Men with Mirrors: The Problem of Emphasis

When I mentioned to an acquaintance of mine that I was reading Madame Bovary, he immediately raised eyebrows, accusing it of being a racy book.  Come to find out, he hadn’t read the book; neither was he basing his impression on the famous obscenity trial of 1857, but instead on a movie version he had seen years ago.  If you’ve read Madame Bovary, you’ll see (as many of Flaubert’s contemporaries failed to see) that sex is beside the point; instead, it’s a tool—among others more outstanding—that Flaubert uses to make a thematic point.  Many point to ennui as a great theme in Madame Bovary.  You might also take away thematic ideas on the danger of allowing disillusion to take over when life fails to live up to a person’s ideal vision of it.  You can see how these themes are far richer and far more needing illumination than mere sex.

Crafty Flaubert: Reflections on Madame Bovary

“Generally,” writes Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction, “a novelist retains his liberty to draw upon any of his resources as he chooses, now this one and now that, using drama where drama gives him all he needs, using pictorial description where the turn of the story demands it.”  Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, from a craft perspective, is a study in how to expertly use these two methods and expertly shift between them.

It is more than that, of course.  For one, it is a quiet, wry satire in which Flaubert pulls off commenting on characters who nonetheless have a certain dignity.  He strikes this balance by making the blame for foolishness lie not on the character herself, but on her circumstances and surroundings.  Emma doesn’t choose to build the lofty, sentimental, and romantic thoughts that will ultimately be her downfall, but the books she reads during her convent education are placed in her hands without any guidance as to how to balance the real and the ideal.  The book is also a vividly painted portrait of provincial life—a picture so life-like that descriptions never feel laborious.