By Lechi Eke
Madame Bovary is a tragic story of adultery written and published in series in the Revue de Paris from October 1 to December 15, 1856. Thereafter, it was published in two volumes the following year in 1857.
Using a somewhat common story of a middle-class woman’s infidelity which comes from her quest to fulfil her life’s fantasy, Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) weaved an insightful and weighty story of human behaviour. The author’s exposition of the intricate inner human struggles of his title character, Madame Bovary, sets the book apart.
Flaubert is able to examine and expose the challenges of an insatiable soul, a discontented heart. Madame Bovary’s quest for romantic fantasy, for a better life is the story of humanity. This literary oeuvre became a masterpiece, in fact Flaubert’s masterpiece.
This work became the magnum opus of the realism movement on the European literary stage. Its carefully wrought rhythmic prose is comparable only to poetry. Flaubert paid attention to diction, to style. He had spent five years writing and rewriting Madame Bovary.
The realist novelist got into trouble with the French government for this novel. The government accused him of obscenity. He was arrested and charged to court. Although he was later discharged and acquitted, the trial drew so much publicity that by the time the story was released in a book form in 1857, it sold wildly.
The story begins with young Charles Bovary grappling with fitting into his new school and being scoffed at by his mates. He is timid, dull and not book smart as we would say today. He stumbles through high school and eventually goes to medical school where he fails before passing poorly to become a second-rate village doctor.
His mother thereafter arranges a “good” marriage for him with a rich widow who later dies leaving nothing much to her widower. Later, Charles meets and falls in love with the daughter of one of his patients, a young very beautiful farm girl who has been raised in a convent. Her name is Emma.
This is where the story swings focus to Emma. She loves and reads romantic novels and has fantasies of an idealized marriage. But in reality, marriage is nothing near what Emma fantasizes. She has thought that marriage will meet all her needs.
A great ball in the home of a wealthy man, throws Emma into depression as the reality of what she is missing is thrown in her face. She soon falls sick and even the expectation of a little one on the way doesn’t lift her spirit. Her husband decides to move his family to a town – from the village of Tostes, to Yonville believing it will help his wife’s health.
It turns out that Emma needs an idealized life filled with romantic love and money and not even the birth of her daughter soothes her. In fact, she wants a son, not a daughter.
It is in Yonville that Emma meets a law clerk, Leon by name who employs the fantasy of romantic novels to escape dreary backwoods town life. Leon, who is as depressed as Emma, falls in love with the beautiful Emma. She, on learning this, pulls back and busies herself with raising her daughter and attending to her husband out of guilt. Leon cannot wait forever for unreciprocated love. He leaves for Paris to study law. Emma becomes very despondent.
Not long after that she meets a neighbour named Rodolphe who is wealthy. Rodolphe falls for Emma’s beauty and makes overtures to her. Emma grabs the opportunity and they begin an illicit love affair right under her husband’s nose!
Charles Bovary’s mediocre lifestyle and practice do not help the situation because at that time, he and a fellow quack named Homais attempt to operate on a patient’s clubfoot and failing, they bring in an expert who amputates the foot incurring his wife’s disgust even more.
Contrary to African way of practising love, Emma becomes the one who gives gifts to Rodolphe. At the same time, she makes desperate needy demands on him like asking him to elope with her and Berthe, her daughter.
Rudolphe soon tires of her demands and stops seeing her. This shatters Emma who falls sick and almost dies.
At this time, Charles Bovary is in debt and trying to pay off Emma’s debts which she incurs from buying gifts for her lover and for her medical treatment. One day, Emma’s gullible husband takes her to the city (Rouen) to see an opera. There, the unforeseen happens – Emma meets Leon again, and a fresh affair starts. This time, full swing!
You all know how expensive extra marital affairs are (chuckles), Emma runs into deeper debts from stealing away to the city to see her love interest, many times almost getting caught because of her carelessness. The money lender (Lheureux) continues to lend Emma money with higher interests until she acquires a great debt and Lheureux begins to demand payment, even asking that his debtor sells her family property to pay.
Desperate, Emma runs around to raise money, even going to her former lover Rodolphe, but no help comes from anyone. Afraid that her husband will find out and with nothing else to do, Emma commits suicide by taking arsenic powder!
Her silly doting husband overwhelmed with grieve goes on mourning her and trying to pay her huge debts until he discovers her love letters to other men. He blames her infidelity on fate, but becomes despondent.
Eventually, Charles Bovary dies in his garden and their only child Berthe goes to work in a cotton factory.
Excerpts from Madame Bovary –
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tags: dreams, hope
She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tags: disappointment, disillusionment, gilding, idols, touch
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright…Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tags: book, reading
Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,–a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tags: infinity, passion, time
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tags: books, literature, reading
One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be – tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tags: philosophical
She was not happy–she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life–this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet’s heart in an angel’s form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! How impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tags: despair, future, life
The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tags: detachment, idolatry, idols, love-disappointment