"Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert

"Madame Bovary, c'est moi" (Gustave Flaubert)

Very often to understand a work of literature, a real work of literature I mean, it is necessary to know the background. Often the reasons that caused the author to write his book can become a key to its understanding. Often the key is the episodes of the author's biography or his beliefs. Here the key is Flaubert himself.

Before I begin speaking about the novel itself I'd like to say a few words about Flaubert's concept of "ivory tower". Flaubert liked to say that a real writer, metaphorically speaking, should lock himself in an ivory tower, which will separate him from the vulgar and trivial world, only then will he be able to produce a real work of art. What does this mean? Ivory was always considered to be a noble material, as it is very rare and expensive and only chosen ones can afford to have things made of it. Ivory tower symbolizes the nobility of writer, his moral superiority over other people. It sounds rather snobbish, but let us not judge the author, but his novel.

The first thing you notice when you begin to read "Madame Bovary" is the language. Beautiful, rich, colourful and highly emotional, it makes you read on and on, it makes you want to read another Flaubert's book immediately after you have finished. Such style is the result not only of the author's talent, but also of his hard work. It took Flaubert 5 years to write this relatively short novel, he had a habit of working thoroughly over each word, each phrase, each sentence. The result is absolutely gorgeous. Take your time reading "Madame Bovary", it is really worth your appreciation.

The other peculiarity which makes it worth reading is that it is written in realistic manner and therefore you will have an opportunity to enjoy detailed descriptions of the manners, clothes, houses and even dishes of the XIX century.

But all those were just side remarks about the novel, let us now speak about the themes and ideas of it.

"Madame Bovary" shows how dangerous illusions can be sometimes, how your false ideals can misguide you, make you unhappy, wrapping you into a web from which there is no escape.

The book tells about the tragedy of Emma Bovary which resulted from the conflict between her illusions and reality. Emma lives in a small provincial town where she seems completely out of place. She considers herself morally higher than other people (thus like Flaubert himself living in an ivory tower), she is interested in art, literature and theatre, but it is not easy to find people with the same interests among the farmers. Being able to feel deeply and having fancy for everything beautiful and exalted, Emma desires for something romantic, unusual to happen. Everything and everybody around seems to her trivial and vulgar which makes her terribly unhappy.

The major problem of Emma is that she can see only that beauty which was created by her imagination. She is always longing for distant lands and other places and that becomes the only reason for marrying Charles Bovary - to escape from her father's farm, to move to the town, there, only there her real life will begin. But it doesn't begin. Emma fails to see the beauty which surrounds her, she looks for it elsewhere - in the ball she happens to visit once, in Rouen, in Paris. Emma simply can't understand that she can blame only herself, for she won't take pleasures in what she already has.

Another problem of Emma is the idealistic picture of a man she has drawn in her mind. Poor commonplace Charles fails to correspond it and Emma, without giving it another thought, moves on to find lovers. But no lover (and in fact no person, living or dead) could match up her ideal. Moreover, her relations with her lovers look not so poetic and lofty as she imagines. Pretty soon Emma begins to behave like a heroine of penny novels, while the feelings of her lovers would better be described as "lust" than "love" and they would have the same feelings to another girl, had they met her instead of Emma. Charles, on the contrary, notwithstanding his "peasant behaviour", is deeply and sincerely in love with Emma, which she fails to notice and appreciate.

Emma seeks for more and more ways to make her life more beautiful and noble and soon becomes desperate in her search, surrounding herself with lie and debts. Being so busy with her thoughts about elegant feelings she has no time to actually feel. The only feelings she seems to have are make-believe. Trying to escape from reality Emma only sinks deeper and deeper into it becoming vulgar herself.

In "Madame Bovary" Flaubert was intending to show that there is no place for illusions and deeply feeling people like Emma in modern world which corresponded to his vision of reality. He believed that life at his time became too commonplace, even art became shallow - his predecessors Balzack and Stendhal described real emotions and passions because people at that time had such, but what is left to his contemporaries is to deal with coarse bourgeois feelings. "Madame Bovary is me", - he used to say, meaning that both he and his character were sophisticated personalities who tried to resist he triviality of bourgeouis world.

I guess the tragedy of Emma (and partly of Flaubert himself) was in the fact, that they were too prejudices against the world around them. Deep feelings are not always complicated, pleasures can be found in quite common things. The world will seem not so hideous if you open your eyes to look at it.