Madame Bovary, c’est moi*

” . . . and human language is like a cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.”

No book has given me or my life more meaning than Madame Bovary. I read it at the terrifying age of fifteen in true trilogy format along with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. It would have been at this point, that a teacher should have intervened. And up until that point I had never felt more connected to a character as I had with Emma. People know of my infatuation with this piece of work, but I fear that no one truly understands how much it has done for me. In my head, I was (and still am) Emma Rouault- someone whose sole reality existed in books, from which I drew my true images of passion and love, of romance and weddings, and of marriage and children. Emma Bovary, an optimist confined to a life that bores her is longing for the gigantic and gorgeous emotions she finds in her books. Her imagination isn’t even enough. And cyclically, like me, for Emma, it is her fondness for reading that leads to her demise. Her raison d’être is in making her life as elaborate a novel as possible.

                   Emma is deluded by literature, from which she gets her highly romanticized view of the world. It is through words that she begins to crave love, passion, wealth and a coveted spot in high society. The real world eludes her; it holds no meaning because the one she has constructed in her own head is far more interesting. As the wife of a bourgeois country doctor she is searching for a higher, more spiritual life than the one available to her but all her longing leads only to destruction. What I find amazing is through all her delusion, what she’s searching for is so relatable. She wants something genuine and important. She wants her life to have meaning- for transcendence. Her pursuit of ecstasy leads her to fall madly in love with a cad, a coward and ultimately ignoring both her husband and daughter results in her death. It is this disparity that leads her life. Her day to day is driven by fighting her reality and wanting to write her own stars. But such desire cannot be contained in one woman, which is why she takes her own life. It was more painful for her to live a life that left her unsatisfied then to live at all.

            Flaubert’s treatment towards Emma is ambivalent. He ridicules her romantic tendencies as impractical but never places any blame on her. Instead he indicates that she is unable to free herself from these traits. I too don’t know how to stop. Throughout the novel, Emma herself questions why she is unable to be happy with her life? Even after she has her affairs and accrues debt. Flaubert takes the story of adultery and presents it as blasé and makes Emma as unheroic as infidelity can be. But he also makes it beautiful, repugnant, and melancholy. He, through her, revels in emotions that run amok and the mess of emotions that clichés can neither hide nor encapsulate. Madame Bovary explores the possibility that the written word fails to capture even a small part of the depth of a human life. Words just aren’t enough, so much so that sometimes even “I love you” cannot be enough.

            I don’t want this to be critical dribble. This is the only way I know to explain what she means to me. Emma emerged and made my imagination ok, she made it ok for me to be the way I was. At fifteen, I had a gay best friend and books (incidentally the same combination exists today)- both as dramatic and draining as is possible. At twenty-three I am still this way, even with what little wisdom and age I have on my side, I watch Romeo & Juliet (the Claire Danes one) and sit with baited breath at the very end and hope that this time will be different. That in this instance, she will touch his face before he drinks the poison. That everyone has a yellow flag to raise like Fermina and Florentio did in Love in the time of cholera. And they swore on love forever and did just that. They followed through on it, leading as authentic a life as possible based on that very vow. That even vows of love made under a presumption of immortality – childish stupidity, to most –can be honored, much later in life when we should all know better. That everyday it rains will be the day I have my perfect kiss. That “He” is lurking behind every corner I turn. That it’s ok for me to believe. She singularly makes it ok for me to be this way; her existence, even as just a character, validates my thought process. That is phenomenal. And though I didn’t realize this importance in high school, I can absolutely see the weight of it now. I don’t know why I thought to write this or post it. Maybe I just wanted it in writing to remind myself of who I think I am. But then again, are these words sufficient enough to describe who she is or who I am?

“One way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”- Flaubert

*Flaubert’s infamous statement during his trial regarding the indecency of Emma’s character.