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A review by fatima4reads
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
4.0
“It didn’t matter! She was not happy and never had been. Why was life so inadequate, why did the things she depended on turn immediately to dust? … Yet if somewhere there existed a strong, handsome being, with a valorous nature, at once exalted and refined, with the heart of a poet in the shape of an angel, a lyre with strings of brass, sounding elegiac epithalamiums to the heavens, then why mightn’t she, by chance, find him? Oh, how impossible! And anyway, nothing was worth the difficulty of such a search; everything was a lie! Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every pleasure its own disgust, and the sweetest kisses left on your lips no more than a vain longing for a more sublime pleasure.”
I honestly can’t tell if I hate Emma Bovary or if I pity her.
I think at first I pitied her, then I hated her, then when she swallowed a handful of arsenic I went back to pitying her.
Emma really does live in her own mind, which she has filled with out of touch thoughts about the reality she lives in. She couldn’t be happy with herself no matter what she did, and even when she thought she was getting what she had always wanted, it was never enough for her, there was always something missing.
I was baffled by how she completely loathed Charles even though he was nothing but sweet to her, and she went on to cheat on him with not one, but two different men who did nothing but use her. In the end she not only ruined her own life, but her husband’s, and her little girl’s future, all for vanity.
Finally I just want to say that carriage scene is iconic.
I honestly can’t tell if I hate Emma Bovary or if I pity her.
I think at first I pitied her, then I hated her, then when she swallowed a handful of arsenic I went back to pitying her.
Emma really does live in her own mind, which she has filled with out of touch thoughts about the reality she lives in. She couldn’t be happy with herself no matter what she did, and even when she thought she was getting what she had always wanted, it was never enough for her, there was always something missing.
I was baffled by how she completely loathed Charles even though he was nothing but sweet to her, and she went on to cheat on him with not one, but two different men who did nothing but use her. In the end she not only ruined her own life, but her husband’s, and her little girl’s future, all for vanity.
Finally I just want to say that carriage scene is iconic.