Part III

I'm not yet at the end of Part III in Madame Bovary, but it doesn't take a genius to predict she is on the decline. The way that Flaubert portrays Emma's development as a character reminds me of a binge-eater. Eventually she's going to make herself terribly sick-- or unappealing. Sometimes I wonder if her character would have been more or less tragic and unattractive if she ate or drank herself into ruin. Instead she is destroying herself on a diet of questionable love and dubious lies.

As their affair progresses, even Leon begins to feel a little unsettled by Emma's transformation. At one point he wonders: "Where could she have learnt this corruption so deep and well masked as to be almost unseizable?" (219.)  This question has several answers. One of them is Rodolphe. Before Rodolphe, the novels Emma devoured set the stage for the romantic disorder that her affair with Rodolphe cemented. Rodolphe's life reflects the link between consumption and corruption, indulgence and indifference. Flaubert gives us a glimpse of his history in the following passage: ". . for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing was left; whatever entered there, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall." (162).

After Emma recovers from Rodolphe, she emerges in Leon's eyes as "woman of the world" (209). She satiates herself with pleasures during her relationship with Leon, to the point where love no longer even factors into her feelings. Though in many ways she becomes, at the height of her powers, more physically attractive to Leon, her mentality approaches that of an ever-expanding glutton. Flaubert's genius lies in his ability to portray with daring irony and sensuality the point where the path of a distinctive personality crumbles into pathology.

Part II

An Ordinary Existence

What I really enjoy about the selected readings for this class, and great literature in general, is that the texts and the characters we encounter generate endless talking points.  I find this especially the case with Madame Bovary. I've reached the point in the book where the positively diabolical Rodolphe Boulanger succeeds in his seduction and conquest of Emma. Flaubert has been inspiring humorous snorts from us up to this point with every flailing conceit of his self-absorbed heroine and every ridiculous flourish of Roldolphe. I found the scene at the agricultural fair that preceded the consummation of the lovers' affair, biting. The way Flaubert intersperses quick portraits of yawn-worthy pompous town officials and stupid livestock between Monsieur Boulanger's obvious advances, makes for something almost absurd--and virtuosic. Flaubert is a bit of a ventriloquist. Then, far that matter, so is Roldolphe. He talks to Emma using phrases that seem to come directly from her romance novels.

But Flaubert is in this for more than the laughs (if perhaps the same can't be said of Roldolphe). Moments of stirring beauty are his other forte. As Emma luxuriates in her passion for Boulanger in a country meadow, Flaubert's attention to Emma's perceptions, like everything he writes, gleams with exquisite, flawless, detail: "Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds flying about had scattered their feathers." (130). Later he writes, "A blue space surrounded her and ordinary existence appeared only intermittently between these heights, dark and far away beneath her." (131). By despising her ordinary existence, Emma makes what I fear might be a tragic mistake-- a rejection of a life that for all purposes is a good life, a life that many would consider a blessing.  All of the unassuming, harmless, honest mundanities of life-- of which Charles numbers the sorriest-- strike Emma, in her illness, as things she can not enjoy and can not endure. As she basks for the first time in the fulfillment of her romantic dreams, we feel a small ache for the plain, true gifts that are being overlooked, at the exact moment that a world that is sensationally gorgeous and dazzlingly false is being discovered.

Part I

Now that I'm reading our next selection, Madame Bovary, I feel a little sad that we're leaving ancient literature behind, and rapidly approaching modernity. The Sorrows of Young Werther departed from the older classics and offered a semi-modern voice, but Madame Bovary kind of leaves it in its dust, even as Flaubert takes inspiration from Goethe. Both stories strike me as cautionary tales. I'm seeing a theme that we discussed at the beginning of Dante's Inferno appear again: how literature can be a bad influence on characters.

Werther, before his downward spiral, boasts that he has abandoned his favorite songs from Homer and replaced them with Ossian-- unaware that the rhapsodic literary sensation of the latter was that of a poetic charlatan. Madame Bovary makes the same mistake of worshiping false idols you could say, falling sway to the powerful glamors and attractions of fiction and life. Already full of beautiful worthless nonsense from girlhood, she becomes chronically discontented after she glimpses wealthy Parisian life at a ball.

It is incredible how Flaubert doesn't make a moral judgment on the characters-- a feature, we learned in class-- that got him in trouble. Instead he offers an overwhelming array of data and details in prose that dances with elegant ironies and truths. I'm hooked, though I'm disappointed by Charles Bovary, and care even less for Emma. But I love how Flaubert writes about her, as when he reveals how the early development of her character surrounded a sensitivity to things that a devout person might not find devout. We are told that her temperament was the kind that “loved the church for the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs, and literature for the passions it excites,” and “rebelled against the mysteries of faith ...” (34).

I think a writer has a different kind of disorder, but in a way it's equivalent. Writers love words for the music in them, and grapple at times with 'the mysteries of faith,' as I'm sure Flaubert did. Writing literature is a task that demands a considerable amount of passion, and a considerable amount of faith (even if it's not religious faith)-- as well another thing that Flaubert says Madame Bovary lacks: Discipline. It takes discipline to write this blog, I realize. So that's a start.