Book Review : Madame Bovary

Emma lured me soon after she becomes Madame Bovary .But when she was over , just like her lovers, I too began to feel disillusioned with her. It was not that it had a bad ending or a clichéd one as you may call it.It was because when I started to recount how good the book was, I could see that , as a writer I cannot even try to emulate the meticulousity and conviction that characterised Flaubert’s storytelling.

The novel belonged to the 1800s and I have been fairly acquainted with the literature that belonged to the Victorian period through the likes of David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice. Madame Bovary has all typical characteristics of the literature of this era – the painstaking endeavours to find and use the perfect,irreplaceable word throughout, the characters that are never allowed to become humans due to overemphasis of their distinct features (Homais for instance) , the obstinacy or fear to stay away from  obscenity (inspite of the tempting premise) , but what sets the novel apart was Flaubert’s success in sketching Emma , the protagonist , with so much ingenuity that for never once I could hate her as much as I could sympathise with her.

Emma is confined to her countryside as long as she is with her dad and for obvious reasons loathes her mundane living awaiting for a Prince Charming to usher her into her dream life. Just like infants who love strangers for the sole reason that they take them outside their boring homes for a walk , Emma assumes Charles Bovary, the doctor , who visits frequently to attend to her ailing father,to be her dream man because he is her only hope for freedom. Emma marries him,and is initially pleased with her new life and tries to love her husband but, is surprised to find she cannot.

She begins her quest for happiness through books and stories and starts to believe that she still can start afresh with someone else to satiate her desires. But she is reluctant and tries hard to resign herself to her destiny. This resignation, as time moves, transmutes itself into a huge sacrifice before her eyes and gives her a sense of contentment that she is able to cling to morals and societal restrictions inspite of the cruelty of her fate. This contentment soon emboldens her to unfetter herself at the cost of morals and innocence , because it teaches her to feel that the good always deserve something better. At some juncture she is of course, offered the alluring chance to break free, in the form of young and naïve Leon but she turns it down and this incident reinforces her sense of honesty and sacrifice. However, her moment arrives later and she is swept off her feet by Rodolphe , a wealthy tycoon and an unhappy husband in his 30s.

My heart , however went out for Charles Bovary who after a first doomed marriage senses a new beginning in Emma and in fact achieves it easily. He is an immaculate man with so much love for his wife and is extremely happy throughout, mistakenly assuming that he is being reciprocated. Ignorance is bliss. He never for once suspects her infidelity and is able to alienate even his mother for his wife on a few occasions. Emma in turn cheats him, swindles all his hard earned money ,even ignores her baby girl ,tries to earn the hatred of Charles(but in vain) and soon descends into doom quite predictably. You can see that these are all clichés in a typical drama based on adultery but Flaubert’s plotting of the Emma’s character arc is impeccable that she remains human inspite of her detestable acts.

Bovary is honest , lovable and competent but Emma cannot love him because she cannot. How can you love someone whom you do not find attractive at all even even though he is revered by everyone around you? How can you be happy in a life ,however rich and opulent it could be, if you have been born with the disease of insatiety? She does not even try to apprise him of her unhappiness because she deems him incompetent to understand it. Whether the caring Charles would have helped her out had he known  it ,is a very difficult question to answer.  Emma looked helpless and vulnerable throughout my journey with her and I admit she could have tried other ways to reach her end. These dilemmas and imperfections elevated the experience of my reading several notches.

I have seen a similar instance of an unhappy wife in Pirivom Sandhippom . I expected, initially that Emma would reform after she graduates into motherhood and the child will complement her desires, as many Indian movies portray.Visalakshi and Emma are of course ,different women in many aspects and, the former had a savior, but Emma, unfortunately had only masqueraded ones.

After Emma’s death, I forgot about one inevitability in any tale of adultery that is the event of the husband discovering the unfaithfulness of his wife. The moment arrives some time later,when Charles reads her secret letters and I was surprised to see that he finds himself unable to hate his wife even after the shocking revelation ,since he is so irretrievably sunk in depression over the loss of his beloved. This was the instant it struck me that I should write a review for the book.

 I could contrast this incident with a similar one in About Schmidt when Jack Nicholson discovers the same uncomfortable truth about his wife after her death. He reacts violently disposing her belongings from his house and does things which his wife had forbidden him to. Schmidt’s was a natural reaction since he never once loved her during her lifetime , but begins to love her out of guilt and loneliness only to be hampered by the revelation that she was unfaithful. Bovary is very much his antithesis.