Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary  is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered by many critics to be a 

masterpiece. 

The narrative begins from the perspective of a French schoolboy, who records Charles Bovary’s first day in his class. Everyone stares at Charles, the fifteen-year-old “new boy” from the country, who enters with an exceedingly embarrassed manner. His classmates soon begin to tease him, ostracizing him for his country manner and dress. The teacher also ridicules him when he can’t understand Charles’s pronunciation of his name and makes him sit on a dunce stool near him.

Charles is an average student, but others note that “he had not the least elegance of style.” After his parents determine that he would make a fine doctor, he enrolls in medical school, where he becomes a mediocre student. He soon begins to enjoy his freedom at college, frequenting the tavern and playing dominos, which develops into “an initiation into the world, the introduction to forbidden pleasures.” As a result, he fails his medical examinations. Later, he returns to school and, through careful memorization of the questions, retakes the exams and passes. Soon after, he moves to Tostes to begin his practice. When his mother decides he must marry, she finds him a forty-five-year-old wealthy widow. Charles finds Héloïse ugly and thin. After they marry, she takes control of the household and complains incessantly of health problems.

One night Charles is called away to a farmhouse to set a farmer’s broken leg. The farmer, Monsieur Rouault, is a widower with one daughter, Emma. Charles is struck by her beauty and returns to the farmhouse as often as he can, ostensibly to check on her father but in reality because he is drawn to the farm and especially to her. When Héloïse finds out that Rouault has a beautiful daughter, she forbids Charles’s return to the farm. After Héloïse loses her inheritance, Charles’s parents accuse her of lying about her wealth and cause a scene. Héloïse becomes so upset that she falls ill and suddenly dies.

Charles returns to the farm and soon asks Rouault for his permission to marry Emma. Although he finds Charles rather dull, Rouault agrees, since he determines that Emma is not much use to him around the farm. After a suitable period, Emma and Charles marry at the farmhouse and then go on to Tostes. Charles clearly adores his wife and so becomes supremely happy and contented. Emma, however, is not satisfied. She had thought herself in love with Charles before they married, but those feelings failed to materialize. Emma is a neurasthenic, in the modern sense, but in the 19th century she would have been said to suffer from hysteria, a mental condition diagnosed primarily in women. When her lovers leave her, she has what amounts to nervous breakdowns. After Rodolphe leaves her she makes herself so sick that she comes near death. Her imagination is much too powerful and too impressionable for her own good. This is part of the reason for Flaubert’s oft-repeated quote, “Bovary, c’est moi.” Flaubert was a neurasthenic as well and could easily work himself into a swoon as a result of his imaginative flights. There is even conjecture that he may have been, like Dostoevsky, an epileptic, and it is further intimated that this disorder was brought on by nerves, though this may be dubious, medically speaking.

Madame Bovary is not flawless, but it comes awfully close. It is one of the great controlled experiments in the fiction of any era. It even anticipates cinematic technique in many instances, but particularly in the scene at the Agricultural Fair. Note how Flaubert juxtaposes the utterly mundane activities and speeches occurring in the town square with Rodolphe’s equally inane seduction of Emma in the empty Council Chamber above the square:

“He took her hand and she did not withdraw it.”

“`General Prize!’ cried the Chairman.’”

“`Just now, for instance, when I came to call on you…’”

“Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix.”

“`…how could I know that I should escort you here?’”

“Seventy francs!”

“`And I’ve stayed with you, because I couldn’t tear myself away, though I’ve tried a hundred times.’”

“Manure!”

This is representative Flaubert. With a few deft strokes, he lays the whole absurdity of both the seduction and the provincial’s activities bare.

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.

Madame Bovary“ by Gustave Flaubert.
Here is a famous movie adaptation by Claude Chabrol, with the celebrated actress Isabelle Huppert.