A bit of a Madame (Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert)

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Product:	Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Date:	25/07/07 (94 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good characterisation; comic look at French rural life at the time

Disadvantages: Characters have become rather dated; verbosity and excessively floral writing

Indulge me a moment while I relate a short tale. More years ago than I care to remember, when I was at school, we were assigned, in a French oral class, the task of working in pairs, one of us taking the part of a police officer and the other a witness, to converse in French, asking for and giving the description of a person spotted at the scene of some fictitious crime. I worked with my friend Louise and, although this is blatant boasting, I have to say that we were both some distance ahead of the rest of our classmates in our proficiency of the language. I took the part of the police officer and, having established that Louise could offer a description of this shady character, I began to ask what he was wearing. Louise's imagination knew no bounds and she was delighted to report that he was wearing a leather skirt (yes, really) and a yellow hat. Further investigation revealed that this was no ordinary hat for it, too, was made of leather and it had an attractive floral band around it. The man was wearing socks which were described as "serpent like" and a tie which reminded her of a carpet. So the description continued becoming more detailed and elaborate by the second. It was all I could do not to collapse into hysterical laughter as Louise demonstrated the depths of her French vocabulary. As I review "Madame Bovary" it should become apparent why this episode sprang to mind when I put pen to paper to write this piece.

When it was published in 1857, "Madame Bovary" caused something of a sensation. It's author, Gustav Flaubert, received widespread condemnation for what was deemed an immoral novel and there were even attempts to prosecute. However, it is widely held, now, as one of the great novels of French literature and one which is said to mark a shift in French literature - the first novel of the realism genre.

Emma Bovary is married to a country doctor, a few years her senior. Charles never intended to become a doctor, it was wished for him by his mother when he completed his schooling and for want of any other ideas, Charles fell into line. When his mother also found him a wife he again agreed but the wife died soon after the marriage and when Charles met Emma while attending to her injured father, he quickly fell in love with her.

Some years earlier, Emma had returned to the family farm after being schooled in a convent. The nuns had had high hopes of Emma joining the sisters and she had shown much early promise but she had then discovered romantic novels and immersed herself in tales of knights and damsels and, instead of hymns, she could be heard singing ballads of the day.

Emma has doubts about marrying Charles because she does not think that she is madly in love with him. She feels that passion is missing but she marries him nonetheless because she persuades herself that love will come later. After the wedding she leaves her father to live with Charles in the town of Yonville where she is intorduced to Leon, the clerk to the town's lawyer. At first Emma tries to hide her feelings for this vital young man but she is forced to admit to herself and eventually to Leon that she has fallen in love with him. At this point, though, it is too late, Leon is on his way to the city to complete his legal exams.

After his departure, Emma tries her best to be a good wife to Charles and a good mother to Bertha, their young daughter but she is miserable. Marriage is not what she had imagined, a far cry from the lives led by the characters in her books and the rich people she reads gossip about in the magazines she has sent from Rouen and Paris.

It is not that Charles does not love Emma, he is merely undemonstrative and it is perhaps symbolic of the nature of courtship and marriage at that time that Emma feels such disappointment, after all she would not have had the chance to really get to know a partner like woman do before committing to marriage today. Charles in not the husband she wants although noone could fault his generosity and his kindness. Emma sees in Charles all kinds of faults which a happy woman would probably never notice but which make her more and more unhappy as she tries to give the impression of happiness.

When, later, she meets the arrogant and womanising Rodolphe she succumbs to his dubious charms and throws herself into the affair. However even the romance and excitement she so badly craves are not enough to make her happy and Emma is not able to live with the consequences of her actions.

Some people have said that Emma Bovary is very much a modern woman: she has been described as being a feminist icon. This novel is one of the earliest examples of a heroine who wants more than to be the dutiful wife, a woman who is bored with staying at home and looking after the house while her husbnd goes out to work. However, for me, Emma loses any of the strength and spirit she might be considered to have because she is essentially selfish and vacuous. She is easily impressed by nobilty and wealth and is disdainful of the habits of the country folk around her. Personally, I never felt any sympathy for Emma but it may be that it is because I am looking at her from the perspective of a young woman in the twenty-first century. However, since the book caused such a stir on publication, clearly, society at the time did not care much for Emma Bovary either.

Charles is not an exciting man he does what he thinks is right for Emma,such as buying her a horse when it has been suggested that more fresh air would be of benefit to her health. His naivete is no doubt one of the reasons for his inability to be the romantic hero Emma would like for a husband. Straight from his medical training to a small practice in the provinces, he has seen little of the world and and is little experienced in what women want. He does nothing to suggest that Emma is justified in the way she treats him but on the other hand he offers no real colour or life.

Flaubert's writing is filled with similes, metaphors and a constant stream of adjectives. I found this rather charming at first but gradually it began to wear me out. I longed for things just to be blue or high but Flaubert obviously didn't think things sufficiently described until the reader was crying out for relief from the bombardment of adjectives. Used in moderation the descriptive writing would be lovely to read but I found it overwhelming. This excess was what reminded me of my French classes where Louise and I never knew quite when to draw the line.

One passage reads "Her black eyes looked blacker. Her hair, slighlty puffed over her ears, glittered with a blueish sheen. The rose in her chignon quivered onits flexible stem. At the tip of each leaf there was an artificial drop of water. Her dress was of pale saffron yellow, relieved by three tight bunches of roses complete with their leaves. "

Someone said to me recently that comtemporary author, Will Self, uses all the words that Martin Amis wanted to use in his novels but couldn't fit in. It's just as well they're not contemporaries of Flaubert - there would be no spare words left to use!

All of this is not to say, though, that "Madame Bovary" no longer has anything to offer today's readers. The characterisation is wonderful and Flaubert has, managed to capture almost every personality one might meet, from the rapacious wet nurse who is charged with looking after the newborn Bertha to he pedantic chemist Monsieur Homais whose ministrations first brought Charles to Yonville. There is enough entertainment from these characters to keep the reader occupied even if the trials of Charles and Emma's marriage do begin to wear you down. They certainly wore me down: I found little to attract me to either Charles or Emma but I did enjoy the depiction of life in provincial France with it's petty rivalries. One lovely chapter covers the communities agricultural show where prizes are being handed out for various achievements in farming and the industrial arts. In one delightful scene, a toothless, wrinkled, old lady is completely bambozzled when she is ushered to the stage to claim a prize of twenty five francs for long service to her farm.

It really is necessary to bear in mind that conventions and morality were very different when "Madame Bovary" was written to the way they are today although human nature does not seem to have changed much. Maybe this is why I did not get too vexed with this story even though I could easily have been so inclined. I was torn between being irritated by Emma and feeling a bit sorry for a fellow woman trapped in an unhappy marriage. It doens't seem that unusual these days to hear tell of a young woman marrrying an older man only for the results of the age gap to later have a negative impact on the relationship. Nor is it an unheard tale for a man to work hard to provide for his wife and children with it never to be quite enough to satisfy her. Therefore, the situations depicted in this novel are not peculiar to the mid-nineteenth century but our reaction to them is influenced by our looking at them with a modern perspective.

Although my copy had quite useful and interesting notes at the end, I did not feel that there was anything that was not self-explanatory in the text, no references specific to the time which are not in common usage today and certainly nothing which would warrant a quick look to get its gist before I could read on.


Recommended with reservations; not a book for everyone.
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My copy is a second hand edition published by World's Clasics. ISBN - 0-19-281564-4

It is translated by Gerard Hopkins and has an introduction (including a brief chronology of Flaubert) by Terence Cave.

Summary: A classic novel that has perhaps dated too much