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3.51 AVERAGE
3.51 AVERAGE
challenging
sad
slow-paced
Not as scandalous as the blurb made it out be, but still thoroughly enjoyable. It is definitely an interested look at the liberation of women around this time. I did find the ending abrupt and anticlimactic although it did highlight the moral message behind the narrative.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Emma's character drove me crazy, and I do struggle with hard-to-love protagonists. I tried to step back and see the universal view, what was the author's intent? Social commentary? I can appreciate the novel would have been groundbreaking in its time. But I felt like I suffered, not with Emma but because of Emma.
Dear lord. Great book, but I couldn't read another page of it. There is no lack of French drama in it, the characters all make you go: "Are you for real?", and it just gets heavier the further you get. Most of the time I was hooked by the beautiful writing and the way the plot was unraveling, but there were moments where it felt too much. Actually, the great thing about it is that it goes so far at times, the book becomes funny (aside from the more openly comedic passages of which there were plenty), which I'm sure Flaubert intended as well.
In my opinion, not a novel suited for reading 120 pages in a day like I did in finishing it, but it's an absolute classic from its prose to its abundance of interesting personal and societal themes and the very, for its time, progressive presentation of its characters and their views.
Also, Emma Bovary. The protagonist. I don't even know what to say other than the oh so eloquent "dafuq".
In my opinion, not a novel suited for reading 120 pages in a day like I did in finishing it, but it's an absolute classic from its prose to its abundance of interesting personal and societal themes and the very, for its time, progressive presentation of its characters and their views.
Also, Emma Bovary. The protagonist. I don't even know what to say other than the oh so eloquent "dafuq".
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I'm somewhat confused on if Flaubert liked other humans or thought himself above all others? At times, his treatment of his characters reaches a near-unforgivable pitch of cruelty, and if that's to mimic life, well, isn't it hard enough without going to excess? But he's also careful to humanize each of his mains.
I was uncomfortable with the way Emma's sentimentality is mocked. The writing of her dreams was some of my favorite. Do all readers and writers feel a kinship with Emma? Are we meant to feel so appalled by the world's treatment of Emma that not even Flaubert seems kind enough to her?
Baudelaire: Madame Bovary gives herself with magnificent generosity, in an entirely masculine manner, to fools who don’t begin to measure up to her…”
Only in her imagination can Emma Bovary live out the fullness of her heart. Only literature could accomplish what she dreams of.
Henry James: That is the triumph of the book as the triumph stands, that Emma interests us by the nature of her consciousness and the play of her mind, thanks to the reality and beauty with which those sources are invested.
Page Notes - Norton Edition:
And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words bliss, passion, ecstasy, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books” (30)
The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness (32)
She knew by heart the love-songs of the last century . . . (32)
She had … “enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women.” 33
34: …she thought herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing more to feel.
35: believe that she at last felt that wondrous passion which, till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings, hung in the splendor of poetic skies;--and now she could not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness of her dreams.
“To taste the full sweetness” of her honeymoon . . . 35: In post-chaises behind blue silken curtains, one rides slowly up steep roads, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall. At sunset on the shores of gulfs one breathes in the perfume of lemon-trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, one looks hand in hand at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could she not lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills?
“If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden bounty would have come from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that kept them apart.”
38: “…she tried to imagine what would have been these unrealized events, this different life, this unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive . . .”
49: “…like the huge crevasses that a thunderstorm will sometimes carve in the mountains…down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart resembled them: in its contact with wealth, something had rubbed off on it that could not be removed.”
…the wistful feeling remained with her.
50: She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map she walked about the capital.
52: She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
53: Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this act of fortune would be, what wind would bring it, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a rowboat or an ocean liner with three decks, carrying anguish or laden to the gunwales with bliss. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come hat day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the next day.” Spring and fainting spells
57: She leant her head against the walls to weep; she longed for lives of adventure, for masked balls, for shameless pleasures that were bound, she thought, to initiate her to ecstasies she had not yet experienced.
69 – when she and Leon connect, it is because they share at least a surface appreciation for poetry, beautiful scenery, and the elegance of the world.
71 - …the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid, all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself, living here far from the world, this is my one distraction” -- Leon
72 – She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.”
79 “Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond.
82 – “…a constant exchange of books and of romances.” Between her & Leon
85 “…his large blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain-lakes which mirror the heavens.”
89 – The rigid folds her dress covered a tormented heart of which her chaste lips never spoke. She was in Love with Leon, and sought solitude 90 – that she might more easily delight in his image. His physical presence troubled the voluptuousness of this meditation. Emma thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained in her only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow.”
102 – Henceforth the memory of Leon was the center of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fires left by travelers on the snow of a Russian steppe. … her projects of happiness that cracked in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the yoke of domesticity,--she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
103 – So it was decided to keep Emma from reading novels.
116 – Rodolphe “Don’t you know that there are souls constantly tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all sorts of fantasies, of follies.
130 “…and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places.”
131
“She was entering upon a marvelous world where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An endless rapture. A blue space surrounded her and ordinary existence appeared only intermittently between these heights, dark and far away beneath her.
140 – She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts whinnied when one passed by, and galloped, galloped . . . Under her window there was a beehive and at times, the bees wheeling round in the light, struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness…What a wealth of illusions!”
149 – “her dreams sinking into the mire like wounded swallows” … after Charles failed attempt to fix Hippolyte’s club foot
her anger: 150: …the burning glance of her eyes like tow arrows of fire about to dart forth.
“When Rodolphe came to the garden that evening . . . all their rancor melted like snow beneath the warmth of that kiss.”
157 – After Rodolphe leaves her: “…she blossomed forth in the fullness of her being, like a flower feeding on manure, on rain, wind and sunshine.
Emma’s other dreams: 158: “To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a new land, from where they would never return. Often from the top of a mountain there suddenly appeared some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, their pointed steeples crowned with storks’ nests. …the murmur of guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters.” … in the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing specific stood out . . . bathed in sunshine . . .”
180 – when Emma goes to the theatre, she mistakes the illusion as real. Take me away! All my passion and all my dreams are yours!
207 “From time to time a gust of wind would drive the clouds toward the slopes of Saint Catherine, like aerial waves breaking silently against a cliff.
The hundred and twenty thousand souls palpitating there had all at once wafted to her the passions with which her imagination had endowed them. Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and filled with the tumult of the vague murmuring which rose from below.
213 From that moment on, her existence was one long tissue of lies, in which she wrapped her love as under a veil in order to hide it.
222 Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers, poetry, the moon and the stars, naïve resources of a waning passion striving to keep itself alive by all external aids.
223 He even strove not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he felt his courage desert him, like drunkards at the sight of strong liquor.
223 How she envied her first undefinable sentiments of love which she had tried to construct from the books she read.
224 Emma lived all absorbed in her passions and worried no more about money matters than an archduchess.
229 “she would long for the love of a prince”
“The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.”
231 Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.
She none the less went on writing him love letters, in keeping with the notion that a woman must write to her love.
But while writing to him, it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories, of her favorite books, her strongest desires, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that her heart beat wildly . . . he dwelt in that Azure land where silken ladders swung from balconies in the moonlight, beneath a flower-scented breeze. … these vague ecstasies of imaginary love would exhaust her more than the wildest orgies.”
241 Emma goes to war against all men.
246 With the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex…
248 She suffered only in her love, and felt her soul escaping from her in this memory, as wounded men, dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds.
…fiery spheres were exploding in the air like bullets when they strike, and were whirling, whirling, to melt at last upon the snow between the branches of the tree.”
I was uncomfortable with the way Emma's sentimentality is mocked. The writing of her dreams was some of my favorite. Do all readers and writers feel a kinship with Emma? Are we meant to feel so appalled by the world's treatment of Emma that not even Flaubert seems kind enough to her?
Baudelaire: Madame Bovary gives herself with magnificent generosity, in an entirely masculine manner, to fools who don’t begin to measure up to her…”
Only in her imagination can Emma Bovary live out the fullness of her heart. Only literature could accomplish what she dreams of.
Henry James: That is the triumph of the book as the triumph stands, that Emma interests us by the nature of her consciousness and the play of her mind, thanks to the reality and beauty with which those sources are invested.
Page Notes - Norton Edition:
And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words bliss, passion, ecstasy, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books” (30)
The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness (32)
She knew by heart the love-songs of the last century . . . (32)
She had … “enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women.” 33
34: …she thought herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing more to feel.
35: believe that she at last felt that wondrous passion which, till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings, hung in the splendor of poetic skies;--and now she could not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness of her dreams.
“To taste the full sweetness” of her honeymoon . . . 35: In post-chaises behind blue silken curtains, one rides slowly up steep roads, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall. At sunset on the shores of gulfs one breathes in the perfume of lemon-trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, one looks hand in hand at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could she not lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills?
“If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden bounty would have come from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that kept them apart.”
38: “…she tried to imagine what would have been these unrealized events, this different life, this unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive . . .”
49: “…like the huge crevasses that a thunderstorm will sometimes carve in the mountains…down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart resembled them: in its contact with wealth, something had rubbed off on it that could not be removed.”
…the wistful feeling remained with her.
50: She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map she walked about the capital.
52: She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
53: Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this act of fortune would be, what wind would bring it, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a rowboat or an ocean liner with three decks, carrying anguish or laden to the gunwales with bliss. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come hat day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the next day.” Spring and fainting spells
57: She leant her head against the walls to weep; she longed for lives of adventure, for masked balls, for shameless pleasures that were bound, she thought, to initiate her to ecstasies she had not yet experienced.
69 – when she and Leon connect, it is because they share at least a surface appreciation for poetry, beautiful scenery, and the elegance of the world.
71 - …the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid, all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself, living here far from the world, this is my one distraction” -- Leon
72 – She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.”
79 “Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond.
82 – “…a constant exchange of books and of romances.” Between her & Leon
85 “…his large blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain-lakes which mirror the heavens.”
89 – The rigid folds her dress covered a tormented heart of which her chaste lips never spoke. She was in Love with Leon, and sought solitude 90 – that she might more easily delight in his image. His physical presence troubled the voluptuousness of this meditation. Emma thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained in her only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow.”
102 – Henceforth the memory of Leon was the center of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fires left by travelers on the snow of a Russian steppe. … her projects of happiness that cracked in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the yoke of domesticity,--she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
103 – So it was decided to keep Emma from reading novels.
116 – Rodolphe “Don’t you know that there are souls constantly tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all sorts of fantasies, of follies.
130 “…and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places.”
131
“She was entering upon a marvelous world where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An endless rapture. A blue space surrounded her and ordinary existence appeared only intermittently between these heights, dark and far away beneath her.
140 – She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts whinnied when one passed by, and galloped, galloped . . . Under her window there was a beehive and at times, the bees wheeling round in the light, struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness…What a wealth of illusions!”
149 – “her dreams sinking into the mire like wounded swallows” … after Charles failed attempt to fix Hippolyte’s club foot
her anger: 150: …the burning glance of her eyes like tow arrows of fire about to dart forth.
“When Rodolphe came to the garden that evening . . . all their rancor melted like snow beneath the warmth of that kiss.”
157 – After Rodolphe leaves her: “…she blossomed forth in the fullness of her being, like a flower feeding on manure, on rain, wind and sunshine.
Emma’s other dreams: 158: “To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a new land, from where they would never return. Often from the top of a mountain there suddenly appeared some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, their pointed steeples crowned with storks’ nests. …the murmur of guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters.” … in the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing specific stood out . . . bathed in sunshine . . .”
180 – when Emma goes to the theatre, she mistakes the illusion as real. Take me away! All my passion and all my dreams are yours!
207 “From time to time a gust of wind would drive the clouds toward the slopes of Saint Catherine, like aerial waves breaking silently against a cliff.
The hundred and twenty thousand souls palpitating there had all at once wafted to her the passions with which her imagination had endowed them. Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and filled with the tumult of the vague murmuring which rose from below.
213 From that moment on, her existence was one long tissue of lies, in which she wrapped her love as under a veil in order to hide it.
222 Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers, poetry, the moon and the stars, naïve resources of a waning passion striving to keep itself alive by all external aids.
223 He even strove not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he felt his courage desert him, like drunkards at the sight of strong liquor.
223 How she envied her first undefinable sentiments of love which she had tried to construct from the books she read.
224 Emma lived all absorbed in her passions and worried no more about money matters than an archduchess.
229 “she would long for the love of a prince”
“The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.”
231 Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.
She none the less went on writing him love letters, in keeping with the notion that a woman must write to her love.
But while writing to him, it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories, of her favorite books, her strongest desires, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that her heart beat wildly . . . he dwelt in that Azure land where silken ladders swung from balconies in the moonlight, beneath a flower-scented breeze. … these vague ecstasies of imaginary love would exhaust her more than the wildest orgies.”
241 Emma goes to war against all men.
246 With the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex…
248 She suffered only in her love, and felt her soul escaping from her in this memory, as wounded men, dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds.
…fiery spheres were exploding in the air like bullets when they strike, and were whirling, whirling, to melt at last upon the snow between the branches of the tree.”
slow-paced
Listen, I understand that this was very important for its time. It says a lot about the position of women during that time and what freedoms they did/didn't have.
HOWEVER, it is still very openly misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and racist in numerous parts. It's also, in my opinion, quite boring. I would highly recommend reading a summary or commentary on the book, but not the book itself.
HOWEVER, it is still very openly misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and racist in numerous parts. It's also, in my opinion, quite boring. I would highly recommend reading a summary or commentary on the book, but not the book itself.