Oh, Emma. Emma, Emma, Emma. Darling, why must you make it so easy ? No, dear, (for once) I don’t mean for the men. I mean for everyone else in the world who goes into this book just looking for an excuse to make fun of you. I would say that most people don’t know that much about France, but they do know a few things: that they like their baguettes, their socialism, Sartre, dirrrty dirrty sexy lurrrve and they despise this thing called the bourgeoisie. This book doesn’t really do a thing to disprove any of this (though I can’t say baguettes had a prominent place in the plot), and I expect that it had a great deal to do with starting the last two stereotypes. Emma, my dear, Desperate Housewives isn’t your fault, but you can see why some people might blame you, don’t you? Your constant, throbbing whining about how your (plentiful) food isn’t served on crystal platters, how your dresses(of which you have more than a typical country doctor’s wife) aren’t made of yards of spider-spun silk, and most of all how your husband dresses wrong, talks wrong, thinks wrong, WEARS THE WRONG HAT (!!), and is so offensively happy with you that he enjoys coming straight home to tell you about his day and relax in front of his fireplace every night instead of going out drinking- well, there’s a saying about the smallest violin, isn’t there?It makes it easy for people to plausibly dismiss this story with things like this:(If it makes you feel better, dear, you are hardly the only one.. Your other compatriots in 19th century repressed female misery receive similar treatment: )It is easy to despise you, Emma. You and your seemingly shallow priorities, the unthinking selfish harm you did to your husband AND your baby girl, the endless excuses you had for your, frankly, off the charts stupid behavior, the fact that you didn’t even try and communicate how unhappy you were to the guy who loved you who might’ve done something about it (since all the evidence shows that he is willing to COMPLETELY CHANGE HIS LIFE whenever you ask him to) and, finally (what can seem to be) the incredibly coward move you made in finding a way to not face the consequences your childish sense of the world couldn’t believe would eventually come up. What goes around comes around ,as the wise chanteur sayeth. (Perhaps the alternate cover above should substitute ‘Justin Timberlake’ for Sassy Gay Friend.)That’s pretty much how I felt about you for about 150 pages after you made your entrance, Emma. While you started your endlessly copied, endlessly bastardized fall from Angel in the Home Grace, and while you tried to make a saint out of yourself for not having sex with a young clerk who couldn’t have supported you anyway. You were simply the grandmother of Lady Chatterley, an extended protest letter to a dead king I couldn’t care less about.But in the end, you won, Emma. I couldn’t escape you. Seriously, y’all, this book would not leave my head alone, for days, and I thought… many different and contradictory things about it. In the end, though, I kept coming back to one thought: the most terrifying thing I can think of is getting caught in Emma Bovary’s eyes. Did everyone read that profile about Dan Savage this weekend about infidelity and marriage? I did. Emma is the literary incarnation of Savage’s argument. Her eyes are on the cover of this book, and the more I looked at them, the more disturbed I got. Those eyes are the reason that marriage is so frightening, why ‘commitment issues’ exist. This is a novel about how reality can look just the same to you from one day to the next, but to your partner, it can have turned into a hell or a heaven, even if it is the same Tuesday routine as the last one. Emma’s gaze, how each time she fixes her eyes on some scheme of happiness and how those eyes transform everything they see. She shows how unstable marriage is, how thin the foundations are- resting on nothing but the words- “I love you.” Words that just need one more word to dissolve the entire thing. That’s it, you guys. One word and someone’s will to speak it is all that stands between a solid marriage and one that is over- no matter how much paperwork you sign, how many kids you have, houses you fill with furniture. You never really know what the person across from you is thinking. How do you really know what motivates someone? Are they with you because they have made a resolution to be? Are they there with you because the stars shine in your eyes? Are they perfect to you because they are about to leave? Marriage, for better or worse, no matter what people say, adds so many complications. It is the commitment that people twist and bend over and around in so many different contortions to try to make it work- because it is a marriage, because it means something. How difficult is it to trust that people are simply what they say they are? Charles is simple and straightforward and rather sweet- and Emma hates him for it. She smiles and smiles and smiles… and then cheats on him, bankrupts him, tries to prostitute herself and kills herself rather than spend another day with him. This is the most anxiety inducing book I have ever read about marriage. It’s the 19th century where you have to make a vow for life that you can't get out of, not really, in order to test the idea that you might want to be with someone. If you're wrong, that's it. You've failed. It’s all-or-nothing. Emma is the incarnation of the expectations of the institution at the time- all-or-nothing. Madame Bovary is destroyed because she tries to put her all into Charles, then Rodolphe and then Leon, and none of them can withstand it. Each of them are good for different things, and only for a little while, and she can't accept it. That is not the ideal. She won't accept less than the ideal. You guys, she's nothing more than exactly what she is told is available to her- granted, she's after the best of what she's told is available: the ideal. But why do we hold that against her? As long as we live in a society where we’re told to strive after the ideal, to never give up, you will have people who destroy themselves and everyone around them to get it. Savage’s discussion of what the “ideal” means in real life is enlightening and pertinent here, I think. He talks about how you have to be willing to change a lot and make a huge effort to keep the deal of monogamy alive. Of course everyone has their limits, and in many marriages, the trade offs of one person’s limits for the others (I won’t do this, and you won’t do that- I won’t do that, but I will do this) end up making the deal of monogamy work. But you have to be honest about it, you have to be able to say things that you’ve never said out loud before. You have to admit that you won’t be happy unless you live a life where you have crystal knickknacks on your fireplace, and you get off from pies being thrown in your face. But it’s not that easy- Emma was on her deathbed, writhing in agony from eating arsenic, and she still couldn’t tell Charles what she wanted from him.I can’t blame Emma, ultimately. It actually made me think, of all things, a bit about Planet of Slums. That book talks about the millions of people who have been born outside the system, in illegal settlements to parents who are illegal themselves, and who are not, in fact, ignored by the system. They never get into the system in the first place- a system that is not built to cope with the mind-blowing poverty that arises from its excrement. The system can’t acknowledge it and justify itself. At the risk of sounding like I think relatively-well-off white lady problems bear any resemblance to the horror of someone living on the outskirts of Kinshasa in a lean-to, Emma is just trying to get in to a society that can't acknowledge her and go on. She’s trying with all her might to buy into the fairy tales she’s been told (just like the revived, and growing belief in magic in some slums), and does whatever she has to do to get her hands on it, even if only for a little while. She saw that fairy tales are real (or so she thinks) at that ball that one time- she SAW it, mommy- and can’t handle the fact that they exist on this earth and she can’t be a part of it. And in case anyone finds her head-in-the-sand refusal to face the world overly childish or impossible to relate to: The endless line of irresponsible credit she takes out from the scam artist down the street in order to feed her fantasies about the way she believes her life should look has obvious immediate relevance to America in the pre-2008 financial crisis era. In some ways, the existential crisis Flaubert is trying to outline here: between a solidly practical, profit-and-advancement outlook on life and a sensibility that at least tries to aspire to something higher, even if it is unaffordable or impossible, is the distilled essence of the push and pull of American partisan politics. Monsieur Homais would have done very well on Wall Street. Emma can be read as being more American than French, really. Emma is a true believer. She doesn’t just want attention from men, or shiny things. I didn’t really believe that until the part where she tries to renounce the whole world for fervent religious devotion. Failing making it into her fairy tale, she wants to escape where she is- to somewhere else, anywhere else. By the end, I felt like I was suffocating right along with her. Virginia Woolf said that the “present participle is the devil” . Emma adds the present place, the present time, the present person you are with. She really is willing to try anything to escape. On her deathbed, as she pleaded to die, my heart was racing along with hers and the whole finale read like a blockbuster last action scene with explosives and severed limbs flying. I didn’t enjoy the journey I had with her, but I had made it and lived in tiny spaces with her, spaces that got ever smaller as the book wound down. Every chapter there was less and less light until she was curled up in a ball in solitary confinement with no hope of escape. In the Count of Monte Cristo, we root for the hero to get thrown over the side of a cliff in a body bag because it is his only hope of escape. How could we do less for poor Emma? She deserves her chance to make it to the place she always hoped for- even if priests and businessmen argue whether she got there over her corpse. If she can’t be buried in ‘blessed’ ground, well, at that point the priest’s God is just another man telling her she has to stay in the woods with the witch and her oven rather than try to find the path home, like she was always taught to do. Flaubert handles his prose deftly, precisely, and with a deceptively commonplace hand. He doesn’t try for smart metaphors and delicate similes, but rather has characters say what the mean in an effectively believable way that makes Emma a character who can impact the lives of real women. Parts of this novel are spine-tinglingly sordid, others wrench out your gut, most of it can be drearily, boringly, mind-numbingly quotidian, and every so often, a gem shines through that makes you turn around and look at someone you had thought you were done being interested in. In other words, it’s like last Wednesday. And the Tuesday before that. And today. And probably next Monday. The morning when you woke up vowing that today it was all going to be different, that afternoon when you just wanted to die, the evening when you forgot it all making dinner and laughing about that thing you saw on the internet.Flaubert can’t get it all, or say it all right, but he knows that. In fact, he’s willing to tell his readers that. But he does it in such a way that you just want to punch him in the face like you do that size 0 model who complains that she’s too fat:“Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”Aw, come on, Gustave. Why do you want to make those of us with irrevocably not-size-0 rears, who can’t get from Q to R, cry? Yet, even your complaining makes me want to hug you.I guess what I am saying is why are you so awesome, Monsieur Flaubert?
Madame Bovary & The Science of AdulterySome universal features stand out when we talk of the human mating system. 1. First, women most commonly seek monogamous marriage—even in societies that allow polygamy. Rare exceptions notwithstanding, they want to choose carefully and then, as long as he remains worthy, monopolize a man for life, gain his assistance in rearing the children, and perhaps even die with him. 2. Second, women do not seek sexual variety per se. There are exceptions, of course, but fictional and real women regularly deny that nymphomania holds any attraction for them, and there is no reason to disbelieve them. The temptress interested in a one-night stand with a man whose name she does not know is a fantasy fed by male pornography. Lesbians, free of constraints imposed by male nature, do not suddenly indulge in sexual promiscuity; on the contrary, they are remarkably monogamous. None of this is surprising: Female animals gain little from sexual opportunism, for their reproductive ability is limited not by how many males they mate with but how long it takes to bear offspring. In this respect men and women are very different.3. But third, women are sometimes unfaithful. Not all adultery is caused by men. Though she may rarely or never be interested in casual sex with a male prostitute or a stranger, a woman, in life as in soap operas, is perfectly capable of accepting or provoking an offer of an affair with one man whom she knows, even if she is “happily” married at the time. This is a paradox. It can be resolved in one of three ways: 1. We can blame adultery on men, asserting that the persuasive powers of seducers will always win some hearts, even the most reluctant. Call this the “Dangerous Liaisons” explanation. 2. Or we can blame it on modern society and say that the frustrations and complexities of modern life, of unhappy marriages and so on, have upset the natural pattern and introduced an alien habit into human females. Call this the “Dallas” explanation. 3. Or we can suggest that there is some valid biological reason for seeking sex outside marriage without abandoning the marriage—some instinct in women not to deny themselves the option of a sexual “plan B” when plan A does not work out so well. Call this the “Emma Bovary” strategy.The “Emma Bovary” strategy.It takes two hands to clap, as the old saying goes among men when blamed for being adulterous by nature. And knowing the evolutionary logic, we have to ask: What’s in it for the women?For the males it is obvious enough: Adulterers father more young. But it is not at all clear why the female is so often unfaithful. Birkhead and Møller, in their experiments, rejected several suggestions: that she is adulterous because of a genetic side effect of the male adulterous urge, that she is ensuring some of the sperm she gets is fertile, that she is bribed by the philandering males (as seems to be the case in some human and ape societies). None of these fit the exact facts. Nor did it quite work to blame her infidelity on a desire for genetic variety. There seems to be little point in having more varied children than she would have anyway.Birkhead and Møller were left with the belief that females benefit from being promiscuous because it enables them to have their genetic cake and eat it—to follow the Emma Bovary strategy. A female needs a husband who will help look after her young, but she might be unlucky and might find all the best husbands taken. Her best tactic is therefore to mate with a mediocre husband or a husband with a good social position/job/inheritance and have an affair with a genetically superior neighbor. This theory is supported by the facts: Females always choose more dominant, older, or more “attractive” lovers than their husbands; they do not have affairs with bachelors (presumably rejects) but with other females’ husbands; and they sometimes incite competition between potential lovers and choose the winners.Baker and Bellis, in their experimental results, do not claim to have found more than a tantalizing hint that this is so, but they have tried to measure the extent of cuckoldry in human beings. In a block of flats in Liverpool, they found by genetic tests that fewer than four in every five people were the sons of their ostensible fathers. In case this had something to do with Liverpool, they did the same tests in southern England and got the same result. Like birds, women may be—quite unconsciously—having it both ways by conducting affairs with genetically more valuable men while not leaving their husbands.In short, the reason adultery is so common is that it enables a male to have more young and enables a female to have better young.[ One of the most curious results to come out of bird studies in recent years has been the discovery that “attractive” males make inattentive fathers. Nancy Burley, whose zebra finches consider one another more or less attractive according to the color of their leg bands, first noticed this, and Anders Moller has since found it to be true of swallows as well. When a female mates with an attractive male, he works less hard and she works harder at bringing up the young. It is as if he feels that he has done her a favor by providing superior genes and therefore expects her to repay him with harder work around the nest. This, of course, increases her incentive to find a mediocre but hardworking husband and cuckold him by having an affair with a superstud next door. ]In any case, the principle—marry a nice guy but have an affair with your boss or marry a rich but ugly man and take a handsome lover—is not unknown among female human beings. It is called having your cake and eating it, too. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary wanted to keep both her handsome lover and her wealthy husband. It might not always work out along the evolutionary plan…~ adapted wholesale from Matt Ridley’s discussion of adultery among birds in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
What do You think about Madame Bovary (2015)?
The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then determine whether or not they deserve the label. Madame Bovary is book #26 of the series.The story in a nutshell:Considered by nearly everyone to be one of the best novels ever written, French cynic Gustave Flaubert's 1857 Madame Bovary (originally published serially in 1856) is one of the first fiction projects in history to be as much a deep "character study" as a vehicle for simply propelling an exciting plot; it is an ultra-detailed look at an ultra-complex person, the Emma Bovary (nee Rouault) of the book's title, where the whole point is not just to learn what happens to her but what makes her tick in general. Because make no mistake, Bovary is one of the most complicated characters in the history of literature too, still able to ignite passionate arguments among fans to this day: some see her as a clearly sympathetic and very typical woman, forced into a whole series of awkward situations by a whole series of incompetent men in her life, just like such dunderheads have been doing to smart females for centuries; while others see her more like an unmedicated sufferer of bipolar disorder, constantly flip-flopping on what she wants out of life depending on what in particular she doesn't happen to have that particular moment, constantly adding unneeded drama to her life when bored and treating pretty much every single person around her like complete crap.Raised in a convent, a lover of erotica, desirous of an expensive urban lifestyle yet not very smart about money, it is this dichotomy of traits that keeps Bovary careening from one radically different situation to the next: first falling hard for her father's roving rural doctor (full-time "good guy" and hence impotent cuckold Charles Bovary), thinking that their marriage will finally bring her the sophisticated Paris life she's always dreamed of; then trying and failing at a domestic life as a small-town wife and mother, after it becomes clear that Charles prefers the dowdy provincial life of the northern French farmlands, leading to a hot-and-cold emotional affair with a young law student there named Leon; then a move to essentially one of the first large "suburbs" in France's history (the fictional mid-sized Yonville, not too far from Paris by carriage or rail, based on the real-life suburb of Ry), where she embarks on a much more serious affair with a major hater-playah named Rodolph; then an unceremonial dumping by Rodolph, after she offers to leave her husband for him and bring the kid along, leading to a short period again in her life as a pious born-again Christian; with all of that followed believe it or not by a reacquaintance with the now successful young urban lawyer Leon, leading to a sexually explicit "hotel afternoons in the big city" affair (the part of the book that led to its infamous obscenity trial when it first came out); which then finally leads to an ending whose details I'll leave a surprise, but let's just say results in ruin and/or death for nearly every freaking person involved. Oh, those French and their happy endings!The argument for it being a classic:Madame Bovary established so many firsts, its fans will argue, it's sometimes scary: not just the first novel ever to be written in the modern, pared-down "conversational tone" we know today, not just one of the first novels to complexly combine both character and plot development equally in one manuscript, but also one of the very first novels in history to establish the "Realist" school of thought, a set of conventions which now guide almost all contemporary novels being written (but more on that in a bit), all while ironically being a perfect example of a Victorian-Age Romantic novel as well, and of containing all the hallmarks that fans of Romanticism look for even while making vicious fun of them too. In fact, this book is almost like a freaky artifact from a future time that shouldn't actually exist, if you want to get technical about it; a book that reads exactly like a contemporary mainstream-lit character study, but published at the same time as the severely overwritten, overwrought, epistolary-style adventure tales and pseudo-science babble much more typical of the mid-1800s. It's not just important as a historical artifact (but more on that in a bit too), not just seminal to the arts in about a half-dozen different ways, but is still a surprisingly great read even 152 years later; nearly every novel being written today owes one aspect of its form or another to this ultra-important precedent, fans argue, making it the very definition of a literary "classic" that should still be picked up by every lover of great books out there.The argument against:Ironically, the only criticisms of Madame Bovary I could find seemed to argue that the book is just too well-written; that Flaubert created such a hyper-realistic emotional trainwreck, they ended up disgusted by her and couldn't even finish. "Ugh, that Emma, I can't stand her, she's so despicable," I saw one online critique after another say, none of these people apparently realizing that that's the whole point; that the entire purpose of this book existing is to present this ultra-flawed, many times legitimately despicable character, to examine what motivates her and how she can be so sympathetic at times too, to understand ourselves better and especially those parts of our own personalities we share with her.My verdict:So how exactly should we feel about Emma Bovary, anyway? Well, to ponder that question is to avoid the much more remarkable point -- that Flaubert managed to create such a magnificently complicated creature to begin with, one who can still inspire such enflamed debates about her character a full century and a half later. (And by the way, how dispiriting to finally learn that Tom Perrotta's novel Little Children, which I highly favorably reviewed here in 2007, owes much of its success to a rather literal rip-off of many of Madame Bovary's key points, all the way down to sometimes stealing entire scenes beat-for-beat. Sheesh, no wonder Perrotta's follow-up The Abstinence Teacher was such a miserable stinker; he had no seminal semi-forgotten public-domain classic to lean on that time.) Not to mention, concentrating on Bovary's sometimes abhorrent behavior ignores a much more important point -- that every single character in this novel is abhorrent, done so by Flaubert very deliberately. Let's not forget, the book is set in the years of France's so-called "July Monarchy," which in a simplified nutshell saw the creation for the first time in history of middle-class suburbanites; and like every other bitter artist in history, Flaubert despised middle-class suburbanites with every fiber of his being, and meant in many ways for Madame Bovary to be a devastating indictment of them all -- from the schizophrenic Emma to the facile Charles, from the jealous village pharmacist Homais to the weasely neighborhood merchant Lheureux. Let's always remember that Flaubert worked for decades on an epic called Bouvard and Pecuchet, which he always considered his perpetually-unfinished masterpiece; but that when it was finally released to the public posthumously in 1881, it turned out to be not much more than a massive unfocused rant, a grand satire concerning the utterly pathetic mediocrity of most human beings and the utter folly of ever thinking we will learn anything by studying history. Now that's a bitter French artist, my friend.But if this weren't enough, there's also the matter of the utterly remarkable language and structure used, which I now know for a personal fact because of doing this CCLaP 100 series is just so profoundly unlike any of the other novels that were being published at the same time; it really does feel like some freaky anomaly that shouldn't actually exist, snatched from the 1930s during the height of Early Modernism and somehow by time-machine accidentally left behind in the middle of the Victorian Age. (And even more remarkably, Flaubert himself wasn't particularly prolific or well-known, only finishing three other novels besides Bovary and all of them obscure even during his own lifetime.) This is why you hear so many people rave about this book's style, because it really is a perfect example of what the French call seeking le mot juste ("just the right word"); there are passages on display here that can instantly transport you in just a few paragraphs to a misty early evening in 19th-century northern rural France, before you even realize what's going on or that you'd left in the first place. And all of a sudden you've missed your bus, and you're standing on the streetcorner cursing Flaubert for being such an astounding writer in the first place.It's remarkable, I think, that this book lays the entire groundwork for the Realist school of literary thought, a full 50 years before Henry James and others even first came up with the English version of the term, and like I said nearly every mainstream-lit novel written today gets at least some of its cues from it; because much like the "Socratic method," Realism has become so permeated in our culture that we don't even realize anymore that that's what it is when we see it, with the entire thing essentially boiling down to the idea of writing stories in a "realistic" fashion, as if we were invisible ghosts hovering over the shoulders of the characters and quietly observing the events of the story as they actually happen (now known as "omniscient narration," and the basis behind 95 percent of all novels written). But it's also true what its fans say, that it doubles as a perfect Romantic novel too, a different school of literary thought with goals that sometimes clash with those of Realism; like the best of Victorian-Age literature, Madame Bovary too places great emphasis on emotions, feelings, passion, madness, and all the other great hallmarks of being an alive human being, and also like all great Victorian novels it too features as a character a buffoonish adherent of rationalism (in this case, the constantly pontificating pharmacist Homais), a holdover "true believer" from the 1700s Enlightenment who both the Romantics and Realists could agree on regarding their mutual hatred. (Stupid fun-hating scientists!)Although I'm only about a quarter of the way through the CCLaP 100 as of the writing of this particular review, I think it's safe to say that this is going to turn out to be one of my absolute favorites of the entire series, and it's simply astonishing in my opinion how well it's held up now over the last 150-odd years. It's a standard-bearer for sure of this entire series, one of only a handful of books in existence that nearly everyone agrees is a classic, which then helps us make the relative determination as well for much more troublesome candidates. If you're to read only a handful of books in the CCLaP 100 series, do make sure to make Madame Bovary one of them.
—Jason Pettus
گوستاو فلوبر نزديك چهار سال براي نوشتن اين داستان وقت صرف كرد.وي سبكي كاملا جديد پديد آورد و اينكه راوي داستان فقط ناظري باشد دقيق براي نمايش زندگي و نظر شخصي اش را وارد داستان نكنديك زندگي واقعي،كه خبري از انسان هاي كاملا خوب يا بد نيست،و انسان ها در كنار خوبي،بدي هم دارند و همه شان مردمي معمولي هستند كه دچار روزمرگي شده اند، به غير از اِما و پدرِ شارل كه براي قلب خود ارزش قائلند ولي راه اشتباهي را انتخاب مي كنندجامعه و اخلاقیات در اروپای آن زمان هنوز نمی توانست چنین انسان هایی را درک کنندشخصيت داستان زني شبيه مادر ترزا يا ژاندارك نيست،دختري معمولي است كه وقتي در صومعه داستان هاي مبتذل عاشقانه را دزدكي و به دور از ديد راهبه ها مي خواند ،آرزوي اين دنياي خيالي شب و روزش را مي ربايداِما در تمام عمرش در پي اين خوشبختي مي گردد ولي نه در برِ معشوق و نه در خانه اي با اسباب گران قيمت و نه در جاي ديگري، هيچوقت آنرا پيدا نمي كنداين قسمت دقيقا نفرت نويسنده از سبك رمانتيسم افراطي را نشان مي دهد و اينكه اين داستان ها چه تاثير بدي بر ذهن خام دختري نوجوان مي گذاردازدواج اِما با شارل اقدامي عجولانه بود و دختري كه در رويا ها سير مي كرد،مجبور بود كمي از اين رويا ها فرود بيايد تا شايد طعم خوشبختي را بچشد.ولي هركاري كرد نچشيد چون او مزه اي مي خواست كه در زمين خاكي و قابل لمس وجود نداشتاِما خيلي زود از شوهرش نااميد شد،چون شوهرش شبيه قهرمان داستان هايي كه خوانده، نبود.تلاش كرد شوهرش را تبديل به چنين مردي كند ولي نه شارل چنين ظرفيتي داشت و نه اين قهرمانان واقعي بودندولي اِما بجاي واقعيت بيني همه چيز را تقصير شوهرش ديد و شروع كرد به سقوط ...كردنشايد اگر قبل از ازدواج عشق را آنطور كه هست مي شناخت و یا عاشق می شد و حتي در آن شكست مي خورد،زندگيش در آينده عوض مي شدكارل گوستاو يونگ هر انساني را داري شخصيت مرادنه و زنانه مي داند.شخصيت مردانه اِما قابل توجه است، در چند جاي داستان از زن بودنش متنفر بود و همچو يك مرد بر شوهرش حكومت مي کرد و دوس داشت فرزندش پسر باشدتنها كسي كه اِما بهش وفادار نبود همسرش بود و در مقابل، همه فاسقانش ...فراموشش كردند به غير از شوهرش
—Afshar
Uff! Gustave Flaubert! Yes, he writes with style. Yes, style is the word that ascertains his elegiac description of details which preliminarily is deemed minute and frivolous but gradually assumes a funereal air around the characters which lividly boils out in an explosion of melancholy and is then petered out with consummate grace.I misconstrued the enormity of this book assuming the plot to be similar to that of Anna Karenina (Women indulging in extra-marital affairs in their ardent pursuit of adventure and a longing excitement of unbridled passion which finally culminates into their downfall). It is more than just the plot. It is the craftsmanship of Flaubert’s prose and the construct of the story which leaves me in a vague tranquillity. His writing carries a tone of derisive complacency and probes the wanton expectations of a reprobate human mind.Flaubert starts slowly introducing characters initially attributing them with characteristics he has himself likened to-Emma Bovary loves reading and makes a proposition of a midnight marriage, an eccentricity rather than a custom, Maupassant’s grandfather, whom Flaubert knew and a certain Madame he idolized both had midnight marriages. Charles Bovary is introduced as a clumsy person who is easily swayed but is dutiful as a son and a husband nonetheless. He is an admirer of Beranger, a popular liberal poet. Flaubert included ‘admiration for Beranger’ in a list of things he disliked in other people.Flaubert colludes with his characters furtively deluding the reader as the story unfolds to its baffling finality.Charles Bovary is easily taken by Emma’s beauty and proposes marriage to her father who somehow exhorts Charles into this match in the first place. Emma, daughter of an uneducated peasant spends her time reading novels of Chivalry and Passion hastily agrees to the marriage in a nervous state of excitement expecting the kind of life she reads about in her novels but only sees the daily humdrum and the unpleasant existence in married life along with the submissive and fragile nature of Charles building up a rage in her. She finds a companion in Leon, a clerk, a fellow book lover and indulges in chaotic debaucheries with a philanderer Rodolphe and Leon in succession. Flaubert flings Emma into a myriad of emotions showcasing his exceptional percipience of love and other lewd cravings of an unsatisfied mind. Emma jumps from one relationship to another in her endeavours to sate her expectations of finding true love only to find herself confounded and a perplexing realization of her being simply taken advantage of dawns on her which finally leads to an infernal end to the novel.'indeed what could be better than spending the evening by the fireside with a book, while the wind beats against the window panes and the lamp glows brightly?' 'You empty your mind,’ he went on, ‘and the hours fly past. Without stirring from your chair, you wander through countries you can see in your mind’s eye,and your consciousness threads itself into the fiction,playing about with the details or following the ups and downs of the plot. You identify with the characters; you feel as if it’s your own heart that’s beating beneath their costumes.' ‘Have you ever had the experience,’ Leon continued, ‘of finding, in a book, some vague idea you've had, some shadowy image from the depths of your being, which now seems to express perfectly your most subtle feelings?’Reading Madame Bovary has simply been a delight and a majestic celebration of the love of reading.
—Ritwik
