Book: Madame Bovary
Dec. 20th, 2009 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseI’ve stated before that Madame Bovary is one of those classics I can do without because I found it rather dull and the characters not at all compelling. I’d even suspect that it was one of those novels that would have been far more interesting to study rather than pick up as leisure reading because the socioeconomic details may well have been fascinating in their historical context. I’ve actually tried to read Madame Bovary at least twice and failed miserably not all that far in so I’d given up on it, and then I stumbled across LibriVox which is a selection of free audio book recordings by volunteers. It’s probably an age issue but when I was younger I didn’t have any use for audio books and decided that they must be for people far too lazy to actually pick up a book but recently I’ve taken to listening to radio dramas and audio books myself so trying Madame Bovary one last time in audio book format seemed like a good idea.
In audio book format I can sit back and listen and it gives me the option to do other things while I do, it also makes it that little bit harder to just close the book and toss it aside. So having listened to this reading of Madame Bovary I can say that the story is actually reasonably interesting and that what put me off the novel was the long diversions into things like the descriptions of towns or speeches at farming fairs. The extended initial description of Yonville is in fact the reason that I stopped reading the first time. With those details being read aloud instead of having to turn the pages myself I managed to at least sit back and listen half-heartedly until the story itself picked up again and thus I managed to actually make it through the novel and even appreciate it.
Just about everyone knows the basic premise of Madame Bovary and even a brief sketch of the actual key events but listening to the language used to describe those events was worth the few days I spent listening to the audio book. Things like the dull agricultural speech really hammered the point home that this was the tedium of the titular character’s life and Homais’ dialogue even in conversation was a rather good illustration of how much is and isn’t said by characters on occasion. There was even one line that stood out to me regarding Rodolphe’s excuses given to Emma later on as to why he chose to leave her:
“For, all the three years, he had carefully avoided her in consequence of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex.”
For the most part the volunteers who read various chapters knew what they were doing when it came to French name pronunciations which made one of the latter chapters where the reader obviously did sound rather more jarring than it otherwise would have. Likewise there was one chapter that I simply couldn’t understand due to the reader being a Francophone with a very breathy voice who seemed to be much too close to the microphone to the point where I had to look that chapter up to read myself and skip on to the next one in the recording.
When it came to the story from the outset I did, which was the point of the novel, consider Emma to be a fair bit of an idiot. She had some very romantic dreams and little to none practical sense. She enjoyed playing various roles and acted out behaviours that she ascribed to roles be they aristocrat, good mother or pious woman. She was an actress immersing herself in each role entirely until it bored her or didn’t deliver the rewards she expected it to and when she wasn’t satisfied on each occasion I thought she was a fool. In fact, had the novel only covered up to a certain point I might have come away with the impression that the fault lay squarely on her shoulders but as the story progressed while she was at fault for her own inability to manage her own affairs it became fairly apparent that the world around her wasn’t helping any either.
Emma was very obviously trapped by being female where her options were to be beholden to a father or a husband in an official capacity and potentially face the whims of a love unofficially. A male character of a similar mindset would doubtless have made equally stupid mistakes but he’d be both more likely to get away with it without any moral judgments being made about him or be free to simply run off to the next big town to start over with his idiocy till debt and the bailiffs put him out on the street to starve with little drama or fuss. Because Emma is a woman she’s expected to present a very publicly correct image which is something that she doesn’t bother herself to do, she’s required to be extremely clever about any conduct that doesn’t fit this public morality and like the Marquise de Merteuil become a ‘virtuoso of deceit’. It’s even debatable whether or not Emma simply isn’t intelligent enough to learn that necessary deception because she doesn’t even try and doesn’t seem to believe that it’s at all necessary in the first place.
As the story progressed it became fairly obvious that while Charles is simple and good-hearted he’s also so wilfully oblivious and indulgent of Emma’s behaviours that his very presence does in fact make matters worse. Granted, I have a great deal of trouble with the idea that as her husband he should be anything other than an equal partner in their marriage and in fact should be disciplining his wife, and of course if he’d attempted to it would have given Emma more fodder to feed her delusions but I can’t help but suspect that he should at least done something. Charles’ reluctance to be anything other than completely oblivious or indulgent of Emma’s fantasies is counterbalanced by his mother who tends towards the other extreme to the point where she disapproves of Emma’s subscription to the library and suggests that hard work will be the cure for everything. Both are extremes of responses towards Emma’s behaviour and neither is particularly useful in that sense.
Léon and later Rodolphe aren’t helpful to the situation either. Léon has a young man’s idealism which does at first seem equally matched with Emma’s romantic fantasies but when it comes to practicality while he does conduct an affair with Emma, when called to heel by his employer and his mother he sees to his own reputation first and foremost. Arguably, Emma has become quite an inconvenience to him by that point and this is their second encounter, since his love for her in Yonville remained unrequited so perhaps it’s a little unfair to presume he ought to have been of some use to her by that point. He certainly couldn’t have stolen the money for her to repay her debts but there is a sense that could have dealt with her more sensibly rather than enjoying her expensive indulgence of him and then simply running off. Rodolphe at least has his own jaded sensibilities as an explanation to the point where he considers all his romantic encounters filled with hollow promises. Again it’s not particularly likely that he’d have been able to assist Emma with the amount needed to pay off her debt and certainly when she attempts to reinitiate their relationship only to ask him for money straight of the bat he has no reason to believe anything sincere of her. In that respect he reminds me of Georges in Bel Ami who makes the mistake of seducing a married woman who thus far has been entirely faithful and once besotted with him is rather hard for him to shake off. Both Emma and Madame Walter in Bel Ami are women who believe that their respective seductions are indicative of love after all, Madame Walter in innocence and Emma in the throes of romantic fantasy.
Of the characters while Homais doesn’t actually do anything to damage Emma personally he does expend his energies in manipulating both her and Charles so as to undermine Charles’ position as the local Health Officer. Thus he is akin to Lheureux who through his manipulation leads Emma into the overwhelming debit that destroys her in the end. One works on the husband, the other the wife and the end result is tragedy.
Overall, while Emma is clearly at fault as the story progresses it’s made very obvious that the situation and the people around her clearly aren’t helping and in some cases are in fact exacerbating matters. She’s never exonerated due to this outside influence but it bears an almost equal responsibility for her demise. In fact just about the only figure who’s clear of any responsibility after interacting with Emma is the Viscount who waltzes with her, out of politeness, once at a ball and around whom she builds one of her many romantic fantasy. Her interaction with him lasts all of the length of the waltz and yet that’s entirely enough for her because as her repeated behaviour shows, her fantasies are less to do with anybody else’s contribution to them and are instead about herself.
Interestingly, Madame Bovary like Bel Ami is one of those French novels where my opinion of the main character has changed considerably as events come to a head. In Bel Ami I was quite enjoying Georges’ opportunistic exploits up until a certain point where it became plainly obvious that he was both a hypocrite and an ungentlemanly exploiter of women thus in reverse of Madame Bovary where as things came to a head I found that I had sympathy for the initially obnoxiously self-absorbed and foolish Emma.
Having finished the novel I found myself a copy of the 2000 BBC adaptation because I’m always fond of comparing adaptations to the source material.
One of the first differences I noticed in the BBC adaptation was that the elder Madame Bovary, who’d been sensible but not terribly appealing in the novel, was absolutely hilarious which was a nice character change to start with. Though I don’t recall Leon being quite so arrogant and Charles as quite so flawless a besotted husband to Emma. In fact the skipping of Charles’ intro in the novels really detracted from the whole of his character so that he became a sensible husband rather than the rather less sensible man of the novels whose lack of awareness lets Emma bring about their ruin. In fact as the adaptation progressed it became pretty apparent that in compacting the story they’d gone down the route of exonerating everyone but Emma. Charles was self-aware and sympathetic, Emma’s interactions with Léon were amplified to give her unstable behaviour as a perfect excuse for Léon to behave in the way he does, Rodolphe in the end was genuinely bankrupt so couldn’t help her and only Lheureux was actually at fault in his own actions towards her.
Truncating the story and changing aspects to better fit a live action rendering are one thing but with this adaptation I was annoyed at quite how polarised it became, producing a rendering where Emma was completely at fault and everyone else around her was fairly blameless. It can’t exactly be called a misogynistic rendering due to the source material but it came far too close to it for my liking, after all, there really was no need to absolve everyone, even a character like Rodolphe of their actions.
In audio book format I can sit back and listen and it gives me the option to do other things while I do, it also makes it that little bit harder to just close the book and toss it aside. So having listened to this reading of Madame Bovary I can say that the story is actually reasonably interesting and that what put me off the novel was the long diversions into things like the descriptions of towns or speeches at farming fairs. The extended initial description of Yonville is in fact the reason that I stopped reading the first time. With those details being read aloud instead of having to turn the pages myself I managed to at least sit back and listen half-heartedly until the story itself picked up again and thus I managed to actually make it through the novel and even appreciate it.
Just about everyone knows the basic premise of Madame Bovary and even a brief sketch of the actual key events but listening to the language used to describe those events was worth the few days I spent listening to the audio book. Things like the dull agricultural speech really hammered the point home that this was the tedium of the titular character’s life and Homais’ dialogue even in conversation was a rather good illustration of how much is and isn’t said by characters on occasion. There was even one line that stood out to me regarding Rodolphe’s excuses given to Emma later on as to why he chose to leave her:
“For, all the three years, he had carefully avoided her in consequence of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex.”
For the most part the volunteers who read various chapters knew what they were doing when it came to French name pronunciations which made one of the latter chapters where the reader obviously did sound rather more jarring than it otherwise would have. Likewise there was one chapter that I simply couldn’t understand due to the reader being a Francophone with a very breathy voice who seemed to be much too close to the microphone to the point where I had to look that chapter up to read myself and skip on to the next one in the recording.
When it came to the story from the outset I did, which was the point of the novel, consider Emma to be a fair bit of an idiot. She had some very romantic dreams and little to none practical sense. She enjoyed playing various roles and acted out behaviours that she ascribed to roles be they aristocrat, good mother or pious woman. She was an actress immersing herself in each role entirely until it bored her or didn’t deliver the rewards she expected it to and when she wasn’t satisfied on each occasion I thought she was a fool. In fact, had the novel only covered up to a certain point I might have come away with the impression that the fault lay squarely on her shoulders but as the story progressed while she was at fault for her own inability to manage her own affairs it became fairly apparent that the world around her wasn’t helping any either.
Emma was very obviously trapped by being female where her options were to be beholden to a father or a husband in an official capacity and potentially face the whims of a love unofficially. A male character of a similar mindset would doubtless have made equally stupid mistakes but he’d be both more likely to get away with it without any moral judgments being made about him or be free to simply run off to the next big town to start over with his idiocy till debt and the bailiffs put him out on the street to starve with little drama or fuss. Because Emma is a woman she’s expected to present a very publicly correct image which is something that she doesn’t bother herself to do, she’s required to be extremely clever about any conduct that doesn’t fit this public morality and like the Marquise de Merteuil become a ‘virtuoso of deceit’. It’s even debatable whether or not Emma simply isn’t intelligent enough to learn that necessary deception because she doesn’t even try and doesn’t seem to believe that it’s at all necessary in the first place.
As the story progressed it became fairly obvious that while Charles is simple and good-hearted he’s also so wilfully oblivious and indulgent of Emma’s behaviours that his very presence does in fact make matters worse. Granted, I have a great deal of trouble with the idea that as her husband he should be anything other than an equal partner in their marriage and in fact should be disciplining his wife, and of course if he’d attempted to it would have given Emma more fodder to feed her delusions but I can’t help but suspect that he should at least done something. Charles’ reluctance to be anything other than completely oblivious or indulgent of Emma’s fantasies is counterbalanced by his mother who tends towards the other extreme to the point where she disapproves of Emma’s subscription to the library and suggests that hard work will be the cure for everything. Both are extremes of responses towards Emma’s behaviour and neither is particularly useful in that sense.
Léon and later Rodolphe aren’t helpful to the situation either. Léon has a young man’s idealism which does at first seem equally matched with Emma’s romantic fantasies but when it comes to practicality while he does conduct an affair with Emma, when called to heel by his employer and his mother he sees to his own reputation first and foremost. Arguably, Emma has become quite an inconvenience to him by that point and this is their second encounter, since his love for her in Yonville remained unrequited so perhaps it’s a little unfair to presume he ought to have been of some use to her by that point. He certainly couldn’t have stolen the money for her to repay her debts but there is a sense that could have dealt with her more sensibly rather than enjoying her expensive indulgence of him and then simply running off. Rodolphe at least has his own jaded sensibilities as an explanation to the point where he considers all his romantic encounters filled with hollow promises. Again it’s not particularly likely that he’d have been able to assist Emma with the amount needed to pay off her debt and certainly when she attempts to reinitiate their relationship only to ask him for money straight of the bat he has no reason to believe anything sincere of her. In that respect he reminds me of Georges in Bel Ami who makes the mistake of seducing a married woman who thus far has been entirely faithful and once besotted with him is rather hard for him to shake off. Both Emma and Madame Walter in Bel Ami are women who believe that their respective seductions are indicative of love after all, Madame Walter in innocence and Emma in the throes of romantic fantasy.
Of the characters while Homais doesn’t actually do anything to damage Emma personally he does expend his energies in manipulating both her and Charles so as to undermine Charles’ position as the local Health Officer. Thus he is akin to Lheureux who through his manipulation leads Emma into the overwhelming debit that destroys her in the end. One works on the husband, the other the wife and the end result is tragedy.
Overall, while Emma is clearly at fault as the story progresses it’s made very obvious that the situation and the people around her clearly aren’t helping and in some cases are in fact exacerbating matters. She’s never exonerated due to this outside influence but it bears an almost equal responsibility for her demise. In fact just about the only figure who’s clear of any responsibility after interacting with Emma is the Viscount who waltzes with her, out of politeness, once at a ball and around whom she builds one of her many romantic fantasy. Her interaction with him lasts all of the length of the waltz and yet that’s entirely enough for her because as her repeated behaviour shows, her fantasies are less to do with anybody else’s contribution to them and are instead about herself.
Interestingly, Madame Bovary like Bel Ami is one of those French novels where my opinion of the main character has changed considerably as events come to a head. In Bel Ami I was quite enjoying Georges’ opportunistic exploits up until a certain point where it became plainly obvious that he was both a hypocrite and an ungentlemanly exploiter of women thus in reverse of Madame Bovary where as things came to a head I found that I had sympathy for the initially obnoxiously self-absorbed and foolish Emma.
Having finished the novel I found myself a copy of the 2000 BBC adaptation because I’m always fond of comparing adaptations to the source material.
One of the first differences I noticed in the BBC adaptation was that the elder Madame Bovary, who’d been sensible but not terribly appealing in the novel, was absolutely hilarious which was a nice character change to start with. Though I don’t recall Leon being quite so arrogant and Charles as quite so flawless a besotted husband to Emma. In fact the skipping of Charles’ intro in the novels really detracted from the whole of his character so that he became a sensible husband rather than the rather less sensible man of the novels whose lack of awareness lets Emma bring about their ruin. In fact as the adaptation progressed it became pretty apparent that in compacting the story they’d gone down the route of exonerating everyone but Emma. Charles was self-aware and sympathetic, Emma’s interactions with Léon were amplified to give her unstable behaviour as a perfect excuse for Léon to behave in the way he does, Rodolphe in the end was genuinely bankrupt so couldn’t help her and only Lheureux was actually at fault in his own actions towards her.
Truncating the story and changing aspects to better fit a live action rendering are one thing but with this adaptation I was annoyed at quite how polarised it became, producing a rendering where Emma was completely at fault and everyone else around her was fairly blameless. It can’t exactly be called a misogynistic rendering due to the source material but it came far too close to it for my liking, after all, there really was no need to absolve everyone, even a character like Rodolphe of their actions.
