Madame Bovary

This was a highly scandalous novel when it first came out 150 years ago - so much so that Flaubert even had to answer in court for writing an "obscene" novel. If you look merely at content, that seems ridiculous today and should even have seemed ridiculous then; the sex scenes are so tame that it's hard to imagine anyone taking offense even in 19th-century France. But the scandalous - the bit that still puzzles slightly today, though many others have followed suit - isn't in what happens but in how it's presented. Madame Bovary looks like a morality tale; a woman cheats on her husband, loses his money, and pays the price of sin. I suppose it can still be read like that if one absolutely wants to, but the novel itself doesn't insist upon it. Flaubert doesn't pick sides, he doesn't editorialise (much), he merely narrates, and when the end comes Emma doesn't repent. There's no punishment in hell, no reward in heaven, just people messing up.

He made a post-mortem and found nothing.

In fact, I'd say that the only thing approaching a moral in this story comes in the epilogue, where the fool (well, everyone's a fool in this...) Homais gets the only happy ending, having done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

There's another way to read this: while it would indeed be difficult to argue that Madame Bovary is a feminist work, it's interesting to ask: just what is expected of Emma, anyway? Almost every single woman in the novel is stuck in one (or both) of two roles: as a loyal wife, or as a lowly servant. Again, let's remember the old woman getting a medal at the agricultural show:

Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked out two large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of washing the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and by dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at her.

Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of servitude.

That's an ideal to be rewarded, apparently. And while that's the extreme end of the scale - Emma is pretty privileged, after all, especially for a farmer's daughter - it's not really a world that lends itself to dreaming of something better. Flaubert makes quite a lot of little wry asides about the roles of both gender (like when he describes Rodolphe's treatment of Emma as a "consequence of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex") and class, and all of it points to one thing: Emma is a hopeless romantic trapped in a realistic world, and has no clue how to get out of it. Her ideals are simply too lofty, too unrealistic for someone in her position - she doesn't fit in anywhere. She keeps chasing one thing after another - love, religion, material wealth, sex - and not one of them turns out to make her happy.

[Léon] was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted.

They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.

Which ties into the complaint that a lot of people have with the novel: that it's hard to make yourself care about any of the characters. Basically, there's not really one single character here to root for; Charles is an incompetent but well-meaning fool, Emma is a reckless dreamer, Homais is a clueless know-it-all, etc. They're all excellently drawn, with just enough exaggeration to occasionally make for great satire, but they're far from likable. Which shouldn't be a prerequisite, of course, but... Now, I really love Flaubert's writing style, even if he occasionally gets bogged down in detail, and there are passages here that absolutely burn on the page (the coach ride, for instance - there's a reason that's a classic) and others which make me laugh out loud; ol' Gustave had a way with dry irony, and there's a lot of humour to be found in the ridiculous but all-too-normal situations everyone finds themselves in. But at the same time, when we know how it's going to end and we don't really sympathize with the characters enough to want to know exactly how they get there, it tends to drag a bit, especially in Part II. We're still conditioned to expect some sort of dramatic pay-off in fiction, and when it all just slowly falls apart with no great twists or turns we tend to call it "boring" rather than "realistic."

At the end, Charles blames fate for everything. It's described as "the only fine phrase he ever made", and then immediately undercut by Rodolphe who correctly observes that he is partly responsible, not fate. At best, Madame Bovary is a rather brilliant character drama which leaves it up to the reader to decide who was right or wrong. Nobody's a hero, nobody really manages to change anything, people just go about their business... and when they run into each other, they tend to stumble and fall. As another great writer put it - "You are right from your side, and I am right from mine."