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apechild 's review for:
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
This is a fantastic read - not the happiest of endings. Kind of a cautionary tale about unwise marriages - perhaps why someone people should never get married - and certainly why some people should never have credit cards - ok, this is historical, so it's just credit, but it all boils down to the same thing - merrily spending money you haven't got for things you don't need in the mad belief that they will fill a hole in your life and make you happy. Ultimately it's the money that is Emma Bovary's downfall, and it's this that drives her to take her own life. And she leaves her husband to live in the mess she's left. I did feel sorry for her at the beginning of the book, but by the time she was getting to the point of extreme overspending and getting bored with her second lover, I found her self-centered, irrational, in desperate need of a reality check and deserving of all the bad luck that came to her. And then she commits suicide rather than facing up to all the crap she did. And I didn't feel sad when she died - oh how harsh I am!
At the start I did feel sorry for her. She made an unwise marriage with a guy who wasn't going to make her happy. He idolised her like some little doll, but I don't think they were ever equal partners who were interested in one another as people; and she wanted something more from life than the mediocrity he had to offer. To be fair, she's the kind of woman who should have been able to develope herself, have a job, earn her own money, learn to enjoy her own company and not be so dependent on men and those exciting feelings of first falling in love - because as she finds out, these feelings can't last in any relationship. And she's in a period of history when she can't do this - she's there to run her husband's home (and before that her father's), and as she's reasonably well to do, she gets these traditional six weeks after giving birth when she can rest up and the baby lives with the wet nurse. There's nothing real for her to do or aim towards in her life for herself. Which would drive anyone nuts.
But at the same time we've all got our problems with life, and the way to survive in a way is to become disillushioned - to realise that this romantic love and passion from novels doesn't actually exist, that the world doesn't owe you a living or a happy ending. You've got to make what you can from what life hands you. Emma is quite dumb in a way, well, not developed as a person in her own right and always reliant on men - her father keeps her, then her husband. And it's not actually her that iniates the affairs, but the two men she's attracted to. Even with the living on credit, she's originally persuaded by the money lender and salesman to buy all these things and take out all these credit notes. But once these men have put these ideas in her head, she takes them all to the extreme, expecting these passionate, quite frankly ridiculous sounding love affair, spending far too much money, taking out credit to clear old credit etc etc... and eventually falls into a great mess of her own making.
It is a really great read.
At the start I did feel sorry for her. She made an unwise marriage with a guy who wasn't going to make her happy. He idolised her like some little doll, but I don't think they were ever equal partners who were interested in one another as people; and she wanted something more from life than the mediocrity he had to offer. To be fair, she's the kind of woman who should have been able to develope herself, have a job, earn her own money, learn to enjoy her own company and not be so dependent on men and those exciting feelings of first falling in love - because as she finds out, these feelings can't last in any relationship. And she's in a period of history when she can't do this - she's there to run her husband's home (and before that her father's), and as she's reasonably well to do, she gets these traditional six weeks after giving birth when she can rest up and the baby lives with the wet nurse. There's nothing real for her to do or aim towards in her life for herself. Which would drive anyone nuts.
But at the same time we've all got our problems with life, and the way to survive in a way is to become disillushioned - to realise that this romantic love and passion from novels doesn't actually exist, that the world doesn't owe you a living or a happy ending. You've got to make what you can from what life hands you. Emma is quite dumb in a way, well, not developed as a person in her own right and always reliant on men - her father keeps her, then her husband. And it's not actually her that iniates the affairs, but the two men she's attracted to. Even with the living on credit, she's originally persuaded by the money lender and salesman to buy all these things and take out all these credit notes. But once these men have put these ideas in her head, she takes them all to the extreme, expecting these passionate, quite frankly ridiculous sounding love affair, spending far too much money, taking out credit to clear old credit etc etc... and eventually falls into a great mess of her own making.
It is a really great read.