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Summary
Summary
A literary event: one of the most celebrated novels ever written, in a magnificent new translation
Seven years ago, the incomparable Lydia Davis brought us an award-winning, rapturously reviewed new translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way that was hailed as "clear and true to the music of the original" ( Los Angeles Times ) and "a work of creation in its own right" (Claire Messud, Newsday ). Now she turns her gifts to the book that defined the novel as an art form.
When Emma Rouault marries dull, provincial doctor Charles Bovary, her dreams of an elegant and passionate life crumble. She escapes into sentimental novels but finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. She spends lavishly and embarks on a series of disappointing affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, Emma takes drastic action with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter. When published in 1857, Madame Bovary was embraced by bourgeois women who claimed it spoke to the frustrations of their lives. Davis's landmark translation gives new life in English to Flaubert's masterwork.
Author Notes
Born in the town of Rouen, in northern France, in 1821, Gustave Flaubert was sent to study law in Paris at the age of 18. After only three years, his career was interrupted and he retired to live with his widowed mother in their family home at Croisset, on the banks of the Seine River. Supported by a private income, he devoted himself to his writing.
Flaubert traveled with writer Maxime du Camp from November 1849 to April 1851 to North Africa, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. When he returned he began Madame Bovary, which appeared first in the Revue in 1856 and in book form the next year. The realistic depiction of adultery was condemned as immoral and Flaubert was prosecuted, but escaped conviction.
Other major works include Salammbo (1862), Sentimental Education (1869), and The Temptation of Saint Antony (1874). His long novel Bouvard et Pecuchet was unfinished at his death in 1880. After his death, Flaubert's fame and reputation grew steadily, strengthened by the publication of his unfinished novel in 1881 and the many volumes of his correspondence.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
New York Review of Books Review
Naxos AudioBooks THE PUBLICATION of Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" in 1857 and of Émile Zola's "Thérèse Raquin" 10 years later roused the French literary establishment against two previously unknown authors who had gone beyond the bounds of all that was held to be morally admissible in fiction with their portraits of adulterous women starved by marriage of sex and romance. The state prosecuted Flaubert for gross indecency, despite the terrible punishment he metes out to his wayward heroine. Zola was not subjected to the same ordeal, but critics treated him as a rogue purveying smut in the name of realism. Both novels have appeared in countless editions since the 19th century. Both have been adapted to the screen. Now they are available as audiobooks, read by two gifted English actresses: "Madame Bovary" by Juliet Stevenson and "Thérèse Raquin" by Kate Winslet. Zola predicted that his work would prove to be a succès d'horreur, and horror is indeed what it portends from the opening scene, which ushers the reader into a narrow Parisian street or "passage" overhung by a dirt-encrusted glass canopy admitting little daylight (today, "passages" that survived Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris under Napoleon III are mostly smart commercial arcades). Residing in this sepulchral milieu are the Raquins: Thérèse; her frail husband, Camille; and her mother-in-law. Thérèse had joined the family long before her marriage. The illegitimate child of Mme. Raquin's brother by an Algerian woman, she had been raised to pamper Camille, first as his childhood companion, then as his nominal spouse. Time passes joylessly for her until Camille introduces a friend named Laurent, whose virile presence releases the "African" stifled by her chlorotic French family. She gives herself passionately to Laurent, and in due course conspires with him to rid herself of Camille. No sooner have the lovers killed him than they discover that what had stood between them also bound them together: The murder consummating their lust extinguishes it. Joined in marriage, the couple marry their villainy and form a ménage à trois with the memory of Camille, who posthumously acquires the power he never enjoyed in life. Even critics otherwise sympathetic to Zola carped at his obvious distortions. To Sainte-Beuve, Zola's Paris, far from illustrating the doctrine of realism, was, in its "utter blackness," a proper backdrop for melodrama. But with Zola one should bear in mind Eric Bentley's dictum that melodrama is the realism, or "naturalism," of the dream life. His Passage du Pont-Neuf, for example, is the archetype of enclosed spaces that harbor violence or depravity throughout his 20-volume saga, "Les Rougon-Macquart." It prefigures the greenhouse in "The Rush for the Spoil," the glass-roofed market in "The Belly of Paris," the derelict country church in "The Sinful Priest," the apartment building in "Pot Luck," the underground maze in "Germinal." Like Balzac, Zola closely investigated his different settings. But what shapes each one is a fantasy of instinctual forces bursting through the structure containing them and leaving a world in ruins. Tree limbs poke into holy naves, well-laid gardens go to seed, locomotives run full steam with no one at the engine, water floods mine shafts. Zola, whose recurrent nightmare was of himself buried alive, could hardly conceive drama without a sacrificial victim. Identity and enclosure, the self and an abode standing islandlike on the margin of some larger settlement are linked again and again in disaster. Kate Winslet's reading proceeds in a rich voice from one extreme of human dysfunction to another - from the internments of deadly routine and obsessive guilt to murder and self-extinction. It tells the story as well as one could wish it told, with perfect diction but an edge of anxiety, maintaining a deliberate pace but anticipating the rush to an abyss. Where Zola's narrative calls for dialogue, Winslet brilliantly impersonates the main characters, becoming by turns an old woman, an effeminate man-child, a vulnerable brute, a desperate vixen. She tells us that she first read "Thérèse Raquin" years ago and was riveted by it. Here we enjoy all the benefit of her long engagement with the novel. "Madame Bovary" features another woman whose quest for fulfillment outside her conjugal prison ultimately leads to suicide. In both novels, pretending is a matter of life and death. While Thérèse wears a mask of contentment to survive as best she can the dreariness of her adoptive family's petit-bourgeois arrangements, Emma Bovary is portrayed as a born actress wed to the belief that real life lies in a Romantic netherworld far removed from rural Normandy. Among the greatest scenes in Flaubert's novel are those that cruelly expose her self-deception. And among these the most ingenious takes place at an agricultural show in Yonville, where Emma and a suave man of means named Rodolphe Boulanger, seated at a tall window behind the town square, witness the spectacle of merchants and peasants assembled to hear a regional councilor glorify animal husbandry. While the government official throws bouquets of rhetoric to the crowd, Rodolphe addresses world-weary rants to Emma. The commotion of livestock being judged for prizes serves as an ironic obbligato to the philanderer's well-rehearsed script. Theater answers theater from either side of the square. All this Stevenson manages with the virtuosity of a quick-change artist, adapting herself to one persona after another: the full-throated functionary, the practiced libertine, the plaintive wife of a country doctor. Flaubert, who would have preferred a life onstage to the career in law he was expected to pursue, always read his sentences aloud. Stevenson - whose movies include "Truly Madly Deeply" and "Bend It Like Beckham" - gives her all, or all that the translation allows, to their worked beauty and expressiveness. Another example is the oblique description, some chapters later, of Emma having sex behind drawn shades in a hackney carriage circling round and round Rouen, to the bewilderment of onlookers. She and her new lover are unseen, but unseen in flagrante delicto, and unheard except for the lover angrily hectoring the coachman to press on. Here as elsewhere, eros travels recklessly. Heeding Flaubert's metaphoric cues, Stevenson reads the blind journey as a dirge timed to the beat of horses' hooves and conducted by a death wish. The scene harks back to the agricultural show, only one or two harvest seasons past in her neighbors' calendar, but long enough ago for Emma to have descended from the Romantic stage to a harlot's mobile boudoir. The audience - now facing her - still sees nothing. Animals still attend her love life. She is fallen, still cherishing dreams of elevation. Kate Winslet has said, in praise of audiobooks, that it is "magical" to have an atmosphere and environment "created entirely for you by somebody else's voice." There are voices and then there are voices. For magic of that kind, Flaubert and Zola are well served by her and Juliet Stevenson. FREDERICK BROWN'S latest book, "The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940," was published last month.
Guardian Review
Reading Madame Bovary for the first time was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life - at least up to that point. I was a very young woman - not even 18. I was an au pair in the French provinces in the 1950s, and I read Madame Bovary in French, sitting in the furrow of a vineyard. I was like Emma Rouault before she became Madame Bovary, someone whose most intense life was in books, from which I had formed vague images of passion and adventure, love and weddings, marriage and children. I was afraid of being trapped in a house and a kitchen. Madame Bovary opened a vision of meaninglessness and emptiness, which was all the more appalling because it was so full of things, clothes and furniture, rooms and gardens. The worst thing of all was that it was the books that were the most insidious poison. Recently Madame Bovary appeared in a British newspaper listing of the "50 best romantic reads." It was, and is, the least romantic book I have ever read. If I have come to love it , it is because now I am half a century older, and not trapped in a house and kitchen, I can equably sympathise with the central person in the book, who is its author - endlessly inventive, observant, and full of life. Madame Bovary was published in 1856-57 and is at the centre of any discussion of the European realistic novel of bourgeois life - especially provincial life. The 19th-century novel, however much it criticises the bourgeoisie, is a bourgeois form that grew up with the prosperous middle classes who had time for reading, and were interested in precise discriminations of social relations and moral and immoral behaviour. It comes after the chivalric epic with its codes of honour and courtly love, and after the religious epic, Paradise Lost , The Divine Comedy , religious dramas of the nature of the human soul in the mythic cosmology. The dense social novel flourished in countries with large cities - London, Paris, St Petersburg, Moscow - in which populations were in a state of rapid change - and in provincial societies in which old orders and hierarchies and habits persisted and change was slower. The novel was interested in the structures of societies - from money to education, from religious habits to kinship and marriages, from ambition to failure. Fairy-tale images, the hopes of princesses and kitchenmaids, of youngest sons and poor old women, are contained in but also corrected by the realist novel. Fairy stories end with the lovers marrying and living happy ever after. Jane Austen's novels keep that pattern. The great realist novels study at length what happens after marriage, within marriages, within families and businesses. One of the great subjects of the realist novel is boredom - narrow experiences in small places and unsympathetic groups. There is no greater study of boredom than Madame Bovary - which is nevertheless never boring, but always both terrifying and simultaneously gleeful over its own accuracy. Madame Bovary is also at the centre of any discussion of literary descriptions of adultery. Denis de Rougemont, in his book Love in the Western World , observed that "to judge by literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most remarkable occupations in both Europe and America". He discussed the great lovers of medieval Romance - Lancelot and Guenevere, Tristan and Iseult - and pointed out that the difficulty and unlawfulness of their love is part of the essence of their passion. Marriage is, so to speak, the social and normal framework of the human story - adultery is the great act of individual self-assertion and longing. In terms of medieval Romance, which takes place in a world of dynastic marriages and chivalric devotion, such transgressions are doomed and glorious. In terms of bourgeois monogamous society, they are different. Engels believed that "individual sex love" is a recent concern in human societies, and in our modern capitalist monogamous world is more difficult for women than for men - for men are not condemned and ostracised for promiscuity as women are. Anna Karenina and the heroines of Henry James and Edith Wharton suffer for their desires; their souls are battlefields between good and evil, their fates are tragic. The outward events of Emma Bovary's life are a petit bourgeois version of the doom of Anna Karenina - with important differences. Both heroines have sexually unappealing husbands, and lives that leave them dissatisfied. Both take lovers and both, in their ways, are betrayed or let down by their lovers. Both are sensual and vulnerable and both commit suicide. It might even be said that both are physically attractive to the men who invented and trapped them in their stories, and that both are punished by their authors, as well as by society. Anna Karenina is tragic almost despite Tolstoy. But if Emma Bovary - who is small-minded and confused and selfish - is tragic, it is not in a romantic way, and not because her readers share her feelings or sympathise with her. Our sympathy for her is like our sympathy for a bird the cat has brought in and maimed. It flutters, and it will die. When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary - the fairy-tale happy ending - she becomes the third Madame Bovary in the book, after her living mother-in-law and Charles Bovary's dead first wife, whose decaying wedding bouquet she finds in her drawer. Her name, and the title of the novel, define her as a person who is expected to behave in certain ways, fitting her station and function. She loses what individual identity she had. She herself has had vague conventional expectations of marriage, and Flaubert wonderfully describes her sexual disappointment, her reluctance to let go of the idea that she is experiencing post-wedding bliss. He also describes her fairytale, women's magazine attempts to make her house and clothes conform to an idea she has of decorum and elegance. What makes it impossible for her to inhabit her house or her marriage is her romantic sense that there is something more, some more intense experience, some wider horizon if she could only find it. Her desires are formed by her reading and her education. In the convent where she was educated her dreamy spiritual ecstasies were succeeded by dreamy visions of happiness derived from novels, good and bad. She is like that other archetypal reading hero, Don Quixote, in that her reading habits corrupt her vision of the world and her conduct of her life. They are both Romantics. Don Quixote desires to make provincial La Mancha into a battlefield of giants, demons and ladies in distress. Emma Bovary desires to be happy in lovely clothes in swift carriages, dancing at balls, being admired. The psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre wrote an illuminating paper on Madame Bovary , entitled "Death by Daydreaming", in which she used Freud's essay on "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" to discuss the particular daydreams of Emma Bovary. According to Freud, daydreams are related to children's play, in which the toys and objects they arrange are , like "castles in the air", symbols of what they desire in their lives. Freud's interest in this essay is not, he explicitly says, in the great authors of epics and tragedies whose material springs from the myths and history of their world. He is interested precisely in the writers of consoling fantasy tales, minor fictions in which the reader can bathe in narcissistic fantasies of being perfectly brave and beautiful, beloved and successful. Folk tales, Freud says, are the daydreams of a culture. In 1856 George Eliot wrote one of the funniest critical essays of her time on "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists". In her mock accounts of the heroines of what she calls the "mind-and-millinery" novel she describes its heroine as surrounded by men who "play a very subordinate part by her side." "Ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany the heroine on her 'starring' expedition through life. They see her at a ball and are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding-excursion and they are witched by her noble horsemanship; at church and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanour. She is the ideal woman in feelings faculties and flounces." Emma's daydreams derive from this pattern. In fact her lovers tire of her and desert her, and it is she who is subordinate. Freud also makes the point that the hero or heroine of the daydream is in a narcissistic solitary world. Emma Bovary's romantic desires are little scenes in which she plays the heroine. She prefers to dream about her first lover, Leon, rather than to see him. Her moment of ecstasy after she has been seduced by Rodolphe is when she is able to tell herself in a mirror, "J'ai un amant. J'ai un amant." ["I have a lover. I have a lover.] When she decides to set out on the fatal riding expedition with him, it is not desire, let alone love, which propels her - it is Charles Bovary's promise of a riding habit, an "amazone". "L'amazone la decida." ["The Amazon convinced her."] She is, as other writers have pointed out, not only a romantic reader, but a bad reader. Flaubert is very precise about the lethal vagueness of her fantasies, as they sap the reality from her world, and simultaneously lay her open to the financial depredations of Lheureux, who sells her the concrete toys - the riding whip and cigar-case - to act out her daydreams. And to destroy the lives of her husband and child. It is not a nice story. So why is it one of the greatest novels of all time? To answer that, it is necessary to look at the history of its writing, and Flaubert's ideas about what he was trying to achieve. Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen, where his father was the chief surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu hospital. His father hoped that Gustave would also be a doctor but the son seems always to have known that he wanted to write. He lived most of his life in Normandy, though he travelled often to Paris and in 1851 travelled with his friend Maxime duCamp in Egypt, the Near East and the Mediterranean. He contracted syphilis on this journey, and was also subject to severe epileptic fits. He never married, and lived close to his mother. He had a long, unsatisfactory affair with Louise Colet, 11 years older than he was, and also a writer, who saved his splendid letters. He had himself a Romantic interest in the distant and strange, both in space and in time. In 1849 Flaubert finished writing La Tentation de Saint Antoine , inspired by a painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder he had seen in Genoa in 1845, which depicted the ascetic saint in the desert beset by demons and fleshly temptations. He did a great deal of research on 4th-century beliefs, pagan, Christian and heretical, and staged his tale as an exotic drama of ideas. In 1849, just before setting out for Egypt with DuCamp, he spent - according to DuCamp - 32 hours reading the text aloud to him and his other great friend Louis Bouilhet. Also according to DuCamp, Bouilhet, when Flaubert finally demanded his opinion of the work, said "I think you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again." Flaubert was understandably distressed by this response. In 1851 he abandoned various other romantic and exotic projects - Une Nuit de Don Juan, Anbis - and embarked on his novel of provincial life. The immediate inspiration for the plot was the death of a local doctor in Normandy, Eugene Delamare, whose second wife, Delphine, had caused scandal by taking lovers and running up huge debts. But already at the age of 16 Flaubert had written a tale based on a news story in the Rouen newspapers. He called it Passion et Vertu . Its central character is a woman who poisons her husband and children in order to join her lover in America, and then commits suicide when the lover rejects her. Flaubert gave his murderess and suicide romantic tastes as motivation, whereas the original woman seems to have been driven more by money and a desire to evade trial and execution. Flaubert's published letters - especially those to Louise Colet about the writing of Madame Bovary - are some of the most fascinating accounts of the writing process that exist. He tells her he is "two distinct persons: one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase and lofty ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like to make you feel almost physically the things he reproduces." And early in the writing of the novel he says, "The entire value of my book, if it has any, will consist of my having known how to walk straight ahead on a hair, balanced above the two abysses of lyricism and vulgarity (which I want to fuse in a narrative analysis). When I think of what it can be, I am dazzled." He wrote also that his new novel would be "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the external strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible." He was both excited and exhausted by the difficulty of the enterprise - Bovary , he told Louise in July 1852, "will have been an unprecedented tour de force (a fact of which I alone shall ever be aware): its subject, characters, effects etc. - are all alien to me . . . Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles." The supreme importance of style is something to which he returns again and again. He believed he lived in a time when it was not possible to create great types, like Don Quixote or the characters of Shakespeare who "was not a man, he was a continent; he contained whole crowds of men, entire landscapes. Writers like him do not worry about style: they are powerful in spite of all their faults and because of them. When it comes to us, the little men, our value depends on finished execution." Flaubert admired his heroic artists - Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes - for their power to create simple, absolute types and scenes. He says somewhere that great art can appear almost silly, stupid, in its self-sufficiency. His descriptions have exactly that self- sufficiency, a simplicity of presence which is meaning. He knew very well what he was doing. He curbed his naturally flam boyant style. He wrote to Louise Colet, "I think that Bovary will move along, but I am bothered by my tendency to metaphor, decidedly excessive. I am devoured by comparisons as one is by lice, and I spend my time doing nothing but squashing them: my sentences swarm with them." Working with the life of things in Flaubert's style and story is another great interest - idees recues or cliches. One of Flaubert's projects over many years was the compilation of a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas - a collection of platitudes which would be "the historical glorification of everything generally approved." Much of both the comedy and tragedy of Emma Bovary's two love affairs arises from Flaubert's merciless observation of the cliches in which the lovemaking is carried on. Here is his description of the writing of the first rapprochement of the young clerk Leon and Madame Bovary: "Things have been going well for two or three days. I am doing a conversation between a young man and a young woman about literature, the sea, mountains, music - all the poetical subjects. It is something that could be taken seriously and yet I fully intend it as grotesque. This will be the first time, I think, that a book makes fun of its leading lady and its leading man." Flaubert may appear to keep a controlled and glacial distance from his fictional world. In fact his attitude to it was double. He told Louise Colet, "Rien dans ce livre n'est tire de moi . . . Tout est de tete" ["Nothing in this book is from within myself. Everything is from my head"], but he also told Amelie Bosquet, famously, "Madame Bovary c'est moi! - d'apres moi." ["Madame Bovary is me! Drawn from me."] His mother told him, "Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart". But he lived the moments he was writing intensely - "for better or worse it is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes." And when he came to kill Madame Bovary he imagined her agony so intensely that he tasted the bitterness of the arsenic in his own mouth, to the point of vomiting. Is Flaubert's deliberate self-limitation to the physical an aspect of an attempt to be "scientific"? Dostoevsky, who like Flaubert took his subject-matter from the faits divers of newspapers, almost anonymous tales of comedy and disaster, typical tales, was aware of the glittering fascination of the new discoveries of statistics - on suicide for instance. Durkheim's theory of anomie derived from the scientific study of the curious regularity of the number of suicides in Paris, irrespective of the individual despairs that led to them. Dostoevsky believed that without God, in a universe that analysed bodies scientifically - since bodies were all that humans were, in the eyes of science - people would commit suicide because it was a matter of indifference to them whether they lived or died. Emma Bovary's suicide certainly takes place in a meaningless world, and her emotions are not so much tragic as automatic and confused. Her corpse is watched over by a pharmacist who thinks in scientific cliches, and a clergyman whose anointing of her body is told in terms of the sins that body has committed - "les yeux, qui avait tant convoite toutes les sumptuosites terrestres . . . puis sur la bouche qui s'etait ouvert pour le mensonge, qui avait gemi d'orgueil et crie dans la luxure . . ." ["Her eyes, which had so coveted worldly pleasures . . . and then (on) her mouth which had given vent to falsehood which had sneered with pride and squealed with delight . . ."] Emma dies and becomes pure body, but her death is not a scientific event. It is delicately absurd, and terrible in its meaninglessness. Contemporary writers were made uneasy by Flaubert. Henry James expressed a recurrent unease which he said was experienced by the "alien reader" and persisted. "Our complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair." DH Lawrence, a naturally visionary and prophetic realist himself, was more vehement. Flaubert, he said, "stood away from life as from a leprosy." Even Proust, writing his precise and elegant defence of Flaubert, begins with a caveat. "Ce n'est pas que j'aime entre tous les livres de Flaubert, ni meme le style de Flaubert." ["It's not that I love Flaubert's books above all else or even his style."] All these express an unease which persists in readers faced with this very great novel. But between seeing Emma Bovary as "really too small an affair", and Flaubert's vision of life as a leprosy, and understanding that Madame Bovary , with all its realistic 19th-century apparatus, is the beginning of a new vision, a modern vision, is only a step. The resolution with which Flaubert polished his perfect surface, and kept it almost purely surface, not transparent, not revealing any deeper meaning than its existence, is behind the nausea of Sartre's Roquentin, and the reduced worlds of Beckett's bare survivors. Its beauty is enchanting and terrible. It shows us implacably the limitations of our habitation in our bodies, in space and time. Emma Bovary is indeed "really too small" but there is a sense in which she is a type of everywoman. Flaubert's relentless and fastidious observation and creation of his small world is itself a form of contem- plation. He shows us laughter, irony and fear. And in the end gentleness, for sad, stupid, honest Charles, and silly, greedy, unsatisfied Emma. This is an edited extract from AS Byatt's introduction to a Norwegian edition of Madame Bovary. To read the full English version go to www.books.guardian.co.uk. AS Byatt's next novel, The Whistling Woman, will be published in September by Chatto at pounds 16.99. To order it for pounds 14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-byattonbovary.1 Reading Madame Bovary for the first time was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life - at least up to that point. I was a very young woman - not even 18. I was an au pair in the French provinces in the 1950s, and I read Madame Bovary in French, sitting in the furrow of a vineyard. I was like Emma Rouault before she became Madame Bovary, someone whose most intense life was in books, from which I had formed vague images of passion and adventure, love and weddings, marriage and children. I was afraid of being trapped in a house and a kitchen. Madame Bovary opened a vision of meaninglessness and emptiness, which was all the more appalling because it was so full of things, clothes and furniture, rooms and gardens. The worst thing of all was that it was the books that were the most insidious poison. Recently Madame Bovary appeared in a British newspaper listing of the "50 best romantic reads." It was, and is, the least romantic book I have ever read. If I have come to love it , it is because now I am half a century older, and not trapped in a house and kitchen, I can equably sympathise with the central person in the book, who is its author - endlessly inventive, observant, and full of life. In 1849 [Flaubert] finished writing La Tentation de Saint Antoine , inspired by a painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder he had seen in Genoa in 1845, which depicted the ascetic saint in the desert beset by demons and fleshly temptations. He did a great deal of research on 4th-century beliefs, pagan, Christian and heretical, and staged his tale as an exotic drama of ideas. In 1849, just before setting out for Egypt with DuCamp, he spent - according to DuCamp - 32 hours reading the text aloud to him and his other great friend Louis Bouilhet. Also according to DuCamp, Bouilhet, when Flaubert finally demanded his opinion of the work, said "I think you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again." Flaubert was understandably distressed by this response. In 1851 he abandoned various other romantic and exotic projects - Une Nuit de Don Juan, Anbis - and embarked on his novel of provincial life. The immediate inspiration for the plot was the death of a local doctor in Normandy, Eugene Delamare, whose second wife, Delphine, had caused scandal by taking lovers and running up huge debts. But already at the age of 16 Flaubert had written a tale based on a news story in the Rouen newspapers. He called it Passion et Vertu . Its central character is a woman who poisons her husband and children in order to join her lover in America, and then commits suicide when the lover rejects her. Flaubert gave his murderess and suicide romantic tastes as motivation, whereas the original woman seems to have been driven more by money and a desire to evade trial and execution. Contemporary writers were made uneasy by Flaubert. [Henry James] expressed a recurrent unease which he said was experienced by the "alien reader" and persisted. "Our complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair." DH Lawrence, a naturally visionary and prophetic realist himself, was more vehement. Flaubert, he said, "stood away from life as from a leprosy." Even Proust, writing his precise and elegant defence of Flaubert, begins with a caveat. "Ce n'est pas que j'aime entre tous les livres de Flaubert, ni meme le style de Flaubert." ["It's not that I love Flaubert's books above all else or even his style."] All these express an unease which persists in readers faced with this very great novel. But between seeing Emma Bovary as "really too small an affair", and Flaubert's vision of life as a leprosy, and understanding that Madame Bovary , with all its realistic 19th-century apparatus, is the beginning of a new vision, a modern vision, is only a step. - AS Byatt.
Library Journal Review
Kate Reading narrates Davis's tightly woven and highly accessible new translation of Flaubert's 1857 literary classic, in which the title character, a middle-class, bored, self-centered woman who is desperately seeking a purpose in life, instead finds herself in a destructive arc. Both translator and reader have won numerous awards for their respective previous works, and this collaboration results in an audio performance that is both polished and engaging. Warmly recommended for any non-French speaker interested in literary classics. [Alternate recordings of previous translations are available from Blackstone Audio, as read by Simon Vance, and from Tantor Audio, as read by Donada Peters.-Ed.]-I. Pour-El, Des Moines Area Community Coll., Boone, IA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
[1] We were in Study Hall, when the Headmaster entered, followed by a new boy dressed in regular clothes and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who were sleeping woke up, and everyone rose as though taken by surprise while at work. The Headmaster motioned us to sit down again; then, turning to the study hall teacher: "Monsieur Roger," he said to him in a low voice, "here is a pupil I am entrusting to your care; he is entering the fifth. If his work and his conduct are deserving, he will be moved up to the seniors , as befits his age." Still standing in the corner, behind the door, so that one could hardly see him, the new boy was a fellow from the country, about fifteen years old, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut straight across the forehead, like a village choirboy's, his manner sensible and very ill at ease. Although he was not broad in the shoulders, his suit jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have pinched him around the armholes, and it showed, through the vents of its cuffs, red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, emerged from a pair of yellowish pants pulled tight by his suspenders. He wore stout shoes, badly shined, studded with nails. We began reciting our lessons. He listened to them, all ears, as attentive as though to a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs or to lean on his elbow, and at two o'clock, when the bell rang, the teacher was obliged to alert him, so that he would get in line with us. We were in the habit, when we entered the classroom, of throwing our caps on the floor, so that our hands would be free; from the doorsill, we had to hurl them under the bench, in such a way that they struck the wall, making a lot of dust; it was the thing to do . But either because he had not noticed this maneuver or because he had not dared go along with it, after the prayer was over, the new boy was still holding his cap on his knees. It was one of those head coverings of a composite order, in which one can recognize components of a busby, a lancer's cap, a bowler, an otter-skin cap, and a cotton nightcap, one of those sorry objects, indeed, whose mute ugliness has depths of expression, like the face of an imbecile. Ovoid and stiffened with whalebones, it began with three circular sausages; then followed alternately, separated by a red band, lozenges of velvet and rabbit fur; next came a kind of bag terminating in a cardboard-lined polygon, covered with an embroidery in complicated braid, from which hung, at the end of a long, excessively slender cord, a little crosspiece of gold threads, by way of a tassel. It was new; the visor shone. "Stand up," said the teacher. He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh. He bent over to pick it up. A boy beside him knocked it down again with a nudge of his elbow; he retrieved it again. "Get rid of that helmet of yours," said the teacher, who was a wit. There was a burst of laughter from the class that disconcerted the poor boy, so that he did not know whether he should keep his cap in his hand, leave it on the floor, or put it on his head. He sat down again and laid it on his knees. "Stand up," said the teacher, "and tell me your name." Stammering, the new boy articulated an unintelligible name. "Again!" The same mumble of syllables was heard, muffled by the hooting of the class. "Louder!" shouted the teacher. "Louder!" The new boy , summoning an extreme resolve, then opened an inordinately large mouth and bawled at the top of his lungs, as though shouting to someone, the word Charbovari . Now an uproar exploded all at once, rose in a crescendo , with outbursts of shrill voices (they howled, they barked, they stamped, they repeated: Charbovari! Charbovari! ), then continued in isolated notes, quieting with great difficulty and sometimes resuming suddenly along the line of a bench from which a stifled laugh would start up again here and there, like a half- spent firecracker. However, under a rain of penalties, order was gradually restored in the classroom, and the teacher, having managed to grasp the name of Charles Bovary, having had it dictated to him, spelled out, and read back, at once commanded the poor fellow to go sit on the dunce's bench, at the foot of the platform. He began to move but, before going, hesitated. "What are you looking for?" asked the teacher. "My c...;," said the new boy timidly, casting uneasy glances around him. "Five hundred lines for the entire class!" The furious exclamation put an end, like the Quos ego , to a fresh squall. "Now, keep quiet!" continued the indignant teacher, wiping his forehead with the handkerchief he had just taken from inside his toque. "As for you, new boy , you will copy out the verb ridiculus sum for me twenty times." Then, more gently: "Come now! You'll find your cap; it hasn't been stolen!" All was calm again. Heads bent over satchels, and for two hours the new boy 's behavior continued to be exemplary, even though, from time to time, a pellet of paper fired from the nib of a pen came and splattered on his face. But he would wipe himself off with his hand and remain motionless, his eyes lowered. That evening, in Study Hall, he drew his cuff guards from his desk, put his little things in order, carefully ruled his paper. We saw him working conscientiously, looking up all the words in the dictionary and taking great pains. Thanks, no doubt, to this willingness he displayed, he did not have to go down into the lower class; for while he knew his rules passably well, he had almost no elegance in his constructions. It was the curé of his village who had started him on Latin, his parents, for reasons of economy, having delayed as long as possible sending him to school. His father, Monsieur Charles-Denis-Bartholomé Bovary, a former assistant army surgeon, compromised, in about 1812, in some business involving conscription and forced, at about that time, to leave the service, had then profited from his personal attributes to pick up a dowry of sixty thousand francs, presented in the form of a hosier's daughter, who had fallen in love with his fine appearance. A handsome, boastful man, jingling his spurs loudly, sporting side-whiskers that merged with his mustache, his fingers always garnished with rings, and dressed in gaudy colors, he had the appearance of a valiant soldier, along with the easy enthusiasm of a traveling salesman. Once married, he lived for two or three years off his wife's fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking great porcelain pipes, coming home at night only after the theater, and haunting cafés. The father-in-law died and left little; he was indignant at this, went into manufacturing , lost some money at it, then retired to the country, where he intended to cultivate the land . But since he hardly understood farming any better than he did chintz, since he rode his horses instead of putting them to the plow, drank his cider by the bottle instead of selling it by the barrel, ate the best poultry in his yard and greased his hunting shoes with the fat of his pigs, he soon realized that it would be better to abandon all financial enterprises. For a rent of two hundred francs a year, therefore, he found, in a village on the borders of the Caux region and Picardy, a dwelling of a sort that was half farm, half gentleman's residence; and there, morose, gnawed by regrets, railing at heaven, envying all the world, he shut himself away at the age of forty- five, disgusted with men, he said, and determined to live in peace. His wife had been madly in love with him at one time; she had doted on him with countless slavish attentions that had estranged him from her even further. Once lively, expansive, and wholeheartedly affectionate, she had become, as she aged (like stale wine turning to vinegar), difficult in temper, shrill, nervous. She had suffered so much, without complaining at first, when she saw him running after every slut in the village and when a score of low-life places would send him back to her at night surfeited and stinking drunk! Then her pride had rebelled. She fell silent, swallowing her rage in a mute stoicism, which she maintained until her death. She was constantly out on errands, on business. She would go see the lawyers, the presiding judge, remember the due dates of the notes, obtain extensions; and, at home, she would iron, sew, wash, look after the workers, settle the accounts, while Monsieur, troubling himself about nothing, eternally sunk in a sullen torpor from which he roused himself only to say unpleasant things to her, sat smoking by the fire, spitting in the ashes. When she had a child, he had to be put out to nurse. Back in their house, the little boy was spoiled like a prince. His mother fed him on jams; his father let him run around without shoes, and, imagining himself an enlightened thinker, even said that he could go quite naked, like the young of animals. In opposition to the mother's inclinations, he had in mind a certain manly ideal of childhood, according to which he tried to mold his son, wanting him to be brought up ruggedly, in a spartan manner, to give him a good constitution. He sent him to bed without a fire, taught him to drink great drafts of rum and to jeer at church processions. But, peaceable by nature, the boy responded poorly to his efforts. His mother kept him always trailing after her; she would cut out cardboard figures for him, tell him stories, converse with him in endless monologues, full of melancholy whimsy and beguiling chatter. In the isolation of her life, she transferred into that childish head all her sparse, shattered illusions. She dreamed of high positions, she saw him already grown, handsome, witty, established, in bridges and roads or the magistracy. She taught him to read and even, on an old piano she had, to sing two or three little ballads. But to all this, Monsieur Bovary, little concerned with literature, said it was not worth the trouble! Would they ever have enough to keep him in a state school, to buy him a practice or set him up in business? Besides, with a little nerve, a man can always succeed in the world . Madame Bovary would bite her lips, and the child would roam at will through the village. He would follow the plowmen and drive away the crows, throwing clods of earth at them till they flew up. He would eat blackberries along the ditches, tend the turkeys with a long stick, toss the hay at harvest time, run through the woods, play hopscotch on the porch of the church on rainy days, and, on the most important holy days, beg the sexton to let him ring the bells so that he could hang with all his weight on the great rope and feel himself borne up by it in its flight. And so he grew like an oak. He acquired strong hands, good color. When he turned twelve, his mother saw to it that his studies were begun. The curé was entrusted with this. But the lessons were so brief and so poorly understood that they could not be of much use. They were given at idle moments, in the sacristy, standing up, in haste, between a baptism and a burial; or the curé would send for his pupil after the Angelus, when he did not have to go out. They would go up to his room, they would settle in; the gnats and moths would circle around the candle. It was warm, the child would fall asleep; and the good man, dozing off with his hands on his belly, would soon be snoring, his mouth open. At other times, when Monsieur le curé, on his way back from carrying the last sacrament to some ill person in the environs, spied Charles wandering the countryside, he would call out to him, sermonize him for a quarter of an hour, and profit from the occasion to make him conjugate a verb at the base of a tree. The rain would come and interrupt them, or an acquaintance passing by. Moreover, he was always pleased with him, even said that the young man had a good memory. This could not be as far as Charles went. Madame was emphatic. Ashamed, or, rather, tired out, Monsieur gave in without a struggle, and they waited one more year until the boy had made his first communion. Another six months went by; and, the following year, Charles was finally enrolled in the school in Rouen, taken there by his father himself, toward the end of October, at the time of the Saint-Romain fair. It would be impossible by now for any of us to recall a thing about him. He was a boy of even temperament, who played at recess, worked in study hall, listening in class, sleeping well in the dormitory, eating well in the dining hall. He had as local guardian a wholesale hardware dealer in the rue Ganterie, who would take him out once a month, on a Sunday, after his shop was closed, send him off to walk along the harbor looking at the boats, then return him to the school by seven o'clock, before supper. In the evening, every Thursday, he would write a long letter to his mother, with red ink and three pats of sealing wax; then he would review his history notebooks or read an old volume of Anacharsis that was lying around in the study hall. Out walking, he would talk to the servant, who, like him, was from the country. By dint of applying himself, he stayed somewhere in the middle of the class; once he even earned a first honorable mention in natural history. But at the end of his third year, his parents withdrew him from the school in order to have him study medicine, convinced that he would be able to go on alone to the baccalaureate. His mother chose a room for him, on the fifth floor, overlooking the Eau de Robec, in the home of a dyer she knew. She concluded the arrangements for his room and board, procured some furniture, a table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherrywood bed, and bought, as well, a little cast-iron stove, with the supply of wood that was to warm her poor child. Then she departed at the end of the week, after a thousand injunctions to behave himself, now that he was going to be abandoned to his own care. The curriculum, which he read on the notice board, made his head swim: a course in anatomy, a course in pathology, a course in physiology, a course in pharmacy, a course in chemistry, and one in botany, and one in clinical practice and one in therapeutics, not to mention hygiene and materia medica, names with unfamiliar etymologies that were like so many doors to sanctuaries filled with solemn shadows. He understood none of it; though he listened, he did not grasp it. He worked nonetheless, he possessed bound notebooks, he attended all the lectures, he never missed a hospital round. He accomplished his little daily task like a mill horse, which walks in circles with its eyes covered, not knowing what it is grinding. To spare him expense, his mother would send him each week, by the carrier, a piece of roast veal, on which he would lunch in the morning when he returned from the hospital, stamping his feet against the wall. Then he would have to hurry to his classes, in the amphitheater, in the hospital, and return home along all those streets. In the evening, after the meager dinner provided by his landlord, he would go back up to his room and back to work, his damp clothes steaming on his body, in front of the red-hot stove. On fine summer evenings, at the hour when the warm streets are empty, when servant girls play at shuttlecock in front of their doors, he would open his window and lean on his elbows. The stream, which makes this part of Rouen into a kind of sordid little Venice, fl owed past below him, yellow, violet, or blue, between its bridges and its railings. Workmen, squatting on the bank, washed their arms in the water. On poles projecting from the tops of attics, hanks of cotton dried in the air. Across from him, beyond the rooftops, extended the great, pure sky, with the red sun going down. How good it must be out there! How cool under the beech trees! And he would open his nostrils wide to breathe in the good smells of the country, which did not reach him. He grew thinner, his body lengthened, and his face took on a sort of plaintive expression that made it almost interesting. Quite naturally, out of indifference, in time he released himself from all the resolutions he had made. Once he missed the hospital rounds, the next day his class, and, savoring this idleness, gradually he did not return. He acquired the habit of going to taverns, along with a passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every night in a grimy public room, in order to tap on a marble table with little mutton bones marked with black dots, seemed to him a precious assertion of his freedom, which raised him in his own esteem. It was like an initiation into the world, an access to forbidden pleasures; and as he went in, he would put his hand on the doorknob with a joy that was almost sensual. Then many things that had been repressed in him opened up; he learned songs by heart and sang them to his lady friends, he developed an enthusiasm for Bèranger, knew how to make punch, and at last experienced love. Owing to this preparatory work, he completely failed his public health officer's examination. They were waiting for him at home that very evening to celebrate his success! He set off on foot and stopped at the entrance to the village, where he sent someone to get his mother, told her everything. She made excuses for him, shifting the blame for his failure to the unfairness of the examiners, and steadied him a little, taking it upon herself to sort things out. Only five years later did Monsieur Bovary know the truth; it was old by then, he accepted it, incapable, moreover, of supposing that any man descended from him could be a fool. Charles therefore set to work again and prepared, unremittingly, the subjects for his examination, for which he learned all the questions by heart in advance. He passed with a fairly good grade. What a great day for his mother! They put on a grand dinner. Where would he go to practice? To Tostes. There was only one elderly doctor there. For a long time, Madame Bovary had been waiting for him to die, and the old gentleman had not yet breathed his last when Charles was installed across the road, as his successor. But it was not enough to have raised her son, seen to it that he got his medical training, and discovered Tostes for his practice: he needed a wife. She found him one: a bailiff 's widow from Dieppe, who was forty-five years old with an income of twelve hundred livres. Although she was ugly, thin as a lath, as thick with pimples as the spring is with buds, Madame Dubuc certainly had no lack of suitors to choose from. To achieve her ends, Mère Bovary was obliged to supplant them all, and she very skillfully foiled even the intrigues of a pork butcher favored by the clergy. Charles had foreseen in marriage the advent of a better situation, imagining that he would have more freedom and would be able to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was the one in charge; in company he had to say this, not say that, eat no meat on Fridays, dress as she expected, pester at her command those clients who had not paid. She would open his letters, spy on his movements, and listen to him, through the wall, when he saw patients in his office, if they were women. She had to have her hot chocolate every morning, she wanted endless attention. She complained incessantly about her nerves, about her chest, about her spirits. The sound of footsteps was painful to her; if people left her, the solitude would become loathsome to her; if they came back, it was to see her die, no doubt. In the evening, when Charles returned home, she would take her long, thin arms out from under her sheets, put them around his neck, and, having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, begin telling him about her troubles: he was forgetting her, he loved someone else! They had told her she would be unhappy; and she would end by asking him to give her some tonic for her health and a little more love. Excerpted from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.