‘Le désespoir est mon état normal.’ Flaubert, 1857

Certain books – Wuthering Heights is one, Madame Bovary another – are often first read when we are too young, are rejected or misunderstood, and risk never being properly read at all.

A first reading of Flaubert’s novel can give the impression that the author despises his characters. He seems to write about them dismissively, without sentiment or sympathy. Later, when rereading, we understand that Flaubert’s contempt is not for his characters, but for the narrow, provincial circumstances in which they exist. For Emma, this means that her rich emotional expectations remain frustrated, not that she does not experience at least the ardent passion of and for three men – her husband and her two lovers.

Emma Bovary is often considered foolish. She might act foolishly, but she is a victim of her time and its convent education for girls. Her head and her heart are full of the romantic stories she absorbed when a girl. This sets her up for delusion. Is such a person foolish? Flaubert did not want us to see Emma’s fate as a result of folly. He sees her as a victim of her circumstances as a woman of her time and place.

Unlike Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary is a work of social criticism, though by no mean limited to that. Emma is a victim of her circumstances, as well as of her well-meaning but limited husband, and of her selfish lovers.

In Madame Bovary Flaubert wrote a social novel without politics. He was by then – to say the least – sceptical about the effect of political action (his later novel Sentimental education is a more extreme demonstration of this). But his portrait of the effect on human beings of life in mid-nineteenth century increasingly capitalist Europe resembles the criticism of early French social thinkers (Lamennais, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc).

Flaubert’s lack of belief in public action, or in man’s ability or will to undertake it, means that he focuses almost entirely on the corrosive internal effects of external society on the lives – especially the emotional lives – of his characters, especially Emma’s.

What can they do about it? Nothing. Flaubert simply records their bleak lives in dispassionate prose, seeming to distract us – or perhaps himself – by prose passages of great beauty and observations of landscape or incident, sometimes seen through the mood of his unhappy heroine.

Flaubert’s own voice is tinged with despair and disgust, expressed through compassionate black humour – the desperate attempt resignedly to survive hopeless circumstances.

Emma’s lover Rodolphe Boulanger announces the end of his four-year affair with her by having his ploughman deliver her a letter hidden at the bottom of a basket of apricots.  Emma is duly upset, but covers it up and tells her husband Charles to carry on at table:

‘Charles, pour obéir, s’etait rassis, et il crachait dans sa main les noyaux des apricots, qu’il déposait ensuite dans son assiette.’
(‘Charles did what she asked and sat down again, spitting the apricot stones into his hand before putting them on his plate.’)

Poor Charles! He is completely oblivious, just as he was of his absurd hat at the very beginning of the novel.

Most comparisons are odious – the frequent comparison of Madame Bovary with Anna Karenina is definitely so. Flaubert was not a moralist, but a social critic. Tolstoy was a social critic too, but he was even more a moralist. The motto and message of Anna Karenina is primitive, cruel, Biblical: ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I will repay’. Think of Anna’s fate and these words seem pitiless, whereas Madame Bovary, a title of delicious irony, and a novel which mercilessly puts a whole social environment and its characters in quotation marks, leaves us without a message – only with its own beauty and truth, and its pity for Charles, and especially for Emma, of whom Flaubert famously said, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’

Cast

ROUEN
Headmaster of school
Monsieur Roger (schoolteacher)
CHARLES BOVARY
Monsieur Bovary senior (father)
Mme Bovary (mother)
Widow Dubuc, Héloïse (Charles’s first wife)
Nastasie (maid, sacked by Emma at Tostes)
Wedding guests
Théodore Rouault (Emma’s father)
EMMA BOVARY (née Rouault)

TOSTES
Marquis and Marquise d’Andervilliers (hosts at La Vaubyessard)
Duc de Laverdière
A Vicomte (dances with Emma)
Felicité (Emmas’s maid, aged 14)
Hurdy-Gurdy man

No other characters are named in Tostes. Charles’s mother and Emma’s father both make visits. When Emma and Charles leave Tostes, her marriage bouquet goes up the chimney and she is pregnant.

YONVILLE-l’ABBAYE
Yanoda, previous occupant of the Bovary’s house in Yonville
Madame Leroux
Monsieur Homais (pharmacist)
Mme Homais
Justin (Homais apprentice)
Napoléon, Irma, Athalie (Homais children)
Bridoux (friend of Homais)
Vaufrylard (painter)
Dr Larivière (Rouen)
Lestiboudois (grave-digger, verger, sacristan)
Widow Lefrançois (landlady of Lion d’Or)
Artémise (maid at Lion d’Or)
Hivert (commercial agent, diligence driver)
Camus (butcher)
Binet (tax collector, lathe turner, National Guard head)
Léon Dupuis (clerk, law student)
Morel (Dupuis’s friend)
Widow Dupuis (Léon’s mother)
Maître Guillaumin (lawyer, notary)
Théodore (Guillaumin’s servant)
Hippolyte Tautain (stable–boy at the Lion d’Or)
Abbé Bournisien (Curé)
Monsieur Boulard (bookseller)
Monsieur Tuvache (mayor of Yonville)
Madame Tuvache
Lheureux (cloth merchant, money-lender)
Annette (Lheureux’s servant)
Vincart (Lheureux’s banker partner)
Blind Man in Yonville
Berthe (Emma and Charles’s daughter)
Mère Rollet (wet-nurse)
Père Tellier (landlord of Café Français)
Mesdames Caron, Langlois, Dubreuil (Emma’s visitors)
Rodolphe Boulanger de la Huchette (landowner, entrepreneur)
Virginie (his mistress)
Monsieur Derozerays (president of jury
Monsieur le Prefet
Lieuvain (Councillor)
Monsieur Liégeard (landowner) and Madame
Old Guérin (Le Pollet fisherman)
Boudet (carpenter and son, Riboudet)
Catherine Leroux (special prizewinner)
Prizewinners at country show
Maître Hareng (bailiff)
Dr Canivet (Neufchâtel, surgeon)
Lagardy (Rouen opera tenor)
Mlle Lempereur (piano teacher)
Girard (Rodolphe’s ploughman)
Maître Dubocage (Léon’s employer)
Léocadie Leboeuf (marries Léon Dupuis)

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane is sometimes compared to Madame Bovary. They are both great novels with a strong social dimension. But Flaubert is an angry radical critic of the society surrounding his Emma, whereas Fontane, or his characters, are critically resigned to the cruelty of the masculine Prussian ethos of honour and duelling. Both authors love their heroines. Fontane is German, Flaubert French. We are lucky to have them both.