“When she knelt on her Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same suave words that she had murmured formerly to her lover in the outpourings of adultery”. For me, this sentence quite summed up the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s story of Emma Bovary, the woman who tried to live out all facets of her life based on a romance novel. It speaks volumes that upon her return from riding with Rodolphe Boulanger, with whom she goes on to have her first extra-marital affair, the first thing she does is “recall the heroines of the books she had read”.
As far as the character of Madame Bovary goes, I have to say, I was neither very interested nor very impressed. To be very honest, I think at some point I felt that had this been an adulterous woman who wielded some power or sway over her various conquests, it would have made for a better story. Because Madame Bovary is so given to weeping and wilting over relations that do not even have the remotest justification to begin with, I was getting a bit tired of her dramatics. While I could certainly see the effect of a clash between romance novels and harsh reality on a young and sheltered mind, I could not get behind the very desperate and servile affectations she brought into every relationship.
That said I still could not stop reading this book for the sheer power of its rich narrative. Through the romanticized eyes of a disillusioned woman, we travel back to beginning-mid 19th century France, and experience rural French life, with all its regular people and their mundane jobs and their harmless gossiping and harmful plotting … and that, for me, is what makes ‘Madame Bovary’ (I read the translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling) such an unforgettable reading experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment