful) food isn’t served on crystal platters, how your dresses(of which you have more than a typical country doctor’s wife) aren’t made of yards of spider-spun silk, and most of all how your husband dresses wrong, talks wrong, thinks wrong, WEARS THE WRONG HAT (!!), and is so offensively happy with you that he enjoys coming straight home to tell you about his day and relax in front of his fireplace every night instead of going out drinking- well, there’s a saying about the smallest violin, isn’t there?

It makes it easy for people to plausibly dismiss this story with things like this:


(If it makes you feel better, dear, you are hardly the only one.. Your other compatriots in 19th century repressed female misery receive similar treatment:
)

It is easy to despise you, Emma. You and your seemingly shallow priorities, the unthinking selfish harm you did to your husband AND your baby girl, the endless excuses you had for your, frankly, off the charts stupid behavior, the fact that you didn’t even try and communicate how unhappy you were to the guy who loved you who might’ve done something about it (since all the evidence shows that he is willing to COMPLETELY CHANGE HIS LIFE whenever you ask him to) and, finally (what can seem to be) the incredibly coward move you made in finding a way to not face the consequences your childish sense of the world couldn’t believe would eventually come up. What goes around comes around  ,as the wise chanteur sayeth. (Perhaps the alternate cover above should substitute ‘Justin Timberlake’ for Sassy Gay Friend.)

That’s pretty much how I felt about you for about 150 pages after you made your entrance, Emma. While you started your endlessly copied, endlessly bastardized fall from Angel in the Home Grace, and while you tried to make a saint out of yourself for not having sex with a young clerk who couldn’t have supported you anyway. You were simply the grandmother of Lady Chatterley, an extended protest letter to a dead king I couldn’t care less about.

But in the end, you won, Emma. I couldn’t escape you. Seriously, y’all, this book would not leave my head alone, for days, and I thought… many different and contradictory things about it. In the end, though, I kept coming back to one thought: the most terrifying thing I can think of is getting caught in Emma Bovary’s eyes. Did everyone read that profile about Dan Savage this weekend about infidelity and marriage? I did. Emma is the literary incarnation of Savage’s argument. Her eyes are on the cover of this book, and the more I looked at them, the more disturbed I got. Those eyes are the reason that marriage is so frightening, why ‘commitment issues’ exist. This is a novel about how reality can look just the same to you from one day to the next, but to your partner, it can have turned into a hell or a heaven, even if it is the same Tuesday routine as the last one. Emma’s gaze, how each time she fixes her eyes on some scheme of happiness and how those eyes transform everything they see. She shows how unstable marriage is, how thin the foundations are- resting on nothing but the words- “I love you.” Words that just need one more word to dissolve the entire thing. That’s it, you guys. One word and someone’s will to speak it is all that stands between a solid marriage and one that is over- no matter how much paperwork you sign, how many kids you have, houses you fill with furniture. You never really know what the person across from you is thinking. How do you really know what motivates someone? Are they with you because they have made a resolution to be? Are they there with you because the stars shine in your eyes? Are they perfect to you because they are about to leave? Marriage, for better or worse, no matter what people say, adds so many complications. It is the commitment that people twist and bend over and around in so many different contortions to try to make it work- because it is a marriage, because it means something. How difficult is it to trust that people are simply what they say they are? Charles is simple and straightforward and rather sweet- and Emma hates him for it. She smiles and smiles and smiles… and then cheats on him, bankrupts him, tries to prostitute herself and kills herself rather than spend another day with him.

This is the most anxiety inducing book I have ever read about marriage. It’s the 19th century where you have to make a vow for life that you can't get out of, not really, in order to test the idea that you might want to be with someone. If you're wrong, that's it. You've failed. It’s all-or-nothing. Emma is the incarnation of the expectations of the institution at the time- all-or-nothing. Madame Bovary is destroyed because she tries to put her all into Charles, then Rodolphe and then Leon, and none of them can withstand it. Each of them are good for different things, and only for a little while, and she can't accept it. That is not the ideal. She won't accept less than the ideal. You guys, she's nothing more than exactly what she is told is available to her- granted, she's after the best of what she's told is available: the ideal. But why do we hold that against her? As long as we live in a society where we’re told to strive after the ideal, to never give up, you will have people who destroy themselves and everyone around them to get it. Savage’s discussion of what the “ideal” means in real life is enlightening and pertinent here, I think. He talks about how you have to be willing to change a lot and make a huge effort to keep the deal of monogamy alive. Of course everyone has their limits, and in many marriages, the trade offs of one person’s limits for the others (I won’t do this, and you won’t do that- I won’t do that, but I will do this) end up making the deal of monogamy work. But you have to be honest about it, you have to be able to say things that you’ve never said out loud before. You have to admit that you won’t be happy unless you live a life where you have crystal knickknacks on your fireplace, and you get off from pies being thrown in your face. But it’s not that easy- Emma was on her deathbed, writhing in agony from eating arsenic, and she still couldn’t tell Charles what she wanted from him.

I can’t blame Emma, ultimately. It actually made me think, of all things, a bit about Planet of Slums. That book talks about the millions of people who have been born outside the system, in illegal settlements to parents who are illegal themselves, and who are not, in fact, ignored by the system. They never get into the system in the first place- a system that is not built to cope with the mind-blowing poverty that arises from its excrement. The system can’t acknowledge it and justify itself. At the risk of sounding like I think relatively-well-off white lady problems bear any resemblance to the horror of someone living on the outskirts of Kinshasa in a lean-to, Emma is just trying to get in to a society that can't acknowledge her and go on. She’s trying with all her might to buy into the fairy tales she’s been told (just like the revived, and growing belief in magic in some slums), and does whatever she has to do to get her hands on it, even if only for a little while. She saw that fairy tales are real (or so she thinks) at that ball that one time- she SAW it, mommy- and can’t handle the fact that they exist on this earth and she can’t be a part of it. And in case anyone finds her head-in-the-sand refusal to face the world overly childish or impossible to relate to: The endless line of irresponsible credit she takes out from the scam artist down the street in order to feed her fantasies about the way she believes her life should look has obvious immediate relevance to America in the pre-2008 financial crisis era. In some ways, the existential crisis Flaubert is trying to outline here: between a solidly practical, profit-and-advancement outlook on life and a sensibility that at least tries to aspire to something higher, even if it is unaffordable or impossible, is the distilled essence of the push and pull of American partisan politics. Monsieur Homais would have done very well on Wall Street. Emma can be read as being more American than French, really.

Emma is a true believer. She doesn’t just want attention from men, or shiny things. I didn’t really believe that until the part where she tries to renounce the whole world for fervent religious devotion. Failing making it into her fairy tale, she wants to escape where she is- to somewhere else, anywhere else. By the end, I felt like I was suffocating right along with her. Virginia Woolf said that the “present participle is the devil” . Emma adds the present place, the present time, the present person you are with. She really is willing to try anything to escape. On her deathbed, as she pleaded to die, my heart was racing along with hers and the whole finale read like a blockbuster last action scene with explosives and severed limbs flying. I didn’t enjoy the journey I had with her, but I had made it and lived in tiny spaces with her, spaces that got ever smaller as the book wound down. Every chapter there was less and less light until she was curled up in a ball in solitary confinement with no hope of escape. In the Count of Monte Cristo, we root for the hero to get thrown over the side of a cliff in a body bag because it is his only hope of escape. How could we do less for poor Emma? She deserves her chance to make it to the place she always hoped for- even if priests and businessmen argue whether she got there over her corpse. If she can’t be buried in ‘blessed’ ground, well, at that point the priest’s God is just another man telling her she has to stay in the woods with the witch and her oven rather than try to find the path home, like she was always taught to do.

Flaubert handles his prose deftly, precisely, and with a deceptively commonplace hand. He doesn’t try for smart metaphors and delicate similes, but rather has characters say what the mean in an effectively believable way that makes Emma a character who can impact the lives of real women. Parts of this novel are spine-tinglingly sordid, others wrench out your gut, most of it can be drearily, boringly, mind-numbingly quotidian, and every so often, a gem shines through that makes you turn around and look at someone you had thought you were done being interested in. In other words, it’s like last Wednesday. And the Tuesday before that. And today. And probably next Monday. The morning when you woke up vowing that today it was all going to be different, that afternoon when you just wanted to die, the evening when you forgot it all making dinner and laughing about that thing you saw on the internet.

Flaubert can’t get it all, or say it all right, but he knows that. In fact, he’s willing to tell his readers that. But he does it in such a way that you just want to punch him in the face like you do that size 0 model who complains that she’s too fat:

“Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

Aw, come on, Gustave. Why do you want to make those of us with irrevocably not-size-0 rears, who can’t get from Q to R, cry? Yet, even your complaining makes me want to hug you.

I guess what I am saying is why are you so awesome, Monsieur Flaubert?

n  Perhaps she would have liked to confide in someone about all these things. But how does one express an uneasiness so intangible, one that changes shape like a cloud, that changes direction like the wind? She lacked the words, the occasion, the courage.n

Some blame it on novels packed with sentimentalist kitsch; some point out her too-lofty dreams, her too-narrow house, so that the higher she raised the bar of happiness the harder it got to climb; some direct their anger at her reckless financial transactions that put her family in bankruptcy; some are disappointed at the lack of her sense of duty towards her husband and the small child; some dub her a coward for committing suicide when her secrets were about to get out, renouncing the chutzpah that had propelled her to devise rash schemes. In short, everyone thinks her as silly, stupid, selfish, vacuous, impulsive, unrealistic, et cetera, even an evil woman, [insert more abuse], bent on destroying herself and her family, echoing, in a way, Madame Tuvache's assertion that such women ought to be whipped. Many of us think Emma had no good excuse to set herself on a path to self-destruction, to which Flaubert might have replied: "None of you can see past your ideological filters."

Amid this torrent of condemnation we conveniently fail to see in the mirror that which Flaubert, in his deadly neutral voice, shows us unflinchingly at every major turn of the story, by employing his sad and delectable repertoire of irony: the pretentious milieu that's trapped in appearances; those stiff-collared times that judged you by your complexion of wealth; that suffocating morality which hypocritically reinforced itself through the very structures it claimed to fight. But we still forget that she prayed for a son when she got pregnant. She did not even look at the baby girl when she was born with the wrong gender. This is how Emma wishes to abandon her womanhood to realise her illusory dream:

n  She wanted a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this idea of having a male child was a sort of hoped-for compensation for all her past helplessness. A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.n

Every woman today, in any corner of the world, who doesn’t want to give birth to a girl carries a little of Madame Bovary in her.
Emma, for me, is a doleful shadow of her times who seems out of step precisely because she was possessed of an untamed intelligence and unbridled passion that could find no outlet in the restrictive channels available to her. If you allow me to quote a quatrain of Omar Khayyam: There was a door to which I found no key / There was a veil past which I could not see / Some little talk awhile of me and thee / There seemed, and then no more of thee and me.

Emma’s inexorable and inevitable decline fits the metaphor of a river about to burst out of its banks with tsunamic abandon, destroying itself and everything in its wake, all without recourse to its own free will. In the greater scheme of things, however, Emma is a quest for absolute happiness, for wealth, for station, for recognition, that eludes humanity at its heart. Why, when we possess all the indicators of a reasonably happy life, we still feel the pangs of ennui like a spiritual victim of an equivalent of a Somali famine? Emma provides us with an answer, and this is where she becomes universal, revealing to us a truth about the human condition. In a brilliant moment of self-actualisation Emma sees her profile reflected in the mirror, her hands and eyes so large, so dark, so deep, and says to herself again and again:

n  "I have a lover! A lover!” reveling in the thought as though she had come into a second puberty. At last she would possess those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired. She was entering something marvelous in which all was passion, ecstasy, delirium.n

It turned out to be a mirage. Happiness did not come. Love did not last. She was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. No matter what Emma did or thought, whatever path she undertook, she could find no answer to the enigma of existence.

But where does Mr Charles Bovary fit in all this? He ticks all the boxes of a “good husband” and a “good man.” He is moderately middle class, a respectable medical practitioner who loves his wife, does not argue with her, respects her personal choices, excuses her whimsical lifestyle. On paper, and before getting to know him, Charles is a husband any woman would want. But his conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone’s ideas walked along it in their ordinary clothes, without inspiring emotion, or laughter, or reverie. He makes love without passion, speaks without wit, walks without a gait, and displays no fascination for life. He is humourless; he has no personality. Simply put, Charles can’t make Emma laugh and Emma can’t stand his stupid face.

n  For, after all, Charles was someone, always an open ear, always a ready approbation. She confided many secrets to her greyhound! She would have done the same to the logs in the fireplace and the pendulum of the clock.n

Charles listens to her like a pendulum of the clock or a log in the fireplace! Later, during a bout of disquietude she wished Charles would beat her, so that she could more justly detest him, avenge herself.

Flaubert enthralls the reader with his clauses towed to long sentences with judicious deployment of semi colons along the way. The continuous ebb and flow of his prose has a soporific effect on the mind. He enriches an image with choice details to highlight the mood of the setting and of the character. You do not find a spurious detail that does not add something to the narrative. The writing is remarkably modern for its time, light and airy, so different from the suffocating formality of Victorian English. There are dozens of instances I can cite of Flaubert’s beautiful, balanced, brilliant prose, his use of irony that makes this novel what it is, but that would push this write-up beyond the confines of a review and make it an essay. Suffice it to say that the sheer variety of reaction to Emma Bovary is an emphatic tribute to Flaubert’s craft.

All direct quotes in italics
May 2015

الرواية تنتمي الى المدرسةً الواقعية والتي بدأت في الظهور في بداية القرن التاسع عشر.

مدام بوفاري التي اصابت نفسها وعائلتها بالخراب بسبب نفسها الشهوانية والتي ام تستطع السيطرة على نفسها والحفاظ على شرف زوجها رغم الحب الذي يكنه لها ومركزه المرموق في المجتمع الريفي كطبيب رغم عدم تقدمه في هذه المهنة بسبب تعليمه المتقطع والذي فرضته عليه أمه.

دعوة الى حفلة من المجتمع الراقي (الأرستقراطي) يقلب كيانها بعد حفلة راقصة شاهدت فيها الشباب والرجال يرقصون ويمرحون. عادت ولَم يعد شيئا يعجبها لا بيتها ولا حياتها ولا زوجها.

سقطت في بئر الخيانة والتستر على هذه الأفعال مستغلة طيبة زوجها الذي احبها وحاول بكل استطاعته انزيرضيها حيث ترك مدينته وزبائنه الكثر لينتقل الى الريف.

لكن هذه الخيانة كانت تسير بما تشتهي حتى وقعت في الدين وذلك من اجل تغطية رحلاتها ومبيتها في الفنادق.

كان بامكانها ان تنهي المأساة باعتذار لزوجها ولكن ابت لنفسها هذه المذلة وتنهي الرواية بطريقة مأساوية وأثرت على حياة روجها وطفلتها التي كانت الخاسر الأكبر في النهاية.

أحب ان أقول ان الرواية رغم ما فيها من خيانة فلن تجد فيها كلمة واحدة تخدش الحياء العام.

والمؤلف توسع في وصف المباني والحدائق والأجواء والبساتين حتى تصل الى مرحلة الملل بعض الشيء رغم ان احداث الرواية بطيئة جدا.

في نهاية الرواية محاضر للمحاكمة التي أقيمت المؤلف والناشر كون الرواية في ذلك العصر كانت مخالفة للأسلوب والمنهج السائد.

إلى الملولين جدا وكارهي الكلاسيكيات واللي مش هيقرأوا هذه الرواية وأي حد معدي بالصدفة: يومك لذيذ وبعد..
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Reading and/the Romance/Adultery: A Moral for the Bored and Restless

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live”—Flaubert

On my 25th birthday, I was shopping, in the cereal aisle, and suddenly broke down: I was a quarter century old, I was married, had been teaching in a small rural (provincial) parochial school for a few years, and I was bored and restless, terrified in a way no one else in my family or school seemed to be, that I would be stuck there the rest of my life. And maybe I was a little arrogant, too. A part of me—on the basis of some early success with publication—thought I might have a chance at being a much published and possibly famous Author of Literary Fiction. And I longed to travel, to expand my world. Why? I read novels that filled up my sense of the possibilities for my life, On the Road, A Farewell to Arms. I needed to go to Paris with Fitzgerald and Hemingway and drink wine with Gertrude Stein! And sure enough, I blew up my life for a few years in predictably and stupidly sad ways. But lived to read this story, Madame Bovary, a cautionary tale for the bored and restless, one of the greatest novels of all time in spite of the fact that it contains zero characters you can truly like or admire.

And how does she get there, this selfish and self-satisfied Emma? In part through reading romances, a “sentimental education” that prepared her to believe she was destined for a more passionate life than the one she feared she was living in Provincial France, far from the life she wanted to live in Paris, the one of fashion, style, waltzing at balls with clever, handsome men. No one understood her and appreciated her for what she truly was and could be! Oh, there was Charles, her doting and dull husband, so ordinary, but if you increasingly see yourself as remarkable, you come to resent him. You can’t find Charles if you read romances! And religion is a kind of temporary escape for Emma, though not into a life of quiet devotion, but into aspects of religion that lead her close to a passionate life. Sure, there was religion, but that became as ultimately boring and tedious for her as Charles. Emma read romances and believed she was the main character of them:

“She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague ‘she’ of all the poetry books.”

“What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright. . . Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?”

“Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waste of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be – tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.”

“She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification—for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.”

And Emma impatiently waited for the kind of love she read about in books. She had a child with Charles, but this did not satisfy her. Too provincial, too ordinary, to be a mere mother. She needed more things, she needed to be surrounded by beauty, and beautiful things, and clever, gorgeous men. And she found them, twice in her life, two shallow, (somewhat) clever men, who also lived life for these clandestine affairs, for mystery, the challenge of not getting caught, for fantasy and imagination and sweet sensations. Love!

“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”

At one point she cries out to one of these men:

“I’m your servant and your concubine! You’re my king, my idol! You’re good! You’re handsome! You’re intelligent! You’re strong!”

But we see what he is thinking, a lover of many women, himself a more experienced taster of sweet illicit pleasures:

“. . . Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerations that concealed commonplace affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.”

It’s not gonna last with this boy, Emma. Let him go! He’s just cotton candy! And cheap at that, for all of his riches, his appreciation of her charms, and his chateau.

So, does it sound like Emma will make you want to tear your heart out from frustration? Join the club! Millions of readers have loved to hate Emma for her shallow narcissism. A great beauty, pah! But trust me, this is one of the great novels of all time. How is it Shakespeare makes you just a little sorry for the selfish Macbeth, who destroys his life for ambition? By making him into a living, breathing human being, through ever-penetratingly gorgeous language.

Flaubert, too, in creating one of the two great novels of adultery of the nineteenth century, creates a character you neither love nor admire, but you come to somehow care for. In describing with such great and sumptuous detail the life of beauty Emma so admires, we come to want it—just a bit? A lot?—for ourselves. We also have read and wanted more! The book makes it seem reasonable that someone might take the road Emma takes, and deliciously, he turns the mirror on us, readers, after all, who love Great Books that take us to distant lands—France!—and to people who live lives far richer than we can ever imagine.

In the end, the chemist/pharmacist and the priest debate what novels one should read: Voltaire! A writer of comedies, to help us see that Emma’s story is, finally its own kind of comi-tragedy. And so we come full circle to reflect on what reading might be best for a richer, fuller life and not just for a shallow, sentimental education.

I have read this more than a couple times, butI heard the great writer and translator Lydia Davis had recently translated this book, so I listened and read along to her somewhat different, elegant, lean translation of this story. Doubled my pleasure. Read it! Emma is not as sympathetic as Anna Karenina—you don’t quite fall in love with Emma as you do with Anna, but you do fall in love with Flaubert’s rich language. It’s not so much a romance as it is a reflection on romance, and yes, sure, I learned, I reflected on my own life through it, as great novels—versus escapist books that are fun and good for their own purposes—are supposed to help one do. Happy ending for me! But poor, poor Emma, and her doting Charles.

Oy, the tedium, the drudgery of trying to read this book! I tried to get into this story. Really, I did. It's a classic, right? And everyone else likes it. I kept making myself continue, hoping I could get into the story and figure out what's supposed to be so good about it.
I won't waste any more of my precious reading time on this. It's about a self-absorbed young wife who longs for anyone else's life except her own. When she's in the city, she dreams of the farm. When she's in the country, she dreams of the city. When she's at a social gathering she imagines that everyone else's life is so much more exciting than her own. Blah, blah, blah.
Too many wordy descriptions of what people were wearing, what the buildings looked like, etc. If you're going to take a long time to tell a story, it had better be a good story. This one is NOT!

Emma Bovary is one of my new favourite women in fiction. God she's such a BAMF. She's literally Beyoncé of the 19th century. This is how heroines are meant to be written! (Hear that Jane Austen you god awful woman?!) This is the story of a woman who gets married to the most boring man ever and decides, "fuck this, this guy's a wet blanket, I'm gonna have some adulterous affairs, yay!". It's really good, read it.

Madame Bovary, c’est qui ? Bovary, c’est d’abord le nom de Charles, le personnage qui ouvre et clôt le roman, si bien qu’on pourrait presque affirmer que c’est lui le héros, petit médecin de campagne, gentil mais sans talent, mari cocu mais pas jaloux. Un Bovary un peu bovin, en somme. Et Madame Bovary, c’est plusieurs personnages à la fois : Madame Bovary mère, la marâtre qui ne supporte pas que son fils appartienne à une autre ; Héloïse Dubuc, la première femme de Charles, dont les pieds au fond du lit sont froids comme des glaçons ; c’est potentiellement aussi la petite Berthe, la fille de Charles, qui finira orpheline dans une filature de coton. Mais c’est surtout Emma.

Emma est jolie comme un cœur et fait tourner la tête des hommes autour d’elle. Elle, cependant, s’ennuie ferme avec son petit mari médecin au fin fond de son trou normand avec toujours les mêmes insupportables voisins : Homais (Emma inversé), le pharmacien prétentieux, scientiste et anticlérical ; l’abbé Bournisien, « médecin des âmes », d’une sottise à faire pleurer la sainte vierge ; le maire Tuvache (un autre bovin) et bien d’autres encore. Bref, dans tout ce tas d’imbéciles, il n’y en a pas un pour rattraper les autres. Alors Emma, don Quichotte normande, lit des romans pour échapper à la mesquinerie ambiante et à la déprime – on la comprend ! Elle lit Walter Scott et Lamartine, des livres d’aventure et des romans pieux ou à l’eau de rose, Jane Austen, peut-être – en poussant un peu le bouchon, elle lit les équivalents de Barbara Cartland au XXème siècle ou de Colleen Hoover en ce premier quart du XXIème. (Elle lit tellement qu’elle mourra en vomissant de l’encre.)

Alors quand vient à passer quelque « beau gosse » rêveur (Léon) ou un « bad boy » ombrageux (Rodolphe), évidemment, Emma succombe à la volupté – bon, on peut encore la comprendre... Et quand vient à passer quelque vendeur de fringues de marques et autres bagatelles, elle succombe encore et dépense généreusement les économies de son petit mari le médecin – on la comprend, mais, il faut bien l’avouer, de moins en moins. Bref, toutes ces histoires d’adultère petit-bourgeois et de dettes impossibles à payer semblent assez triviales et par moment franchement dégoutantes, « cette couleur de moisissure d’existence de cloporte », comme aurait dit l’auteur lui-même.

Si ce n’est que, en matière d’auteur, nous sommes entre les mains de Gustave Flaubert, le père du roman moderne, et cela change tout. D’abord parce que chaque page du livre ou presque est une prouesse stylistique : ironie mordante, descriptions pénétrantes et sonores, jeu étourdissant et souvent hilarant sur les perspectives, entremêlement des voix narratives, cut up et montage alterné. Ainsi, certaines scènes sont d’inoubliables morceaux de bravoure : les comices agricoles (II,8), la lettre de Rodolphe (II,13), la promenade a cheval qui finit en galanterie (II,9), la promenade en fiacre qui finit pareillement (III,1), l’opération du pied bot qui finit différemment (II,11), l’agonie d’Emma qui finit encore bien pire (III,8).

En définitive, le monde n’est décidemment pas à la hauteur de l’absolu auquel Emma aspire. Madame Bovary, c’est l’héroïne romantique qui a soif de glamour, de lyrisme, de sublime, et qui retombe toujours dans la boue du prosaïque et du sordide. C’est l’albatros, l’ange qui tourne à la pute, la vierge à la triste figure, l’idéal qui rechute dans le spleen. En ce sens, oui sans doute, Madame Bovary, c’est Gustave Flaubert.

Add: Il existe plusieurs adaptations cinématographiques du roman de Flaubert. L’une des plus remarquables est sans doute celle de Claude Chabrol. Le ton sec du cinéaste, maître de l’ellipse et du sous-entendu correspond à la pudeur du récit flaubertien, mais ne parvient toutefois pas à rendre les voltiges stylistiques de l’écrivain. En revanche, Isabelle Huppert est magnifique, tour à tour lumineuse et torturée.

Like every European teenager who takes French at secondary school, I was supposed to read Madame Bovary when I was seventeen or so. I chose not to, and boy, am I glad I did. I couldn't possibly have done justice to the richness of Flaubert's writing as a seventeen-year-old. Moreover, I probably would have hated the characters so much that I never would have given the book another chance. Which would have been a shame, as it's really quite deserving of the tremendous reputation it has.

Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Rouault, a mid-nineteenth-century peasant woman who has read too many sentimental novels for her own good. When the hopeless romantic marries Charles Bovary, a country doctor, she thinks she is going to lead a life full of passion and grandeur, but instead she gets stuck in a provincial town where nothing ever happens. Hell-bent on some escapism and yearning for someone who understands her romantic needs, Emma embarks on two adulterous affairs, plunges herself into debt and ends up very badly indeed, leaving behind a husband who might not have been the dashing hero of her dreams but who most certainly did care about her.

Madame Bovary is most famous for its portrayal of an unfulfilled woman, and indeed it's Emma's ennui and desperate need for romance that the reader will remember. They are described so convincingly that it's hard to believe the author was a man rather than a woman. However, Madame Bovary isn't all about one woman going through life dreaming and breaking down every time reality catches up with her. Like other great classics of realism, it's about society – about the social mores and conditions which instil certain kinds of behaviour in people and then punish them for it. Flaubert's depiction of Emma's provincial village (a haven of all that is base and mediocre) is painstakingly detailed and realistic. It's a wonderfully vivid and well-observed account of life in mid-nineteenth-century rural France, where people go about doing their jobs, conducting illicit affairs, gossiping behind each other's backs, ruining each other financially and generally leading lives which are far from exalted. Flaubert's portrayal of his characters is unabashedly vicious and misanthropic, but such is the quality of his writing that you forgive him for taking such a dim view of humanity. There are descriptions in the book (the seduction at the market, the club-foot operation, the endlessly prolonged death from arsenic poisoning) which rank among the best things nineteenth-century realism has to offer – gloriously life-like scenes which make you feel as if you're right there in the thick of things, watching things happen in front of your horrified eyes. And if the whole thing has a tragic and deterministic slant to it, well, so be it. That's realism for you. At least Flaubert has the decency to grant his heroine a few sighs of rapture before her inexorable demise. For it may be a realist novel, but it has some genuinely romantic moments of passion and drama (cab ride through Rouen, anyone?), and is all the better for it.

Ultimately, how you respond to Madame Bovary depends on your own susceptibility to romantic notions. If, like Emma Bovary, you're prone to dreams of passion, beauty and perfection, and yearn to feel and experience rather than being stuck in a dreary life in a village where nothing ever happens, chances are you'll be able to relate to Emma and thus see the genius of Flaubert's depiction of her. If, on the other hand, you think that such romantic escapism is a lot of sentimental, self-indulgent claptrap (which it is – that's the tragedy of it!), you probably won't be able to relate to Emma at all, and therefore won't much appreciate her as a tragic heroine. As for myself, I'm definitely in the former camp. If I'd been Emma, I probably would have walked into the same traps that she does. I would have fallen in love with the one neighbour who seems to understand my need for intensity, I would have gone through the same mad cycle of repentance, dissatisfaction and making the same mistakes again, and I probably would have spent a bit too much money in my quest for soul-affirming experiences, as well. My ruin wouldn't have been as complete as Emma's, but it would have been fed by the same dreams and desires. Oh, yes. So don't let anyone tell you Madame Bovary is an old-fashioned creature whose dilemmas are no longer relevant to modern readers. There are plenty of people in modern society who are as much in love with romance itself as she is, and not just women, either. And as for discontent, how many people today aren't dissatisfied with their lives because they don't match the glamorous/exciting lives they see on TV? And how many people today don't rack up huge debts because the magazines they read have led them to believe that they're entitled to more than is within their means? Replace 'sentimental novels' by 'TV', 'movies' and 'magazines', and all of a sudden Emma's cravings won't seem so outdated any more. Quite the contrary; they're as timeless and universal as they ever were. That's the hallmark of a classic – it speaks to us from across a century and a half and shows us ourselves. We may not much like the picture of ourselves, but it's pretty powerful all the same.

I'd give the book four and a half stars if I could, but alas. In the absence of half stars, four stars will have to do, with the assurance that it's well worth another half.

Madame Bovary & The Science of Adultery

Some universal features stand out when we talk of the human mating system.

1. First, women most commonly seek monogamous marriage—even in societies that allow polygamy. Rare exceptions notwithstanding, they want to choose carefully and then, as long as he remains worthy, monopolize a man for life, gain his assistance in rearing the children, and perhaps even die with him.

2. Second, women do not seek sexual variety per se. There are exceptions, of course, but fictional and real women regularly deny that nymphomania holds any attraction for them, and there is no reason to disbelieve them. The temptress interested in a one-night stand with a man whose name she does not know is a fantasy fed by male pornography. Lesbians, free of constraints imposed by male nature, do not suddenly indulge in sexual promiscuity; on the contrary, they are remarkably monogamous. None of this is surprising: Female animals gain little from sexual opportunism, for their reproductive ability is limited not by how many males they mate with but how long it takes to bear offspring. In this respect men and women are very different.

3. But third, women are sometimes unfaithful. Not all adultery is caused by men. Though she may rarely or never be interested in casual sex with a male prostitute or a stranger, a woman, in life as in soap operas, is perfectly capable of accepting or provoking an offer of an affair with one man whom she knows, even if she is “happily” married at the time. This is a paradox.

It can be resolved in one of three ways:

1. We can blame adultery on men, asserting that the persuasive powers of seducers will always win some hearts, even the most reluctant. Call this the “Dangerous Liaisons” explanation.

2. Or we can blame it on modern society and say that the frustrations and complexities of modern life, of unhappy marriages and so on, have upset the natural pattern and introduced an alien habit into human females. Call this the “Dallas” explanation.

3. Or we can suggest that there is some valid biological reason for seeking sex outside marriage without abandoning the marriage—some instinct in women not to deny themselves the option of a sexual “plan B” when plan A does not work out so well. Call this the “Emma Bovary” strategy.

The “Emma Bovary” strategy.

It takes two hands to clap, as the old saying goes among men when blamed for being adulterous by nature.

And knowing the evolutionary logic, we have to ask: What’s in it for the women?

For the males it is obvious enough: Adulterers father more young. But it is not at all clear why the female is so often unfaithful. Birkhead and Møller, in their experiments, rejected several suggestions: that she is adulterous because of a genetic side effect of the male adulterous urge, that she is ensuring some of the sperm she gets is fertile, that she is bribed by the philandering males (as seems to be the case in some human and ape societies). None of these fit the exact facts. Nor did it quite work to blame her infidelity on a desire for genetic variety. There seems to be little point in having more varied children than she would have anyway.

Birkhead and Møller were left with the belief that females benefit from being promiscuous because it enables them to have their genetic cake and eat it—to follow the Emma Bovary strategy.

A female needs a husband who will help look after her young, but she might be unlucky and might find all the best husbands taken. Her best tactic is therefore to mate with a mediocre husband or a husband with a good social position/job/inheritance and have an affair with a genetically superior neighbor.

This theory is supported by the facts: Females always choose more dominant, older, or more “attractive” lovers than their husbands; they do not have affairs with bachelors (presumably rejects) but with other females’ husbands; and they sometimes incite competition between potential lovers and choose the winners.

Baker and Bellis, in their experimental results, do not claim to have found more than a tantalizing hint that this is so, but they have tried to measure the extent of cuckoldry in human beings. In a block of flats in Liverpool, they found by genetic tests that fewer than four in every five people were the sons of their ostensible fathers. In case this had something to do with Liverpool, they did the same tests in southern England and got the same result. Like birds, women may be—quite unconsciously—having it both ways by conducting affairs with genetically more valuable men while not leaving their husbands.

In short, the reason adultery is so common is that it enables a male to have more young and enables a female to have better young.

[ One of the most curious results to come out of bird studies in recent years has been the discovery that “attractive” males make inattentive fathers. Nancy Burley, whose zebra finches consider one another more or less attractive according to the color of their leg bands, first noticed this, and Anders Moller has since found it to be true of swallows as well. When a female mates with an attractive male, he works less hard and she works harder at bringing up the young. It is as if he feels that he has done her a favor by providing superior genes and therefore expects her to repay him with harder work around the nest. This, of course, increases her incentive to find a mediocre but hardworking husband and cuckold him by having an affair with a superstud next door. ]

In any case, the principle—marry a nice guy but have an affair with your boss or marry a rich but ugly man and take a handsome lover—is not unknown among female human beings. It is called having your cake and eating it, too. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary wanted to keep both her handsome lover and her wealthy husband. It might not always work out along the evolutionary plan…

~ adapted wholesale from Matt Ridley’s discussion of adultery among birds in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

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For one of the most influential novels ever written, Madame Bovary is an understated affair. Flaubert is courageous in his treatment of female marital dissatisfaction, though I wish his Emma were able to act with a little more intelligence. Her dissatisfaction and desire for emotional fulfillment are perfectly understandable given her societal and personal circumstances, but her selfishness, recklessness and stupidity erase much of the sympathy one might have for her. Her husband is a pathetic character; a man who is constant and dedicated to a marital ideal, while neglecting the reality of his wife as a living, breathing person. I really did feel for him in the end. Though neither character is particularly admirable, the culpability lies less in their personal failings than in the norms of sexual separation and emotional repression that thrust Charles and Emma unprepared into each other's lives. What could Charles Bovary know about women, and what could Emma really understand about marriage; about herself? Despite the controversy, I find it hard to believe this novel could have enticed anyone to commit adultery. It's about as good a deterrent as I've read.