madame bovary

i really don't know what to think of this book. i'm pretty overwhelmed by it and i'm dazzled by all the stuff that people -- having read it a dozen times and translated it -- have to say about it. it's a super disappointing thing to read the book's introduction still so pleasantly bewildered, to know that every single one of one's uncertainties and hunches and feelings have already been distilled into workman like little essays on "neighbors" or "marriage" or "childhood" in the novel. they don't leave much room to waffle and dream, they don't much allow for the infinite oddities of a book that is, ultimately, about a faraway country 150 years ago.

one thing that i sheepishly think about madame bovary is that this is, in a sneaky way, a salute to the plodding charles bovary. he sires the title, he brackets the story. in a preface michele something or other writes that this was flaubert's subversive node to the male dominated world in which women lived (for the real story, of course, is emma's). but something the book made me think of is what constitutes drama, a tale worth telling. you get swept up reading the book by the fear, always fulfilled, that this will fade, that feelings strenuously felt will eventually exhaust themselves and that emma's performative emotions will be revealed for what they are. her paramours are no more particular than the velvet of her dresses, they only exist insofar as they provoke feeling in her. it doesn't seem to me that emma ever acknowledges that they (or anyone else she interacts with in the book, for that matter) have interior selves.

anyway, emma's got the story. the intro talks about how we start off with this charbovari guy and it's throwing us for a loop; we doubt if this young man who grows like an oak will hold our attention. he isn't given the chance, but he definitely wouldn't. but what's interesting in this is how this intensely boring man contains love in the most pure, passionate form imaginable. or maybe not, maybe it's contentment -- he is described as pretty passively enjoying her company and not trying to ravish her every other minute, but that's its own proof; emma was a spectacularly shitty spouse, i'm pretty sure charles is banned from her room, her floor of the house for a good 75% of the book and he's regularly described restraining himself for fear of disturbing the one he so pathetically loves. and the ending is its own proof; this man dies without her.  if he'd been simply content, the falsification of that domestic happiness with the discovery of her infidelity wouldn't be so devastating, charles doesn't have a lot of pride to lay him low. what he did have was love.

this is a pretty funny thing to bring up. there's a book in the 19th century, a big, interesting book that's all about a woman and the things she feels! it condescends to her, yes, and pretty forcefully identifies her as a woman, but it's still about her. and then i try and put emphasis back on this stodgy little bourgeois man. but still, it's in that ruddy simpleton that there is love, the real and not performative love, the love as intense and drunk and eternal as any oriental farce.

also, the intro to the book makes elaborate arguments about flaubert being subversive and taking down the bourgeoisie. it argues he was depressing them from the inside, rotting out the conventional people with his relentlessly cynical novels. and that they are, but that is pretty weak. and in a novel so epically flowery, so "supremely beautiful," i think it's a mistake to say that something that might conceptually nibble at the edifice of bourgeois life actually does anything at all to it. if anything, it reinforces it because people are underratedly blockheaded in taking what they will from culture, in cherry picking. and in madame bovary there is a smorgasborg of contented-ass  landscape painting and towering love affairs and everything passionate and beautiful that one might ask of life. and for many readers, perhaps nearly all, that is all they will take from it.