Madame Bovary (Oxford Pocket Classics)
Emma Bovary is stunning and bored, trapped in her relationship to a mediocre medical professional and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for enthusiasm and seeks escape in fantasies of large romance, in voracious paying and, sooner or later, in adultery. But even her affairs carry her disappointment and the effects are devastating. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary brought on a ethical outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they have been the product for his heroine but Flaubert insisted: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’.
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10 Responses to “Madame Bovary (Oxford Pocket Classics)”
Simple Plot, Elaborate Details in This Masterpiece,
A simple story really: Charles Bovary, an insensitive, crude, socially awkward oaf, sleazes his way into the medical profession and becomes a doctor in small French provinces at the danger of the citizenry. Additionally, Charles marries a young, beautiful woman, Emma, who intoxicated on romance novels, expects her marriage to Charles to be as grand and splendid as the romances she has gorged on all her life. As one would expect, her marriage is hellish, isolating, and frustrating; Emma grows more and more irritable with her husband and looks to allay her frustrations by spending beyond her means and by engaging in affairs with fops, charlatans, and other mountebanks who seduce Emma with the illusions of romance she has read in her novels. Her growing debts and growing disillusionment with her lovers reaches a climax that I’ll save for the reader.
The novel’s plot is actually a vehicle for Flaubert’s real agenda: to skewer the vulgarities and pettiness of the middle-class. He shows no mercy and is rather misanthropic in his portrayal of his characters. Nevertheless, his vision is a true and vigorous one. This is not a novel for people who want to sit back and enjoy a French period piece romance. To the contrary, this novel kills romance and in fact Flaubert was once dubbed “The Hang-Man of the Romantics.”
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|Madame Bovary,
Destined for doom and misfortune, Madame Bovary, the female protagonist, falls down the wrong corridor in search for a life of luxury. She marries a country doctor in the hopes of living a better life that suits her elite tastes but instead becomes tangled and twisted in romances and extra marital relationships, betraying her family and her marital oath. Madame Bovary is never fulfilled, only full of distaste of the life that her husband has provided her. Her marriage is the ultimate source of unhappiness and Madame Bovary is unwilling and perhaps unable to turn their marriage around.
Her husband is an oaf at heart and is unwilling to help his wife out of her misery. But to do so would call for an entire change of heart and character. He is blind to his faults and perceives their marriage as a happy one. Until the bitter end, Bovary fails to see Madame Bovary as she really is, a frivolous and vain woman with dreams that he cannot fulfill.
One affair after another, one disappointment after another, Madame Bovary seeks happiness and fulfillment but finds none. She is wrong to expect from her husband what he cannot provide and wrong to find happiness elsewhere beyond the boundaries of their marriage.
Madame Bovary shows the wreckage of a marriage without hope. From the beginning, Madame Bovary expects too much and knows far too little about marital duties. Her expectations remain unfilled, her husband lost and
clueless.
Madame Bovary is a common housewife who runs amuck with their marriage and who never sees the wreck of an end in sight. Had she accepted her marital role then she would have never been part of the infamy bestowed upon her and might have found happiness. But she was seeking luxury and not happiness.
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