Madame Bovary

Overview

Madame Bovary is three hundred and thirty pages and took Flaubert five years, at a rate that sometimes came to a page a week. He wrote standing at a lectern, read every sentence aloud in a room he called his shouting-place to test its rhythm, and left thousands of pages of drafts behind. The letters he wrote to Louise Colet while doing it are the best record we have of what it costs to write well.

The subtitle is Provincial Manners, and it matters. This is a novel about a place as much as a person, and the place is Normandy in the 1830s and 40s: a market town with a pharmacy, a church, an inn, a notary and nothing else.

What makes it revolutionary is the narration. Flaubert wanted the author to be present everywhere and visible nowhere, like God in creation. So there is no commentary. Instead the prose keeps sliding into the idiom of whoever is in the scene, so that Emma’s romantic vocabulary and Homais’ newspaper phrases arrive in the narrator’s own voice, unmarked, and condemn themselves by contact with the plain sentences around them. This is free indirect style used as a precision instrument, and Flaubert is the reason every novelist after him had to learn it.

One oddity worth noticing on page one. The novel opens in the first person plural: we were in class when the headmaster came in. The “we” is a schoolboy who never reappears and is never identified. Flaubert uses it for a chapter and abandons it, and nobody has fully explained why.

What happens

Charles Bovary is a slow, decent boy who becomes a mediocre country doctor and marries a sour older widow chosen by his mother. Called out to set a farmer’s broken leg, he meets the farmer’s daughter, Emma. The widow conveniently dies. He marries her.

Emma has been educated at a convent, where she took from religion mainly its imagery and from the lending library a supply of novels about tragic queens, moonlight, and men with pistols. She expects marriage to produce the words she has read: passion, felicity, intoxication. What it produces is Charles, who eats noisily, has no conversation, and is entirely happy.

Then they are invited to a ball at a marquis’s chateau. Emma dances, sees a real duke, notices a woman eating an ice out of a gilded shell, and goes home. That evening fixes everything. For the rest of the novel she is comparing her life to a single night and finding it unbearable.

They move to Yonville-l’Abbaye, where Flaubert assembles the cast: Homais the pharmacist, a fountain of progressive opinion and self-promotion; Léon, a young notary’s clerk who shares Emma’s taste for sunsets; the priest Bournisien, who cannot tell the difference between a spiritual crisis and indigestion; and Lheureux, a draper who is really a moneylender and who understands Emma better than anyone else in the book.

Léon leaves for Rouen before anything happens. Then Rodolphe Boulanger, a local landowner with money and experience, looks at Emma across a room and calculates how to have her and how to get rid of her afterwards. His seduction takes place during the agricultural show, and Flaubert cuts it, line by line, against the prizegiving from the platform, so that vows of eternal feeling alternate with awards for manure and a medal for fifty-four years of service in the same farmyard. It is the most quoted passage in nineteenth-century fiction and it is genuinely funny.

The affair runs for months. Emma buys things on credit, plans to run away, and Rodolphe agrees and then does not, sending a letter of self-justifying regret in a basket of apricots. She collapses, is ill for weeks, and turns briefly to religion.

Between these two affairs comes the episode that shows Flaubert at his cruellest. Homais persuades Charles to make his name by operating on a stableboy’s clubfoot. Emma encourages it because she wants a husband she can admire. The operation is botched, gangrene sets in, and a specialist amputates the leg at the thigh.

In Rouen she meets Léon again and they begin, and this time Emma is the one who pursues. Weekly trips, a hotel room, more debt, and a slow reversal in which she becomes the demanding partner and he starts avoiding her. Lheureux’s notes come due. She is seized for eight thousand francs, and she goes to every man she knows: Léon, who has nothing, the notary, who offers a transaction, Binet, who is horrified, and finally Rodolphe, who says he has no money, which happens to be a lie.

She walks to the pharmacy, gets the key to the store room from Homais’ assistant, and eats arsenic by the handful. The death takes many pages and Flaubert gives it in clinical detail: the taste of ink, the vomiting, the convulsions, the priest’s oils, and, outside the window, the blind beggar singing the song she has heard on every trip to Rouen.

Charles, grieving, discovers the letters and understands everything, and does not blame her. He sells the furniture, lets the house go, and is found dead on a bench in the garden. Their daughter Berthe is passed to an aunt and sent to work in a cotton mill. The last paragraph belongs to Homais, whose practice is flourishing and who has just received the Legion of Honour.

How to read it

Read it slowly enough to notice the sentences. This is a book about style, and racing it for plot is reading past what it is.

Watch for the cliché. Whenever a phrase sounds elevated, ask whose phrase it is. Almost always it belongs to a character, usually to Emma, and is placed there to be seen as borrowed.

Use Lydia Davis’ translation if you want Flaubert’s own awkwardnesses preserved, and Geoffrey Wall if you want a smoother read. Davis keeps effects that other translators tidy away, and the tidying is precisely what Flaubert spent five years avoiding.

Watch Charles. The novel opens and closes on him, he is the only character who loves anybody, and the cruelty of the book is largely in how thoroughly Emma and the reader agree to despise him.

Track the money. Emma’s affairs are what everyone remembers, but the mechanism of her ruin is entirely financial, and Lheureux’s notes are laid out with such care that you could reconstruct the account.

The common misreading is that this is a moral tale about adultery, which is what the prosecutor argued in 1857 and what the court declined to find. Nobody in the novel is punished for adultery. Emma is destroyed by debt, by the absence of anything to do, and by a language she got out of books.

Questions it raises

• Is Emma a fool, a victim of her education, or the only person in Yonville who notices that the place is intolerable?
• The narration never judges. Does that make the book merciless or merciful?
• Flaubert blames novels for Emma’s expectations while writing one. What is he claiming about his own?
• Charles is stupid and kind, and the book invites contempt for him. Does it endorse that contempt or trap the reader in it?
• What options did Emma actually have? The novel is precise about her constraints; is her ruin personal failure or the arithmetic of her situation?
• Homais gets the medal in the last line. Why did Flaubert give the ending to him rather than to any of the people who suffered?