Meditations in an Emergency — Madame Bovary — Part 2
It is now time to reject those assumptions that form soonest in our minds, of dismissing Bovary’s decisions, for the sake of maintaining our own social status. In part one, I described Emma as a “silly woman,” which, unfortunately, limits the reader of absorbing what they should. If novels were devoid of what we considered deplorable, there would be no novels. And Emma’s affair is a representation of one, not an affair itself. It has been the recent habit of many astute readers to deride an author’s decisions as being more important than reality itself. This is how books are banned. If tolerance were more effective at drawing people towards religion, attendance of church services would be much higher today. As they are not, moralizers have it in their best interest to fear and dismiss literature. I, however, am a virtuous pagan. As such, I would like to take Emma’s character, her longings, her misery, more seriously than I did before, in order to learn what continues to make Madame Bovary so compelling.
Flaubert wastes no time in reminding us repeatedly of Charles’s intellectual indolence. Not only does Charles seem completely out of lockstep with his wife’s emotional state, his ambitions for himself arise by proxy. Charles is humiliated when a surgery he performed on a club foot is infected, leading to an amputation that need not have occurred. His simplicity, and Emma’s complex rebellion, both lead to failure and rebuke. Rodolfe writes a letter, rather than run away with Emma, and he begins the process of moving on by belittling her manners and dress (Rodolfe’s dismissal echoes my own, and those of other readers). Emma receives a flash of hope for personal rehabilitation by going to the opera and seeing her plight externalized in a more romantic context. But before she is able to move on as well, Leon returns from her past back into her life. Charles, oblivious to their chemistry, practically encourages this dangerous liaison by suggesting the two return to the opera at a later date without him. Perhaps my thesis endured: both Emma and Charles are smart enough to persist in living the way they do, but both are unwilling to interrogate their own emotional and intellectual shortcomings, respectively. That emotions can be illusions, that humility in the face of science is endless. Had they these tools, perhaps they could have thwarted these second act disasters.
Flaubert’s reveal that Emma was him, rather than a particular subject in his life, does more to place his character with jealousy for not being male. As Rodolfe tempts her at the Agricultural Fair, Emma makes several remarks on her contrasting lack of freedom. After the first time Emma pursues infidelity, she spots a man hunting illegally. He chastises her for not being more afraid after seeing a rifle, but more fascinating is the comparison of both pursuiing something condemned by society in either ethics or the law. If Emma would have been allowed, as is more often the case with men (particularly French men), to pursue this elaborate gratification, would Emma have had a more successful coming to terms with her own psyche? Esther Perel, upon being asked on a final verdict on whether or not to have an affair, she responds, “yes.” The complexity of the human mind is such that not all affairs produce corrosive results. In several key moments, Emma shows surprising affection for her daughter. While men were free to vary in type of desire, women were singularly prepared for domesticity. Only prostitutes had “adventures,” and those were typically not the fun kind. Boredom bred survival. Tedium ensured security. The problem with the formation of industrial society was that no one bothered to ask if this was the sort of life that women wanted unilaterally to lead? While Charles could at least pursue his profession, many women were only given one. Why should we be surprised to find that, when women have the choice of the number of children to be born to the household, they choose less? Increasingly, it seems as though women are more comfortable choosing even none, and to not marry. Are women like Emma role models for motherhood? Her ambivalence toward Berthe is alarming. Would Charles’s ambivalence be more or less tolerated? Emma’s plight is an institutional one, that of a society written by men, detailing women’s one obligation that she can only hope to rebel from rather than reject outright.
Before Rodolfe, Emma’s attachment to Leon was youthful, gawky, lacking the standing for anything beyond flirtation. But now that Emma has experienced an affair, might she be imbued with Rodolfe’s hunger, and show Leon a little of how it’s done? Emma’s distress over her break up with Rodolfe alarms the reader, but was it empowering? It does not seem that way: Charles’s mother claims victory over the docile household, and Emma’s responses are erratic, containing cruelties that do not match her facial expressions. It becomes clear that Emma continues to be torn on questions of faithfulness. When moralists celebrate a lowering of divorce rates in a nation, we would do well to remember Emma. For marriages alone do not indicate they are at all stable ones. Conservative ideas, even from supposedly liberal candidates like Andrew Yang, would have us believe that families are a priori more beneficial an institution for an egalitarian society. Had Yang read Flaubert, or perhaps Charles Dickens, he could see that families are just as susceptible to corruption, debtor’s prison, and the injuries of child labor. Flaubert is here to say that it is women who most suffer in permanent ways the laws and duties of society. While men are free to dabble, when men break the rules, they pay a fee. When women break them, they are ruined. Damn the world for making the early decisions of a young woman this permanent. Instead of divorce, Emma does worse. Can we blame her? She lashes out in her tower, which happens to be the world.
Originally published at https://theroyleline.blog on May 25, 2021.
