| Product: |
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert |
| Date: |
04/06/07 (128 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A great French classic
Disadvantages: An unappealing heroine from my male viewpoint
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
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Emma Bovary is bored. She’s bored with her humdrum life; married to a boring and mediocre doctor she lives under the burden that people judge her only relative to her husband and she struggles to find her own identity. She fills her empty days reading chick-lit romance novels and shopping before embarking on a string of adulterous affairs trying to find a man who will love her and appreciate her as a person in her own right.
So far, so Desperate Housewives. The bookshop shelves are filled with this kind chick-lit stuff, so what makes this book stand out? Well firstly it was written by a man, and a Frenchman by the by, and secondly it was written in 1857.
Madame Bovary was the first novel published by Gustave Flaubert and to say it caused something of a stir would be an understatement. In correspondence with friends Flaubert had said that he wanted his first book to make some waves but even he was surely surprised by the outcry that greeted its publication. The book was initially banned on the grounds that it was morally offensive and it took a high court ruling before publication could go ahead, very similar to the furore surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover a century or so later.
The novel is the story of Emma Rouault, the convent educated daughter of a well to do gentleman farmer, and Charles Bovary, a not particularly competent local doctor. The story opens with Charles starting school for the first time at about age fourteen and how under the relentless prompting of his ambitious mother he scrapes his way through school and medical training until he is able to open a practice in a small provincial town. In his first few months in the town he is railroaded into an unhappy marriage with a local widow, again by his mother, and is only freed when his new wife dies soon after. Whilst in mourning he treats a local farmer for a broken leg and falls for his daughter, Emma.
After a suitable period of time they marry and Emma Rouault becomes Emma Bovary. At this point the focus of the story shifts, where before Charles is the centre of attention now Emma is the main character. She is the only one we really get to know and all other characters become peripheral, seen only through her eyes. This is quite a dramatic shift as the two characters are in many ways reflections of the other. When we first meet Emma, through Charles’s eyes, she is a near silent figure sitting in her father’s kitchen lacklustrely performing her household chores. Up till now we are focussed on Charles and his battles with his own demons and sense of failure and at this point it would be hard to imagine a less inspiring character than Emma. It is only once they are married that we are allowed into her thoughts and feelings, and then it is Charles who moves into the near silent role, a role he is stuck with for the duration of the book.
The marriage doesn’t start well as from the outset Emma is filled with despair at her husband’s lack of ambition and energy. Despite having received a ‘good education’, in that she learned how to read, sew, play the piano and act demurely, she has little idea how the real world operates. She spent much of her school days reading romance novels and colourful magazines describing the exciting lives being led in glamorous Paris and has an expectation that this is what her life would and should be like. Acutely aware that her husband will never have the means or ambition to provide her with this life she grows ever more resentful and bitter, not just at Charles but with the world she lives in and the perceived lack of opportunity and freedom afforded to her as a woman. As time passes her resentment grows and manifests itself in a variety of ways. On a rare occasion when they are invited to an aristocratic social event she is filled with jealousy of the moneyed and titled women around her and desire for the dashing men. When a handsome viscount drops his cigarette case she takes it home and cherishes it as some kind of totemic link to a world she can only dream about. She is mean-spirited and cold to her husband, despite his clear but inarticulate devotion to her. When pregnant with their child she prays it will be a boy so it will enjoy the freedoms of the world, but when it is born a girl she virtually denies its existence, handing her over to nurses and servants and never showing affection, indeed there are times when she is violently resentful of the child’s presence.
When she inevitably embarks on a series of affairs she is reckless in her pursuit of them and it is only her husband’s artlessness that stops him seeing what is happening. In fact, so keen is he to enhance his wife’s happiness that on several occasions he provides her with the means of continuing her adulterous behaviour. At the same time she has developed a ruinous addiction to shopping and is seduced into spending more and more on clothes and furnishings by an unscrupulous shopkeeper, running up unmanageable debts in her husband’s name.
Madame Bovary is a tragedy; the heroine is clearly a tragic figure but it is hard to find any sympathy for her. In common with classical tragedy she is brought down by her own flaws, but unlike other classical figures who are undone by their own noble but misplaced actions she is brought down by a combination of her own greed and maliciousness. If there is a victim in this book it is Charles. He has spent his life being let down by those closest to him. From the father who let him run wild in the countryside before sending him thoroughly unprepared to school as a teenager, through his domineering mother forcing decisions on him at every turn to his young wife who despises him and takes advantage of him at every opportunity. His tragedy is that he wants to be everything to all of them, to please them all. It’s his noble desire to be what they all want him to be that fits the classical profile.
It is always difficult to judge books that have been translated, but this one appears to have been very well done. Beyond the central story the book is a satire on the habits and practices of a certain class of people. French middle classes, living in provincial towns are the target of some sharp mockery and the translator captures this and passes it on to the reader in a subtle but unmissable way. The book is very easy to read and the reader is never excluded from the story by the distance in time and geography, most of the cultural references will be unknown to a modern audience (there are footnotes to explain them) but these in no way hinder the overall understanding of the narrative.
Despite my misgivings about the central character I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book. The author has a wonderful sense of pace and is able to capture the essence of the supporting characters in just a couple of sentences that often injects some humour and light into what is otherwise quite a dark and sad story.
This review is based on the Penguin Classics edition translated by Geoffrey Wall and containing an interesting preface by Michele Roberts and comprehensive introduction.
Summary: Well worth reading - a classic novel still relevant today.
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