Suggestible, With Proclivities – Emma Bovary

I finished Madame Bovary yesterday but gave myself a night to sleep on it, to ensure that I would write a review that might say something new after Llosa’s seminal criticism and that might also appeal to that Slacker member who regards the novel as her favorite. (I think my favorite novel from school days is Weathering Heights, a book I found on rereading for book club continued to resonate with me.)

Madame Bovary seemed almost a second reading after the thorough analysis found in The Perfect Orgy. With large sections quoted therein, I plot and progress of the story were familiar and yet captivating. Despite all of Llosa’s dissections of narration, time and grammar, I was oblivious to them as the story itself seduced me, in parallel with Emma’s own dalliances.

To me, Emma resounded with the echo of Paradise Lost. Emma is Eve. Not the happy creative sprite found in Mark Twain’s Diaries but one much more classically Old Testament. She was eminently susceptible to the sweet talk of the Serpent as personified first in Rodolphe and later in L’Heureux. Both of these men saw Emma as a woman to not such much corrupt as benefit from.

Although fantasizing about an alternate life of passion, she did not acting on it until Rodolphe decided to have her. Unlike the visual allure of the ball and the mental reveries of being a heroic, cherished fictionalized heroine, Rodolphe appealed to her through her sense of hearing. He sweet talked her over the hawking of the merchants and the absurdity of country fair prizes. He then made her life less sedentary by getting her out riding and away from her house. By nature, she was a thrill seeker and too readily became another in a line of Rodolphe’s conquests.

In her subsequent affair, Leon was the prime mover, again the one making the decision to seduce her. These were not relationships born of love or mutual lust. Emma was prey. Flaubert wrote beautifully on the eternal art of seduction but the story was larger: one that essentially contrasted comfort with boredom as they are confused in Emma’s mind. Her husband Charles was boring to her because his job took him away for most of each day, brought him home too exhausted to converse with her, and was so satisfied with his wife and child that he could not suspect anything intruding into his Eden.

L’Heureux was the most viperous of all Emma’s temptations. He tapped not into lust but into the guileless simplicity in her character. Living with boredom between affairs and designing a stage on which to perform her life, Emma compulsively redecorated the house and succumbed to Parisian styles; it was finances rather than flirtations that was her final fall.

A novel this old has to attract and mean something to a contemporary reader, without being deconstructed into meaninglessness. And so the story, Emma, and the other characters have to be identifiable in current society. The universality of marital unfaithfulness seems tawdry when screamed from today’s mass media yet the scandal sticks more to the fallen woman, even today. Emma was a woman alone. She had no mother, no close female friends, no neighbors to gossip with. Her reality was never tested; her fantasy raced unreined.

The men in the novel were engaged in the community and more importantly had attainable if challenging goals and plans. Homais, the pharmacist eventually got his Legion of Honor; L’Heureux expanded his usurious store into extensive property holdings and transportation routes. Leon post-Emma finished his schooling, became gainfully employed and married well.

Emma’s goals were hallucinations of intense rapture, goals that even when occasionally attained self-destructed when she supported their continuation by recreating the home life comforts she was otherwise oblivious to.

Widowed and impoverished Charles arose as the hero of the story. He was the one, true to his milieu more than his religion or his family, who created a peaceable home, tolerating Emma’s highs and lows as an undiagnosed manic-depressive. His tolerance and conformance made an environment that was like a conservatory, but one that Emma regarded as too confining for an exotic flower. Never did she realized that when Rodolphe seduced her during the award for best manure was being given to a local farmer, that she was being given the same line of “compost.” She never could appreciate the comfort of the predictable, ye boring.

Flaubert's language is perfect as exhaustively discussed by Llosa. Two quotes are my favorites. The first occurring shortly after the birth of her daughter condenses the story's entire theme: "A man is free, at least -- free to range the passions and the world, to surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasures. Whereas a woman is continually thwarted. Inert, compliant, she has to struggle against her physical weakness and legal subjection. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat, quivers with every breeze: there is always a desire that entices, always a convention that restrains."

The other quote, that despite illustrating Flaubert's low opinion of the Catholic Church, I find to be the sexiest lines in the novel, at Emma's Extreme Unction: "First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands, that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again"