Madame Bovary is one of the classics of the Realist movement, and so how you feel about it is going to depend on how you feel about detailed depictions of the lives of people who aren’t terrible monsters but who do kind of… well, suck.  I’m always torn on this period of literature because I can appreciate the skill involved in creating such fully-fleshed out and believable characters, but I don’t at all enjoy reading about them.

Madame Bovary follows Emma, a beautiful and romantically-inclined woman who, wanting desperately to experience great love and passion, falls into a series of poor decisions.  As a young woman, believing herself to be in love, she marries Charles Bovary, a doctor and frankly a bore of a person, and when her life quickly becomes dull and mundane, she turns to extramarital affairs for passion and purpose.  Despite the book’s scandalous reputation, Emma only has two lovers, and in both cases she does for a time believe she truly loves them (and in one case, the man seems to love her back, at least at first.) But Emma’s idea of love is based on novels (Madame Bovary being also part of that odd genre of 19th century literature, in which a novelist decries the effects of a different type of novel on usually female brains), and it is too shallow to withstand the realities of life.  Even as her loves disappoint her, Emma also fights against the dullness of middle class life, and it is ultimately not her infidelities, but her extravagance, that brings about the book’s tragic end.

It is actually this last trait that saves the book for me.  If this were an example of a moralistic story, where a woman is punished for daring to want more than the little society deems acceptable for her, I would hate it, but that’s not really Emma’s problem.  Yes, she is jealous of what she sees as the greater freedoms accorded to men, and Flaubert even seems sympathetic to her complaints about the restrictions on women, but what Emma is really jealous of is the freedom of wealth.  Emma and her husband are middle-class, and Flaubert, while setting them in contrast to the extreme poor, also shows the ways in which Emma’s love of romance exposes her not just to wild ideas about love, but about the sensual life, and how her desire for a life that is more than the practicalities destroys her.  One of my favorite parts of the book is a scene in which Emma is seduced by her aristocratic lover while, in the background, a village fair goes on, with speeches extolling the virtues of agriculture and other industries.  It is this solid, practical and useful life that Emma disdains; this, not her desire for love, is her real character flaw.

But the real strength of Flaubert is in the description of his characters.  Even in their most tragic moments, like the somewhat melodramatic ending, they feel extremely real,

to the point that when Emma was panicking over her financial situation and not wanting to face Charles, I actually found myself thinking “she’s going to decide to kill herself” before the thought occurred to her.

The details of Emma’s dissatisfaction and recklessness, Charles’ placid contentment, Leon’s own romantic illusions, etc all feel true to life.  Even the secondary characters like the ambitious pharmacist Homais are carefully crafted.

This book is a masterpiece of characterization, although at times his descriptions are a little too wordy. Beautiful turns of phrase that devastate you alongside the plot events. Love Flaubert’s use of free indirect discourse. 

Emma just became more and more irritating until I just stopped caring what happened. Charles was also obnoxious, just in a different way. Ultimately I read a spoiler summary and realized the rest of the plot was not worth the time. I hate cheating in books anyway so I was already prepared to DNF if I wasn’t enjoying it.

A perfect little novel. The prose is fantastic and the mapping out of the tragicomedy is so clever and sensitive to the nuances of human life. I feel so so bad for Charles and Berthe but I could empathise also with the dissatisfaction that Emma experienced. A book for our times, when we are constantly encouraged to yearn for more exotic experiences rather than treasure the people around us.