Note: This seems kind of silly to say, but lots of Madame Bovary spoilers follow. -SL
Louise posted a thread on FriendFeed about “comfort books” or books that one reads over and over again for a sense of well-being (or something like that). I thought I didn’t really have such a book and was about to post a comment saying so, but then I remembered Madame Bovary.
I first read Madame Bovary in college, but I think not for a college course. Paul Edwards had adapted “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitalier” and “A Simple Life” for the stage, and I had a part in the ensemble. I hadn’t read Flaubert before and I was more intrigued by the thought of working with Paul than I was excited about the source material. But it’s hard to work with literature night after night and not come to a deeper appreciation for it, and that’s what happened with me and Flaubert.
I’m pretty sure I read Madame Bovary as part of that experience. I then may have re-read it the next year or later that same academic year when I took a class with Paul that dealt with performing Madame Bovary. We read the novel, we read Paul et Virginie, we watched an opera, the opera that Emma and Leon go to see together before screwing in the back of the cab. ( I just checked, and I remember incorrectly–the opera is where she meets Leon for the second time, and the bouncing cab ride necessarily comes later. I still can’t recall the name of the opera.) It was in this class where I read Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Perpetual Orgy, a book that I think was on the recommended reading list, or perhaps we read a photocopied chapter.
I found the novel fascinating and Vargas Llosa’s response to the book struck a chord with me. He wrote of how, during a very dark time in his life when he thought he might kill himself, he returned to Madame Bovary again and again, especially to Emma’s suicide scene. He felt that Emma was killing herself so that he might live. And I think (and I think I thought) that this is a perfect, moving response to this novel. Emma reads her romance novels and finds that her life will never compare to her fantasies of how life and love should be, and her dissatisfaction leads to everything–her affairs, her debt, her suicide. Vargas Llosa reads Madame Bovary and finds that his sadness and self-hatred are expressed so exquisitely, so strangely in the book that he need not kill himself.
The people in Madame Bovary are all fools and charlatans, leaving a wake of destruction that they seem to be unaware of. (I was thinking today that the Cohen Brothers should adapt the novel into a film set in present-day Minnesota or something.) It is easy to feel superior to them or contemptuous of them. But I think that one of the keys to enjoying the novel is Flaubert’s statement, “Madme Bovary c’est moi.” The book forces me to perform the trick of seeing Emma for the fool that she is while also seeing myself fully in the fool. Is this something like what Freaks and Geeks does but without the comforting haze of nostalgia? Yes, I am that foolish, yes I am that vain, yes I am that tacky, yes I am that egotistical, that conniving, that self-deceiving.
The writing knocks me out every time I read the book too, though of course I’m not capable of reading the French. Regardless, the translations seem to all have the same sense of words used economically, with understatement. Flaubert writes with a scalpel, not a cutlass (or a blunderbuss like David Foster Wallace).
How, though, could this be comfort reading (apart from the guard against suicide that Vargas Llosa mentions)? I think that comfort reading might often involve those passages and details that are mostly remembered and then appear in the novel and don’t disappoint, but just sink in deeper as right, as inevitable, as perfect. Even in just the first few chapters I read today there are so many moments like this. Charles’ hat and his pathetic cry of “Charbovari!” The first Mrs. Bovary’s bony shoulders and cold feet, and her death: “She was dead! How surprising!” Emma licking the drop of liquor from the bottom of the glass. The convent’s relief at Emma’s departure. Emma reflecting on her desire for a honeymoon in a more exotic location: “It seemed to her that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like a plant native to that soil which grows poorly anywhere else. Why could she not be leaning over the balcony of some Swiss chalet, or nursing her melancholy in a cottage in the Highlands, with a husband wearing a long-skirted coat of black velvet, soft boots, a pointed hat, and ruffles at the wrist!”
Vladimir Nabokov’s illustration of Charles’ hat.
I find it a joy to read at the level of the sentence. At the level of the plot and the characters, I find it something that makes me very satisfied in the welling up of contradictory feelings and thoughts. They are all vain fools who make terrible decisions and show little understanding of themselves. And yet, if Flaubert were to write of my life and my blindnesses and my petty egotism, would it not sound the same? That’s not to say that I think this is the point of the novel, but it’s one of the ways that it gives me an apparently endless supply of happiness.