Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857, translated by Mildred Marmur)

What a beautifully written, devastating book. In the name of "realism", Flaubert leaves us no character to applaud: not Emma Bovary, the dissatisfied wife who descends into adultery, betrayal, and debt; not Charles, her clod-like husband who blindly worships his wife yet wonders why his home isn't happier; not Homais, the educated sceptic who rails against the priests and pursues wordly fame; and certainly not Leon or Rodolphe, the men Emma loves.

Flaubert's writing style is admittedly dazzling.  His simple yet evocative prose cuts with the precision of a scalpel as it shapes his characters and their actions. The psychology and the situations are all true to life, whether in portraying Emma's dissatisfaction with Charles's lack of ambition, Charles waffling between the demands of his wife and those of his mother, or Emma manipulating her husband into allowing her the freedom she needs to escape to the arms of another. Flaubert is especially accurate depicting the quickness with which a new love's excitement diminishes, and the layers of lies involved in the illicit rendezvous:

He no longer used words so sweet that they made her cry, as he had in the old days; nor were his caresses so ardent that they drove her mad. So the great love affair in which she had plunged seemed to diminish under her like the water of a river being absorbed into its own bed, and she began to see the slime at the bottom. She didn't want to believe it and redoubled her tenderness. Rodolphe hid his indifference less and less.

The book was charged with immorality by the French government. Its defense was that the book incites its readers to virtue through the horrors of vice. I don't buy it. To incite to virtue, virtue must be portrayed. Supporters award Charles with the "virtue" mantle, but if that's virtue, count me out. Continually deceived, estranged without knowing it, Charles still worships his wife even after he learns the truth, as if her betrayal made her better. It would be different if Charles embodied unconditional love, but all he has is deluded love. Rather than loving Emma despite her wrongdoings, he finds himself unable to judge her actions as wrong.

All we see through Flaubert's lense is unquenchable dissatisfaction (Emma) or idiotic devotion to a lie (Charles).  Because of this, Madame Bovary, while a precision portrait of the hopelessness caused by sin, deceit, and materialism, offers no solution.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 ounces of slime at the bottom