Madame Bovary: It's in the Canon, but . . .

Madame Bovary. I wanted to like this book. I really did. It’s Flaubert’s masterpiece. The praise was overwhelming.

• James Wood, contemporary literature’s finest critic, waxes elegant about its groundbreaking effect on all of modern literature in his latest book, How Fiction Works.
• Frank Conroy, (former) director of the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop program, is said to have told MFA students that it can never stop teaching us about writing.

Perhaps they’re right, but I don’t see it.

The Story
The story is about Emma Bovary’s attempts to escape her loveless marriage with the bumbling Dr. Charles Bovary. Her efforts lead to adulterous affairs, among other things, but it’s all in vain. There is great detail lavished on every scene (and I’m told hidden patterns, which may indicate I’m a clueless reader), but it reads like so much plodding through the French countryside today. The social situations, while obvious at the time (I presume), now seem to need footnotes to make sense.

It’s hard to empathize with Emma or her cuckolded husband, as she is shallow, without a spark of freshness. Ultimately, her desperation to escape doesn’t seem like desperation, but selfishness. Unlikable characters are fine, but selfishness is so easy. (While this might be a perfect prophecy about our selfish society, its prescience nonetheless feels wilted.) There has to be more at stake. I never felt that for Emma.


Compared to another adultery story with a female protagonist written less than 20 years later, it feels lifeless, while Anna Karenina’s star continues to grow more lustrous despite being about four times as long.

A Counter-Thought
Maybe Flaubert is a ground breaker, so a comparison to Chaplain might be in order. Watch Gold Rush today and it’s cute; however, at the time of its release no one had ever seen anything like that before. Now it’s been ripped off so many times, and so many have used it for inspiration, that it’s hard to enjoy it past “Cute today.”

A Caveat
Now that I think about it, French lit has never captured my imagination. Balzac’s Pere Geriot seemed insightful, but Zola’s Theresa Racquin seemed pedestrian and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education read flat (though I loved his little witty dictionary).