Product Description

Novel in which a woman defies the standards of conventional French society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64143 in Books
• Published on: 1982-07-01
• Released on: 1982-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780553213416
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Madame Bovary is like the railroad stations erected in its epoch: graceful, even floral, but cast of iron." -- John Updike


From the Trade Paperback edition. -- Review

Review
"Madame Bovary is like the railroad stations erected in its epoch: graceful, even floral, but cast of iron." -- John Updike


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Customer Reviews

The Hope Diamond of Novels
Making a statement like Madame Bovary is the "greatest" novel ever written would be superfluous. It could be argued that it is the most perfectly written novel in the history of letters and that in creating it, Flaubert mastered the genre. What can't be argued is that it is one of the most influential novels ever written. It changed the face of literature as no other novel has, and has been appreciated and acknowledged by virtually every important novelist who was either Flaubert's contemporary or who came after him.

It's interesting to see the range in opinion that still surrounds this novel. Some of the Readers here at Amazon are morally affronted by the novel's central character, viewing her as something sinister and "unlikeable," and panning the novel for this reason. Such a reaction recalls the negative reviews Bovary engendered soon after its initial publication. It was attacked by many of the authorities of French literature at the time for being ugly and perverse, and for the impression that the novel presented no properly moral frame. These readers didn't "like" Emma much either, and they took their dislike out on her creator.

But this is one of the factors making Madame Bovary "modern". One of the hallmarks of modern novels is that they often portray unsympathetic characters, and Emma certainly falls into this category. How can we as readers "like" a woman who elbows her toddler daughter away from her so forcefully that the child "fell against the chest of drawers, and cut her cheek on the brass curtain-holder." After this pernicious behavior, Emma has a few brief moments of self-castigation and maybe even remorse, but very soon is struck by "what an ugly child" Berthe is. Emma's self-centeredness borders on solipsism. For readers looking for maternal instincts in their female characters or for a depiction of a devoted wife, they had better turn to Pearl S. Buck and The Good Earth, perhaps, rather than to Flaubert.

Much has been made of Flaubert's attempts to remove himself from the narrative, that he was searching for some sort of ultimate objectivity. His narrative technique is much more complex than that, however. It is his employment of a shifting narrative, sometimes objective, sometimes subjective, that again is an indicator of the novel's modernity. At times the narrator is merely reporting events or is involved in providing descriptive details. Yet often the authorial voice makes rather plain how the reader is to look at Emma and her plebeian persona. When she finally succumbs to Rodolphe and thinks she is truly in love, Flaubert becomes downright cynical: " `I've a lover, a lover,' she said to herself again and again, revelling in the thought as if she had attained a second puberty. At last she would know the delights of love, the feverish joys of which she had despaired. She was entering a marvelous world where all was passion, ecstasy, delirium."

Emma is a neurasthenic, in the modern sense, but in the 19th century she would have been said to suffer from hysteria, a mental condition diagnosed primarily in women. When her lovers leave her, she has what amounts to nervous breakdowns. After Rodolphe leaves her she makes herself so sick that she comes near death. Her imagination is much too powerful and too impressionable for her own good. This is part of the reason for Flaubert's oft-repeated quote, "Bovary, c'est moi." Flaubert was a neurasthenic as well and could easily work himself into a swoon as a result of his imaginative flights. There is even conjecture that he may have been, like Dostoevsky, an epileptic, and it is further intimated that this disorder was brought on by nerves, though this may be dubious, medically speaking.

Madame Bovary is not flawless, but it comes awfully close. It is one of the great controlled experiments in the fiction of any era. It even anticipates cinematic technique in many instances, but particularly in the scene at the Agricultural Fair. Note how Flaubert juxtaposes the utterly mundane activities and speeches occurring in the town square with Rodolphe's equally inane seduction of Emma in the empty Council Chamber above the square:

"He took her hand and she did not withdraw it."

"`General Prize!' cried the Chairman.'"

"`Just now, for instance, when I came to call on you...'"

"Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix."

"`...how could I know that I should escort you here?'"

"Seventy francs!"

"`And I've stayed with you, because I couldn't tear myself away, though I've tried a hundred times.'"

"Manure!"

This is representative Flaubert. With a few deft strokes, he lays the whole absurdity of both the seduction and the provincial's activities bare.

If you have read this book previously and have come away feeling demoralized and even angered, please try reading it again, this time concentrating on the richness of its metaphors, Flaubert's mastery of foreshadowing, symbolism and description. Maybe you will come away with your viewpoint changed. For those who have not yet read this classic of classics, I know that if your mind remains open, you will come away with an appreciation for this master-novelist and for this monumental work.

For my money, the preferred translation of Flaubert's novel
When I was teaching World Literature we began class each year reading Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." Unfortunately, this is the one novel that most needs to be read in its original language since Flaubert constructed each sentence of his book with the precision of a poet. As an example of the inherent problems of translation I would prepare a handout with four different versions of the opening paragraphs of "Madame Bovary." Each year my students would come to the same conclusion that I had already reached in selecting which version of the book they were to read: Lowell Bair's translation is the best of the lot. It is eminently readable, flowing much better than most of its competitors. Consequently, if you are reading "Madame Bovary" for pleasure or class, this is the translation you want to track down.

Flaubert's controversial novel is the first of the great "fallen women" novels that were written during the Realism period ("Anna Karenina" and "The Awakening" being two other classic examples). It is hard to appreciate that this was one of the first novels to offer an unadorned, unromantic portrayal of everyday life and people. For some people it is difficult to enjoy a novel in which they find the "heroine" to be such an unsympathetic figure; certainly the events in Emma Bovary's life have been done to death in soap operas. Still, along with Scarlett O'Hara, you have to consider Emma Bovary one of the archetypal female characters created in the last 200 years of literature. "Madame Bovary" is one of the greatest and most important novels, right up there with "Don Quixote" and "Ulysses." I just wish I was able to read in it French.

In Love With Love and Doomed From the Start
In this masterpiece of French literature, Gustave Flaubert tells the tale of Emma Bovary, née Roualt, an incurably romantic woman who finds herself trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage in a prosaic bourgeois French village, Yonville-l'Abbaye.

Her attempts to escape the tedium of her life through a series of adulterous affairs are thwarted by the reality that the men she chooses to love are shallow and self-centered and thus are unable to love anyone but themselves.

In love with a love that can never be and dreadfully overstretched financially, Emma finds herself caught in a downward spiral that can only end in tragedy.

Part of the difficulty, and the pleasure, of reading Madame Bovary comes from the fact the Flaubert refuses to embed his narrative with a moral matrix; he refuses, at least explicitly, to tell the reader, what, if any, moral lesson he should draw from the text.

It is this lack of moral viewpoint that made Madame Bovary shocking to Flaubert's contemporaries, so much so that Flaubert found himself taken to court for the novel's offenses to public and religious decency. Although today's readers will find no such apparent scandals in the book, they will still be challenged to make sense of both Emma and her story.

It is quite common to see Emma Bovary as silly, extravagant and much too romantically inclined. An avid consumer of romantic literature (a habit into which the heroine was indoctrinated in her convent school upbringing), Emma has made the morbid mistake of buying into the notion of romantic love in its fullest sense, and the mortal mistake of believing she can reach its fulfillment in her own life.

As such, Emma Bovary becomes a tragic figure of almost mythic proportion. Far from being foolish and self-indulgent, Emma is the victim of her own fecund imagination. A lesser woman would have been satisfied in the constrained world Emma inhabits, a world of sewing and teas and parties. But Emma is possessed of both splendid passions and tremendous energy; an artist and a rebel in her challenge to the priorities and ideals of her age.

Madame Bovary is an unusual novel in the sense that it has given its name to its own psychological condition: bovarysme, the condition in which we delude ourselves as to who and what we really are and as to life's potential to fulfill.

In this sense, Madame Bovary becomes the story of one woman's faulty perception of reality. In an early version of the novel, Flaubert included a scene at the ball at La Vaubyessard in which Emma is seen looking out at the landscape surrounding the house through colored panes of glass, a scene clearly meant as a representation of Emma's projection onto the world of an illusory and faulty model of reality.

Emma cannot, or will not, see the world as it is, since she is constantly imposing onto it, and herself, the criteria of romantic literature. Flaubert has thus written a supremely romantic novel about the dangers of reading supremely romantic novels!

Romantics, Flaubert seems to be saying, have no reasonable hope of ever seeing their fondest dreams come to fruition.

This is, indeed, a recurrent pattern in the novel: Emma dreams of one thing but gets something else entirely. Marriage, motherhood, and ultimately, adultery, all fall short of Emma's expectations and she appears to be a woman doomed to one disappointment after another.

Although Emma believes her marriage will fulfill her romantic expectations, Charles certainly fails to live up to Emma's hopes, and even Rodolphe, with his expensive riding boots, gloves and substantial income is eventually considered coarse and vulgar by Emma. Léon, the very essence of the young, romantic artist, leaves Emma when he is made premier clerc, and Emma finds she much come to the realization that even adultery contains "toutes les platitudes du mariage."

The foregoing certainly begs the question: are Emma's expectations too high or is life fundamentally deficient?

The society portrayed in Madame Bovary is one stratified in terms of class, and this is a book about the bourgeoisie, a portrait of class in the process of finding and defining itself and its role in society.

The novel is filled with scenes of buying and selling and even personal relationships fall under the sway of financial considerations.

What is particularly notable about Emma is her extravagance: she spares no thought for expense and consumes far beyond her means. Rejecting good economic management, thrift and hard work, Emma dedicates herself to style extraordinaire and lavishes expensive presents on her "man of the moment."

The world described in Madame Bovary is an extremely enclosed and restricted one and images of entrapment are abundant throughout the book. Emma's first marital home is described as "trop étroite;" her marriage to Charles is likened to "l'ardillon pointu de cette courroie complexe qui la bouclait de tous les côtes."

These restrictive images clearly demonstrate how confining Emma finds her world. Trapped in the dusty and damp home with its "éternel jardin," the highly imaginative Emma sees no escape.

It is interesting to note that when Emma does attempt to escape the confines of femininity, society and marriage through adultery, many of the scenes take place al fresco. (The first act of adultery with Rodolphe takes place in a forest and her later relationship with Léon contains a scene on a river.)

Later scenes, however, reveal the degradation inherent in Emma's acts and she finds herself confined to bedrooms that are sorely reminiscent of the restrictions of her married life. The fiacre ride with Léon in Rouen, in particular, is anticipatory of entrapment. For Emma, adultery eventually becomes as much of a prison as is marriage and family life.

Another recurrent image is that of the window. This can be interpreted as Emma's desire for escape or as a reaffirmation of her entrapment and powerlessness. The window opens onto a space of which poor Emma can only sit and dream; it serves as a frame for both her dissatisfaction and her fantasies.

In order to enjoy Madame Bovary to the fullest extent, it must be read in the original French. This is an absolute for Flaubert was an author who made full use of the potential offered by his native tongue. Although many translations are superb, nothing can match the original French in its poetic prose and lush descriptions.

Many interpretations of this wonderful and timeless novel are possible and all, no doubt, hold some validity. Therein lies the book's genius. Of one thing, though, we have no doubt: luscious Emma Bovary was, indeed, a victim. Whether of herself or of a repressive society matters little.