Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners [Paperback]

I came to Madame Bovary through a perhaps fairly commonplace contemporary window - Julian Barnes's masterful 1984 novel 'Flaubert's Parrot'. Barnes, for those who are unfamiliar with him, is a Francophile English novelist who grabbed me when I was younger and I now read omnivorously. Flaubert's Parrot is a fascinating playful novel meditating on life, art, and especially Flaubert and his life and work, and especially Madame Bovary.

Of course, I was slightly wary of Madame Bovary's massive classic status. It easily holds its own in the pantheon of top five novels ever or something. But to read some of the reviews you might think Emma Bovary was a moderately attractive provincial slapper who got what she deserved.

People who think this clearly have no understanding human psychology. For on a first reading (most novels one reading suffices, but for Madame Bovary it was clear that it demands many subsequent re-readings) it was clear that Flaubert's succes du scandale is perhaps the greatest realist novel ever.

His style is supremely elegant, yet not dated in the way many of his 19th Century contemporaries have become. His subject is the world and its everymen - provincial people, limited in education, with vulgar and at hypocritical mores. His themes are timeless - the disjunction between people's idealised projection of themselves and the reality of their lives, the power dynamics of human relationships, the machinations of the heart, the difficulties of communication between people who live closely knit lives. His characters shine through not as mere holograms but as shining paragons of convincing personalities - the plodding mediocre husband, the frustrated wife, the feckless libertine and (my favourite) the tedious community worthy. These are not cliches but exemplars of so much human existence brought to life by the brilliance of Flaubert's style (he only wrote 25 words a day - slow progress, but well worth it).

Move over Steegmuller, move over Lowell Bair, Margaret Mauldon's translation is fantastic. The translation flows with elegant ease. This translation has proved better and more accurate than any other, as far as I can tell. I highly recommend this translation.

Flaubert claimed to absent himself from his work, to be "everywhere present and yet nowhere visible," and in some points in "Bovary" this technical detachment seems to effect a sense of icy-cold objectivity. And yet every time I read the novel it becomes clearer that it was written in a state of intense emotion, of excruciating moral striving and almost blood-thirsty savagery. With every choice of every "right word" is embedded Flaubert's love or Flaubert's hate, and sometimes both love and hate at once.

What does Flaubert hate? He certainly seems to hate cliche, and Emma's days are wasted in pursuit of one cliche after another. She does not love the three men in her life, or her daughter, or God, or anyone, but sees them as more or less suitable accessories to the cloying romance she would like to make of her life. To say that Flaubert hates the idea of the bourgeois is accurate but potentially misleading. For him, the bourgeois has almost nothing to do with social class and everything to do with a failure to look and think for oneself, everything to do with giving in to the temptation to accept easy generalities ("received ideas") and ignore the value in the minutia of everyday life. Emma does not notice, as careful readers will, the depravity of the aristocrats at the ball because she does not observe them; she is only interested in the *idea* of aristocrats and in how being among them reflects on her. This has nothing to do with being middle class or with being for or against the establishment. Emma adopts anti-establishment attitudes, and certainly transgresses against social custom, but this is Emma at her worst; her affectations are no more admirable than Leon's poeticized histrionics or the pose of Byronic nihilism with which Rodolphe lures Emma into bed. Homais is a self-styled "free thinker," and even a ludicrous sort of bohemian at times, but this doesn't involve any actual thinking or looking.

Cliche is not just an artistic or intellectual sin for Flaubert, but an ethical lapse. (For Flaubert, almost as much as for Aquinas, the good cannot be divorced from the beautiful or the true.) Emma's failure of imagination leads her to brutalize her husband, her daughter, and herself. The novels she reads as a girl might perhaps contain some emotional truths, but Emma reads them literally, expecting that her life will resemble them almost perfectly, even down to the level of interior decoration. Life, of course, fails to oblige, and Emma suffers greatly and causes great suffering. Flaubert truly is attracted to something about Emma's striving, I think, and manages to evoke a great deal of sympathy for her when her flimsy worlds start to spin apart at the end of the novel, but this does not undo the damage she has done.

What is less obvious about Flaubert, or at least less talked about, is what he loves--particulars, close observation, artistic and scientific precision, the poetry of the quotidian, truth, honesty, beauty, ordinary decency, and (surprisingly) intense passion--as can be seen in part in his description of Dr. Lariviere: "He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of Bichat, to that generation . . . of philosophical practitioners, who, loving their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with enthusiasm and wisdom. . . . Disdainful of honours, of titles, and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospitallers, generous, fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, he would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect had not caused him to be feared as a demon. His glance, more penetrating than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected every lie athwart all assertions and all reticences." That "practising virtue without believing in it" part rings false to me, as if the author were protecting himself from the charge of sentimentality, but the passage still manages to demonstrate that Flaubert remains the romantic he was in his youth. He has just discovered the romance of the real.

It is in Charles, though, and through Charles's eyes that Flaubert's sense of value can be most clearly discerned. Dullard though he may be, and blind as he is to his wife's faults, his love for Emma and for Berthe is genuine, and he has a gift for happiness that is utterly beyond her or anyone else in the novel: "A meal together, a walk in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener . . . now made up the endless round of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, by her side, on the pillow, he watched the sunlight sinking into the down on her fair cheek, half hidden by the lappets of her night-cap. Seen thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on waking up, she opened and shut them rapidly many times. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, depths of different colours, that, darker in the centre, grew paler towards the surface of the eye. His own eyes lost themselves in these depths; he saw himself in miniature down to the shoulders, with his handkerchief round his head and the top of his shirt open." This handkerchief-headed dunce will experience misery, yes, but he is conscious in a way that Emma will never be, in a way that someone like Rodolphe could never even faintly comprehend.

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