Madame Bovary

The societal scandal of Madame Bovary is as remote now as the asceticism of the spirit practised by Flaubert and Baudelaire, who seem almost self - indulgent in the era of Samuel Beckett.Rereading Madame Bovary side-by side with say Malone Dies is a sadly instructive experience. Emma seems as boisterous as Hogarth or Rabelais in the company of Malone and Macmann. And yet she is their grandmother, even as the personages of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka are among her children. With her the novel enters the realm of inactivity, where the protagonists are bored, but the reader is not. Poor Emma, destroyed by usury rather than love, is so vital that her stupidities do not matter. A much more than average sensual woman, her capacity for life and love is what moves us to admire her, and even to love her, since like Flaubert himself we find ourselves in her.

Flaubert despised realism and said so over and over throughout his life; he loved only the absolute purity of art." Madame Bovary has little to do with realism, and something to do with a prophecy of impressionism, but in a most refracted fashion. All of poor Emma's moments are at once drab and privileged; one remembers Browning's Andrea del Sarto intoning: "A common grayness silvers everything." The critical impressionism of Walter Pater is implicit in Madame Bovary; imagery of hallucinatory intensity is always a step away from suddenly bursting forth as secularized epiphanies.

Several myths continue to distort our perspective on Madame Bovary. Flaubert set so much store by technical perfection, he so vociferously denied the intrinsic merits of a "subject" and proclaimed instead the supreme importance of style, he complained so bitterly of the tortures of composition and of the desperate baseness of his Norman setting, that it is only too easy to believe that the novel was for him primarily an exercise in self - discipline, perhaps even a much needed therapy to rid himself of his disheveled romanticism.

To be considered a "novelist's novelist" is of course an enviable reputation. But the very expression seems to imply a somewhat theoretical, overly deliberate and even "cold" or lifeless creation. Henry James was filled with professional admiration for Flaubert, but he also found Madame Bovary morally shallow. This indeed seems to have been the slowly acquired fame of the novel: it was considered an astonishing feat of literary organization, displaying an unusual mastery of structure and texture, but a work that did not spring from the author's heart, whose subject even ran counter to the author's temperament - in short, a self-imposed task! The truth is somewhat different. Not only are there sources other than the Delamare story (the Memoires de Madame Ludovica, for instance, which tell of the adulteries and financial difficulties of Mme Pradier, whom Flaubert frequented long before the unfavorable verdict against La Tentation de saint Antoine), but the theme of Madame Bovary, and in particular the central motif of adultery, had been a major obsession of Flaubert ever since his adolescence. Passion et vertu, written at the age of sixteen years, is indeed a striking miniature version of Madame Bovary.

Not only were some of the key themes of Madame Bovary (sterile but frenetic eroticism, sensuous longing for the absolute, flirtation with death) already fully sketched out in Flaubert's mind in 1837, but this long gestation should encourage critics to subordinate considerations of sheer technical accomplishments to the deeper meanings of the work. Madame Bovary is hardly an artificial or arbitrary exercise - even though Flaubert himself claimed that the subject was unpalatable to him. It corresponds in fact to some of the basic patterns of his imagination.