Madame Bovary

August 06, 2014

I think (hope!) this book will live in my head for some time to come. There is so much to say about this book - the language, style, characters, emotions, life in a bourgeois town in mid 19th century France...!

The prose really stands out, the care Flaubert took with every passage comes across crystal clear even in translation. There are many clever things Flaubert does with his sentences that all work remarkably well. One common flourish is juxtaposition - the absurd against the sacred (as when Emma goes to seek solace with the priest who has time only for the material deficits of the world), the philosophical against the romantic (Rodolphe's expert seduction against the prosperity of the workers)... This is often hilarious, sometimes pathetic but always effective! I often found myself rereading a sentence, savoring its musicality and insight. 

Flaubert also uses tense in a very versatile manner, I would have to read the book again to explain it better. But for instance this passage: 

"It was the hour when, along the dockside, you hear the mallets of the caulkers ringing against the hulls of the ships. Smoke from the tar escaped from among the trees, and on the broad patches of oil undulating unevenly beneath the crimson glow of the sun, like floating plates of Florentine bronze."

It is in the middle of a section describing Leon and Emma's honeymoon days and everything except this passage is in the immediate past ("They would take the boat...") but the description of the city and that one hour is in the present. I thought this gave the entire section of their honeymoon a feeling of eternity - perhaps how Emma or Leon would remember it much later...

Flaubert also uses metaphors and similes sparingly but that just serves to enhance their effect when they do appear. For instance:

"The next day was, for Emma, a dismal one. Everything seemed enveloped in a dark mist that drifted indistinctly over the surfaces of things, and sorrow rushed into hero soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in an abandoned chateau. It was the sort of reverie you sink into over something that will never return again, the lassitude that overcomes you with each thing that is finished, the pain you suffer when any habitual motion is stopped, when a prolonged vibration abruptly ceases."

or 

"As for Emma, she never questioned herself to find out if she loved him. Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning - a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss. She did not know that the rain forms lakes on the terraces of houses when the drainpipes are blocked, and thus she would have lived on feeling quite safe, had she not suddenly discovered a crack in the wall."

As another example, the beginning of the book has many Madame Bovarys but none of them are the true, correct one we will know later. Indeed, the book begins with a description of Charles and we are introduced to Emma from his point of view. He finds her immediately beautiful and charming and hence imagines her to be good. The reader has no choice but to buy this fairy tale till later, when we get to peer into the mind of Emma. This had the very interesting effect of ever so slightly distancing Emma for the rest of the book. Perhaps it makes her a little easier to sympathize with? Also, quite strangely, the very beginning of the book has the narrator involved in the story ("We were in the Study Hall...") but very quickly, this style is abandoned for the more familiar third person. Somehow it works...

Flaubert's "realism" is also a resounding success. The narrator has a clear and distinct presence but never a moral slant. The events of the book are purely superficial - Emma is motivated by lust and a desire for status and for the most part, the book is concerned with purely the physical events. But Flaubert uses these objective descriptions to great effect in explaining the subjective experiences of his character and at this point, the book is anything but superficial. 

Indeed, perhaps no character is likeable but almost everyone is sympathetic.  Poor, saintly Charles who has complete faith in Emma to the ruin of himself, his daughter, his parents. Naive, romantic Emma who aspires all her life to the ideals of the novels of her childhood never to succeed. She digs herself deeper and deeper into her grave out of a sense of claustrophobia - of being nothing more than a small town doctor's wife in provincial France. Perhaps she cannot love Charles because to do so would be to accept her fate? Or perhaps because she and Charles are utterly incompatible - love comes easy to Charles and he never stops to wonder how Emma is feeling, what she desires and hopes for. Most of all, Flaubert's immense sympathy for Emma comes through in the host of tiny details about her life, her thoughts and her fears.

At its heart, despite (or because of) the main character, the book reads a starkly feminist tract. Had Emma been born a man, perhaps her aspirations would have been fulfilled through other means. As it is, she is relegated to a domestic life with only one outlet for her imagination and even there, her gender is a constant reproach. She imagines herself the heroine of her life but sadly, her lovers have all the power. They abandon her when they grow bored of her and move on to the approval of their friends. On the other hand, Emma faces constant judgement and has no one to turn to, confide in. 

And for the final point, perhaps some context first! My understanding of literature in this time period (1800-1850) is that the novel as an art form really rose to prominence because of the rise of a bourgeois middle class who had the time and leisure to engage in reading. And most of all, they were interested in reading about themselves, society, inner lives etc. The books of Austen, Dickens, Balzac etc fulfilled this need, being stories about romance, the poor and so on but they were moralistic (?) in the sense that the stories had a moral arc, protagonists, antagonists and certain other conventions through which the novel was often obviously unrealistic and aspirational. Since they were written for such an audience, the novel was considered the least artistic of the possible art forms, the basest one for the common people.

My understanding is that Flaubert wanted to subvert this tradition - his novel has no heroes or heroines, no virtuous or despicable characters and is set in a tiny provincial town where nothing at all happens! Indeed, his "heroine" is beautiful but not virtuous while his "hero" is ugly, self-sacrificing and completely without agency. Perhaps many of the supporting characters would have even been intimately familiar to his readers. Indeed, he goes much further blaming the downfall of Emma entirely to the novels she read during her childhood, the novels full of heroism and idealism! Flaubert is particularly harsh on the bourgeois:

"It was time to be serious. Accordingly he was renouncing the flute, elevated sentiments, and the imagination. Every bourgeois in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or a minute has believed himself capable of a grand passion, a high endeavour. Every run-of-the-mill seducer has dreamed of Eastern queens. Not a lawyer but carries within him the débris of a poet."

Indeed, this would be so shocking to the morals of mid 19th century France that the Government would try to ban the book and prosecute Flaubert in court for violating public morality. Their immediate rout in court did nothing to limit the book's popularity and the influence it would have on literature since...

So Flaubert set out to write a book devoid of heroes and villains, about the banality and sensuality of everyday life. Ultimately, I guess he wrote a book about everything: what it means to pursue an unachievable goal, what it means to be trapped by the dictates of your society and times and on the value of human dreams and their cost. And in doing so, he elevated the novel to be the definitive literary art form.

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Some fun stuff I found reading secondary commentary: Apparently, Flaubert was so immersed in the character of Emma that while writing her death scene, he himself felt the taste of arsenic in his mouth and felt weak and suffered indigestion for a few days after. Similarly, while writing about Rodolphe and Emma's horseback ride, he worked so hard and immersively that he almost suffered a nervous breakdown himself.

As opposed to his earlier works, Flaubert meticulously planned the entire novel before writing it down, nothing in it seems to have been spontaneous. He moved from section to section slowly, sometimes spending as much as a day on a sentence. His definitive criteria for a finished sentence was that it must sound good - he would say it aloud in various ways before making the final decision.  He did extensive research for the novel, going out and talking to pharmacists, bankers etc, striving for factual accuracy as much as poetic sensibility. But the villages in the novel seem to have been completely imaginary.

It seems that a lot of Emma is based on real people - on a famous scandalous affair that happened around the time Flaubert began his novel, on his friend/short-time lover "Ludovica" who has almost the same downward arc as Emma and perhaps on many other contemporary events too.