Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)
Novel – my copy (read on my kindle) during December 2011 to January 2012
#31 of 2011-12 – #152 of All-Time
- 4 nods out of 5 -
For the British reader, there is always something quite intimidating about the French novelist. For centuries these two nations have fought wars and battles, rivalled one another for significance of their time zones and spheres of influence, as well as sniffing their noses at various culinary delights. But language seems to play that more crucial and higher role in the British-Franco relationship.
Mr Flaubert remains one of the world’s, and in particular France’s, most celebrated novelists. In a year – 2012 – when the English speaking world is trumpeting the achievements of Charles Dickens, Flaubert is a writer who produced work in the very same time period. But rather than the cheeky, squalid low-lives of Dickensian London, Flaubert went for the tragic of our mundane lives. Madame Bovary is the noted classic of Flaubert’s back catalogue; a book that has been read the world over, and adapted – with various successes – to the silver screen.
The book charts the life of Charles Bovary, a provincial doctor whose wife dies whilst young. He remarries, to a farmer’s daughter called Emma. The new Madame Bovary grows listless and tired of her married life, forever daydreaming of a more cherished, spoilt future dancing with aristocrats, receiving complements, and supping on the finest that the world had to offer. She would read of ‘love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, “gentlemen” brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains.’ As with other noteworthy realist - and naturalist - novels of the nineteenth century (including Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth), Emma never fulfils such fantasy; instead succumbing to a horrible, prolonged death of her own making. Not even this suicide lived up to the romantic expectations that she had read so feverishly in books and stories:
‘Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began to give extreme unction. First upon the eyes, that had so coveted all worldly pomp; then upon the nostrils, that had been greedy of the warm breeze and amorous odours; then upon the mouth, that had uttered lies, that had curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then upon the hands that had delighted in sensual touches; and finally upon the soles of the feet, so swift of yore, when she was running to satisfy her desires, and that would now walk no more.’
In hoping to escape her life, Madame Bovary takes various lovers; including the duplicitous Rodolphe, and the withdrawn Leon. Each relationship never fulfils its initial promise, with Emma envying the males that surround her. ‘She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she could call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free…’ Even in this, she did not succeed; giving birth to a daughter.
In Madame Bovary, Flaubert has created a heavyweight of characters from the pages of novels; a mystery that is hard to unwrap and solve. This is shown nowhere more clearly than in the main character’s very own name. Just who is Madame Bovary? Is the first wife who dies early in the novel; or Charles’ very own mum; or perhaps Emma, who does all she can to escape the very same surname. As Rodolphe exclaims to her:
“Ah! You see,” replied he in a melancholy voice, “that I was right not to come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! Why all the world calls you thus! Besides, it is not your name; it is the name of another!”
Madame Bovary is a woman at odds with the world, her own identity and destiny; as well as her very own name. But despite such tension, the text is not one full of warmth in which the Worm longed to return to the following evening. Despite Flaubert’s – seemingly self-congratulatory – talent for description and prose, the book has its shortcomings. In the very same dreary humdrum way of Madame Bovary’s very own life, the end of the book is one, like the central character’s herself, are glad of escape at its final close.
Is this simple British fear, snobbery, envy, dislike of a renowned and celebrated French novelist? Please, dear reader, delete as appropriate and send your answers on a postcard for the Worm to retort aloud.
Buy it here in paper form:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Madame-Wordsworth-Classics-Gustave-Flaubert/dp/1853260789/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329774687&sr=8-1
Or download it on your Kindle, free of charge!:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Madame-Bovary-ebook/dp/B000JQU7LW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1329774687&sr=8-2
