Carriages Rides and Shipwrecked Sailors - Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"

In November 2025, June read Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary and told me she thought it was on par with Anna Karenina which is very high praise coming from her.  I had read Madame Bovary about 15 years prior and while I remembered that I thought it was good, I didn't remember much else.  Since I was now also a devoted Anna Karenina appreciator and I trust June's literary opinions implicitly I decided I'd revisit it.

And, oh man, this book is good.  The writing is incredible.  I'm actually kind of flabbergasted that it didn't make a thunderous impression all those years ago and was relegated to a half remembered "it was good I...think" but then again, younger me was stupid.

Background

Madame Bovary is the 1856 debut novel by the French writer Gustav Flaubert.  It was first published serially under the title Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners.  It's the story of Emma Bovary who marries a dull country doctor in provincial France.  It...doesn't go well.

Flaubert (1821-1880) was born in Rouen, a city in Normandy in Northern France.  He had some health issues, not the least being epilepsy, which caused him to drop his law studies and focus on writing.

And that writing really was influential.  Literary critic James Wood, in his great book How Fiction Works says:

There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.  We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author’s fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.

Flaubert's first attempt at a novel, The Temptation of St Anthony from 1849, didn't go super well.  He read it aloud to his two good friends who told him to burn it and write about something less fantastical.  Flaubert turned to the true story of Delphine Delamare, a country woman married to a doctor who had numerous affairs before committing suicide.  Oh and, uh, spoilers.  Flaubert started work on Madame Bovary in 1850.

The novel took five years to write and it was apparently a grueling experience where Flaubert agonized over every sentence while sometimes finishing less than 3 pages a week.  In 1852, he wrote to his lover Louise Colet that:

It is now impossible for me to write a whole sentence, good or bad.  I have as much trouble placing a single word as if I were writing poetry.

Plot Summary

The novel opens by describing the good natured but boring Charles Bovary and his meeting of Emma, the daughter of a provincial farmer who is one of Charles's patients.   Emma has lofty notions of romance because of all the sentimental novels she has read and, perhaps impulsively, agrees to marry Charles.  She is quickly overcome by overwhelming boredom and resentment of her dull and oblivious husband and enters into affairs with both the philandering Rodolphe and then the clerk Leon.

Her affair with Leon starts to fizzle out and she gets increasingly in debt to the merchant Lheureux.  After the bills come due and she exhausts all hope of paying them off, she takes arsenic and dies after days of pain.  The end

The Writing

Madame Bovary is a masterfully written novel and is a fast, compelling, and often very funny read.  It combines a sharp eye for clinical detail with some really insightful and beautiful passages that make you realize that if Flaubert, as quoted above, struggled mightily with the prose as poetry, he succeeded in creating a text that is both.

To quote the man himself:

Literarily speaking there are two distinct fellows inside me.  One who is taken by roaring lyricism and another who digs and scratches for the truth as well as he can and would like the reader to feel the things he describes almost palpably.

Both of these fellows are very obvious in this novel.

Realism vs Romanticism

Flaubert, after his failure with St Anthony, turned his attention towards realism and unwittingly altered the trajectory of 19th Century writing.

Grant Voth, in his Great Courses lecture series "The History of World Literature," says this about realism:

As Romanticism was a rejection of all of the values of the Enlightenment so realism is really a rejection of the values of Romanticism.  It’s associated socially with the rise to power of the middle class and the Industrial revolution. … Aesthetically realism really means pretty much in literature what it does in common parlance.  That is, what the realists meant to do is to give us a faithful and truthful representation of the real world.

The novel pays great attention to setting, laying out the geography and appearance of places in detail without overstaying its descriptive welcome.  One representative example:

Through the cracks in the wood, the sun stretched out its long thin rays on the flagstone floor, shattering against the corners of the furniture and trembling on the ceiling. Flies were climbing the length of the glasses left on the table, and buzzing as they drowned at the bottom, in the cider’s dregs. The daylight that came down the chimney, giving a velvet sheen to the fireback’s soot, turned the cold cinders slightly blue.  (Part 1, Chapter 3)

As I mentioned above, Flaubert's tilt toward realism does not mean he sacrificed all poetry for a list of details and the novel is filled with creative and evocative descriptions (more on this later.).  To quote the author again:

All the value of my book, if it has one, will be to have been able to walk steadily on a hair, suspended, between the double abyss of lyricism and vulgarity.

Perspective

Madame Bovary is written in third person but, like Leo Tolstoy would do later in Anna Karenina, Flaubert has his omniscient narrator frequently adopt the perspective of the character it's following.

Arnold Weinstein, in his Great Courses series "Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature" says this of the narration:

Flaubert invented what is called the “free indirect discourse.”  It’s a way of writing and the free indirect discourse means that you write subjectivity in the third person. It’s not in quotation marks anymore.  That he will use a third person descriptive phrase and you will realize as you negotiate that phrase that this is definitely the point of view or the bias of that particular character.

Take, for example, the scene where Charles, Emma, Homais, and Leon go for a walk:

Charles was there. He had his cap pulled down over his eyebrows, and his thick lips were quivering, which added something stupid to his face; even his back, his unruffled back was irritating to look at, and there, exposed on the frock coat, she found all the vapidness of the individual. (Part 2, Chapter 5)

This is quite clearly Emma's perspective on the husband that annoys her.  There's no "she thought" or "she imagined" here just the third person narration adopting her viewpoint.

Several times June mentioned how cinematic the writing was and she had hit upon something that James Wood describes in How Fiction Works:

Flaubert seems to scan the streets indifferently, like a camera. Just as when we watch a film we no longer notice what has been excluded, what is just outside the edges of the camera frame, so we no longer notice what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness. How superb and magnificently isolate these details are—the women yawning, the unopened newspapers, the washing quivering in the warm air.

Just as how in film the gaze of the camera, i,e, what it chooses to focus on and emphasize, has an immense, even overwhelming if sometimes subconscious effect on a viewer's perspective of the events, so too does the gaze of Flaubert's narrator.

What I think is really interesting is when Flaubert's free indirect subjectivity pops into the setting description passages, unattached to any character, and the narrator's descriptions get a little...bitchy?  Unlike Tolstoy, who I described as a gentle narrator who seems to love his setting and characters, there's a touch of contempt that occasionally bleeds through in Madame Bovary.

In chapter 1, the narration describes the Seine as making "a vile little Venice of this area of Rouen" and later at the start of Part 2 while describing Yonville, where the Bovarys are relocating to, it describes the region like this:

Here we are in the border country of Normandy, Picardy and the Ile de France, a bastard region where the language lacks modulation, like the characterless countryside. This is where the worst Neufchâtel cheeses in the entire district are made, and where, on the other hand, farming is expensive, because a lot of dung is needed to fatten these friable soils full of sand and stones.

The narration also sometimes takes potshots at the characters, particularly the provincial ones.

An example that leaps to mind is how the old woman who wins a prize at the Yonville agricultural fair is briefly described:

From a life spent with animals, she had taken on their dumbness and their placidity.

It doesn't happen a lot, which gives the impression of a narrator who kind of hates these people and sometimes can't maintain objectivity.  And it's kind of funny every time.

The Perfect Word

Flaubert wrote with the principle of "le mot juste" (i.e."the right word") which in a nutshell is the almost mystical idea that there is a specific unique and correct word for every situation.  This explains both the fantastic precision that comes through in every sentence and why the writing process was so agonizing.

To quote James Heffernen from his Great Courses lecture series "Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition:"

In spite of the beating that he took for the overheated lyricism of “the Temptation [of St. Anthony]” Flaubert does not simply lurch from the fantastic to the commonplace.  One reason he struggled so hard with the writing of Madame Bovary is that he strove mightily to make its prose sound poetic.

And he succeeded.  The book is rife with imaginative and sometimes surprising poetic imagery. Arnold Weinstein draws particular attention to this passage describing Emma after her first tryst with Rodolphe:

Here and there, all about her, in the leaves or on the ground, spots of light trembled, as if hummingbirds, flying to and fro, had scattered their feathers. The silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to rise from the trees; she was aware of her heart, that was beating again, and of the blood circling through her flesh like a river of milk. (Part 2, Chapter 9)

As Weinstein says, "That’s not a cliché.  That’s the language of a poet."

I also very much liked this passage about Emma's view of love regarding Leon:

As to Emma, she did not examine her heart to know whether or not she loved him. Love, she believed, should come on all at once, with great claps of thunder and lightning—a hurricane from heaven that falls upon your life, turns it topsy-turvy, tears up intentions like leaves and sweeps your whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that, on the foundation terrace of a house, the rain makes lakes when the gutters are blocked, and so she remained safe and secure, until suddenly she discovered a crack in the wall. (Part 2, Chapter 4)

Cinema

The cinematic effect of this novel isn't only achieved through the "camera" that Wood describes.  It's also in how the book cross cuts between actions.  The most obvious example is during Yonville's agricultural fair where Rodolphe's seduction of Emma is intercut with an agricultural dignitary giving out farming awards.

The juxtaposition is funny and quite pointed as the the dignitary's overblown language extolling farming virtues is placed alongside Rodolphe's overblown romantic pablum.  Also the dignitary unknowingly comments on the seduction.  Rodolphe, a man of many mistresses, doesn't actually care about Emma; he's just trying to sleep with her.  So having the dignitary follow Rodolphe's “A hundred times, even, I desired to leave, and I followed you, I stayed” with a shout of “Manures” is kind of perfect.

(I think this probably doesn't work in the French, but in translation there's also kind of a fun wordplay when the dignitary calls out an award for "good general husbandry" right after Rodolphe first takes Emma's hand.)

June said, and I completely agree, that his novel seems like it would be fairly easy to adapt into a good movie or maybe a miniseries.

Also, perhaps to take advantage of the novel's original serialized publication, the chapters often end on plot cliffhangers, emotional gut punches, or dramatic reversals that set up future conflict, all of which add to the cinematic effect.

Humor

This book is really funny, if often in kind of a gallows humor kind of way and Flaubert seems to enjoy taking the piss out of his characters.  Some examples I really liked:

A few pages after Charles' less-than-stellar Latin education and abilities are described, the text says:

The curriculum, which he read on the noticeboard, made him feel giddy: lectures in anatomy, lectures in pathology, lectures in physiology, lectures in pharmacology, lectures in chemistry, in botany, and in clinical and therapeutic medicine, not to mention hygiene and materia medica, all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant ... (Part 1, Chapter 1)

I laughed out loud at this; of course someone who sucks at Latin wouldn't know his etymologies and Flaubert couldn't resist getting the jab in, even pages after it was relevant.

I also chuckled when, while Emma and Leon are consummating their affair in a coach in Rouen, the novel adopts the point of view of the coach driver who does not understand why his passengers just want to endlessly ride around town with all the windows closed.  The narration says "He could not comprehend what mania for locomotion drove these individuals to not want to stop." (Part 3, Chapter 1)

There's also some stuff that's quite funny on a re-read.  Early in their marriage, Charles buys Emma a buggy, "knowing how she loved to take a ride in a carriage."  Which based on the carriage episode I just quoted is a clever little easter egg.  Just you wait, Charles.

There's also some funny setups with shock reversals.  One of the early ones that I laughed at was after the novel spent two pages on how happy and in love Charles was with his new wife, then switches to Emma's perspective right before the chapter break and drops this bomb:

Before they were married, she had believed herself to be in love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from this love had not come, she must have been mistaken, she reflected. (Part 1, Chapter 5)

After a pretty pointed crescendo about Charle's elation at being with Emma, the book essentially smash cuts to her saying "Eh."  It's pretty bleak, but really funny, especially in the beginning when the book still could have been a comedy rather than bending to tragedy.

Characterization

Flaubert is really good at deft, clever, and consistent characterization.  I very quickly had a good sense of who the characters were and later in the novel I was constantly thinking. "Yep, that's exactly what this person would say in this situation." Poor Charles is a good case study.

Charles is good natured, well meaning, and extremely uncomplicated.  He's also quite unaware, not just of Emma's affairs, but of her emotional state and mental weather, which both is completely consistent with his sweet natured obliviousness and a source of resentment from our heroine.  One of the first things the novel says about him is this:

He understood nothing; he listened in vain, he did not grasp it. Yet he worked, he had well-bound notebooks, he would follow all the lectures, he missed not a single ward round. He performed his little daily task like a mill horse, that turns on the same spot blindfold, ignorant of what it is crushing. (Part 1, Chapter 1)

This is perhaps the best summation of Charles as a character.  It is specifically talking about Charles's study habits but applies to his interpersonal skills as well. This is a really nice touch by Flaubert, this ability to describe a specific situation in the moment while simultaneously laying out a general framework for a character.  To me, this is a fundamental statement about Charles that informs all of his actions in the novel.

He is an extremely dull person who is generally blown around by the desires of stronger willed characters, perhaps because of his limited understanding of people:

Charles’s conversation was as flat as a street pavement, and everyone’s ideas paraded along it in their ordinary dress, without rousing emotion, laughter or dreams.  (Part 1, Chapter 7)

He is conflict averse and seems to be aware that he's generally out of his depth.  When navigating a discussion about whether fiction can be edifying, Charles responds to a statement by Homais with

"Without a doubt," the doctor replied listlessly, whether because, having the same ideas, he did not want to offend anyone, or because he had none. (Part 2, Chapter 24)

He tries and he's attentive, he just sort of lacks the depth to ever be a fulfilling partner, either in conversation or in marriage.  And basically everyone ignores him.  The long winded pedant Homais, trying to suck up to the country doctor, talks in his proximity but is mostly in transmit mode.  Leon, on their first meeting, completely ignores Charles when Charles tries to chime in with some stock pablum while Leon and Emma talk.

As a second class country doctor, Charles is unspectacular, but I do find it amusing that whatever success he has is because he has a light tough with medical intervention because he's "terrified of killing his patients."  In an era where medical intervention could be dangerous, this goes a long way and, again, reflects how he is at least somewhat aware of his own limitations.

I also like the almost throwaway line about Charles wanting to name his daughter after his mother, a controlling woman who clearly dominated Charles throughout his life.

Emma, Herself

Need, Ennui, and Imagination

When looking at Emma it's really hard not to see another Don Quixote, that Romance addled devotee of Courtly Love so "wrapped up in sighs and verses."

When Emma is trying to spark some love for Charles after they are married, the narration says:

Nevertheless, with theories she thought sound, she tried to devote herself to love. By moonlight, in the garden, she would recite all the passionate verses she knew by heart and sing him melancholy adagios, sighing all the while; but she found herself feeling just as flat afterward as before, and Charles appeared neither more amorous nor more roused.  (Part I, Chapter 7)

That passage immediately reminded me of this one from Chapter 2 of Don Quixote:

So he went on stringing together these and other absurdities, all in the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well as he could; and all the while he rode so slowly and the sun mounted so rapidly and with such fervour that it was enough to melt his brains if he had any.

Like Quixote, the obvious "cause" of Emma's romanticism is her consumption of all those sentimental novels, but to me this itself seems like a symptom of a larger need in her, one she will articulate herself right before she gives birth:

She desired a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this notion of having a male child was like the anticipated revenge for all her former powerlessness. A man, at least, is free: he can leaf through loves and lands and pass through obstacles, have a taste for the most remote joys. But a woman is continually impeded. Inert and pliant at the same time, against her she has the weakness of the flesh and the law’s subjections. Her will, like her bonnet’s veil constrained by a ribbon, flutters at every breath of wind; there is always some desire that urges, some seemliness that constrains. (Part 2, Chapter 3)

Emma is not soft in the head as Quixote is; she is a fiercely imaginative and intelligent woman stuck in a provincial life without many fulfilling prospects.

In the depths of her soul, meanwhile, she was awaiting an event. Like a shipwrecked sailor, she swept a despairing gaze over the solitude of her life, searching afar for any white canvas on the foggy horizon. She had no idea of what this chance happening might be, what wind might push it right to her, toward what shore it might carry her, whether it was a rowing boat or a three-masted vessel, laden with anguish or crammed with joys up to the gunnels. But each morning, when she woke, she would have high hopes for it that day, and she listened to every sound, started up out of bed, was amazed when it did not come; then, at sunset, all the more sad, she would yearn for the morrow. (Part 1, Chapter 9).

And shortly after this, she makes the statement regarding the monotony of her days that "Other existences, however vapid, at least stood the chance of a denouement."  This very close to what Anna Karenina, another trapped heroine, says in her novel:

I don't live, I wait for a denouement that keeps being postponed. (Part 7, Chapter 12)

In a different novel Emma could be an amusing and shallow comic character to be laughed at but the above sentiments are why I have a hard time being dismissive of Emma's over the top and sometimes very funny romanticism.  Her incredible imagination maybe makes her more susceptible to romantic notions, and she can absolutely be ridiculous, but it was hard for me to just roll my eyes at her.

She is alone.  Her well meaning husband lacks the inner world or mental ambition to connect with her.  The parish priest ignores her when she goes to him for counsel and just defers her to her husband, despite her saying her troubles are not a physical ones.  She sees her future as "a corridor entirely dark, with a door fast-shut at the end."  She is a woman "full of lusts, rage, hate" and she's looking for, and failing to find, some kind of meaning to get her through the drudgery of her days.  To me that's a person to be pitied rather than mocked.

Her barely sublimated rage also brings her resentment of her husband into focus:

What exasperated her, was that Charles did not appear to have any awareness of her anguish. His firm belief that he was making her happy seemed to her an idiotic insult, and his confidence about it an ingratitude.  (Part 2, Chapter 5)

Given all that, it's not surprising that she characterizes her first romantic encounter with Rodolphe as "vengeance" against her lifelong confinement.

Then she recalled the heroines in the books she had read, and the lyric legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with beguiling, sisterly voices. She became a veritable part of these imaginings and realized the drawn-out dream of her youth, in deeming herself one of those archetypal lovers whom she had so envied. Moreover, Emma felt the gratification of vengeance. Had she not suffered enough! But now she was triumphant, and love, so long contained, gushed forth whole and with a joyful bubbling. She relished it without remorse, without unease, without confusion. (Part 2, Chapter 9)

Emma tries to fill this hole of meaning in herself with, at various times, religion, books, affairs, and material goods.  None of it works for long.  Near the end, faced with the insurmountable bills for her expenses and about to poison herself, she looks around her house and lists of all the objects she has purchased, calling them "all those things that had sweetened her life’s bitterness. (Part 3, Chapter 7)"

I suppose there's a valid argument that the bitterness she references is her once again being melodramatic and her emotional turmoil is self inflicted nonsense from her poor choices but I didn't take it that way.  Emma's affairs really don't have anything directly to do with her suicide at the end, anyway.  Her affair with Leon was starting to fizzle out and once the bills came due her crippling debts were the immediate cause of her decision.  Charles doesn't even find out about her affairs until a while after her death.  She wasn't a scorned lover jumping off a bridge in agony or a busted adulteress rejected by society.

Emma, cornered by her debts, took the only recourse she could think of to regain control of her own narrative.  Her eating of the arsenic is so casual and without drama that I was honestly kind of shocked.  Of course her actual death doesn't go down the way she had worked out in her head.

“Ah it’s really nothing much, death,” she thought; “I’ll go to sleep, and it will all be over.”

The realities of arsenic poisoning disabuse this view of a noble and romantic end.  It's a slow, agonizing, and undignified death.

The Other Hand

I've been, in essence, making a defense of Emma but that's not to say she is a flawless victim and Flaubert is quite harsh on her sometimes.

Despite her rich internal world she is characterized as lacking the ability to be or interest in being empathetic:

When she had treated the maid with particular harshness, she gave her presents or sent her off to visit the neighbors, just as she would sometimes toss all the silver in her purse to paupers, although in the meantime she was scarcely tenderhearted, nor easily capable of feeling another’s emotions, as is true of most country-bred people, who always keep in their souls something of the callousness of their fathers’ hands. (Part 1, Chapter 9)

She's frequently rude to her servants which fits with her tendency to be transactional; they can't help her feel fulfilled or assuage her boredom.

She had to be able to derive a kind of personal advantage from things; and she rejected as useless all that did not immediately contribute to her heart’s consummation,—being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, seeking emotions and not landscapes.  (Part 1, Chapter 6)

She's also an extremely indifferent parent.  Her daughter, Berthe, is barely a character in this and Emma barely seems interested in her  June and I had several discussions about authorial condemnation and how some of this would have played to Flaubert's audience.

Dropping a kid off with a wet-nurse for months on end and then getting annoyed when the woman who is raising your daughter for you asks for stuff is, to a 21st Century American reader, pretty shitty but we weren't sure if that response, which both of us had, would have been anachronistic.  Is that just how things were done in mid-19th Century France and it wouldn't have been particularly noteworthy at the time or intended as an indictment of Emma's character?

June, with characteristic incisiveness, pointed out that the scene of Emma getting exasperated with the wet-nurse's demands could pretty easily been read with either of the women being meant to be the focus of condemnation.   Either could have been the ridiculous comic character of the scene.

It's harder to make a "that's how people were" argument, though, to situations like when Emma repeatedly snaps "Leave me alone!" at her toddler who is just trying to approach her mother and then elbows her away when after the little girl begins to cry.  And shortly afterwards the narrator relates this:

"It's strange," thought Emma, "how ugly this child is."

Yikes.

I found Emma to be an intriguing and messy protagonist, by turns sympathetic, frustrating, charming, awful, ridiculous, and impressive.  I kind of marveled throughout at her creative powers.  The scene where she thinks about a cigar box she and Charles found on the road on the way back from a high society ball and constructs an entire story around it stands out:

She would look at it, open it, and even smell the scent of its lining, mingled with lemon verbena and tobacco. To whom did it belong …? To the Vicomte. Perhaps it was a present from his mistress? Embroidered on a rosewood frame, a delicate, pretty ornament it was, kept hidden from prying eyes, filling many hours, and over which the soft curls of the pensive, painstaking woman had leaned. A breath of love had crept between the stitches on the canvas; each stroke of the needle had fixed therein a hope and a memory, and all these interwoven silk threads were no more than a continuation of the same silent passion. (Part 1, Chapter 9)

Charles certainly doesn't deserve what happens to him in this novel but I am hard pressed to think of a worse match than him and Emma.

Realism vs Romanticism, Redux

The Limits of Language

Arnold Weinstein emphasizes that one of the really sad aspects of this novel is its pessimism over whether we ever really can express our inner selves in language.  To quote Weinstein:   

It’s a vision of a terrible disconnect and that’s not even the right word, a terrible sort of gap, a kind of fissure between what we feel and what we can say.  And one of the most beautiful, remarkable utterances in the book is devoted to that.

“The human tongue is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes to set a bear dancing when we would make the stars weep with our melodies.”  That’s one of the most tragic passages that I know of.  That our tongue, our capacity to speak is like a cracked cauldron and we use it because we are in ecstasy we are trying to state what is most magnificent, remarkable stunning, and unique about our experiences and we would want the stars themselves to weep and instead the bears dance.  This seems to be just a misfit, a kind of hardwired misfit, between our equipment on one hand and our sensations and feelings on the other.

Not even the two most sentimental romantics in the novel, Emma and her lover Leon, can manage to bridge this fissure.  Early on, after they realized they have a connection and are spending time together, they still fumble around with small talk:

Had they nothing else to say? Yet their eyes were full of a more serious talk; and, while they were endeavoring to find trite phrases, both of them felt the same languor invade them; it was like a murmur of the soul, deep and continuous, prevailing over the murmur of the voices. (Part 2, Chapter 3)

Way later after they consummate their affair, Leon tries to write Emma a love poem:

She wanted verses, verses to her, a love poem in her honor; he could never manage to find a rhyme for the second line, and he ended up copying a sonnet out of a keepsake book. (Part 3, Chapter 5)

This barrier between what the characters actually feel and what they manage to express to each other is depressing, and the narration does show them feeling some powerful and evocative things so it's not an issue of emotional or perceptual shallowness.  It's yet another isolating factor for Emma, if one that is potentially subconscious.  Even with her creative power her tongue fails her and she resorts to cliche, unfulfilling romantic platitudes, and grand proclamations taken from things she has read.

The Heat Death of Passion

Another rather bleak theme of the novel is people's inability to sustain love in the face of time.  None of the three members of the novel's romantic pairings, Emma, Leon, and Rodolphe, manage it.

The consumption of desire always paves the way to its death.  From Rodolphe shortly before he ditches Emma:

Emma resembled all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, dropping away little by little like a garment, left nakedly in view the endless monotony of passion, whose shapes and words are always the same. This man, with so much experience, could not distinguish the differences in feeling beneath the sameness of expression.  (Part 2, Chapter 12)

Rodolphe was always just playing Emma, but this sentiment also seeps into her affair with Leon, which was not based on cynical lust but on genuine connection:

Each smile concealed a yawn of tedium, each joy a curse, every pleasure its disgust, and the finest kisses left you nothing on the lips but the unattainable desire for a voluptuousness still more sublime. (Part 3, Chapter 6)

There's no dramatic end to her affair with Leon.  It just sort of dies on the vine.  He just kind of recedes and whatever is left of their passion is completely pushed out of her mind by the very real problem of her debts.

To quote Weinstein:

This then would be the punishment that’s meted out to passion and desire.  The worst thing that you can do to desire is to satisfy it.  Because it can’t be satisfied.

I think one of the reasons this idea is so bleak is that the book doesn't really provide a counter example of what a strong lasting relationship could be, so it feels more like the novel is positing that this erasure is an inevitable force in human interactions.  Anna Karenina contrasted Anna and Vronky's why-the-hell-are-they-even-still-doing-this relationship with Levin and Kitty's far more functional one but Madame Bovary lacks this aspect.

I suppose the horrible pharmacist Homais and his wife seem to be on solid ground in a functional companionate marriage but in my opinion there isn't really enough of them to serve as a counter balance.  Plus Homais sucks.

So it seems to me that the choices are that either all relationships will get ground down by time or that passion itself is folly.   Either option is pretty grim.

Gallimaufry

• When Madam Bovary was first published Flaubert and his publisher were put on trial for obscenity.  They were acquitted.

• I really liked this passage describing Emma: "She liked the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it was thinly scattered among ruins."

• A moment that made me chuckle was when the narrative referred to Charles and Homais as "the two savants" while they were making a horribly bad medical decision.  The entire scene where Charles botches a surgery he's very much not ready to do (and knows it) was really funny, if in a cringy kind of way.  Especially when you know what's coming (i.e. gangrene and amputation) and are just seeing all the red flags in the build up.

• The opera that Emma and Charles see in Rouen is Lucia di Lammermoor, which I saw Opera Orlando put on last season.  I also, like Emma, read the Walter Scott novel it's based on.  It was fun reading this scene actually knowing about the opera.  And Charles says right before Lucia's mad scene "Her hair is untied; that promises to be tragic" which is very similar to something I said in my Lucia review.

• I really liked the line "Because, for three years, he had studiously avoided her, in consequence of that natural cowardice by which the stronger sex is characterized."

• During Rodolphe's seduction of Emma he says this Courtly Love shit to her: "You’re in my soul like a madonna on a pedestal, up on high, steadfast and immaculate."   He certainly had her pegged.

• Emma's dog is named Djali, which is the same name as Esmerelda's goat in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris.  Per James Heffernen, in his Romantic days Flaubert was a defender and admirer of Hugo, so I assume this is an homage.

• When researching this piece I found out French writer Guy de Maupassant was Flaubert's protege.  Maupassant wrote the short story "How He Got the Legion of Honor" that was adapted into the Tobei storyline of Ugetsu.  Kind of a weird coincidence that I was reading a Flaubert novel when I saw Ugetsu. The name de Maupassant would have meant nothing to me if I hadn't just seen the film.

• I thought this section about Emma's widower father watching her ride off after her wedding was really elegiac and powerful:

How long ago all that was. Their son would be thirty, now! And he looked behind him: he saw nothing on the road. He felt as sad as an unfurnished house; and, fond memories mingling with black thoughts in his mind dimmed by the junketing’s fumes, he had a sudden longing to take a turn about the church. Yet, as he was afraid that this sight might make him sadder still, he went straight back home.

• Charle's gets a phrenology skull as part of his doctor's paraphernalia.  June and I weren't sure if this was meant to be a genuine medical instrument or a joke about Charles being kind of an idiot.  We weren't sure if Flaubert would have known phrenology is pseudoscience horseshit.  If he did, it's a solid joke, and if he didn't it's kind of awesome that an anachronistic reading still works with the characterization Flaubert was going for.

• Its interesting that a novel named Madame Bovary starts and ends with Charles.  He gets a lot of page time before Emma even shows up.

Conclusion

There's so much more I could say about this book and so much to chew on.  Believe it or not, I left a lot of thoughts on the cutting room floor.

I think Madame Bovary a masterpiece.  Highly recommend.

Happy reading.

-m