Madame Bovary, Part III

By -
It's the final post on Madame Bovary, and there are spoilers, so don't keep reading if you haven't read it yet!

This last part was very sad.  Emma's immaturity and greed just catches up with her on all fronts, but I was surprised that it was her debt that finished her off, not her adultery (though they have the same root cause).

Emma reminds me of several literary heroines who have similar flaws, but who conquer them--frequently in moral novels for girls.  Anne Shirley wants romance, but her sense of humor, moral training, and good sense eventually teach her that the real boy next door is better than a fictional brooding hero.  Meg and Amy March both desire luxury, but each receives lessons about the vanity of wanting more than you can have.  Oh, let's not forget Marianne Dashwood, who nearly loses her respectability and her life to her romantic notions, and learns to value solid worth!  (None of these people stop being romantic; they just learn to control themselves, as we all must.)  Emma Bovary never tries to conquer her flaws, and she's able to dodge all consequences until the final smash overwhelms her.  She's what happens to a completely uncontrolled extravagant/romantic personality.  And here I thought realistic novels weren't supposed to be moral cautionary tales...

Some bits caught my eye as illuminating Emma's character:

"It's quite improper, you know."
"In what way?" replied the clerk.  "They do it in Paris!"
And that remark, like an irresistible argument, decided her.

Not that she needed much convincing anyway!  But Emma wants to be doing the fashionable, popular thing, and whatever people are doing in Paris, she'll do it too.  (At this point her mother would demand, "And if people in Paris were jumping off cliffs, would you do that too?")

Emma was becoming a little confused by his calculations, and she felt a ringing in her ears as if gold coins were bursting out of their sacks and clinking on the floor all around her...A vista of attainable fantasies then opened out before Emma...

Poor silly Emma, discovering how easy it is to borrow money is her downfall.  She really thinks that she can just keep putting off the day of payment, and have all those little luxuries she wants.   This bit reminded me rather strongly of our recent mortgage bubble!  It's hard to learn that you should only buy what you can afford to pay for--it's all too easy to get into debt just trying to feed your family!

It didn't matter.  She was not happy and never had been.  Why was life so inadequate, why did the things she depended on turn immediately to dust?...Yet if somewhere there existed a strong, handsome being, with a valorous nature, at once exalted and refined, with the heart of a poet in the shape of an angel, a lyre with strings of brass, sounding elegiac epithalamiums to the heavens, they why mightn't she, by chance, find him?  Oh, what an impossibility!  Nothing, anyway, was worth looking for; everything was a lie.  Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every pleasure its own disgust, and the sweetest kisses left on your lips no more than a vain longing for a more sublime pleasure.

I think that just about sums it up; Emma is fundamentally discontented and will never be satisfied.

Unfortunately her discontent ruins everyone else too.  I did hope that at least little Berthe would go on to a better life eventually, but no!

It's an excellent book, so well-written--and so depressing.  I think I need to read a nice cheerful book now.

Madame Bovary Readalong, Part I
Madame Bovary Readalong, Part II
Madame Bovary Readalong, Part III

Comments

  1. Adriana@ClassicalQuestJuly 14, 2012 at 3:52 PM

    Just finished reading all three of your MB posts. Excellent insights!! You captured the essence of this novel well. Loved Flaubert's writing too, but I agree: Emma was truly exasperating! Hope you can join us in the future for another novel.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more