Madame Bovary

[Nick Rubashov]

I was recently given the list of novels we could choose to write our senior research paper on in my English Literature class. Of the four choices, I went with Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Everyone else was going with 1984, but since I've already read Orwell's novel, I wanted to do something different. Besides, that's some serious competition if everyone is choosing the same book. I'd rather pick something different that will hopefully be a breath of fresh air for my teacher. I think it's pretty funny that on the list of books to write about in the final, biggest, most important paper we'll ever receive in my English Literature class, the teacher listed a book written by a Frenchman.

I hope it was a smart decision to go with Madame Bovary, and I was just wondering if anybody here on litnet has read the book before, and what do you think of it? I'm looking forward to pick it up tomorrow and start reading.

[omegaxx]

I read "Madame Bovary" in 2005. It involved not cooking because of reading and smuggling the book into my office to read. My boss almost caught me at it too! Nonetheless it was quite worth it.
The thing that most impressed me was the absolute control Flaubert had over his prose. Some descriptive passages are rather dry, while other dialogues or narratives are absolutely rivetting; the only thing that may be said for sure is that Flaubert never indulges himself in sentimentality, never wallows in sweetness or pain, but simply presents everything with the precision a surgeon scalpelling up a patient, making me put down the book at several places, pining hopelessly for more details, and yet knowing that they would never come.

[genoveva]

I think you made the right choice!

[poem2poes]

"Madame Bovary" is a great choice! Much about it is as applicable today as it was when it was first written. Read carefully and closely. This isn't something you can skim. Every word has meaning. Flaubert was an artist when he created this novel.

[Nick Rubashov]

finished it a couple of weeks ago, the rough draft of my paper is due tomorrow and I've basically put the entire thing off until tonight . Procrastinators are winners I like to say. Anyway you're right, Madame Bovary is one fine piece of literature. I didn't think so while reading it, but looking back makes me want to read it again. And wow is Madame Bovary one criticized novel. I spent almost my entire weekend in the library and found more literary criticisms than I ever dreamed possible. There's certainly a lot to the novel, and although I won't be able to go in tot deep with my paper since I'm writing it so late and there is a 5 page limit, I'm sure I'll go back to Madame Bovary sometime this summer to better appreciate the book.

[bazarov]

Some woman surely did something bad to Flaubert...

[littlewing53]

it's a keeper.....enjoyed it immensely....

[Jozanny]

I am just rereading my edition of Bovary, and despite Leo Bersani's complex introduction, the way Flaubert kills off Heloise, Bovary's first wife, may be nihilistic, but I am not sure what it does for realism as a cause celebre. It is more like a typical literary device to get rid of a character who was only needed to make a point about the stifling nature of bourgeois life. What is it about the French?

[Jozanny]

I am still only in my first quarter section of rereading, after the ball, but during the period when Emma finds Flaubert's famous ennui intolerable:

She abandoned her music. Why should she play? Who would hear her? Since she could never sit on a concert stage in a short-sleeved velvet gown, running her light, graceful fingers over the ivory keys of an Erard piano and feeling the ecstatic murmur of the audience flow around her like a warm breeze, there was no point in going through the boredom of practicing.

I think Henry James would balk at this discontent, and say that aesthetic appreciation is all we have, even if we are but boring little gnats. Who can forget this famous opening from The Beast in the Jungle?

There had been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the original motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made the place almost famous; and the great rooms were so numerous that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the principal group and in cases where they took such matters with the last seriousness give themselves up to mysterious appreciations and measurements. There were persons to be observed, singly or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as with the emphasis of an excited sense of smell. When they were two they either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into silences of even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much the air of the "look round," previous to a sale highly advertised, that excites or quenches, as may be, the dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisition at Weatherend would have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing. The great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though this impulse was not, as happened, like the gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a direction that was not to have been calculated.

[momopi]

Madame Bovary - a very good novel about desire.
If you are familiar with different notions about desire, you'll see.

[wvshooter]

Madame Bovary is a delight to read. So many enjoyable characters. One of my favorites was the businessman/financier who always "only wanted to help Madame" but was able to eventually acquire all of her posessions. And what a fool her husband was. Can anyone be that blind?