I was entirely captured by Madame Bovary when I first read it. I was a young newly married woman like Emma, but unlike her, I was (mostly) happy and satisfied. I also lived in 2004 when women had a lot more freedom, opportunity and personal agency. I had lots in common with my husband, unlike Emma who found her husband under-educated and boorish.
Madam Bovary captivated me so much that I described it as my favourite novel for a decade. I felt that the cautionary message of discontent spiralling into infidelity, deceit, parental neglect and debt was one our culture needed, but what grasped me the most was Flaubert’s prose. His work avoids the cliched and flowery writing that was popular at the time he wrote and feels visceral and contemporary. He shows a love for finding the perfect adjective and the subtlety to convey emotion in new ways.
The reader understands the placement of a flower, a garment, or a gesture to declare a subtext in ways that leave deep impressions on the reader’s mind. However, he’s not vague or obtuse. He boldly explores female desire with a discreet but open hand. Emma is not a subtle character and yet she feels real, almost too bright in every scene.
The visceral Emma
When I first read Madame Bovary, although she is the product of a man, it was Emma herself who grasped me by her perfumed hand and overshared about her consuming passions, her thirst for luxury, her depression and boredom. She talked at me ( not to me) about her desperate need for pleasure and validation. She complained about her husband and his red face, his snore, his protruding belly.
Her eyes shone with manic energy and she twisted a lock of hair around one finger. She would stroke the sleeve of my shirt if the fabric was fine enough. She would ask if I got my jeans on sale, I am sure.
I saw the worst of myself in Emma, but where Emma escaped into fantasy and ordered another silk scarf to wear at her next assignation with her boyfriend - I just wallowed in discontent and lethargy. I dreamed about things I would never get around to. In my daydreams, I left my damp flat by daydreaming, looking out over the ocean view to disappear, like Emma.
I have read Madame Bovary three times over the last twenty years, sometimes to remind myself that my desire for wealth, freedom or romance will end in unhappiness. But usually to enjoy the taut prose of a master whose style powerfully influenced the modern literary novel. The novel seems to directly stimulate my acetylcholine ( sometimes known as the introvert hormone) and puts me into the kind of reverie that Emma knew when waltzing with the viscount at 3 a.m. at his lavish country home.
The male gaze
After my second reading, I started to think about the undercurrent of male fetishism in the novel. Yes, I am an English grad and social researcher so of course I read Laura Mulvey’s ‘the male gaze’. But post #metoo it’s hard to unsee these markers of gender and culture. Novels written from the male gaze do not see women as people.
In my most recent and fourth read of Madame Bovary, I’m seeing more than ever that Emma is not a fully fleshed woman, but a caricatured and objectified woman. She exists in the light of limerance because Flaubert is half in love with her and half loathes her. He wants to possess and discard her in equal measure. She is both idealised and demonised as an object of lust that he will never have.
Perhaps it is against the ad-hominem principles I was taught in philosophy to mention that Flaubert never married and lived with his mother for most of his life. But now when I read his descriptions of ( my beloved - yes I love her, reader) Emma I cannot help but see Flaubert as the ‘gazer’. He’s a man who has watched a lot of women, I imagine, with a calculating stare.
Flaubert, the proto-incel
In my mind, Flaubert is watching Emma with a lupine look in his eyes and rigid set to his jaw. Perhaps Emma Bovary is a combination of other “Emmas” he watched while waiting for his groom to change his horses while he drank a pint at a regional rest stop. He watched her and filed away the details, ostensibly for his novels, but also as a proto-incel. He absorbs the narrowness of her waist and the whiteness of her throat. He notices details, a ring on her finger, a new ribbon, a flounce on her gown.
He studies the way the light catches her hair, and how her teeth show when she laughs. She has a snaggletooth, which suits her. She is too thin, but fashionably so. He watches from afar and knows she does not notice him and will never be her Rodolphe or Leon ( or even Charlie). He watches her as incels do, knowing he is not a Chad. He watches her, not imagining what it is like to be her, but what it would be like to possess her.
Seeing Flaubert himself the creator from my female gaze I cannot quite believe his depiction of her character and I want to redeem her. Flaubert's Emma neglects her child and buys expensive gifts on credit, she visits her lover shamelessly in daylight, muddying her gown. She moves from a believably discontent housewife to a woman with a personality disorder and serious impulse control issues within days of meeting her first lover, Rodolphe.
Redeeming Emma
What was first to me an essential novel about debt and discontent becomes a bit untenable. The cautionary tale feels undermined because Emma, as a parable of discontentment turned to sin, does not exist, not even as a fictional paradigm. My heart wants Emma to see the error of her ways because she is in my mind a flawed woman but not an evil one. Is this because, in my female gaze, I see her with pity? Not lust and revulsion?
In the fairy tale ‘The Red Shoes’ the protagonist, Karen makes poor decisions that dishonour her adoptive mother and begins to focus more on her red shoes than on God. She has many opportunities to choose the right way but gives in to her own vanity.
In this rather gruesome tale, a soldier passes his hands over her shoes on the way to church chanting ‘My! What pretty dancing shoes!’
Karen fantasises about her red shoes all through the sermon - when her shoes suddenly make her dance. Compelled, she cannot stop until the shoes are removed by force, giving her kind adoptive mother a few hard kicks in the process.
The shoes are put in a case so that they will not be worn. Her mother buys her black shoes but shortly afterwards becomes so unwell that she cannot leave her bed. Karen soon receives an invitation to a ball and faced with either caring for her adoptive mother or dancing, she decides to go. Hovering between the forbidden red shoes and the more acceptable black ones, she chooses the red.
At the ball, her shoes take her to the right when she wants to go left, and up the hall when she wants to go down. Eventually, her shoes carry her out of the hall entirely, into a desperate dance across the hills and dales in the black of night. She tries to pull off the shoes and her stockings are torn, but she cannot stop.
Dance she did and dance she must, over field and meadow.
Cut off my feet with the red shoes on them
Eventually, Karen finds an executioner sharpening his axe. She asks him to put her out of her misery as she has danced for days on end. He asks if he should cut off her head and she says that she must live to repent of her sin. She asks that he cut off her feet with the red shoes on them. When he has cut off her feet, the feet and shoes dance off into the wilds. Karen is given crutches and wooden feet and tries to begin her life again. Her adoptive mother died while she was in a dancing fervour. She is filled with remorse and sorrow for her actions.
Emma's shame and Karen's grace
Bovary’s fate is like Karen’s, except that Emma allowed her red shoes ( or her thirst for more) to carry her towards ruin. Madame Bovary does not live to repent of her sin, she kills herself to avoid the consequences of her debt and infidelity, bringing ruin on her husband and daughter.
Karen is the anti-type of Emma, who begs for mercy from God. After her horrific experience with the red shoes, she begins working for minimum wage with a Christian family. Karen avoids church bc the red shoes appear at the door whenever she goes, dancing before her. Hiding from the terror of her sin she stays home to read her Bible, only to find God brings church to her. He hears her cry for mercy, forgives her and never speaks of the red shoes again. His forgiveness and mercy is complete.
Flaubert's cautionary tale falls short
While Flaubert punishes Emma for the disgrace of her sin, the writer of the Red Shoes reminds the reader that God forgives even the most selfish and sinful of us, if we only cry out for his mercy to receive it.
So Madame Bovary is a brilliant, but incomplete novel. It is a revenge fantasy. Flaubert is acting out the rage he feels bc he does not see Emma as a human being who belongs to God, but as a beautiful ravishing creature he wishes to possess. His cautionary tale does carry some of the weight of the fairy tale The Red Shoes but falls short because he cannot show the grace, love and mercy God offers the wayward.
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