Madame Bovary

Recently, I have been thinking quite a bit about Gustave Flaubert’s stylistically gorgeous Madame Bovary, first published in 1856. Over my years in college, I had to read the work no less than four times. Here, I have revisited some of the criticism I wrote while studying the novel. Each time I read the novel, my position evolved on what came in second on Time Magazine’s 2007 survey of writers on the greatest novel of all time (second only to that other great piece of literature about such a tragic heroine, Anna Karenina). I am never sure whether or not I, for lack of a better word, like the novel, but it is one always prone to great debate.

What I reacted to most strongly upon my most recent reading of Madame Bovary is what I have reacted to each time I have read the text. That is where, exactly, my sympathies lie among the characters. Be it too simple, but with themes as emotionally resounding and direct as Flaubert’s, my initial reaction is always a gut level response to the characters’ fidelity and morality—even though I believe that one must objectively evaluate the characters in order to be true to the text. On my first reading, I blindly accepted that Emma is a victim of her situation and circumstance, that she is the victim of her youthful and innocent indulgence of romance novels, and that she is in a position where she cannot divorce the husband she is unhappy with easily, if possible. On my second reading, I, for lack of a better term, turned on Emma. I had not previously not felt for Charles; but reading the novel a second time, I had very little to no sympathy for Emma, and could not feel sorrier for Charles and his own innocent and misguided (but nevertheless true) feelings. Beginning during the third reading and ending in the foruth, I came to the general feeling that the characters are all the things that are said about them. At once, Emma is an innocent, a child, passionate, greedy, selfish, immature, a victim, pathetic, a mother, a victimizer, manipulative and vulnerable. And Charles is at the same time awkward, honest, sincere, a victim, lustful, true, misguided, innocent, and sympathetic. In other words, instead of fate, as Charles theorizes at the novel’s end, it is the characters’ circumstances and personalities that claim credit for their lives’ result.

What stops Emma from being what she is often wholly mistaken for—a petty, unlikable character with no morals or true feelings—are the circumstances of her society and time. When evaluating what kind of person Emma Bovary is, one has to keep in mind that the tools of liberation—being able to freely divorce her husband, or gain more real world experience—are not available to her. Yes, that is not to say that it would be impossible for her to have left Charles—as she does plan with Rodolphe to run away together at one point—but the social consequences of her society’s circumstances must be kept in mind, and this limits her ability to act in virtually every way a modern eye would deem acceptable. That is not to say, however, that she is exempt from judgment because of her world. She is not, and many emotional reactions and actions she commits cannot be excused on the grounds of her being a victim of society; but, rather, a weak person. For example, the embarrassment Emma considers Charles to be at the ball—an event Emma would not have gone to if not for the hardworking husband she considers an embarrassment—cannot be the fault of anything other than petty, ugly feelings toward her husband. Yes, Emma’s unhappiness can be attributed to where society has placed her; but, the fact that she revels in this unhappiness, and takes it out on Charles, cannot be so easily written off. Also, there is the issue of Emma’s romance novels. While during Emma’s time there may not have been as many respectable female role models in literature as there are today, it is hard to imagine that nowhere in her reading or life experience did Emma come across a sensible, more realistic depiction of life than those she idealizes in her novel. This issue brings up, too, questions on the influence of art, and the extents of the effects of art on those who absorb it. Impossible to ever concretely say one way or the other, one can be relatively confident in the notion that while Emma’s novels did not create her fate, or make her the way she is, they did not help and likely nurtured dispositions and tendencies she already, inherently had in her person.

I know that there is no way to hypothetically know ho w Emma would be under different and/or more modern circumstances, but from her conduct in the novel, one can theorize. For instance, one can look at the intensity with which Emma burns through her passions. Over the course of the novel, we are told of Emma’s past devotion to her religious faith, we witness her all-consuming devotion to find the imaginary, idealized romantic love that her books once lied to her about, and we witness brief returns to religious devotion, at points in the novel when Emma actually feels, or more likely feels she should feel, guilty about her indiscretions. These she quickly consumes and moves on, in her pursuit for, if not happiness, contentment, as it is debatable whether or not she knows what true happiness is, and is never satisfied. From these actions, one can read superficiality that likely would follow Emma to whatever time period and social status she might possibly inhabit. In other words, one must consider the circumstances beyond Emma’s control in casting any judgment on her, or deciding her innocence, but while she may be on some terms innocent, she is guilty of other offenses. These range from the ridiculousness of her comparing herself to a martyr when she can’t have sex with the man she has fallen into lust with, to the same behavior she displays after Charles fails to cure Hippolyte, to when she throws herself intensely back into her affair with Rodolphe, in order to either punish what she feels is her failure of a husband, or search for what she feels is a better, instant gratification for herself, or hybrid of those elements. Additionally, Emma is guilty of negligence when it comes to her family. It is enough that she displays such an uncaring attitude toward her daughter and husband, but she cannot think outside herself enough to be part of a family. For example, she is disappointed in the sex of her daughter, as she feels men have more opportunities than women, and afterward she simply accepts the disappointment, and fails to realize that her daughter is a human being who needs a mother. Emma also acts flamboyantly careless as she places the need to buy her lovers presents ahead of the needs of her family, while she secretly plunges her family into massive debt, without being able to comprehend the consequences which eventually destroy her family and leave the only surviving member, her daughter, to a life of work and drudgery that Emma would never have tolerated for herself in life. It is in these actions that while Emma can correctly be labeled an immature innocent there are also elements of her character which cannot be excused.

Conversely, while Charles may indirectly fuel some of Emma’s actions by fueling her instabilities and insecurities—if only by not being the idealized version of a husband Emma never drops from her mind—I nevertheless consider him the most sympathetic of the characters in a novel of sympathetic characters. In one response paper to the novel I wrote in college, I was asked, after making that comment, whether I thought Flaubert intended Charles to be the most sympathetic character in the novel. Honestly, I am unsure. On an extreme end, I think that if Flaubert intended Emma to be entirely sympathetic and Charles the awkward, bumbling, incompetent joke of a husband Emma often considers him, the novel can be deemed a failure (for that point.) However, I do not believe the novel to be a failure in any sense of the word. For one can read the novel as an objective character study shown through the eyes of a subjective subject. Any exaggerated aspects of Charles’ character, therefore, are the fault of Emma’s subjectivity, and not a deficiency in his character.

Cover picture from High Valley Books

James Joyce's "The Dead"

After much deliberation, I decided that the first literature I would write about here would be James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” from Dubliners. I first read the story two years ago for a class, and recently watched John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation. I recent revisited some criticism I had written of it for my class—and here is it. “The Dead” my favorite thing I’ve ever read of Joyce; a beautiful, haunting piece of national identity, interpersonal relationship’s and the heavy cold that falls between. I have not read Dubliners in full, but most, very soon.

Joyce’s “The Dead,” can be read on several different levels. However, I predominantly read the text as a narrative on a man who does not understand women, a man who does not understand his country, and a critique on the limits of art and intellectual hypocrisy. For in the events described in the story—Gabriel attending his (female) relatives’ party and returning home with his wife, Gretta—we are shown a man, attending to a day of simple social tasks (going to a party, going home with his wife) in a world that he, we are repeatedly shown, does not understand. And his world just so happens to be comprised of his homeland; Ireland, women and those who have come before him.

On a very visceral level, “The Dead” chronicles how awkward the protagonist of Gabriel is with the opposite sex, and how he appears not to understand the women in his life. He shares exchanges with a variety of women—his relatives, their maids, an intellectual equal, and his wife—and they each inform him of his lack of understanding in different, very direct ways. Early on, he fumbles an exchange with Lily, being so bold as to assume she has or will have a relationship with a man that will lead to marriage, which offends her; “’…I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine day with your young man, eh?’” (1947). Gabriel goes on to interact with a variety of female characters; all representative of a range of social classes and dispositions. As stated, he is awkward with Lily, a maid. He also fails, if you will (in terms of fumbling and failing to understand) an exchange with an intellectual/professional equal of his, Miss Ivors, another woman. In his dancing and exchange with Miss Ivors, he is confronted on a level closest to his understanding, by another apparent intellectual. By challenging what is, essentially, his patriotism, Miss Ivors threatens his identity, his intellectual standpoint. She tells him “’…haven’t you your own language…” (1954). In questioning his answers that he will vacation in another country, Ivors questions his language, and whether he has one. And, quite truthfully, Gabriel does not appear to have a language of his own. He does not pride himself on being Irish, and is so resentful of what he is (or what is expected of him, by those like Miss Ivors) he tells her “’I’m sick of my own country…’” (1954). These issues speak to the larger themes of the novel, the issues of the intellectual and artistic limits and hypocrisy. For Gabriel is an intellectual, a writer of book reviews. In these reviews, his art, he—assumedly—deals with literature and the goal of literature, which is to understand the human spirit. And yet, in his personal life as we are witnessed to in the novel, he fails to understand those most important in his life; his family, these women, even the acquaintance that intellectually rivals him. The exchange with Ivors is indicative of his lack of understanding his art and surrounding humanity and, at the same time, his nation. That he does not have his own language can mean he is not in tune with his ethnicity, and also that he does not have his own means of understanding humanity. That he does not have his own art to understand the world around him and the people in it, or that the art he does (his reviews) are detached, thoughts on others’ insights, and not his own.

Finally, the conclusion of the novel reveals how out of touch he is with both his wife and nation. Perhaps this is taking the two prospective themes too far, but if one were to symbolically characterize land or the earth, the common personification would be female; for example, the figure of a mother earth. This female image can work to link the two themes, that Gabriel does not understand the women and his homeland around him. In fact, the revelation that the song from the party has so affected Gretta because of a past, deceased lover is the most scathing criticism of Gabriel’s lack of understanding the opposite sex. For the revelation shows he understands not even his own wife, so much so that her heart so passionately belongs to another man, who is no longer living, and he knew nothing of this until the night we see in the story. The final, and what was to me the most striking, image of the story, of Gabriel’s thoughts turning to the snow “…falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.” (1974) can be seen as a climax of the linking of these themes. Put simply, Gabriel does not understand his wife, as the man who holds her heart lies buried within the earth. Within the Ireland he does not understand, under a cold layer of thick snow. All of which is as detached from him as any true feeling is—whether it be the simple relating to another human being or woman through conversation, true intellectual and artistic expression, or the love of his wife.

Photo: BBC, David Lemming

An introduction...

I started this blog without having a purpose. One day last fall, I saw the rose in front of our house in the previous post, thought of the quote and wanted to do something with it. I keep another blog, of the more seasonal persuasion, and in October I was fully busy with that project. This didn't stop me from creating another blog here, with this title, because I felt I needed to; I could come up with a purpose later. Months passed, and each time I would think about this I hadn't the slightest opinion what I could do with this space. That is, until I graduated from college with a B.A. in English this past December.

What would I do with all this free time, I wondered? Since I will be taking time off before graduate school, what will I do with myself if I'm not constantly reading for a deadline at which I'd have to turn in massive papers written during the wee hours of the morning the day there were to be due? I love going on GoodReads.com as soon as I finish a book to write down my thoughts. Couldn't I do the same in a blog format, too?

So, I have decided to start this blog as an extension of my Good Reads profile and life as an English major. Herein will lie a place for all my thoughts on literature and anything related to the art and life of books. I hope, if I am so lucky as to have you as a reader, I don't bore you too often.