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joannaautumn 's review for:
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”
It was in 2018 when I took a course of World literature in the period of Realism where I got a huge program including Stendhal, Flaubert, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, etc – needless to say, it was an experience, one that changed my outlook on literature, and made me fall in love with this particular literary movement.
Stylistically an almost perfect piece of French realistic prose fiction.
Flaubert’s writing is a result of a lot of hard work, he would spend hours constructing the perfect sentence, passage, searching for the right words to express his vision of reality resulting in a finished product that glides as you read, like waves running into each other, natural and impeccable.
It’s the love of language and the beauty of it that make Madame Bovary special. Along with the psychological portrait of a woman who lived her life influenced by sentimental novels that were the product of romanticism, this novel is also a novel of lost illusions about life leading to disappointment and death.
What Balzac and Stendhal started with their social and political realism, Flaubert continued with his novels and even perfected the prose.
“Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be – tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.”
Often claiming the title of one of the greatest tragic literary heroines in fiction, next to Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary is a character that is made to be destroyed, by both her society and herself.
She grew up in an environment mirroring one of the sentimental and gothic heroines, in a convent. Shadowed from the outside world, without any practical knowledge, Emma spent her days praying and reading the abovementioned novels. Those novels gave her an unrealistic and rose-colored vision of life and love, and she held them in such high regard that anything ordinary and mild was repulsive to her.
This highlights one of the points of the book, that is how big and encompassing the influence of a book is on a person, and on a grander scale, on society. If Emma had books that portrayed ordinary lives, then maybe she wouldn’t have such grand expectations later on.
“I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breathe with them.”
Emma is never really happy through this novel, the only moments of happiness she found in the situations that pulled intense emotions from her which often were negative situations like the death of her mother or her affair with Leon and Rodolpho.
“Before her marriage, she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.”
Her ordinary marriage to Charles greatly lets her down, leading her to seek that intensity of emotion somewhere else, be it with expensive gifts she buys for the house and herself or with her love affairs. Her life is a life wasted for something that doesn’t exist in real life.
“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."
Both criticizing Emma and the society around her, notice the only positive character in the novel was the conventional and boring Charles, who sincerely loved his wife; Flaubert made the love story of the novel be the least important aspect and overshadowed by the portrayal of everything wrong in 19th-century French society like delusion, usury, corruption, ignorance, adultery, profiteering on somebody else’s expense and glorification of feelings that lead to nowhere. People like Emma Bovary cannot survive in real life in a society like that, unlike other characters who were more adept for life.
Flaubert fluctuates between irony and compassion in his portrayal of the downfall of his heroine, with his precise eye he paints the social milieu of his time earning the place among the greatest realist writers.
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One of the finest works of French realism, review to come.