And it is the money, not the adultery that is her undoing.Įmma’s hunger is not so much for novelistic romance (or adventure for that matter), but for hedonic experience (the men and the clothes, as a Sex and the City heroine, would describe it) her world is denying her. „Cependant, sur l’immensité de cet avenir qu’elle se faisait apparaître, rien de particulier ne surgissait les jours, tous magnifiques, se ressemblaient comme des flots et cela se balançait à l’horizon, infini, harmonieux, bleuâtre et couvert de soleil.”Įmma does not simply want to experience passion, as people do in romance novels. For even when she imagines a future for herself and Rudolphe she fails – she cannot imagine a series of happy events, but a sort of monotony of happiness, each day like the other. It’s tempting to blame Emma’s heightened expectations of life on books, but that tendency simplifies the existential angst the heroine feels. And she found her own existence unbearable. There was nothing else expected of her- not to work, not to travel, not to do anything much at all, other than to exist. She married her husband, moved to Tostes, had a daughter. But as I read, I was struck by the overwhelming sense of restriction and smallness in Emma’s life. What surprised me, is that whenever I used to read anything about the book, the emphasis was always on the novel reading that corrupts Emma. But love for Madame Bovary is not so much the heroine, tragic as she is in all her unfulfilled longings.
It’s the sort of novel that makes one fall in love with novels all over again. I would really love to read at least some passages of it in the original… and I have downloaded in French onto my Kindle. I read it in Polish translation and it made me double-up on my efforts of improving my French. If not for Nabokov’s essay about Madame Bovary in his Lectures on Literature, I’m not sure I would have reached for it at all. It sounded like a tragic version of Northanger Abbey.
It was mentioned to me so many times as the story of a married woman who gets corrupted by reading too many romances… well, I was fairly blasée about it. Do you know how sometimes you’ve been told a certain book is a classic so many times that you roughly know the details of the plot and think to yourself „well, what’s the big deal”? This was me and Madame Bovary.
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