Poor Emma Bovary. She will never escape the tyranny of her desires, never avoid the anguish into which her romantic conceits deliver her, never claim the oblivion she sought from what is perhaps the most excruciating slow suicide ever written. Her place in the literary canon is assured; she cannot be eclipsed by another tragic heroine. Instead, each day she will be resurrected by countless readers who will agonize over the misery she brings herself and everyone around her and wonder at Flaubert’s ability to, godlike, summon life from words on a page.
The power of “Madame Bovary” stems from Flaubert’s determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes. Not his talent to do so — that would not have been enough — but his determination, which he never relaxed. “Madame Bovary” advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one. “A good sentence in prose,” he wrote, “should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable.”
As Lydia Davis describes Flaubert’s work habits in the introduction to her translation of the book that “permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter,” Flaubert’s attention to detail was as painstaking as humanly possible. He spent up to 12 hours a day at his desk, for months at a time, discarding far more material than he kept and reporting as little progress as a single page per week. Given the pressure Flaubert applied to each sentence, there is no greater test of a translator’s art than “Madame Bovary.” Faithful to the style of the original, but not to the point of slavishness, Davis’s effort is transparent — the reader never senses her presence. For “Madame Bovary,” hers is the level of mastery required.
Having taken to heart the advice of his best friend, the poet Louis Bouilhet (to whom he dedicated “Madame Bovary”), Flaubert settled on a mundane topic to suppress his admitted “tendency to wax lyrical and effusive in response to exotic materials.” (An early draft of “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” was so purple Bouilhet suggested he burn it.) Adultery, financial ruin: these dramas played out in every social circle, Flaubert’s included. Emma’s fate is borrowed from two real-life cautionary tales, the adultery and suicide of Delphine Delamare, and the heedless extravagance that bankrupted Louise Pradier. If the plot was a simple enough equation, adding one vain, selfish act to another until they collectively resulted in disaster, the demands Flaubert placed on his execution of the narrative were severe and absolute.
Readers cannot like Emma Bovary, and yet they follow her with the kind of attention reserved for car wrecks, whether literal or metaphorical. How can a covetous, small-minded woman, incapable of love and (as she feels no true connection to anyone) terminally bored by her life, fascinate us as she succumbs to one venal impulse after the next? Flaubert commands his audience’s attention by rendering every aspect of Emma’s life — he called his novel “a biography” — with such skill that readers need not willingly suspend disbelief. Whether or not they admire Flaubert’s masterwork, they cannot doubt its trenchant, often uncanny realism.
On the face of it, Emma Bovary’s life assumes the shape of that of another celebrated heroine. Anna Karenina has a repellent husband, embarks on an affair with a man who ultimately betrays her love, and commits suicide. But Anna is sympathetic; her tragedy results as much from her circumstances (a woman who must yield to the conventions of 19th-century Russian society) as from her character. Married to an unfeeling man 20 years her senior, Anna doesn’t smother the passion Vronsky awakes in her. Her innate decency cannot overcome her hunger for love. Readers root for Anna and watch Emma with increasing horror, because Emma forces us to confront the human capacity for existential, and therefore insatiable, emptiness. Fatally self-absorbed, insensible to the suffering of others, Emma can’t see beyond the romantic stereotypes she serves, eternally looking for what she expects will be happiness. Anna remains vulnerable to her husband’s threat to take away the son she loves; when Emma isn’t being actively cruel, she ignores her daughter, motherhood having turned out to be one more reality that didn’t measure up to her fantasy of it.
Emma doesn’t have character flaws so much as she lacks character itself. She’s a vacuum, albeit a sensitive and sensual one, sucking up every ready-made conceit. As a convent student Emma mistakes her “ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-fated women” like Joan of Arc for a religious vocation, dreaming of voluptuous sacrifices perfumed by incense. Contemplating her future with Charles Bovary, she wanted “to be married at midnight, by torchlight,” expecting matrimony to teach her the meaning of “the words ‘bliss,’ ‘passion’ and ‘intoxication,’ which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.” Seduced by Rodolphe, Emma feels her most intense pleasure alone, before a mirror, when she looks at her newest self and repeats over and over: “I have a lover! A lover!”
As for that lover, after taking Emma riding into the woods and ravishing her there, “Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.” This sentence is worth a day’s work, if that’s what it took Flaubert to assemble the details necessary to illuminate so critical a moment in Emma’s plummet. The dastard’s teeth already sunk in a subsequent gratification of his appetite; the phallic penknife; the broken restraint; the experience of drawing a previously chaste woman into adultery so unaffecting that his attention has already strayed to a routine chore: what more is needed to confirm Rodolphe’s base nature? The seduction accomplished, it’s only a matter of time before he casts Emma aside, before she takes and is disappointed by another lover, before she falls prey to the money-lender Lheureux.
Flaubert’s “scorn for the bourgeoisie,” whose essence he intended Emma to represent, was based, above all, in its tendency to unconsciously appropriate and serve existing sentiments. Because Emma never questions the validity of her fantasies, borrowed from romance novels or inspired by attending an aristocrat’s ball, she embraces the terms of her disappointment over and over again. Turning her back on the real love she is offered, Emma is always waiting for someone or something better, at the very least the next distraction from her restless ennui. Her 19th-century death — after swallowing the one thing to permanently satisfy hunger: poison — might occur in any age, including our own, and summons less grief than gratitude. At last she has solved the problem of herself.
It is a shame Flaubert will never read Davis’s translation of “Madame Bovary.” Even he would have to agree his masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.
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