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.