Madame Bovary is another one of those novels I first read long ago. When I read it, in my twenties, I found it boring, a labor to read. I enjoyed it now. It is deservedly regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time. But I do see why I found it boring.

Madame Bovary is about boredom. The novel is about the experience of being dissatisfied with a plain life while dreaming of romance, passion, and excitement. Emma Bovary knows that thrilling love affairs and liberating ecstasies exist, she reads about them in books, but her own life, and the life the reader encounters when he reads about her, is small, simple, mundane. I was bored with her life, as I read it forty years ago, as she is bored with it, and I longed for the book to include the kinds of things that Madame Bovary herself longs for. This reading, I recognized the tragedy of her life. Now I know the fantasies we have and I know how dreams sometimes remain unrealized. Though Emma Bovary behaves recklessly, betrays her husband, neglects her child, as I matured more fully she became a sympathetic character to me. Or at least I had some sympathy for her, while also judging her a fool.

Emma Bovary is the daughter of a farmer who becomes the wife of an unimpressive country doctor. She’s lives in rural village. There’s an inn, and a pharmacy, a dry goods store, and a village church, but there’s no theater, fine dining, or dancing. There’s no beauty except natural beauty. Her husband loves her but doesn’t excite her. He’s a disappointment. Her marriage is a disappointment. Her doom comes when she reaches toward her desires: a lover, another, material luxuries, and though her reach can touch them briefly, they slip from her grasp.

The novel begins not with Emma but with Charles Bovary. Charles is introduced as a boy with his family. He goes to school. He passes his medical exams after a second attempt. His mother helps him find a suitable setting to run his practice and a suitable wife. His mother will remain an important character throughout the novel. Charles’ first wife dies. Charles meets Emma when he’s called to set a broken bone for Emma’s father. They woo. They marry.

“Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was experiencing was love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and intoxication which had seemed so beautiful to her in books (p. 30).

But Charles is no romantic character from one of her novels:

“He had never been curious, he said, when he lived in Rouen, to go to the theater and see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim , or fence, or fire a pistol, and he could not explain to her, one day a riding term she had come upon in a novel. But shouldn’t a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries?” (p. 35).

In exchange for some successful medical attention, Charles and Emma are invited to a ball. Emma, for an evening, experiences the kind of life she desires. She dances with a Vicomte and the next day, as she and Charles ride home she finds a cigar case dropped in the road that she believes belonged to dancing partner. But the glimpse of the high life makes her low life even more lowly. She grows irritable and ill. Thinking a change of scenery will cure her, the couple moves to a village outside Rouen called Yonvill-l’Abbaye.

This begins Part II, page 59. The novel is divided into three parts, a short part one followed by two equally long parts two and three, each part further divided into many small chapters.

Emma finds she is pregnant.

“She wanted a son. He would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this idea of having a male child was a sort of hoped-for compensation for all her past helplessness. A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back” (p. 77).

She has a daughter, Berthe. They live next door to an obsequious pharmacist named Homais and his wife and two young children. (Flaubert has much fun with the comical figure Homais.) Several other villagers are introduced: the woman who owns the inn, the mayor, a wet nurse, the cure of the parish church, a tax collector named Binet, and a shopkeeper named Lheureux. The village life is imagined charmingly and convincingly.

Emma entertains herself by buying, on credit, furniture and clothes from Lheureux. And she begins a flirting romance with a young clerk named Leon. He moons about her and wonders what to do with her.

“As for Emma, she never questioned herself to find out if she loved him. Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning,–a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss” (p. 87).

Leon moves to Rouen to study law.

Emma finds another lover, Rodolphe, a worldly man who owns property outside the village. Flaubert makes it clear that Rodolphe is interested in Emma only as a mistress. She is not his first. He intends to toy with her for a time, excite her, and dismiss her, which is exactly what he does. The sex is described discreetly: “with a long tremor she gave herself up to him” (p. 141). Emma, of course, takes the affair much more seriously. She gives Rodolphe expensive presents. She demands to see him. She surprises him at his home. Eventually she insists that he take her away. She buys a traveling cloak and trunks and hides the purchases from her husband.

There’s a marvelous scene that takes place the night before the elopement as Charles and Emma lie together in their bed. Charles is making plans for their young daughter, Berthe: boarding school, piano lessons, how she would grow to resemble her mother, “they would find her some decent boy with a solid profession; he would make her happy; it would last forever” (p. 171). Meanwhile, Emma, awake beside him is dreaming of the horses carrying her and her lover away, mountain tops, domed cities, “bridges, ships, groves of lemon trees, and cathedrals of white marble on whose sharp steeples storks were nesting.” The vision ends with she and Rodolphe living together “in a low house, with a flat roof, shaded by a palm tree, at the far end of a bay, by the edge of the sea. They would go out in a gondola, they would swing in a hammock; their life would be as easy and ample as their silken clothing, all warm and starry like the soft nights on which they gazed” (p. 172).

But her ardor has frightened Rodolphe away. He sends her a note hidden at the bottom of a basket of apricots telling her it was not to be and skips town.

This throws Emma into a long, serious illness. Eventually, to bring Emma out of her depression, the pharmacist, Homais, recommends that Charles take Emma to the opera, in Rouen, a carriage ride of a few hours away. The attend the opera, Emma is entranced, Charles is confused (it’s Lucia di Lammermoor). In the lobby during one of the intermissions, Charles runs into Leon, now working in Rouen. They miss the third act of the opera so Charles suggests that Emma stay a second night in Rouen and see the end of the opera with Leon, while Charles goes back to Yonville and his appointments. They agree. Part II ends. Part III begins.

Emma and Leon alone, and Charles away, they reignite their love affair, now consummated in the back of a cab racing through town. Emma contrives to permit Charles to allow her to travel to Rouen once a week on Thursdays, for “piano lessons” where she meets Leon in a regular hotel room they begin to think of as “ours.”

Madame Bovary has the reputation of being a novel about sex. When it was published (serialized in 1856, in book form in 1857) it faced an obscenity trial. But it’s not the adultery, it’s bad debts that eventually ruin Emma and her family. She buys and spends beyond her means. She buys on credit. She borrows. She offers collateral that is worth less than she imagines. She pays off part of a debt then writes promissory notes for the balance at a higher sum, which she still fails to meet. She doesn’t understand interest or that debts owed to a friend can be sold to someone lacking the friend’s grace.

At last her creditors, principally Lheureux the shopkeeper in Yonville, call in their debts. The entire Bovary household is to be reposessed. Emma, still hoping to hide the situation from Charles, tries everywhere to raise money: family, friends, Leon, and eventually even Rodolphe. Failing to get what she needs, she breaks into the pharmacist’s storeroom and swallows arsenic.

Here, the story that had been moving quickly through several years slows nearly to a stop. There is a long episode of Emma slowly dying from the poison. Then a long episode of Emma being prepared for burial and buried. As the novel began before Charles met Emma, it ends with Charles after Emma’s death. He discovers the letter that Rodolphe sent to Emma when he broke off their affair, which Charles misinterprets as a statement of noble affection. But when he opens the locked desk drawer where Emma saved the love letters from both Leon and Rodolphe, her unfaithfulness is clear, even to the trusting, naive, and always loving Charles.

Far from being a novel in which sin goes unpunished (the claim of the original obscenity trial) the consequences of Emma’s choices are severe. Not only does she die, painfully, but Emma’s suicide ruins Charles emotionally and financially. There’s a brief summing up in the closing pages. Leon marries. Other minor characters have their future’s sketched. Charles dies. Berthe is sent to live with Charles’ mother. When the grandmother dies soon thereafter, Bethe is sent to an aunt who sends the girl to work in a cotton mill.

I chose to re-read Madame Bovary now because I knew it was one of those great books that I felt my first reading had probably failed to give proper due and I should try again. I’m glad I did. Coincidentally, before I started reading, I finished Crowned Heads, by Thomas Tryon, which mentions Madame Bovary and where one of the characters gives a note to another character hidden at the bottom of a basket of apricots, the same strategy Rodolphe uses, so I felt with the coincidence of one book pointing to a book I was already thinking about, I was on the right track.

I bought an inexpensive Union Square and Co. “signature edition” which used the original English translation done by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (Karl Marx’s daughter, interestingly enough) first published in 1886 but now in the public domain. The edition included an introduction by a Burton Rascoe from 1920. I was immediately unhappy with some awkward and confusing language in both the introduction and the opening pages of the novel and I wondered if I could do better. An internet search led me to the highly praised translation by Lydia Davis published in 2010 (there are many others). The library had a copy.

I found Davis’ translation very readable. I also appreciated her introduction and a lengthy section of notes at the end which explain references Flaubert makes to objects, people, and books that would be common knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century but are obscure now.

So what makes it great? The detailed psychological examination reminded me of Proust. It’s a story of obsession and the way obsessives turn every incident over and over and over. Like Cervantes it’s a story of a hero/heroine lead astray by fiction. The language is straightforward in a way that feels very contemporary. It’s a style of no-style, as some have commented, but artful as much as it needs to be. Proust said there wasn’t a single metaphor in the entire novel, which is manifestly untrue, but it makes his point. There are a few wonderful scenes: the side-by-side dreams of Charles and Emma that I mentioned, the scene at the opera, the mad cab-ride through Rouen with Leon and Emma (you know without being told) having sex in the back. The plotting is very good, for instance the way that Lheureux is introduced humorously and inconspicuously early in the novel, the way the arsenic is revealed to be stored unsecured at the pharmacy. Scenes often end with a killing detail that brings fantasy back to earth, like Emma waking from post-sex reverie with Rodolphe to find him casually smoking a cigar and working with his penknife. Flaubert is so gentle with his characters but also cutting of their delusions. You can’t always tell if he loves them, pities them, or despises them. We laugh with and at them, and then, if we’ve read clearly must end by laughing at ourselves.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.