Review of Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"

In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert provides readers with an acute and penetrating psychological analysis of Emma, a beautiful woman who marries Charles Bovary, mainly to escape the stifling confines of her father’s farm. Charles is a good man—honest, committed, loving—and a doctor to boot, making him, by conventional standards, a “good catch”, and yet Emma finds herself deeply unhappy with the ordinariness and monotony of middle class family life. Rather than making an effort to find contentment in her own circumstances, she seeks escape by having adulterous affairs, first with the handsome noble Randolph, then with the young clerk Leon. They ultimately do not satisfy her; even worse, her affairs sow destruction and, in the process, bring ruin to the innocent victims in her life, namely Charles and their daughter Bertha. The moral, it seems, is rather basic: succumbing to one’s desires, rather than accepting societal norms that restrain egotistical behaviour, ultimately produces pain and suffering. But there are other moral sub-plots that challenge this interpretation, such as the success of the selfish moneylender Lheureux and the flourishing of the venal pharmacist Homais. Reasonable people will disagree on the main moral purpose of the book, or whether there is any unifying moral theme at all, but few will disagree that Madam Bovary expresses these ideas with a poetic, lyrical, and beautiful prose.

Frustrated Expectations

The prospects for a happy marriage between Emma and Charles initially seem very good. Her mother dies young, but Emma is raised by her father, Pere Rouault, one of the upstanding characters of the book. He is a decent, hardworking man committed to the well-being of his farm, community, and daughter; he provides a good role model, one assumes, for how to find happiness within the confines of family and household. Charles enters their life one day because Pere Rouault has an accident and breaks his leg, and requires medical assistance. The good doctor visits frequently and helps to mend Rouault’s injury. At the time, Charles has frequent contact with the beautiful Emma, but he is in a somewhat loveless marriage with the wealthy but much older and neurotic Madam Dubuc. His wife’s unexpected death opens an opportunity for another relationship, and at this point Charles begins to pursue Emma.

One fascinating aspect of this part of the book is the courtship rituals in mid-19^th century rural France. In order to obtain Emma, Charles must convince her and her father. This endeavour was not that difficult, since Emma wanted to leave the stifling confines of the farm, and imagined that marriage would consist of endless happiness. Pere Rouault, naturally, wanted a good catch for his daughter, and Charles, the committed doctor who mended his leg, fit the profile. To proceed with the courtship, Charles approaches Pere Rouault rather than Emma to express his feelings; Emma’s father already knows, and must consult with her to ensure consent. This requirement of approval of both father and daughter would, one might think, act as a kind of prophylactic barrier that would prevent incompatible persons from marrying. In most cases, perhaps; but not, unfortunately, for Charles and Emma.

Emma discovers that marriage, household, and middle class small-town life are not what they are cracked up to be. Charles is committed to her, their daughter, and his medical practice, but he bores her to death (quite literally; see below). One reason for these frustrated expectations is that her father was not the main influence on her beliefs about marriage and family. During her formative years Emma spent several years at a convent, where she had the opportunity to read novels which exposed her to medieval ideals of chivalry. The ideal man was heroic, autonomous, independent, adventurous, courageous, and dominant while being submissive and sensitive to the whims of his lady. In the morning he would fearlessly trot to the battlefield and mercilessly slaughter his Saracen opponents, by the evening he was on his knees, gently caressing and kissing his wife’s hands. Her ideal man had multiple talents, could speak multiple languages, and would be a source of endless stimulation—mental, physical, and spiritual. This kind of love, thought Emma, would be “like 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”; even more, it would last until death.

Charles (and perhaps no flesh and blood male) could never meet this standard, causing her domestic unhappiness. Her affair with Randolph was the first attempt to seek escape in the arms of another. He is a handsome landowner with a castle, and encounters the Bovary couple when he visits Charles for a minor medical procedure (Charles practiced medicine from home). He is immediately attracted to Emma. During this period, Emma is having health problems associated with her unhappiness, and the good-natured but naïve Charles encourages her to take up horseback riding with Randolph. Randolph seizes the opportunity during their excursions, and successfully seduces her. As often happens, Randolph spoke the sweet words of love but was mainly interested in the adventure, while Emma fell head over heels for him, although her emotions were probably an exaggerated reaction to finally escaping the monotony of family life and (briefly) finding sexual fulfillment. While Emma is enraptured by these feelings, she proposes that they escape together. Emma imagines that it is her opportunity to finally achieve eternal bliss. Bertha (her child), meanwhile, is almost an afterthought. When Randolph brings up the issue, she says, half-heartedly and reluctantly, that they could take Bertha with them. All of a sudden, the scheme seems less compelling to Randolph; it would mean forcibly taking Bertha away from her father and assuming responsibility for Emma and her daughter. Emma, so consumed by her feelings, is completely oblivious to the question of whether this might not be in little Bertha’s interest. Randolph can be somewhat more rational about the situation; he calls it off and terminates the affair.

Emma falls into despair and becomes unwell, and Charles, the good but naïve husband who is unsuspecting of the cause of her illness, tends to her needs through this difficult period. At least partially because of Charles’ care, she eventually recovers, and one would think that this experience would lead Emma to re-evaluate her beliefs. Had Emma been more reflective, she may have recognized that her pursuit of exalted feelings and extra-marital affairs was unhealthy, and that Charles, although not the knight in shining armour of her medieval fantasies, was a decent man and a good husband, and that she should commit herself to their marriage and their daughter Bertha. Flaubert, perhaps recognizing that many readers of Madam Bovary expected that development, insinuates the possibility: while she and Charles are at an opera about love’s inevitable frustrations, she recognizes “the pettiness of the passions”. But this brief ray of light is instantly overshadowed when she sees Leon, the young clerk to whom she was previously attracted but with whom the relationship was never consummated. They had not seen each other for three years, and during that time Leon had matured, became more confident, and was now, unlike in the past, willing to seduce Emma. He lives in Rouen, and Emma needs an excuse to visit the city frequently. She decides that piano lessons would do the trick, and convinces Charles, who, of course, suspects nothing.

Emma once again finds sexual fulfillment, but it is only temporary. When the rush of the affair’s debut wears off, she discovers that Leon, like Charles, is rather ordinary. Nonetheless, she continues the betrayal, which requires more and more lying, leading to a moral degradation which multiplies her woes. The affair and all its little lies costs money, and she goes further and further into debt, a spiral which is enabled by the unscrupulous financier Monsieur Lheureux. Her debts become unpayable, and the hapless Charles becomes mired in this needless and preventable bankruptcy—moral and financial. Creditors obtain court orders to seize their property, which would mean poverty for her, Charles, and most importantly, Bertha. Emma desperately tries to find a solution—asking her former lovers for loans to get her out of the mess, proposing to Leon that he steal the money, offering to sleep with Monsieur Lheureux, but to no avail. Unable to accept this impending destruction, she opts for suicide by swallowing poison.

Emma’s slow death is one of the more harrowing scenes of the book, partly because of how realistic it is. There are scenes familiar to anyone who has been at the deathbed of another and witnesses their final days and hours. Breathing becomes rapid and strained, while certain facial expressions express an inner turmoil, perhaps reflecting the body’s final resistance to the inevitable. As the end approaches ever nearer, a certain calm and tranquility can be observed in the person’s breathing or facial expression; subsequently, there is one last violent jolt of the body and moment of consciousness before the last breath. As Emma is going through these phases, Charles, distraught beyond words, is kneeling at the side of the bed, his head leaned against her and holding her hand, and before her step into oblivion she has a moment of genuine affection for him and caresses his hair. The man she betrayed and financially destroyed loves her unconditionally, and she, at last, reciprocates, but only briefly, and when it is too late.

Reaping What You Did Not Sow

The good doctor and committed husband experiences unspeakable grief, and one would hope that this loss, although traumatic, would be an opportunity to move on, rebuild his medical practice and financial stability, perhaps even meet someone new, while ensuring that Bertha is well-raised. This scenerio would likely have satisfied the reader’s pity for Charles and the wish for some sort of redemption after all his underserved travails. But his despair is multiplied when he discovers the correspondence between Emma and both of her lovers, where she details her love for them and her contempt for Charles. The spiral of depression takes a nosedive, he isolates himself, loses the capacity to recover, and joins Emma to an early grave. Their daughter, Bertha, will consequently grow up in a life of poverty and hardship. Emma’s wish to escape the mediocrity of middle-class married life, and the consequent adulterous affairs, sowed destruction on the people, Charles and Bertha, who least deserved it. Her enablers, meanwhile, escaped unscathed and even flourished: the unscrupulous money lender Lheureux continues his profitable activity; Randolph proceeds with the life of idleness and leisure typical of many nobles who inherit wealth; and Leon has a successful career as a notary, marries and settles down.

This climax, although not a happy ending, is emotionally powerful. I finished reading Madam Bovary the evening of the day before my book club discussion on the book (November 24^th, 2018), and when I went to bed, I could not stop thinking about the fates of the characters, particularly the Bovary family. Like other readers, I felt immense pity and sadness for Charles and Bertha. This is no coincidence; Flaubert, in his private correspondence with his lover Colet, said that that was precisely his intention when developing Charles’ character. His untimely demise, for no fault other than marrying the wrong person, offends one’s sense of justice, a feeling exacerbated by the fact that Emma’s enablers—Randolph, Leon, and Lheureux—proceed to live happy and prosperous lives. Flaubert evidently wanted to sketch a hyper-realist portrayal of a world where outcomes do not neatly fit our ethical presuppositions. Bad things happen to good people, the latter of which are victims of underserved calamities by virtue of arbitrary circumstances or unforeseen consequences. Bad or selfish people, on the other hand, often flourish because of random processes over which they or others have little control. Flaubert presents this profound, raw, unvarnished, and unsettling reality with a compelling tale and gorgeous style of writing which leaves an enduring impression and which justly renders Madame Bovary a must-read in the pantheon of classics.