Friday, November 25, 2011

Review: MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert


Madame Bovary (1856) is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. She has a highly romanticized view of the world and craves beauty, wealth, passion, and high society. It is the disparity between these romantic ideals and the realities of her country life that drive most of the novel, most notably leading her into two extramarital love affairs as well as causing her to accrue an insurmountable amount of debt that eventually leads to her suicide. In contrast, Emma's husband, Charles Bovary, is a very simple and common man. He is a country doctor by profession, but is, as in everything else, not very good at it. Charles adores his wife and finds her faultless, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. He never suspects her affairs and gives her complete control over his finances, thereby securing his own ruin. When Charles discovers Emma's deceptions after her death he is devastated and dies soon after, but not before frittering away the very last of the assets remaining after his bankruptcy by living the way he believed Emma would have wanted him to live.

While the story is simple, the novel is moving because of its profound humanity. Flaubert records dispassionately every trait or incident that can illuminate the psychology of his characters and their role in the logical development. Flaubert's realism is said to have been a reaction against the romanticism of the prior generation. Emma may be said to be the embodiment of a romantic; in her mental and emotional process, she has no relation to the realities of her world. She inevitably becomes dissatisfied since her larger-than-life fantasies are impossible to realize. As a whole, the novel is a commentary on the entire self-satisfied, deluded, bourgeois culture of Flaubert's time period. His contempt for the bourgeoisie is expressed through his characters, all of whom are seeking escape in empty church rituals, unrealistic romantic novels, or delusions of one sort or another.