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3.51 AVERAGE
3.51 AVERAGE
emotional
sad
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
Please get a hobby
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emma they can never make me hate you
‘Madame Bovary’ is prachtig geschreven, sommige zinnen zijn ware kunstwerkjes. Maar, zoals vaker voorkomt bij klassiekers en wellicht ook past bij de tijdsgeest van publicatie (1856), kan het verhaal met momenten saai en langdradig zijn. Interessant is dat je een goed beeld krijgt van het Franse leven toentertijd, uiteraard vooral gezien vanuit het oogpunt van de dramatische, materialistische Emma. ‘Madame Bovary’ is een mooi verhaal over ‘hoogmoed komt voor de val’ en leert je om te appreciëren wat je hebt. Het gaf me plezier om er bij stil te staan hoe schokkend het boek was toen het ten tonele verscheen. De obsceniteiten! Ach, stel je toch eens voor! Ik heb geworsteld om dit boek uit te lezen vanwege de langdradige start en het trage middenstuk, maar het einde zorgde ervoor dat ik blij ben dat ik heb doorgezet.
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Lotta French 1800’s drama going on here.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There’s something about Flaubert’s writing that makes me want to comment on his books as I’m reading them. I had that experience with [b:Bouvard et Pécuchet|1170919|Bouvard et Pécuchet|Gustave Flaubert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1329251510s/1170919.jpg|47799253] last year and I had it again while reading this book, so I jotted down my thoughts as I read.
Part I jottings
When you’re reading such a famous story as this one, the ending of which everyone knows already, you read it differently. You dawdle along, indulging yourself with odd details. And so, in these early pages, I’m admiring how Flaubert describes the part of France in which he has chosen to set his story: Haute-Normandie, his home territory. It’s clear that he loves the countryside around Rouen very much.
I’m also enjoying the fact that there’s more than one Madame Bovary in the story. Mme Bovary ‘mère’ is a formidable lady who ushers in Madame Bovary ‘belle-fille’, formidable in her own way if not exactly ‘belle’. But Mme Bovary the second, in spite of faithfully taking the medicine prescribed by her doctor husband Charles, dies conveniently, allowing Madame Bovary the third, the very incarnation of ‘belle’, to be ushered in, bringing bag-loads of tension in her train. If she was a match, she’d ignite all by herself.
Now that he’s set up his story, and described its landscape, I feel that Flaubert is really testing his writerly capacities. He’s challenging himself to inhabit Madame Bovary the third’s fiery spirit. He’s good at this. He’s so good at it that I wonder how he can keep it up. I’m noticing too how often he describes the view from her window as she stares longingly at the broader world beyond the walls of her narrow life. That reminds me of something, though I’m not sure what..
And I have to smile at his foresight when he makes Emma Bovary wish that the name Bovary will become famous, that it will be displayed all over bookshops and repeated in the newspapers.
But as the quiet pages turn, I find myself longing for a change for Emma and for me as a reader. Her world is too limited. What about the reader’s needs, dear M Flaubert? Spare a thought for us.
Emma is invited to a ball in the neighboring château and I think, yes, Flaubert is going to change the pace here, and he does. The comical descriptions of dinner at the chateau remind me of the humurous juxtapositions that occurred on every other page of [b:Bouvard Et Pecuchet|35253586|Bouvard Et Pecuchet|Flaubert Gustave|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1496174685s/35253586.jpg|56604479], and I can’t help wishing this book could be more like that one. But unfortunately, the château episode is soon over and it hasn’t delivered much in terms of change for Emma - or for the reader.
Thoughts on Part II
This section starts off with a little more promise. Emma and Charles are moving to Yonville, a little town in a valley by a meandering river. Flaubert describes the road leading to the town as bordered by young aspens, une chaussée plantée de jeunes trembles.
The French word for aspen, ‘tremble’, immediately reminds me of Tennyson’s lines from The Lady of Shalott:
Willows whiten, aspens quiver, little breezes dusk and shiver,
thro' the wave that runs forever by the island in the river, flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls and four gray towers, overlook a space of flowers,
and the silent isle imbowers, the Lady of Shalott.
I remember the descriptions of Emma looking at the world through her window, and I think, Yes! Up to this point, Emma has been exactly like the enchanted Lady of Shalott, looking out at the world as if from a mirror, cut off from real life.
Perhaps from her window in Yonville, she will see Sir Lancelot riding by...
The town provides some interest for the reader in any case. We are introduced to a colorful set of inhabitants. There’s Mme Lefrançois, who runs the local hostelry; there’s her club-footed man-of-all-work, Hippolyte; her regular customers: a querulous tax collector called M. Binet and a young lawyer’s clerk called M. Leon Dupuis. Then there’s a slimy haberdasher called M. Lheureux; the Rouen-Yonville stage-coach driver Hivert; a sanctimonious clergyman called M. Bournisien and a free-thinking but rather pedantic pharmacist called Homais.
An immediate battle of words between the clergyman and the pharmacist livens up the story nicely. I welcome these new characters, no matter how sanctimonious or pedantic. And Homais reminds me quite a bit of Bouvard and Pécuchet, though admittedly Homais seems actually to know what he’s talking about unlike that comic duo.
But while introducing several interesting and comic characters, Flaubert is simultaneously playing with our expectations. He tells us there was little to see in Yonville - the single street, the length of a rifle’s range, stopped short at the corner of the road. If you turned right at the end, you arrived at the cemetary. The mention of a street the length of a gun’s range, and which comes to an abrupt end, combined with the mention of a cemetery, doesn’t augur well at all.
But perhaps I’m wrong to focus on premonitions. On her first morning in her new home in Yonville, Emma looks out the window and sees the lawyer’s clerk, Leon, go by. Is he Sir Lancelot? In any case, within the space of a few pages, he seems to have cheered Emma up considerably. I’m cheered up too because I’m really enjoying the contrast between the super scientific conversations which Homais engages in with everyone, and the super romantic conversation that Emma and Leon have at every opportunity.
But Flaubert is still offering us hints about the future: Homais praises Emma’s new house and mentions particularly the advantage of having a side door in an alleyway that allows people to enter and leave without being seen.
The pages go by without much happening, and the side door remains unused. Oh, wait, something is happening. A bunch of characters are going on a day trip! How exciting!
But it’s only to visit a linen factory.
In Part II, the character list may have expanded but life inYonville Yawnville hasn't really become more interesting.
Emma is increasingly bored and exasperated by her gentle husband Charles and by her narrow life in the town. I’m feeling the same with regard to Flaubert. I absolutely can’t find fault with the writing but the story is becoming just as much a torment for me to read as it is for Emma to live through.
But a passage beginning, ‘Un soir...’ , and which mentions spring and buds, etc, brings hope - for the reader, at least.
Alas, the passage ends with the church bells tolling in peaceful lamentation. Poor Emma. Poor me.
And poor Leon has become so bored with Yawnville that he can’t stand it any longer. He leaves without having once made use of that tempting side entrance.
What has Emma to look forward to now?
Oh right, an Agricultural Show…
But in the meantime, Emma has realised that Leon might have been her best chance at love and she missed it. Really, it goes from bad to worse. I’m certain Flaubert was chuckling to himself as he wrote!
But perhaps shedding a little tear too. His ability to perfectly phrase his character’s thoughts excuses him a lot:
C’était cette rêverie que l’on a sur ce qui ne reviendra plus, la lassitude qui vous prend après chaque fait accompli, cette douleur enfin que vous apportent l’interruption de tout mouvement accoutumé, la cessation brusque d’une vibration prolongée.
Emma has bought herself a prie-dieu, a gothic kneeler. I can’t believe Flaubert wrote that with a straight face.
Oh! It’s market day in Yawnville. Perhaps something will happen today...
Why yes! From her window Emma spies a fine Sir Lancelot in yellow gloves. Or is it Mr Bingley? A single man with twenty thousand a year renting a house in the area, he must surely be in want of a....
Ah! His name is not Bingley but Boulanger, Rodolphe Boulanger. He sounds as romantic as a red-nosed baker. But still, he’s arrived just in time to escort Emma to the Agricultural Show! Who’d have thought the Agricultural Show could turn into a romantic venue!
And side by side with the romance, Flaubert offers us a comic interlude between Mme Lefrançois and Homais, who according to Flaubert, has expressions to suit every circumstance, even unfortunate ones. Quelle épouvantable catastrophe ! s’écria l’apothicaire, qui avait toujours des expressions congruentes à toutes les circonstances imaginables. Yes, I was right. This IS a comic novel!
And now it’s Emma who’s described as having a red nose! Is Flaubert mocking his main character?
Yes, he seems to be mocking everyone in the course of this Agricultural Show episode, juxtaposing contrasting scenes to great comic effect. While the local Deputy engages his large audience at a slow pace on the subject of cereal production, Rodolphe engages his tiny audience at a fast pace on the subject of serial seduction. The deputy is planning a venture involving manufacturing linen, Rodolphe is planning a venture involving bed linen!
The comic strand has the upper hand in this section, and it may well be descending into complete farce because Homais is proposing a radical new medical procedure to cure Hippolyte’s club foot. Is Flaubert trying to turn Homais, the supreme unbeliever, into a Messiah who will make the lame walk and the blind see? In the predictably disappointing aftermath of the miracle procedure, Flaubert gives us some great dialogues between the priest and the pharmacist. These are definitely my favourite parts.
Meantime, Emma dialogues with her conscience on the subject of her affair with Rodolphe. Yes, you’ve guessed right, the side door on the alley has been finally put to some use.
But Rodolphe doesn’t measure up to Emma’s expectations, and his letter of adieu arrives by the unfaithful side-door. While I’m reading Rodolphe’s letter, I’m distracted by the mention of a ‘mancenillier’ tree so I pause to look it up. It’s a poison tree, a tree of death. Flaubert is amusing himself again.
And even as Emma enters crisis mode, Flaubert makes Homais create a comic diversion. And then he gives Charles serious money troubles just to bring us back into serious mode again.
In the next section, Flaubert cooly announces that Emma wants to become a saint! Elle voulut devenir une sainte. Am I the only one who notices this constant lurching between the serious and the farcical?
Ok, she’s now safely through the ‘saint’ crisis and Charles is going to take her to see ‘Lucia de Lamermoor' at the Rouen opera house. This should be a serious episode but it’s introduced by another farcical debate between the pharmacist and the priest. The two are stock comic characters. But romance prevails in spite of the comedy; Emma, like Lucia in the garden scene, meets her old love Leon at the opera.
This more mature Leon turns out to be as calculating in his modest way as Rodolphe was, and he manages to get Charles to agree to Emma staying on an extra day in Rouen by herself. So the pair rendezvous at the cathedral which gives Flaubert an opportunity to indulge in flamboyant parallels between Emma’s situation and the edifice itself. The cathedral is described as a gigantic boudoir, the vaulted ceiling extending its ribs like arms to receive Emma’s confession of love for Leon, the stained glass illumining her face, the smoke from the incense burners creating an angelic halo, etc, etc.
Someone convince me that Flaubert wasn’t laughing when he wrote this. And there’s a ridiculous person hanging around who insists on giving the pair a guided tour, especially of the Chapel of the Virgin under which is buried a Louis the Something, seigneur of something else, etc, etc, who died on the 23rd of July, a Sunday…
The reference to the ‘Sunday’ is one detail too much for Leon. He flees the cathedral’s suffocating arms dragging Emma behind him, and grabs a cab. Not just any cab of course. It has to be a cab that has blinds that can be pulled down completely. Flaubert sends the cabby and his two passengers on a crazy journey around and around the city so that people in the streets see the cab go by again and again and are amazed at the apparitions and reapparaitions of a shuttered vehicle in broad daylight. Phantasmagoric!
When Emma gets back to Yawnville after the cab ‘ride’ there’s bad news. But Flaubert can’t just give us a simple delivery of bad news. No, the scene has to open with Homais castigating his apprentice for daring to unlock his medicine cabinet - where he has a bottle of arsenic locked away. Homais is so carried away that he expostulates in Latin and would have expostulated in Chinese or ‘groenlandais’ if he knew such languages! In the middle of all this expostulating, he conveys the bad news to Emma: Charles’ father has died.
The story moves on through many more chapters as Emma and Leon find possibilities for more rendezvous, sometimes described in ridiculous terms, sometimes in sublime ones: for Leon, Emma is the heroine of every novel and drama. She is the unnamed She of every love poem. But above all, she’s an angel! This is heady stuff!
Emma’s stolen idylls cost money so she borrows and borrows on the strength of Charles’ inheritance. Each time the story strikes such a serious note, Homais is called in to do another comic turn. The man who used to spout Latin at every opportunity suddenly starts peppering his conversation with slang terms to great effect: nous ferons sauter ensemble les monacos. L’apothicaire, autrefois, se fût bien gardé d’une telle expression ; mais il donnait maintenant dans un genre folâtre et parisien qu’il trouvait du meilleur goût ; et, comme madame Bovary, sa voisine, il interrogeait le clerc curieusement sur les mœurs de la capitale, même il parlait argot afin d’éblouir les bourgeois, disant turne, bazar, chicard, chicandard, Breda-street, et Je me la casse, pour : Je m’en vais.
Then for ten pages or so, there’s no comic contrast. Flaubert is serious at last. Leon is gone - or as Homais might say, he’s vamoosed. Emma is left with nothing but debts and broken dreams - described in the most beautiful language needless to say.
Just when I’d given up on any more comic turns, Homais comes to my rescue to advise against eating wheat and dairy products! There’s nothing new in the world surely.
And even when things worsen, he still manages to make me laugh. He declares that in cases of poisoning, the most important thing is to carry out a test. Follow the scientific method. Everything will be fine if you follow the scientific method and carry out tests.
At the very worst moment after the famous doctors have arrived and given up on curing the poison victim, Homais feels obliged to entertain them at his house, sending out for pigeons and lamb chops, the best cream and eggs, and warning his wife to take out the wineglasses with the stems. He even dares to offer the famous doctor his own diagnosis, not omitting to mention that he can’t imagine where the victim could have come upon the arsenic.
And while the entire town, me included, are waiting for news of the victim, Flaubert allows Homais to continue his farce. He can’t finish dinner with the famous doctor without a coffee from a very scientic-sounding machine, using coffee he has of course torrified and pulverised himself, and when he offers the famous doctor sugar for his coffee, he uses the scientific name: Saccharum, docteur?
Soon Homais is back in the sickroom, using all his science to protect the dying woman from the priest’s superstitions. But he doesn’t succeed: Emma is encouraged to bestow on a crucifix the most loving kiss she’s ever bestowed on a man’s body. It’s a wonder Flaubert didn’t name her Marie Madeleine!
And Flaubert isn’t done with us yet. Homais and the priest sit by the deathbed arguing about religion until they both fall asleep, when they are shown to be indistinguishable from one another: two fat men nodding in their chairs, their chins resting on their chests. When they wake up, their differences re-emerge: one sprinkles the room with holy water, the other with chlorine and the story ends on that note.
I really believe ‘Madame Bovary’ is a comedy. But Homais would no doubt prove me wrong. Using suitably scientific methods, he would prove that the majority of readers consider it a tragedy. So be it.
Part I jottings
When you’re reading such a famous story as this one, the ending of which everyone knows already, you read it differently. You dawdle along, indulging yourself with odd details. And so, in these early pages, I’m admiring how Flaubert describes the part of France in which he has chosen to set his story: Haute-Normandie, his home territory. It’s clear that he loves the countryside around Rouen very much.
I’m also enjoying the fact that there’s more than one Madame Bovary in the story. Mme Bovary ‘mère’ is a formidable lady who ushers in Madame Bovary ‘belle-fille’, formidable in her own way if not exactly ‘belle’. But Mme Bovary the second, in spite of faithfully taking the medicine prescribed by her doctor husband Charles, dies conveniently, allowing Madame Bovary the third, the very incarnation of ‘belle’, to be ushered in, bringing bag-loads of tension in her train. If she was a match, she’d ignite all by herself.
Now that he’s set up his story, and described its landscape, I feel that Flaubert is really testing his writerly capacities. He’s challenging himself to inhabit Madame Bovary the third’s fiery spirit. He’s good at this. He’s so good at it that I wonder how he can keep it up. I’m noticing too how often he describes the view from her window as she stares longingly at the broader world beyond the walls of her narrow life. That reminds me of something, though I’m not sure what..
And I have to smile at his foresight when he makes Emma Bovary wish that the name Bovary will become famous, that it will be displayed all over bookshops and repeated in the newspapers.
But as the quiet pages turn, I find myself longing for a change for Emma and for me as a reader. Her world is too limited. What about the reader’s needs, dear M Flaubert? Spare a thought for us.
Emma is invited to a ball in the neighboring château and I think, yes, Flaubert is going to change the pace here, and he does. The comical descriptions of dinner at the chateau remind me of the humurous juxtapositions that occurred on every other page of [b:Bouvard Et Pecuchet|35253586|Bouvard Et Pecuchet|Flaubert Gustave|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1496174685s/35253586.jpg|56604479], and I can’t help wishing this book could be more like that one. But unfortunately, the château episode is soon over and it hasn’t delivered much in terms of change for Emma - or for the reader.
Thoughts on Part II
This section starts off with a little more promise. Emma and Charles are moving to Yonville, a little town in a valley by a meandering river. Flaubert describes the road leading to the town as bordered by young aspens, une chaussée plantée de jeunes trembles.
The French word for aspen, ‘tremble’, immediately reminds me of Tennyson’s lines from The Lady of Shalott:
Willows whiten, aspens quiver, little breezes dusk and shiver,
thro' the wave that runs forever by the island in the river, flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls and four gray towers, overlook a space of flowers,
and the silent isle imbowers, the Lady of Shalott.
I remember the descriptions of Emma looking at the world through her window, and I think, Yes! Up to this point, Emma has been exactly like the enchanted Lady of Shalott, looking out at the world as if from a mirror, cut off from real life.
Perhaps from her window in Yonville, she will see Sir Lancelot riding by...
The town provides some interest for the reader in any case. We are introduced to a colorful set of inhabitants. There’s Mme Lefrançois, who runs the local hostelry; there’s her club-footed man-of-all-work, Hippolyte; her regular customers: a querulous tax collector called M. Binet and a young lawyer’s clerk called M. Leon Dupuis. Then there’s a slimy haberdasher called M. Lheureux; the Rouen-Yonville stage-coach driver Hivert; a sanctimonious clergyman called M. Bournisien and a free-thinking but rather pedantic pharmacist called Homais.
An immediate battle of words between the clergyman and the pharmacist livens up the story nicely. I welcome these new characters, no matter how sanctimonious or pedantic. And Homais reminds me quite a bit of Bouvard and Pécuchet, though admittedly Homais seems actually to know what he’s talking about unlike that comic duo.
But while introducing several interesting and comic characters, Flaubert is simultaneously playing with our expectations. He tells us there was little to see in Yonville - the single street, the length of a rifle’s range, stopped short at the corner of the road. If you turned right at the end, you arrived at the cemetary. The mention of a street the length of a gun’s range, and which comes to an abrupt end, combined with the mention of a cemetery, doesn’t augur well at all.
But perhaps I’m wrong to focus on premonitions. On her first morning in her new home in Yonville, Emma looks out the window and sees the lawyer’s clerk, Leon, go by. Is he Sir Lancelot? In any case, within the space of a few pages, he seems to have cheered Emma up considerably. I’m cheered up too because I’m really enjoying the contrast between the super scientific conversations which Homais engages in with everyone, and the super romantic conversation that Emma and Leon have at every opportunity.
But Flaubert is still offering us hints about the future: Homais praises Emma’s new house and mentions particularly the advantage of having a side door in an alleyway that allows people to enter and leave without being seen.
The pages go by without much happening, and the side door remains unused. Oh, wait, something is happening. A bunch of characters are going on a day trip! How exciting!
But it’s only to visit a linen factory.
In Part II, the character list may have expanded but life in
Emma is increasingly bored and exasperated by her gentle husband Charles and by her narrow life in the town. I’m feeling the same with regard to Flaubert. I absolutely can’t find fault with the writing but the story is becoming just as much a torment for me to read as it is for Emma to live through.
But a passage beginning, ‘Un soir...’ , and which mentions spring and buds, etc, brings hope - for the reader, at least.
Alas, the passage ends with the church bells tolling in peaceful lamentation. Poor Emma. Poor me.
And poor Leon has become so bored with Yawnville that he can’t stand it any longer. He leaves without having once made use of that tempting side entrance.
What has Emma to look forward to now?
Oh right, an Agricultural Show…
But in the meantime, Emma has realised that Leon might have been her best chance at love and she missed it. Really, it goes from bad to worse. I’m certain Flaubert was chuckling to himself as he wrote!
But perhaps shedding a little tear too. His ability to perfectly phrase his character’s thoughts excuses him a lot:
C’était cette rêverie que l’on a sur ce qui ne reviendra plus, la lassitude qui vous prend après chaque fait accompli, cette douleur enfin que vous apportent l’interruption de tout mouvement accoutumé, la cessation brusque d’une vibration prolongée.
Emma has bought herself a prie-dieu, a gothic kneeler. I can’t believe Flaubert wrote that with a straight face.
Oh! It’s market day in Yawnville. Perhaps something will happen today...
Why yes! From her window Emma spies a fine Sir Lancelot in yellow gloves. Or is it Mr Bingley? A single man with twenty thousand a year renting a house in the area, he must surely be in want of a....
Ah! His name is not Bingley but Boulanger, Rodolphe Boulanger. He sounds as romantic as a red-nosed baker. But still, he’s arrived just in time to escort Emma to the Agricultural Show! Who’d have thought the Agricultural Show could turn into a romantic venue!
And side by side with the romance, Flaubert offers us a comic interlude between Mme Lefrançois and Homais, who according to Flaubert, has expressions to suit every circumstance, even unfortunate ones. Quelle épouvantable catastrophe ! s’écria l’apothicaire, qui avait toujours des expressions congruentes à toutes les circonstances imaginables. Yes, I was right. This IS a comic novel!
And now it’s Emma who’s described as having a red nose! Is Flaubert mocking his main character?
Yes, he seems to be mocking everyone in the course of this Agricultural Show episode, juxtaposing contrasting scenes to great comic effect. While the local Deputy engages his large audience at a slow pace on the subject of cereal production, Rodolphe engages his tiny audience at a fast pace on the subject of serial seduction. The deputy is planning a venture involving manufacturing linen, Rodolphe is planning a venture involving bed linen!
The comic strand has the upper hand in this section, and it may well be descending into complete farce because Homais is proposing a radical new medical procedure to cure Hippolyte’s club foot. Is Flaubert trying to turn Homais, the supreme unbeliever, into a Messiah who will make the lame walk and the blind see? In the predictably disappointing aftermath of the miracle procedure, Flaubert gives us some great dialogues between the priest and the pharmacist. These are definitely my favourite parts.
Meantime, Emma dialogues with her conscience on the subject of her affair with Rodolphe. Yes, you’ve guessed right, the side door on the alley has been finally put to some use.
But Rodolphe doesn’t measure up to Emma’s expectations, and his letter of adieu arrives by the unfaithful side-door. While I’m reading Rodolphe’s letter, I’m distracted by the mention of a ‘mancenillier’ tree so I pause to look it up. It’s a poison tree, a tree of death. Flaubert is amusing himself again.
And even as Emma enters crisis mode, Flaubert makes Homais create a comic diversion. And then he gives Charles serious money troubles just to bring us back into serious mode again.
In the next section, Flaubert cooly announces that Emma wants to become a saint! Elle voulut devenir une sainte. Am I the only one who notices this constant lurching between the serious and the farcical?
Ok, she’s now safely through the ‘saint’ crisis and Charles is going to take her to see ‘Lucia de Lamermoor' at the Rouen opera house. This should be a serious episode but it’s introduced by another farcical debate between the pharmacist and the priest. The two are stock comic characters. But romance prevails in spite of the comedy; Emma, like Lucia in the garden scene, meets her old love Leon at the opera.
This more mature Leon turns out to be as calculating in his modest way as Rodolphe was, and he manages to get Charles to agree to Emma staying on an extra day in Rouen by herself. So the pair rendezvous at the cathedral which gives Flaubert an opportunity to indulge in flamboyant parallels between Emma’s situation and the edifice itself. The cathedral is described as a gigantic boudoir, the vaulted ceiling extending its ribs like arms to receive Emma’s confession of love for Leon, the stained glass illumining her face, the smoke from the incense burners creating an angelic halo, etc, etc.
Someone convince me that Flaubert wasn’t laughing when he wrote this. And there’s a ridiculous person hanging around who insists on giving the pair a guided tour, especially of the Chapel of the Virgin under which is buried a Louis the Something, seigneur of something else, etc, etc, who died on the 23rd of July, a Sunday…
The reference to the ‘Sunday’ is one detail too much for Leon. He flees the cathedral’s suffocating arms dragging Emma behind him, and grabs a cab. Not just any cab of course. It has to be a cab that has blinds that can be pulled down completely. Flaubert sends the cabby and his two passengers on a crazy journey around and around the city so that people in the streets see the cab go by again and again and are amazed at the apparitions and reapparaitions of a shuttered vehicle in broad daylight. Phantasmagoric!
When Emma gets back to Yawnville after the cab ‘ride’ there’s bad news. But Flaubert can’t just give us a simple delivery of bad news. No, the scene has to open with Homais castigating his apprentice for daring to unlock his medicine cabinet - where he has a bottle of arsenic locked away. Homais is so carried away that he expostulates in Latin and would have expostulated in Chinese or ‘groenlandais’ if he knew such languages! In the middle of all this expostulating, he conveys the bad news to Emma: Charles’ father has died.
The story moves on through many more chapters as Emma and Leon find possibilities for more rendezvous, sometimes described in ridiculous terms, sometimes in sublime ones: for Leon, Emma is the heroine of every novel and drama. She is the unnamed She of every love poem. But above all, she’s an angel! This is heady stuff!
Emma’s stolen idylls cost money so she borrows and borrows on the strength of Charles’ inheritance. Each time the story strikes such a serious note, Homais is called in to do another comic turn. The man who used to spout Latin at every opportunity suddenly starts peppering his conversation with slang terms to great effect: nous ferons sauter ensemble les monacos. L’apothicaire, autrefois, se fût bien gardé d’une telle expression ; mais il donnait maintenant dans un genre folâtre et parisien qu’il trouvait du meilleur goût ; et, comme madame Bovary, sa voisine, il interrogeait le clerc curieusement sur les mœurs de la capitale, même il parlait argot afin d’éblouir les bourgeois, disant turne, bazar, chicard, chicandard, Breda-street, et Je me la casse, pour : Je m’en vais.
Then for ten pages or so, there’s no comic contrast. Flaubert is serious at last. Leon is gone - or as Homais might say, he’s vamoosed. Emma is left with nothing but debts and broken dreams - described in the most beautiful language needless to say.
Just when I’d given up on any more comic turns, Homais comes to my rescue to advise against eating wheat and dairy products! There’s nothing new in the world surely.
And even when things worsen, he still manages to make me laugh. He declares that in cases of poisoning, the most important thing is to carry out a test. Follow the scientific method. Everything will be fine if you follow the scientific method and carry out tests.
At the very worst moment after the famous doctors have arrived and given up on curing the poison victim, Homais feels obliged to entertain them at his house, sending out for pigeons and lamb chops, the best cream and eggs, and warning his wife to take out the wineglasses with the stems. He even dares to offer the famous doctor his own diagnosis, not omitting to mention that he can’t imagine where the victim could have come upon the arsenic.
And while the entire town, me included, are waiting for news of the victim, Flaubert allows Homais to continue his farce. He can’t finish dinner with the famous doctor without a coffee from a very scientic-sounding machine, using coffee he has of course torrified and pulverised himself, and when he offers the famous doctor sugar for his coffee, he uses the scientific name: Saccharum, docteur?
Soon Homais is back in the sickroom, using all his science to protect the dying woman from the priest’s superstitions. But he doesn’t succeed: Emma is encouraged to bestow on a crucifix the most loving kiss she’s ever bestowed on a man’s body. It’s a wonder Flaubert didn’t name her Marie Madeleine!
And Flaubert isn’t done with us yet. Homais and the priest sit by the deathbed arguing about religion until they both fall asleep, when they are shown to be indistinguishable from one another: two fat men nodding in their chairs, their chins resting on their chests. When they wake up, their differences re-emerge: one sprinkles the room with holy water, the other with chlorine and the story ends on that note.
I really believe ‘Madame Bovary’ is a comedy. But Homais would no doubt prove me wrong. Using suitably scientific methods, he would prove that the majority of readers consider it a tragedy. So be it.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I'm struggling desperately to finish this book. At times the writing gives me pause for appreciation, but overall I found Emma very irritating and the story dragged on too long.
dark
emotional
medium-paced